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The following is a conversation with Jordan Peterson, an influential psychologist, lecturer, podcast host, and author of Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules for Life, and Beyond Order.
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clarifying to reread the summaries because they re so strong.
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I mean, they really encapsulate the ideas from books and allow you to think through what they mean.
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I did this recently for several conversations I was doing.
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It s almost like meditative to think through the ideas in the books I ve read, but of course, I also use it to read summaries of books I haven t read and am unlikely to read, but they re still important to understand.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here s Jordan Peterson.
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Dostoevsky wrote in The Idiot, spoken through the character of Prince Mishkin, that beauty will save the world.
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Solzhenitsyn actually mentioned this in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
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What do you think Dostoevsky meant by that?
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Was he right?
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Well, I guess it s the divine that saves the world, let s say.
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You could say that by definition.
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And then you might say, well,
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Are there pointers to that which will save the world, or that which eternally saves the world?
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And the answer to that, in all likelihood, is yes.
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And that s maybe truth, and love, and justice, and the classical virtues, beauty, perhaps, in some sense, foremost among them.
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That s a difficult case to make, but definitely a pointer.
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Which direction is the arrow pointing?
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Well, the arrow s pointing up.
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No, I think that that which it points to is what beauty points to.
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It transcends beauty.
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It s more than beauty.
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And that speaks to the divine.
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It points to the divine.
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Yeah, and I would say, again, by definition.
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Because we could define the divine in some real sense.
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So one way of defining the divine is, what is divine to you is your most fundamental axiom.
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And you might say, well, I don t have a fundamental axiom.
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Then I would say, that s fine, but then you re just confused.
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Because you have a bunch of contradictory axioms.
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And you might say, well, I have no axioms at all.
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And then I d say, well, you re just epistemologically ignorant beyond comprehension, if you think that.
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Because that s just not true at all.
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So you don t think a human being can exist within contradictions?
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Well, yeah, we have to exist within contradiction.
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But when the contradictions make themselves manifest, say, in confusion with regard to direction, then the consequence of that, technically, is anxiety.
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and frustration and disappointment and all sorts of other negative emotions, but the cardinal negative emotion signifying multiple pathways forward is anxiety.
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It s an entropy signal.
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But you don t think that kind of entropy signal can be channeled into beauty, into love?
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Why does beauty and love have to be clear, ordered, simple?
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Well, I would say it probably doesn t have to be, it can t be reduced to clarity and simplicity.
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Because when it s optimally structured, it s a balance between order and chaos, not order itself.
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If it s too ordered, if music is too ordered, it s not acceptable.
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It sounds like a drum machine, it s too repetitive, it s too predictable.
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It has to have some fire in it, along with the structure.
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I was in Miami doing a seminar on Exodus with a number of scholars, and this is a beauty discussion.
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When Moses first encounters the burning bush, it s not a conflagration that demands attention.
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It s something that catches his attention.
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It s a phenomena, and that means to shine forth.
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And Moses has to stop and attend to it, and he does.
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And he sees this fire that doesn t consume the tree.
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And the tree is a structure, right?
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It s a tree-like structure.
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It s a branching structure.
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It s a hierarchical structure.
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It s a self-similar structure.
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It s a fractal structure.
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And it s the tree of life, and it s the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
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The fire in it is the transformation that s always occurring within every structure.
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And the fact that the fire doesn t consume the bush in that representation is an indication of the balance of transformation with structure.
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And that balance is presented as God.
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And what attracts Moses to it, in some sense, is the beauty.
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Now, it s the novelty and all that.
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Like, a painting is like a burning bush, that s a good way of thinking about it, a great painting.
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It s too much for people, often.
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You know, my house was, and will soon be again, completely covered with paintings inside.
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And it was hard on people to come in there, because... Well, my mother, for example, would say, well, why would you want to live in a museum?
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And I think, well, I would rather live in a museum than anywhere else in some real sense, but beauty is daunting.
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It scares people.
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They re terrified of buying art, for example, because their taste is on display.
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And they should be terrified, because generally people have terrible taste.
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Now, that doesn t mean they shouldn t foster it and develop it, but... And, you know, when you put your taste on display, it really exposes you.
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Even to yourself, as you walk past it.
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Oh, definitely.
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Every day.
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Absolutely.
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This is who I am.
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Yeah, well, and look how mundane that is, and look how trite it is, and look at how clichéd it is, and look at how sterile or too ordered it is, or too chaotic.
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Or how quickly you start to take it for granted because you ve seen it so many times.
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Well, if it s a real piece of art, that doesn t happen.
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You notice the little details.
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The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
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I mean, there are images, religious images in particular, so we could call them deep images, that people have been unpacking for 4,000 years and still haven t… I ll give you an example.
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This is a terrible example.
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So, I did a lecture series on Genesis, and I got a lot of it unpacked, but by no means all of it.
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When God kicks Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, he puts cherubim with flaming swords at the gate to stop human beings from re-entering paradise.
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I thought, what the hell does that mean, cherubim?
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And why do they have flaming swords?
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I don t get that.
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What is that exactly?
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And then I found out from Matthew Paggio, who wrote a great book on symbolism in Genesis, that cherubim are the supporting monsters of God.
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It s a very complicated idea.
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And that they re partly a representation of that which is difficult to fit into conceptual systems.
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They ve also got an angelic or demonic aspect.
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Take your pick.
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Why do they have flaming swords?
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Well, a sword is a symbol of judgment and the separation of the wheat from the chaff.
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You use a sword to cut away, to cut away and to carve.
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And a flaming sword is not only that which carves, it s that which burns.
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And what does it carve away and burn?
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Well, you want to get into paradise?
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It carves away everything about you that isn t perfect.
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And so what does that mean?
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Okay, well here s part of what it means.
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This is a terrible thing.
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So, you could say that the entire Christian narrative is embedded in that image.
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Why?
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Well, let s say that flaming swords are a symbol of death.
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That seems pretty obvious.
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Let s say further that they re a symbol of apocalypse and hell.
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That doesn t seem completely unreasonable.
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So here s an idea.
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Not only do you have to face death, you have to face death and hell before you can get to paradise.
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Hellish judgment, and all that s embedded in that image.
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And a piece of art with an image like that has all that information in it.
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And it shines forth in some fundamental sense.
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It reaches into the back tendrils of your mind at levels you can t even comprehend.
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And grips you.
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I mean, that s why people go to museums and gaze at paintings they don t understand.
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And that s why they ll pay what s the most expensive objects in the world.
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If it s not carbon fiber racing yachts, it s definitely classic paintings.
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It s high-level technological implements, or it s classic art.
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Why are those things so expensive?
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Why do we build temples to house the images?
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Even secular people go to museums.
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I m secular.
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Well, are you in a museum?
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Yes.
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Are you looking at art?
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Yes.
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What makes you think you re secular then?
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It s arguable that the thing many, many centuries from now that will remain of all of human civilization will be our art.
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Not even the words.
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Well, you know, a book has remained a very long time, right?
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The biblical writings.
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Not that long.
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A few millennia.
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That s right.
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But that s in the full arc of living organisms, perhaps will not.
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Well, we have images that are, we have artistic images that are at least 50,000 years old, right, that have survived.
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And some of those are, they re already profound in their symbolism.
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By we do you mean humans?
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Yeah, we found them.
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And they ve lasted, they ve lasted that long.
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And so, and then think about Europe.
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Secular people all over the world make pilgrimages to Europe.
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Well, why?
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Because of the beauty.
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Obviously.
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I mean, that s self-evident.
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And it s partly because there are things in Europe that are so beautiful.
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They take your breath away, right?
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They make your hair stand on end.
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They fill you with a sense of awe.
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And we need to see those things.
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It s not optional.
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We need to see those things.
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The cathedrals.
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I was in a cathedral in Vienna, and it was terribly beautiful, you know.
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Terribly beautiful.
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Well, it was terribly beautiful.
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Is beauty painful for you?
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Is that the highest form of beauty that really challenges you?
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Oh, definitely.
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Yeah, yeah.
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I got a good analysis of this statue of David, Michelangelo s statue.
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It says, you could be far more than you are.
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That s what that statue says.
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And this cathedral, we went down into the under structure of it, and there were three floors of bones from the plague.
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And there they all are.
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And then that cathedral s on top of it.
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It s no joke to go visit a place like that.
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No, it rattles you to the core.
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And our religious systems have become propositionally dubious.
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But there s no arguing with the architecture, although modern architects like to, with their sterility and their giant middle fingers erected everywhere.
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But beauty is a terrible pointer to God.
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And you know, a secular person will say, well, I don t believe in God.
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It s like, have it your way.
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You cannot move forward into the unforeseen horizon of the future except on faith.
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And you might say, well, I have no faith.
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It s like, well, good luck with the future then, because what are you then nihilistic and hopeless and anxiety ridden?
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And if not, well, something s guiding you forward.
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It s faith in something or multiple things, which just makes you a polytheist, which I wouldn t recommend.
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Well, let me ask you one short lived biological meat bag to another.
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Who is God then?
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Let s try to sneak up to this question, if it s at all possible.
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Is it possible to even talk about this?
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Well, it better be, because otherwise there s no communicating about it, right?
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It has to be something that can be brought down to earth.
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Well, we might be too dumb to bring it down.
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It s not just ignorant, it s also sinful, right?
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Because there s not knowing, and then there s wanting to know or refusing to know.
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And so you might say, well, could you extract God from a description of the objective world?
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Is God just the ultimate unity of the natural reality?
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And I would say, well, in a sense, there s some truth in that.
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But not exactly, because God in the highest sense is the spirit that you must emulate in order to thrive.
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How s that for a biological definition?
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Spirit is a pattern.
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The spirit that you must emulate in order to thrive.
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So it s a kind of, in one sense, when we say the human spirit, it s that.
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It s an animating principle, yeah.
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It s a meta, it s a pattern.
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And you might say, well, what s the pattern?
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Okay, well, I can tell you that to some degree.
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Imagine that, like you re gripped by beauty, you re gripped by admiration.
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And you can just notice this.
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This isn t propositional, you have to notice it.
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It s like, oh.
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Turns out I admire that person.
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Hmm.
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So what does that mean?
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Well, it means I would like to be like him or her.
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That s what admiration means.
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It means there s something about the way they are that compels imitation, another instinct, or inspires respect or awe, even.
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Okay, what is that that grips you?
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Well,
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I don t know.
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Well, let s say, okay, fine, but it grips you and you want to be like that.
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Kids hero worship, for example, and so do adults for that matter, unless they ve become entirely cynical.
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I worship quite a few heroes.
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Well, there you go.
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Proudly.
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Yes, well, there you go.
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And there s no, that worship, that celebration and proclivity to imitate is worship.
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That s what worship means most fundamentally.
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Now imagine you took the set of all admirable people,
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And you extracted out AI learning.
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You extracted out the central features of what constitutes admirable.
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And then you did that repeatedly until you purified it to what was most admirable.
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That s as good as you re going to get in terms of a representation of God.
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And you might say, well, I don t believe in that.
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It s like, well, what do you mean?
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It s not a set of propositional facts.
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It s not a scientific theory about the structure of the objective world.
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And then I could say something about that, too, because I ve been thinking about this a lot, especially since talking to Richard Dawkins.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s like, OK, the postmodernist types, going back way before Derrida and Foucault, maybe back to Nietzsche, who I admire greatly, by the way, says, God is dead.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s like, OK.
1
SPEAKER_00
But Nietzsche said, God is dead, and we have killed him, and we ll not find enough water to wash away all the blood.
1
SPEAKER_00
So that was Nietzsche.
1
SPEAKER_00
He s no fool.
1
SPEAKER_01
He s got a way with words.
1
SPEAKER_00
He certainly does.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so then you think, OK, well, we killed the transcendent.
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, what does that mean for science?
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, it frees it up, because all that nonsense about a deity is just the idiot superstition that stops the scientific
1
SPEAKER_00
what process from moving forward.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s basically the new atheist claim, something like that.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s like, wait a second, do you believe in the transcendent if you re a scientist?
1
SPEAKER_00
And the answer is, well, not only do you believe in it, you believe in it more than anything else, because if you re a scientist,
1
SPEAKER_00
You believe in what objects to your theory more than you believe in your theory.
1
SPEAKER_00
Now, we ve got to think that through very carefully.
1
SPEAKER_00
So your theory describes the world, and as far as you re concerned, your description of the world is the world.
1
SPEAKER_00
But, because you re a scientist, you think, well, even though that s my description of the world and that s what I believe, there s something beyond what I believe.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that s the object.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so I m going to throw my theory against the object and see where it ll break.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then I m going to use the evidence of the break as a source of new information to revitalize my theory.
1
SPEAKER_00
So as a scientist, you have to posit the existence of the ontological transcendent before you can move forward at all.
1
SPEAKER_00
But more!
1
SPEAKER_00
You have to posit that contact with the ontological transcendent, annoying though it is, because it upsets your apple cart, is exactly what will, in fact, set you free.
1
SPEAKER_00
So then you accept the proposition that there is a transcendent reality, and that contact with that transcendent reality is redemptive in the most fundamental sense, because if it wasn t, well, why would you bother making contact with it?
1
SPEAKER_00
You re going to make everything worse or better.
1
SPEAKER_02
Why does the contact with the transcendent set you free as a scientist?
1
SPEAKER_00
Because you assume that, you assume, I mean freedom in the most fundamental sense.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s like, well, freedom from want, freedom from disease, freedom from ignorance, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
That it informs you.
1
SPEAKER_00
The logos in it.
1
SPEAKER_00
It is definitely that.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s the direction, let s say, the directionality of science.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s a narrative direction, not a scientific direction.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then the question is, what is the narrative?
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, it posits a transcendent reality.
1
SPEAKER_00
It posits that the transcendent reality is corrective.
1
SPEAKER_00
It posits that our knowledge structures should be regarded with humility.
1
SPEAKER_00
It posits that you should bow down in the face of the transcendent evidence, and you have to take a vow, you know this as a scientist, you have to take a vow to follow that path if you re going to be a real scientist.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s like the truth, no matter what, and that means you posit the truth as a redemptive force.
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, what does redemptive mean?
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, why bother with science?
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, so people don t starve, so people can move about more effectively, so life can be more abundant, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
So, it s all ensconced within an underlying ethic.
1
SPEAKER_00
So, the reason I was saying that, while we were talking about belief in God, it s like, this is a very complicated topic, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Do you believe in a transcendent reality?
1
SPEAKER_00
Okay, now let s say, you buy the argument I just made on the natural front, and you say, yeah, yeah, that s just nature.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s not God.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then I d say, well, what makes you think you know what nature is?
1
SPEAKER_00
See, the problem with that argument is that it already presumes a reductionist, materialist, objective view of what constitutes nature.
1
SPEAKER_00
But if you re a scientist, you re going to think, well, in the final analysis, I don t know what nature is.
1
SPEAKER_00
I certainly don t know its origin or destination point.
1
SPEAKER_00
I don t know its teleology.
1
SPEAKER_00
I m really ignorant about nature.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so when I say it s nothing but nature,
1
SPEAKER_00
I shouldn t mean it s nothing but what I understand nature to be.
1
SPEAKER_00
So I could say, will we have a fully reductionist account of cognitive processes?
1
SPEAKER_00
And the answer to that is yes, but by the time we do that, our understanding of matter will have transformed so much that what we think of as reductionist now won t look anything like what we think of reductionism now.
1
SPEAKER_00
Matter isn t dead dust.
1
SPEAKER_00
I don t know what it is.
1
SPEAKER_00
I have no idea what it is.
1
SPEAKER_00
Matter is what matters.
1
SPEAKER_00
There s a definition.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s a very weird definition.
1
SPEAKER_00
But the notion that we have, you know, that if you re a reductionist, a materialist reductionist, that you can reduce the complexity of what is to your assumptions about the nature of matter.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s not a scientific proposition.
1
SPEAKER_02
Your specific limited human assumptions of this century, of this week, that... So, in some sense, without God in this complicated, big definition we re talking about, there s no humility.
1
SPEAKER_02
It s not enough.
1
SPEAKER_02
There s less likely to be or rather science can err in taking a trajectory away from humility.
1
SPEAKER_02
Well, without something much more powerful than individual human.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well, then and we know, you know, the Frankenstein story comes out of that instantly.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that s a good story for the current times.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s like you you re playing around with making new life.
1
SPEAKER_00
you bloody well better make sure you have your arrows pointed up.
1
SPEAKER_02
And it s interesting because you said science has an ethic to it.
1
SPEAKER_00
I think- It s embedded in an ethic.
1
SPEAKER_02
Well, there s a, you know, science is a big word.
1
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_02
And it includes a lot of disciplines that have different traditions.
1
SPEAKER_02
So biology, chemistry, genetics, physics.
1
SPEAKER_02
Those are very different communities.
1
SPEAKER_02
and I think biology, especially when you get closer and closer to medicine and to the human body, does have a very serious, first of all, it has a history with Nazi Germany of being abused and all those kinds of things, but it has a history of taking this stuff seriously.
1
SPEAKER_02
What doesn t have a history of taking this stuff seriously is robotics and artificial intelligence, which is really interesting because you don t, you know, you called me a scientist, and I would like to wear that label proudly,
1
SPEAKER_02
Often people don t think of computer science as a science, but nevertheless, it will be, I think, the science of one of the major scientific fields of the 21st century, and you should take that very seriously.
1
SPEAKER_02
Oftentimes when people build robots or AI systems, they think of them as toys to tinker with.
1
SPEAKER_02
Oh, isn t this cool?
1
SPEAKER_02
And I feel this too.
1
SPEAKER_02
Isn t this cool?
1
SPEAKER_02
But, you know, at a certain moment you might, isn t this nuclear explosion cool?
1
SPEAKER_00
Because it is.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, or birth control pill cool.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s like, or transistor cool.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, the other thing too, and this is a weird problem in some sense, the robotics engineer types, they re thing people, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, the big classes of interest are interest in things versus interest in people.
1
SPEAKER_02
Some of my best friends are thing people.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, right, and I think people are very, very clear, logical thinkers, and they re very outcome-oriented and practical.
1
SPEAKER_00
Now, and that s all good.
1
SPEAKER_00
That makes the machinery and keeps it functioning.
1
SPEAKER_00
there s a human side of the equation.
1
SPEAKER_00
And you get the extreme thing, people, and you think, yeah, well, what about the human here?
1
SPEAKER_00
And when we re talking about, we ve been talking about the necessity of having a technological enterprise embedded in an ethic.
1
SPEAKER_00
And you can ignore that, like most of the time, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
You can ignore the overall ethic in some sense when you re toying around with your toys.
1
SPEAKER_00
But when you re building an artificial intelligence, it s like, well,
1
SPEAKER_00
That s not a toy.
1
SPEAKER_00
That might be... A toy becomes the monster very quickly.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yes, yes.
1
SPEAKER_00
And this is a whole new kind of monster.
1
SPEAKER_00
And maybe it s already here.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yes, and you notice how many of those things you can no longer turn off.
1
SPEAKER_00
And what is it with you engineers and your inability to put off switches on things now?
1
SPEAKER_00
It s like, I have to hold this for five seconds for it to shut off, or I can t figure, I just want to shut it off, click, off.
1
SPEAKER_02
Well, what is it with you humans that don t put off switches on other humans?
1
SPEAKER_02
Because there s a magic to the thing that you notice, and it hurts for both you and perhaps one day the thing itself to turn it off.
1
SPEAKER_02
And so you have to be very careful as an engineer adding off-switches to things.
1
SPEAKER_02
I think it s a feature, not a bug, the off-switch.
1
SPEAKER_02
The off-switch gives a deadline to us humans, to systems of existence.
1
SPEAKER_02
It makes you, you know, death is the thing that really brings clarity to life.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I do think- Yes, hence the flaming swords.
1
SPEAKER_02
the flaming sword.
1
SPEAKER_02
I do like your view of the flame of the bush, and perhaps the sword, as a thing of transformation.
1
SPEAKER_02
It s also, it s a transformation that kind of consumes the thing in the process.
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, it depends on how much of the thing is chaff.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, this is why you can t touch the Ark of the Covenant, for example.
1
SPEAKER_00
And this is why people can have very bad psychedelic trips.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s like, if you re 95% deadwood, and you get too close to the flame, the 5% that s left might not be able to make it.
1
SPEAKER_02
So you think it s all chat, but I think there is some aspect of destruction that is, that s, you know, the old Bukowski line of do what you love and let it kill you.
1
SPEAKER_02
Don t you think that destruction s part of?
1
SPEAKER_00
That s humility.
1
SPEAKER_02
That s humility.
1
SPEAKER_00
You bet, you bet, you bet.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s like, invite in the judgment, invite in the judgment, because maybe you can die a little bit instead of dying completely.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, and that s, I think it s Alfred North Whitehead.
1
SPEAKER_00
We can let our ideas die instead of us.
1
SPEAKER_00
Right?
1
SPEAKER_00
We can have these partial personalities that we can burn off, and we can let them go before they become tyrannical pharaohs and we lose everything.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so, yeah, there s this optimal bite of death.
1
SPEAKER_00
And who knows what it would mean to optimize that?
1
SPEAKER_00
Like, what if it was possible that if you died enough all the time, that you could continue to live?
1
SPEAKER_00
And the thing is, we already know that biologically, because
1
SPEAKER_00
If you don t die properly all the time, well, it s cancerous outgrowths and it s a very fine balance between productivity on the biological front and the culling of that, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Life is a real balance between growth and death.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so what would happen if you got that balance right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, we kind of know, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Because if you live your life properly, so to speak,
1
SPEAKER_00
And you re humble enough to let your stupidity die before it takes you out.
1
SPEAKER_00
You will live longer.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s just a fact.
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, but then what s the ultimate extension of that?
1
SPEAKER_00
And the answer is, we don t know.
1
SPEAKER_00
We have no idea.
1
SPEAKER_02
Well, let me ask you a difficult question, because... As opposed to the easy ones that you ve been asking so far.
1
SPEAKER_02
Well, Dostoevsky s always just a warmup.
1
SPEAKER_02
So if death, if death every single day is the way to progress through life, you have become quite famous.
1
SPEAKER_00
Death and hell.
1
SPEAKER_02
Death and hell.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, because you don t want to forget the hell part.
1
SPEAKER_02
Do you worry that your fame traps you into the person that you were before?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well, Elvis became an Elvis impersonator by the time he died.
1
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, do you fear that you have become a Jordan Peterson impersonator?
1
SPEAKER_02
Do you fear of, in some part, becoming the famous, suit-wearing, brilliant Jordan Peterson, the certainty in the pursuit of truth, always right?
1
SPEAKER_00
I think I worry about it more than anything else, I hope.
1
SPEAKER_00
I hope I do, I better.
1
SPEAKER_02
Has fame to some degree, when you look at yourself in the mirror, in the quiet of your mind, has it corrupted you?
1
SPEAKER_00
No doubt, in some regard.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s a very difficult thing to avoid, you know, because
1
SPEAKER_00
things change around you, people are much more likely to do what you ask, for example, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
And so that s a danger because one of the things that keeps you dying properly is that people push back against you optimally.
1
SPEAKER_00
This is why so many celebrities spiral out of control, especially the tyrannical types that, say, run countries.
1
SPEAKER_00
Everyone around them stops saying, yeah, you re deviating a little bit there.
1
SPEAKER_00
They laugh at all their jokes.
1
SPEAKER_00
They open all their doors.
1
SPEAKER_00
They always want something from them.
2
SPEAKER_00
The red carpet s always rolled out.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like, well, you think, wouldn t that be lovely?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s, well, not if the red carpet is rolled out to you while you re on your way to perdition.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s not a good deal.
2
SPEAKER_00
You just get there more efficiently.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so one of the things that I ve tried to learn to manage is to have people around me all the time who are critics.
2
SPEAKER_00
who are saying, yeah, I could have done that better, and you re a little too harsh there, and you re alienating people unnecessarily there, and you should have done some more background work there.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I think the responsibility attendant upon that increases as your influence increases.
2
SPEAKER_00
And as your influence increases, then that becomes a lot of responsibility.
2
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, and then maybe have an off day.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, here s an example.
2
SPEAKER_00
I ve been writing some columns lately about things that perturb me, like the forthcoming famine, for example.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it s hard to take those problems on.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s difficult to take those problems on in a serious manner, and it s frightening.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it would be easier just to go up to the cottage with my wife and go out on the lake and watch the sunset.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so I m tempted to draw on
2
SPEAKER_00
anger as a motivating energy, to help me overcome the resistance to doing this.
2
SPEAKER_00
But then that makes me more harsh and judgmental in my tone when I m reading such things, for example on YouTube, than might be optimal.
2
SPEAKER_00
Now, I ve had debates with people about that, because I have friends who say,
2
SPEAKER_00
No, if you re calling out the environmentalist globalists who are harassing the Dutch farmers, then a little anger is just the ticket.
2
SPEAKER_00
But then others say, well, you know, you don t want to be too harsh because you alienate people who would otherwise listen to you.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s a hard balance to get right.
2
SPEAKER_01
But also maybe anger hardens your mind to where you don t notice the subtle quiet beauty of the world.
2
SPEAKER_01
The quiet love that s always there, that permeates everything.
2
SPEAKER_01
Sometimes you can become deeply cynical about the world if it s the Nietzsche thing.
2
SPEAKER_01
Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster.
2
SPEAKER_01
And if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right.
2
SPEAKER_00
But I would say,
2
SPEAKER_00
Bring it on.
2
SPEAKER_00
I also say, knowing that he s absolutely right, but if you gaze into the abyss long enough, you see the light, not the darkness.
2
SPEAKER_01
Are you sure about that?
2
SPEAKER_00
I m betting my life on it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s a heck of a bet.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because it might distort your mind to where all you see is abyss, is the evil in this world.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, then I would say you haven t looked long enough.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, that s back to the swords, the flaming swords.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I said the whole story of Christ was prefigured in that image.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like the story of Christ, psychologically.
2
SPEAKER_00
is radical acceptance of the worst possible tragedy.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s what it means.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s what the crucifix means.
2
SPEAKER_00
Psychologically, it s like gaze upon that which you are most afraid of.
2
SPEAKER_00
But that story doesn t end there.
2
SPEAKER_00
Because in the story, Christ goes through death into hell.
2
SPEAKER_00
So death isn t enough.
2
SPEAKER_00
The abyss of innocent death is not sufficient to produce redemption.
2
SPEAKER_00
It has to be a voluntary journey to hell.
2
SPEAKER_00
And maybe that s true for everyone.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s like, there is no more terrifying idea than that, by definition.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so then, well, do you gaze upon that?
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, who knows?
2
SPEAKER_01
Who knows?
2
SPEAKER_01
How often do you gaze upon death, your own?
2
SPEAKER_01
How often do you remember, remind yourself that this ride ends?
2
SPEAKER_00
Personally?
2
SPEAKER_00
Personally.
2
SPEAKER_00
All the time.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because you, as a deep thinker and philosopher, it s easy to start philosophizing and forgetting that you re, you might die today.
2
SPEAKER_00
The angel of death sits on every word.
2
SPEAKER_00
How s that?
2
SPEAKER_01
How often do you actually consciously?
2
SPEAKER_00
All the time.
2
SPEAKER_01
Notice the angel?
2
SPEAKER_00
All the time.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think it s one of the things that made me peculiar.
2
SPEAKER_00
When I was in graduate school, you know, I had the thought of death in my mind all the time.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I noticed that many of the people that I was with, these were people I admired fine.
2
SPEAKER_00
That wasn t part of their character, but it was definitely part of mine.
2
SPEAKER_00
I d wake up every morning, this happened for years, think, time s short, get at it.
2
SPEAKER_00
Time s short, get at it.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s things to do.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so that was always, it s still there.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it s still there with, I would say, and it s unbearable in some sense.
2
SPEAKER_01
Are you afraid of it?
2
SPEAKER_01
Like what s your relationship?
2
SPEAKER_01
Afraid of death?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, I was ready to die a year ago.
2
SPEAKER_00
And not casually.
2
SPEAKER_00
I had people I loved, you know.
2
SPEAKER_00
So no, I m not very worried about me.
2
SPEAKER_00
But I am very worried about making a mistake.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
I heard Elon Musk talk about that a couple of months ago.
2
SPEAKER_00
It was really a striking moment.
2
SPEAKER_00
Someone asked him about death, and he said, just offhand, and then went on with the conversation.
2
SPEAKER_00
He said, that d be a relief.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then he went on with the conversation.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I thought, well, you know, he s got a lot of weight on his shoulders.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m sure that part of him thinks, I d be easier just if this wasn t here at all.
2
SPEAKER_00
Now, he said it offhand, but it was a telling moment in my estimation.
2
SPEAKER_01
So, for him, that s a why live question.
2
SPEAKER_01
The exhaustion of life.
2
SPEAKER_01
You call it life is suffering, but the hardship... I m more afraid of hell than death.
2
SPEAKER_01
You re afraid of the thing that follows.
2
SPEAKER_00
I don t know if it follows or if it s always here.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I think we re going to find out.
2
SPEAKER_01
What s the connection between death and hell?
2
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
2
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
2
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
2
SPEAKER_01
Is there something that needs to be done before you arrive?
2
SPEAKER_00
You re more likely to die terribly if you live in a manner that brings you to hell.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s one connection.
2
SPEAKER_01
And terribly is a very deep kind of concept.
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s the definition, by the way.
2
SPEAKER_01
What do you make of Elon Musk?
2
SPEAKER_01
You ve spoken about him a bit, you met him.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m struck with admiration.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s what I make of him.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I always think of that as a primary... Well, it s like, do you find this comedian funny?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like, well, I laugh at him.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know what I mean?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s not propositional again.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so, there are things I would like to ask Mr. Musk about.
2
SPEAKER_00
The Mars venture, I don t know what he s up to there.
2
SPEAKER_00
It strikes me as absurd in the most fundamental sense, because I think, well, it d be easier just to build an outpost in the Antarctica or in the desert.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, how much of the human endeavor is absurd?
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, that s what Nietzsche say, great men are seldom credited with their stupidity.
2
SPEAKER_00
Who the hell knows what Musk is up to?
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, obviously he s building rockets.
2
SPEAKER_00
Now he s motivated because he wants to build a platform for life on Mars.
2
SPEAKER_00
Is that a good idea?
2
SPEAKER_00
Who am I to say?
2
SPEAKER_00
He s building the rockets, man, but I d like to ask him about it.
2
SPEAKER_01
I would like to see that conversation.
2
SPEAKER_01
I do think that having talked to him quite a bit offline, I think these, several of his ideas, like Mars, like humans becoming a multi-planetary species, could be one of the things that human civilization looks back at as
2
SPEAKER_01
Duh, I can t believe he s one of the few people that was really pushing this idea, because it s the obvious thing for society, for life to survive.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well, it isn t obvious to me that I m in any position to evaluate Elon Musk.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like, I would like to talk to him and find out what he s up to and why, but, I mean, he s an impossible person.
2
SPEAKER_00
What he s done is impossible.
2
SPEAKER_00
All of it.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like he built an electric car that works.
2
SPEAKER_00
Now, does it work completely and will it replace gas cars or should it?
2
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
2
SPEAKER_00
But if we re going to build electric cars, he seems to be the best at that by a lot.
2
SPEAKER_00
And he more or less did that.
2
SPEAKER_00
People carp about him, but he more or less did that by himself.
2
SPEAKER_00
I know he s very good at distributing responsibility and all of that, but he s the spearhead.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then that was pretty hard.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then he built a rocket.
2
SPEAKER_00
at like one 10th the price of NASA rockets.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then he shot his car out into space.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s pretty hard.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then he s building this boring company, more or less as a, what would you call it?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s sort of, it s this whimsical joke in some sense, but it s not a joke.
2
SPEAKER_00
He s amazing.
2
SPEAKER_01
And Neuralink, delving into the depths of the mind.
2
SPEAKER_00
And Starlink.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like, go Elon, as far as I m concerned.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then, you know, he puts his finger on things so oddly.
2
SPEAKER_00
The problem is underpopulation.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like, I think so too.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think it s a terrible problem that we re... The West, for example, is no longer at replacement with regard to birth rate.
2
SPEAKER_00
It means we ve abandoned the virgin and the child in a most fundamental sense.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s a bloody catastrophe.
2
SPEAKER_00
And Musk, he sees it clear as can be.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like, wow.
2
SPEAKER_00
And where everyone else is running around going, oh, there s too many people.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like, nope.
2
SPEAKER_00
Not that, not only... See, I ve learned that there are falsehoods and lies, and there are anti-truths.
2
SPEAKER_00
And an anti-truth is something that s so preposterous that you couldn t make a claim that s more opposite to the truth.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the claim that there are too many people on the planet is an anti-truth.
2
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, people say, well, you have to accept limits to growth, and it s like...
2
SPEAKER_00
I have to accept the limits that you re going to impose on me, because you re frightened of the future.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s your theory, is it?
2
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, it s an idea.
2
SPEAKER_01
It could be a right idea.
2
SPEAKER_01
It could be a wrong idea.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think anti-truth... Here, I ll tell you why it s the wrong idea, I think.
2
SPEAKER_00
So imagine that there s an emergency.
2
SPEAKER_00
Dragon.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s a dragon.
2
SPEAKER_00
Someone comes and says, there s a dragon.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m the guy to deal with it.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s what the environmentalists say, the radical types who push limits to growth.
2
SPEAKER_00
Then I look at them and I think, OK, is that dragon real or not?
2
SPEAKER_00
That s one question.
2
SPEAKER_01
I ask that question of myself every time when I spend time alone.
2
SPEAKER_00
Is the apocalypse looming on the environmental front?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes or no?
2
SPEAKER_00
I ll just leave that aside for the time being.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think you can make a case both ways for a bunch of different reasons.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it s not a trivial concern.
2
SPEAKER_00
And we ve overfished the oceans terribly.
2
SPEAKER_00
And there are environmental issues that are looming large.
2
SPEAKER_00
Whether climate change is the cardinal one or not is a whole different question, but we won t get into that.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s not the issue.
2
SPEAKER_00
You re clamoring about a dragon.
2
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
2
SPEAKER_00
Why should I listen to you?
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, let s see how you re reacting to the dragon.
2
SPEAKER_00
First of all, you re scared stiff and in a state of panic.
2
SPEAKER_00
That might indicate you re not the man for the job.
2
SPEAKER_00
Second, you re willing to use compulsion to harness other people to fight the dragon for you.
2
SPEAKER_00
So now not only are you terrified, you re a terrified tyrant.
2
SPEAKER_00
So then I would say, well then you re not the Moses that we need to lead us out of this particular exodus.
2
SPEAKER_00
And maybe that s a neurological explanation.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like, if you re so afraid of what you re facing, that you re terrified into paralysis and nihilism, and that you re willing to use tyrannical compulsion to get your way, you are not the right leader for the time.
2
SPEAKER_00
So then I like someone like Bjorn Lomberg, or Matt Ridley, or Marion Toupie, and they say, well, look, we ve got our environmental problems.
2
SPEAKER_00
Maybe there s a there you could make a case that there s a Malthusian element in some situations but fundamentally the track record of the human race is that we learn very fast and faster all the time to do more with less and We ve got this and I think Yes to that idea and I think about it in a different
2
SPEAKER_00
in a fundamental way.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like, I trust Lomberg, I trust Tupi, I trust Matt Ridley.
2
SPEAKER_00
They ve thought about these things deeply.
2
SPEAKER_00
They re not just saying, oh, the environment doesn t matter, whatever the environment is.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, the environment, I don t even know what that is.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s everything, the environment.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m concerned about the environment.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like, which is, how is that different than saying I m worried about everything?
2
SPEAKER_00
How are those statements different semantically?
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, yeah, the environment, it could be I m worried about human society.
2
SPEAKER_01
A lot of these complex systems are difficult to talk about because there s so much involved, for sure.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, everything.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then these models, because people have gone after me because I don t buy the climate models.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, I think about the climate models as extended into the economic models, because the climate model is, well, there s going to be a certain degree of heating, let s say, by 2100.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like, OK.
2
SPEAKER_00
Some of that might be human-generated, some of it s a consequence of warming after the Ice Age.
2
SPEAKER_00
This has happened before, but fair enough.
2
SPEAKER_00
Let s take your presumption, although there are multiple presumptions, and any error in your model multiplies as time extends, but have it your way.
2
SPEAKER_00
OK, now we re going to extend the climate model, so to speak, into the economic model.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I just did an analysis of a paper by Deloitte, third biggest company in the US.
2
SPEAKER_00
300,000 employees, major league consultants.
2
SPEAKER_00
They just produced a report in May.
2
SPEAKER_00
I wrote an article for it in The Telegraph, which I m going to release this week on my YouTube channel.
2
SPEAKER_00
I said, well,
2
SPEAKER_00
If we get the climate problem under control, economically, because that s where the models are now being generated on the economic front, so now we have to model the environment, that s climate, and we have to model the economy, and then we have to model their joint interaction, and then we have to predict a hundred years into the future, and then we have to put a dollar value on that, and then we have to claim that we can do that, which we can t, and then this is our conclusion.
2
SPEAKER_00
We re going to go through a difficult period of privation.
2
SPEAKER_00
Because if we don t accept limits to growth, there s going to be a catastrophe, 50 years in the future or thereabouts.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so to avert that catastrophe, we are going to make people poorer now.
2
SPEAKER_00
How much poorer?
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, not a lot compared to how much richer they re going to be.
2
SPEAKER_00
But definitely, and they say this in their own models, definitely poorer, definitely poorer, than they would be if we just left them the hell alone.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so then I think, OK, poorer, eh?
2
SPEAKER_00
Who?
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, let s look at it biologically.
2
SPEAKER_00
You ve got a hierarchy, right, of stability and security.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s a hierarchy, or one type.
2
SPEAKER_00
You stress a hierarchy like that, a social hierarchy.
2
SPEAKER_00
So there s birds in an environment, and an avian flu comes in.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then you look at the birds in the social hierarchy,
2
SPEAKER_00
The low-ranking birds have the worst nests, so they re most exposed to wind and rain and sun, and farthest from food supplies, and most exposed to predators.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so those birds are stressed, which is what happens to you at the bottom of a hierarchy.
2
SPEAKER_00
You re more stressed, because your life is more uncertain.
2
SPEAKER_00
You re more stressed, your immunological function is compromised because of that.
2
SPEAKER_00
You re sacrificing the future for the present.
2
SPEAKER_00
An avian flu comes in, and the birds die from the bottom up.
2
SPEAKER_00
That happens in every epidemic.
2
SPEAKER_00
You die from the bottom up.
2
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so they say when the aristocracy catches a cold, the working class dies of pneumonia.
2
SPEAKER_00
All right, so now we re going to make people poorer.
2
SPEAKER_00
Okay, who?
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, we know who we make poorer when we make people poorer.
2
SPEAKER_00
We make those who are barely hanging on poorer.
2
SPEAKER_00
And what does that mean?
2
SPEAKER_00
It means they die.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so what the Deloitte consultants are basically saying is, well, you know, it s kind of unfortunate, but according to our models, a lot of poor people are going to have to die, so that a lot more poor people don t die in the future.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like, okay, hold on a sec.
3
SPEAKER_01
Which of those two things am I supposed to regard with certainty?
3
SPEAKER_01
The hypothetical poor people that you re gonna hypothetically save a hundred years from now?
3
SPEAKER_01
Or the actual poor people that you are actually going to kill in the next ten years?
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, I m gonna cast my lot with the actual poor people that you re actually going to kill.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so, and then I think further, it s like, well, okay, the Deloitte consultants,
3
SPEAKER_01
Have you actually modeled the world?
3
SPEAKER_01
Or is this a big advertising shtick designed to attract your corporate clients with the demonstration that you re so intelligent that you can actually model the entire ecosystem of the world, including the economic system, and predict it a hundred years forward?
3
SPEAKER_01
And isn t there a bit of a moral hazard in making a claim like that?
3
SPEAKER_01
Just like just a trifle, especially when so I talked to Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Leon last week.
3
SPEAKER_01
I accepted the UN Estimates of starvation this coming year 150 million people will suffer food insecurity food insecurity
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, food insecurity, that s the bloody buzzword.
3
SPEAKER_01
Famine.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, Michael Yawn thought 1.2 billion, and then that ll spiral because he said what happens in a famine is that the governments go nuts, crazy.
3
SPEAKER_01
The governments destabilize.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then they appropriate the food from the farmers.
3
SPEAKER_01
Then the farmers don t have any money.
3
SPEAKER_01
Then they can t grow crops.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think, yeah, that s exactly what they do.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s exactly what would happen.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so, Jan told me 1.2 billion.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then Bjorn Lomborg said the same thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
I didn t even ask him.
3
SPEAKER_01
He just made it as an offhand comment.
3
SPEAKER_02
So... Let me ask you about the famine of the 30s.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_02
Do you think- In the Ukraine?
3
SPEAKER_02
In the Ukraine.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah, fun, fun, fun.
3
SPEAKER_02
Similar, a lot of the things you mentioned in the last few sentences kind of echo to that part of human history.
3
SPEAKER_01
The hole in the door.
3
SPEAKER_02
Do you- Which no one knows about.
3
SPEAKER_02
Well, now I ve just spent four weeks in Ukraine.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah.
3
SPEAKER_02
There s different parts of the world that still, even if they don t know,
3
SPEAKER_02
They know.
3
SPEAKER_02
They feel history runs in the blood.
3
SPEAKER_01
The Dutch knew, in some sense.
3
SPEAKER_01
They had a famine at the end of World War II, and part of the reason the Dutch farmers are so unbelievably efficient and productive is that the Dutch swore at the end of World War II that that was not going to happen again.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then they had to scrape land out of the ocean.
3
SPEAKER_01
Because Holland, that s quite a country, it shouldn t even exist.
3
SPEAKER_01
The fact that it s the world s number two exporter.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know that it s the world s number two exporter of agricultural products?
3
SPEAKER_01
Holland.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like, I don t think it s as big as Massachusetts.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s this little tiny place, it shouldn t even exist.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they want to put, here s the plan.
3
SPEAKER_01
Let s put 30% of the farmers out of business, while the broader ecosystem of agricultural production in Holland is 6% of their GDP.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, these centralizing politicians think, tell me if I m stupid about this.
3
SPEAKER_01
Take an industry.
3
SPEAKER_01
You knock it back by fiat by 30%.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now it runs on like a 3% profit margin.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now you re going to kill 30% of it.
3
SPEAKER_01
How are you not going to bring the whole thing down, the whole farming ecosystem down?
3
SPEAKER_01
How are you not going to impoverish the transport systems?
3
SPEAKER_01
How are you not going to demolish the grocery stores?
3
SPEAKER_01
You can t take something like that and pare it back, buy fiat by 30% and not kill it.
3
SPEAKER_01
I can t see how you can do that.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, look what we did with the COVID lockdowns.
3
SPEAKER_01
We broke the supply chains.
3
SPEAKER_01
Have you tried buying something lately?
3
SPEAKER_01
And aren t the Chinese threatening Taiwan at the moment?
3
SPEAKER_01
What are we going to do without chips?
3
SPEAKER_01
So, I don t know what these people are thinking.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then I think, okay, what are they thinking?
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, the Deloitte people are thinking, aren t we smart and shouldn t we be hired by our corporate employers?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like, okay.
3
SPEAKER_01
Too bad about the poor.
3
SPEAKER_01
What are the environmentalists thinking?
3
SPEAKER_01
We love the planet.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like, do you?
3
SPEAKER_01
We love the poor.
3
SPEAKER_01
Do you?
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
3
SPEAKER_01
Let s pit the planet against the poor.
3
SPEAKER_01
Who wins?
3
SPEAKER_01
The planet.
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
3
SPEAKER_01
You don t love the poor that much.
3
SPEAKER_01
Do you love the planet?
3
SPEAKER_01
Or do you hate capitalism?
3
SPEAKER_01
Let s pit those two things against each other.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh, well, it turns out we actually hate capitalism.
3
SPEAKER_01
How can we tell?
3
SPEAKER_01
Because you re willing to break it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And you know what s going to happen.
3
SPEAKER_01
So what s going to happen in Sri Lanka with these 20 million people who now have nothing to eat?
3
SPEAKER_01
Are they going to eat all the animals?
3
SPEAKER_01
Are they going to burn all the firewood?
3
SPEAKER_01
They re stockpiling firewood in Germany.
3
SPEAKER_01
So is your environmental globalist utopia?
3
SPEAKER_01
going to kill the poor and destroy the planet?
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s okay, because we ll wipe out capitalism.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like, okay.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, the dragon and the fear of the dragon drives ideologies, some of which can build a better world, some of which can destroy that world.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, what do you think of that theory about trustworthiness?
3
SPEAKER_01
If the dragon that you re facing turns you into a terrified tyrant, you re not the man for the job.
3
SPEAKER_01
Is that a good theory?
3
SPEAKER_02
It s an interesting theory.
3
SPEAKER_02
Let me use that theory to challenge, because what does terror look like?
3
SPEAKER_02
Let me table the turns, turn the tables on you.
3
SPEAKER_02
You are
3
SPEAKER_02
terrified, afraid, concerned about the dragon of something we can call communism, Marxism?
3
SPEAKER_01
Am I terrified of it?
3
SPEAKER_01
I m terrified enough to be a tyrant.
3
SPEAKER_02
Your theories had two components.
3
SPEAKER_02
I m not paralyzed and I don t want to be a tyrant.
3
SPEAKER_02
The tyrant part, I think, is missing with you.
3
SPEAKER_02
But you are very concerned.
3
SPEAKER_02
The intensity of your feeling does not give much space, actually, at least in your public persona, for sitting quietly with a dragon and sipping a couple of beers and thinking about this thing.
3
SPEAKER_02
The intensity of your anger, concern about certain things you re seeing in society,
3
SPEAKER_02
Is that going to drive you off the path that ultimately takes us to a better world?
3
SPEAKER_01
That s a good question.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I don t, I m trying to get that right.
3
SPEAKER_01
So we ve kind of come to a cultural conclusion about the Nazis.
3
SPEAKER_01
Do you get to be angry about the Nazis?
3
SPEAKER_01
Seems the answer to that is yes.
3
SPEAKER_02
Well, actually, let me push back here.
3
SPEAKER_02
I also don t trust people who are angry about the Nazis.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean the actual Nazis.
3
SPEAKER_02
Well, as you know, there s a lot of people in the world that use actual Nazis to mean a lot of things.
3
SPEAKER_01
I know, I know.
3
SPEAKER_02
One of them is very important to me.
3
SPEAKER_01
Me, for example.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, yes.
3
SPEAKER_01
He s a Nazi, or magical super Nazi, as it turns out.
3
SPEAKER_02
I think they actually sort of steel man all their perspectives.
3
SPEAKER_02
I think a lot of people that call you a Nazi mean it.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I m aware of that.
3
SPEAKER_02
There s an important thing there though, because I went to the front in Ukraine and a lot of the people
3
SPEAKER_02
that lost their home or that got to interact a lot with the Russian soldiers, Ukrainian people that interacted with the Russian soldiers, they reported that the Russian soldiers really believe they re saving the people of Ukraine in these local villages from the Nazis.
3
SPEAKER_01
So to them,
3
SPEAKER_02
It s not just that the Ukrainian government has or Ukraine has some Nazis.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s like it has been the ideas that the Nazis have taken over Ukraine and we need to free them.
3
SPEAKER_02
This is the belief.
3
SPEAKER_02
So this, again, Nazis still a dragon that lives.
3
SPEAKER_02
And it s used by people because it s safe to sit next to that dragon and spread any kind of ideology you want.
3
SPEAKER_02
So I just want to kind of say that we have agreed on this particular dragon, but I still don t trust anybody who uses that one.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but we have issues with boundaries, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
So this is a very complicated problem, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
So Rene Girard believed that
3
SPEAKER_01
It was a human proclivity to demonize a scapegoat and then drive it out of the village.
3
SPEAKER_01
I ve thought about that a lot.
3
SPEAKER_01
We need a place to put Satan.
3
SPEAKER_01
Seriously, this is a serious issue.
3
SPEAKER_02
Should he be inside the village or outside?
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, maybe he should be inside you.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s the fundamental essence of the Christian doctrine.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like Satan is best fought on the battleground of your soul.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s right.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s right.
3
SPEAKER_02
Can you actually put words to the kind of dragon that you re fighting?
3
SPEAKER_02
Is it communism?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s the spirit of Cain.
3
SPEAKER_02
Can you elaborate what the spirit of Cain is?
3
SPEAKER_01
So, after Adam and Eve are thrown out of paradise for becoming self-conscious, or when they become self-conscious, they re destined to work
3
SPEAKER_01
And the reason for that, as far as I can tell, is that to become self-conscious is to become aware of the future.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s to become aware of death.
3
SPEAKER_01
That certainly happens in the Adam and Eve story.
3
SPEAKER_01
To have the scales fall from your eyes.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then the consequence of that is that you now have to labor to prevent the catastrophes of the future.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s work.
3
SPEAKER_01
Work is sacrifice.
3
SPEAKER_01
Sacrifice of the present to the future.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s delay of gratification.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s maturity.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s sacrifice to something as well, and in the spirit of something.
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so now Adam and Eve have two children, Cain and Abel.
3
SPEAKER_01
So those are the first two people in history.
3
SPEAKER_01
Because the Garden of Eden doesn t count.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they re the first two people who are born, rather than created.
3
SPEAKER_01
So they re the first two people.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s a hell of a story, because it s a story of fratricidal murder that degenerates into genocide, flood, and tyranny.
3
SPEAKER_01
So, that s fun for the opening salvo of the story, let s say.
3
SPEAKER_01
And Abel and Cain both make sacrifices.
3
SPEAKER_01
And for some reason, Abel s sacrifices please God.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s not exactly clear why.
3
SPEAKER_01
And Cain s don t.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now...
3
SPEAKER_01
There s an implication in the text that it s because Cain s sacrifices are second rate.
3
SPEAKER_01
God says that Abel brings the finest to the sacrificial altar.
3
SPEAKER_01
He doesn t say that about Cain.
3
SPEAKER_01
So you could imagine that Cain is sacrificing away, but he s holding something in reserve.
3
SPEAKER_01
He s not all in.
3
SPEAKER_01
He s not bringing his best to the table.
3
SPEAKER_01
He s not offering his best to God.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so Abel thrives like mad.
3
SPEAKER_01
And everyone loves him, and he gets exactly what he needs and wants, exactly when he needs and wants it.
3
SPEAKER_01
He s favored of God.
3
SPEAKER_01
And Cain is bearing this terrible burden forward, and working, and his sacrifices are rejected.
3
SPEAKER_01
So, he gets resentful.
3
SPEAKER_01
Really resentful.
3
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Resentful enough to call God out and say something like, this is quite the creation you ve got going here.
3
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I m breaking myself in half and nothing good s coming my way.
3
SPEAKER_01
What the hell s up with that?
3
SPEAKER_01
And then there s Abel, the sun s shining on him every day.
3
SPEAKER_01
How dare you?
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay, but this is God that Cain s talking to.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so God says what Cain least wants to hear, which is what God usually says to people.
3
SPEAKER_01
He says, look to your own devices.
3
SPEAKER_01
You re not making the sacrifices you should, and you know it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then he says something even worse.
3
SPEAKER_01
He says, sin crouches at your door like a sexually aroused predatory animal.
3
SPEAKER_01
And you ve invited it in to have your way, to have its way with you.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so he basically says, you have allowed your resentment to preoccupy yourself, and now you re brooding upon it and generating something creative, new and awful, possessed by the spirit of resentment.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s why you re in the miserable state you re in.
3
SPEAKER_01
So then Cain leaves.
3
SPEAKER_01
His countenance falls, as you might expect.
3
SPEAKER_01
And Cain leaves.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he s so incensed by this, because God has said, look, your problems are of your own making.
3
SPEAKER_01
And not only that, you invited them in.
3
SPEAKER_01
And not only that, you engaged in this creatively.
3
SPEAKER_01
And not only that, you re blaming it on me.
3
SPEAKER_01
And not only that, that s making you jealous of Abel, who s your actual idol and goal.
3
SPEAKER_01
And Cain, instead of changing,
3
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kills Abel.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right?
3
SPEAKER_01
And then Cain s descendants are the first people who make weapons of war.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so, that s... Okay, you want to know what I think?
3
SPEAKER_01
That s the eternal story of mankind.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s playing out right now.
3
SPEAKER_01
Except at a thousand times the rate.
3
SPEAKER_02
Can I present to you a difficult truth?
3
SPEAKER_02
Perhaps not a truth, but a thought I have.
3
SPEAKER_02
that it is not always easy to know which among us are the king.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s for sure.
3
SPEAKER_02
And resentment, it is possible to imagine you as the person who has a resentment towards a particular worldview that you really worry about.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well, I talked to a good friend of mine last week about that, publicly, we ll release it.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I said, well, do I have a particular animus against the left, let s say.
3
SPEAKER_01
He s like, well, probably.
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay, why?
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, first of all, I m a university professor.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s not like the universities are threatened by the right.
3
SPEAKER_01
They re threatened by the left, 100%.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they re not just threatened a little bit, they re threatened a lot.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that threat made it impossible for me to continue in my profession the way I was, and it cost me my clinical practice too.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s not over yet, because I have 10 lawsuits against me out right now from the College of Psychologists.
3
SPEAKER_01
because they ve allowed anyone to complain about me, anywhere in the world, for any reason, and have the choice to follow that up with an investigation, which is a punishment in and of itself, and are doing so.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then I ve been tortured nearly to death, multiple times, by bad actors on the left.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now I ve had my fair share of radical right-wingers being unhappy with what I ve said, but personally, that s been the left the whole time.
3
SPEAKER_01
not only me, but my family, put my family at risk in a big way.
3
SPEAKER_01
And constantly, like not once or twice, because many people get cancelled once or twice.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I ve been cancelled like 40 times.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I know like 200 people now who ve been cancelled.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I can tell you without doubt that it is one of the worst experiences of their life.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s if it only happens once.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so,
3
SPEAKER_01
And then I also know that the communists killed 100 million people in the 20th century, that the intellectuals excused them for it non-stop and still haven t quit, that almost no one knows about it, and that the specter of resentful Marxism is back in full force.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so do I have a bit of an animus against that?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
3
SPEAKER_01
Does it go too far?
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m trying to figure that out.
3
SPEAKER_02
The story you just told, it seems nearly impossible for you, an intellectual powerhouse, not to have a tremendous amount of resentment.
3
SPEAKER_02
Well... And this is the... So let me challenge you.
3
SPEAKER_00
Go right ahead, man.
3
SPEAKER_02
Let me challenge you.
3
SPEAKER_02
Can you steal man?
3
SPEAKER_02
the case that the prime minister of this country, Trudeau, wants the best for this country and actually might do good things for this country as an intellectual challenge.
3
SPEAKER_01
Sure.
3
SPEAKER_01
He seems to get along well with his wife.
3
SPEAKER_01
He has some kids.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s no sexual scandals.
4
SPEAKER_00
But he s in a position where that could easily be the case.
4
SPEAKER_00
He seems to have done some good things on the oceanic management front.
4
SPEAKER_00
He s put a fair bit of Canada s oceans into marine protected areas, and that might be his most fundamental legacy, if it s real.
4
SPEAKER_00
I ve been trying to get information about the actual reality of the protection, and I haven t been able to do that.
4
SPEAKER_00
But that s a good thing.
4
SPEAKER_01
So sorry, the family thing is, there s some aspect of... It speaks to his character.
4
SPEAKER_01
There is some aspect to him that makes him a good man.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, I mean, there s the evidence there, you know, I mean, he s not a Jeffrey Epstein profligate on the sexual front.
4
SPEAKER_00
So that s something.
4
SPEAKER_00
And his wife, they seem to have a real marriage and he has kids.
4
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, good for him.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s a good start, by the way, for a leader.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, right.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, then I also thought, okay, well, after the Liberals had brought in a Harvard intellectual who was a Canadian to be their last leader, he didn t work out, and then they re flailing about for a leader, and the Liberals in Canada are pretty good at maintaining
4
SPEAKER_00
power and leadership, and have been the dominant governing party in Canada for a long time.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so they went to Justin and said, well, you know, it s you or a conservative, and you can imagine that s not a positive specter for someone who s on the left, or even a liberal, especially, and Trudeau s quite a bit on the left.
4
SPEAKER_00
And they said, we need you to run.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then I thought, okay, well,
4
SPEAKER_00
The answer to that should have been no, because Trudeau, Justin, has no training for this, no experience.
4
SPEAKER_00
He s a part-time drama teacher, fundamentally.
4
SPEAKER_00
He hadn t run a business.
4
SPEAKER_00
He just didn t know enough to be prime minister.
4
SPEAKER_00
But then, I m trying to put myself in his position, so it s like, okay, I don t know enough, but I m young.
4
SPEAKER_00
And we don t want the conservatives and they had had a run a 10 year run So maybe it was time for a new government.
4
SPEAKER_00
I could maybe I could grow into this man Maybe I could surround myself with good people and I could learn humbly and I could become The person I m now pretending to be which we all have to do as we move forward right and so and so then I thought okay, I Think you made a mistake there because you ran only on your father s name
4
SPEAKER_00
And you didn t have the background, but let s give the devil his due and say that s no problem.
4
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so now what do you do?
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, you get elected and your first act is to make the cabinet 50% women, despite the fact that only 25% of the elected members are female.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like, okay, you just halved your talent pool.
4
SPEAKER_00
That was a really bad move for your first movie.
4
SPEAKER_01
Can I ask you about that?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
Do you think, where does that move come from?
4
SPEAKER_01
Deep somewhere in the heart?
4
SPEAKER_00
No.
4
SPEAKER_01
Or is it trying to listen to the social forces of the moment and try to ride those ways towards maybe greater and greater popularity?
4
SPEAKER_00
You don t make a decision like that by theater, after thinking it through.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like, no, you just halved your talent pool.
4
SPEAKER_00
For cabinet positions.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s what you did.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s enough cabinet positions You know, you could argue that each of the met threshold.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like there s a big difference between threshold and excellent So you don t think that that came from a place of compassion?
4
SPEAKER_00
I don t care if I don t regard compassion as a virtue compassion is a reflex not a virtue You don t think judicious compassion is a virtue.
4
SPEAKER_01
Wait, wait a minute.
4
SPEAKER_01
Wait a minute.
4
SPEAKER_01
Compassion can come deep in
4
SPEAKER_01
from the human heart and the human mind, I think.
4
SPEAKER_01
Are we talking about the same kind of compassion?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_01
Trying to understand the suffering of the world.
4
SPEAKER_00
Treating adults like infants is not virtuous.
4
SPEAKER_01
I see.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, compassion isn t treating adults like infants.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, those are just terms.
4
SPEAKER_00
Are you sure?
4
SPEAKER_01
Whatever the term is, maybe love is maybe the better word.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I suppose I m speaking to love.
4
SPEAKER_01
You don t think those ideas came from concern.
4
SPEAKER_00
Love is compassion.
4
SPEAKER_00
Love is a blend of compassion and encouragement and truth.
4
SPEAKER_00
Love s complicated, man.
4
SPEAKER_00
If I love you, is it compassion or encouragement you want from me?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the dance.
4
SPEAKER_01
Love is definitely a dance of two humans, ultimately, that leads to the growth of both.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, that s the thing.
4
SPEAKER_00
The growth element is crucial.
4
SPEAKER_00
Because to foster the growth element, that requires judgment.
4
SPEAKER_00
Compassion and judgment, while even, and have been conceptualized this way forever, two hands of God, mercy and justice, they have to operate in tandem, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And mercy is, flawed as you are, you re acceptable.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like, well, do you want that?
4
SPEAKER_00
Do you want your flaws to be acceptable?
4
SPEAKER_00
And the answer to that is no!
4
SPEAKER_00
So it s like, well, that s where the judgment comes in.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like, but you could be better.
4
SPEAKER_00
You could be more than you are.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that s the maternal and the paternal in some fundamental sense.
4
SPEAKER_00
And there has to be an active...
4
SPEAKER_00
exchange of information between those two poles.
4
SPEAKER_00
So even if Trudeau was motivated by compassion, and it s like, yeah, just how loving are you, first of all?
4
SPEAKER_00
No, it was a really bad decision.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then he s expressed contempt for monetary policy.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m not interested in monetary policy.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like, OK.
4
SPEAKER_00
You re a prime minister, and he s expressed admiration for the Chinese Communist Party, because they can be very efficient in their pursuit of environmental goals.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like, oh yeah, efficiency, eh?
4
SPEAKER_00
The efficiency of the tyranny in the service of your terror.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so, and I ve watched him repeatedly, and I ve listened to him a lot, and I ve tried to do that clinically and with some degree of dispassion.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that s hard, too, because his father, Pierre, devastated the West in 1982 with the national energy policy.
4
SPEAKER_00
And Trudeau is doing exactly the same thing again.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so, as a Westerner, as well, I have an inbuilt animus, and one that s well-deserved, because Central Canada
4
SPEAKER_00
especially the glittery literati elite types in the Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto triangle have
4
SPEAKER_00
exploited the West and expressed contempt for the West far too much for far too long.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that s accelerating at the moment, for example, with Trudeau s recent attack on the Canadian farmers.
4
SPEAKER_00
He s an enemy of the oil and gas industry.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s an utter and absolute bloody catastrophe.
4
SPEAKER_00
And look what s happened in Europe, at least in partial consequence.
4
SPEAKER_00
And he s no friend to the farmers.
4
SPEAKER_00
I ve tried to steel man him, you know, I try to put myself in the position of the people that I m criticizing.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think he s a narcissist.
4
SPEAKER_01
Do you think there s a degree to which power changed him?
4
SPEAKER_00
If you re not suited for the position, if you re not the man for the position, you can be absolutely 100% sure that the power will corrupt you.
4
SPEAKER_00
How could it not?
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, at the least, if you don t have the chops for the job, you have to devalue the job to the point where you can feel comfortable inhabiting it.
4
SPEAKER_00
So yes, I think that it s corrupted him.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I mean, look at him doubling down.
4
SPEAKER_00
We wear masks in flights into Canada.
4
SPEAKER_00
We have to fill out an arrive can bureaucratic form on our phones because a passport isn t good enough.
4
SPEAKER_00
We can t get a passport.
4
SPEAKER_00
What if you re 85 and you don t know how to use a smartphone?
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh well, too bad for you.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like, yes, it s corrupted him.
4
SPEAKER_01
Would you talk to him?
4
SPEAKER_01
If you were to sit down and talk with him and he wanted to talk, would you and what kind of things would you talk about, perhaps on your podcast?
4
SPEAKER_00
I don t think I ve ever said no to talking to anyone.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, which is, you know... Would that be a first, or would you make that conversation?
4
SPEAKER_01
Do you believe in the power of conversation in those kinds of contexts?
4
SPEAKER_00
No, if he was willing to talk to me, I d talk, because I d like to ask him.
4
SPEAKER_00
I have lots of things I d like to ask him about.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I ve had political types in Canada on my podcast and tried to ask them questions.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I d like to know.
4
SPEAKER_00
You know, maybe I ve got a big part of him wrong.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I probably do.
4
SPEAKER_00
But...
4
SPEAKER_00
My observation has been that every chance he had to retreat from his pharaonic position, let s say, he doubled down.
4
SPEAKER_00
Our parliament is not running for the next year.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s still Zoom in.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s still COVID lockdown parliament.
4
SPEAKER_00
For the next year, it s already been
4
SPEAKER_00
Fatally compromised perhaps by the lockdowns for the last couple of years This is Parliament.
4
SPEAKER_00
We re talking about
4
SPEAKER_01
there s a kind of paralysis, fear-driven paralysis that also, in part, some of the most brilliant people I know are lost in this paralysis.
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t think people assign a word to it, but it s almost like a fear of this unknown thing that lurks in the shadows, and that, unfortunately, that fear is leveraged by people who are not aware
4
SPEAKER_01
that, you know, who are in academic circles, who are in faculty or students and so on, are more in administration, and they start to use that fear, which makes me quite uncomfortable.
4
SPEAKER_01
It does lend people in the positions of power who are not good at handling that power to become slowly, day by day, a little bit more corrupt.
4
SPEAKER_00
I was really trying to figure out, you know, the last two weeks, thinking this through, it s like, how do you know
4
SPEAKER_00
Let s say someone asked me a question in the YouTube comments and said, why can I trust your advice on the environmental front?
4
SPEAKER_00
And I thought, that s a really good question.
4
SPEAKER_00
Okay, let s see if we can figure out the principles by which the advice would be trustworthy.
4
SPEAKER_00
Okay, how do you know it s not trustworthy?
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, one potential response to that would be the claims are not in accordance with the facts.
4
SPEAKER_00
But, you know, facts are tricky things, and it depends on where you look for them.
4
SPEAKER_00
So that s a tough one to get right, because, for example, Lomberg s fundamental critics argue about his facts, not just his interpretation of them.
4
SPEAKER_00
So that can t be an unerring guide.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so I thought, well, the facts exactly doesn t work.
4
SPEAKER_00
Because when it s about everything, there s too many facts.
4
SPEAKER_00
So then how do you determine if someone s a trustworthy guide in the face of the apocalyptic unknown?
4
SPEAKER_00
Because that s really the question.
4
SPEAKER_00
And the answer is, they re not terrified tyrants.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think that s the answer.
4
SPEAKER_00
Now, maybe that s wrong.
4
SPEAKER_01
If someone has a better answer... How do you know if they re a terrified tyrant?
4
SPEAKER_00
Because they are willing to use compulsion on other people.
4
SPEAKER_00
When they could use goodwill.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like, the farmers in Canada objected.
4
SPEAKER_00
They said, look...
4
SPEAKER_00
We have every economic reason to use as little fertilizer as we can, because it s expensive.
4
SPEAKER_00
We have satellite maps of where we put the fertilizer.
4
SPEAKER_00
We have cut our fertilizer use so substantially in the last 40 years, you can t believe it, and we grow way more food.
4
SPEAKER_00
We re already breaking ourselves in half.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if you know farmers, especially the ones who still survive, you think those people don t know what they re doing.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like, they re pretty damn sophisticated, man.
4
SPEAKER_00
way more sophisticated than our Prime Minister.
4
SPEAKER_00
And now you tell them, no, it s a 30% reduction, and we don t care how much food you re growing.
4
SPEAKER_00
So it s not a reduction that s dependent on amount of food produced per unit of fertilizer used, which would be, at least, you could imagine it.
4
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so you re producing this much food, and you use this much fertilizer, so you re hyper-efficient.
4
SPEAKER_00
Maybe we take the 10% of farmers who are the least efficient in that metric and we say to them, you have to get as efficient as the average farmer.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then they say, well, look, you know, our, our situation is different.
4
SPEAKER_00
We re in a more Northern climb.
4
SPEAKER_00
The soil is weaker.
4
SPEAKER_00
You know, you obviously have to bargain with that, but at least, at least you reward them for their productivity.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, it s like, well, Holland isn t going to have beef.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, where are they going to get it?
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, you don t need it.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like, oh, I see.
4
SPEAKER_00
You get to tell me what I can eat now, do you?
4
SPEAKER_00
Really?
4
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
4
SPEAKER_00
And Holland is going to import food from where that s more efficient on the fertilizer front.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s no one more efficient than Holland.
4
SPEAKER_00
Same with Canada.
4
SPEAKER_00
And like, isn t this going to make food prices more expensive?
4
SPEAKER_00
And doesn t that mean that hungry people die?
4
SPEAKER_00
Because that is what it means.
4
SPEAKER_01
So ultimately poor people pay the price of these kinds of policies.
4
SPEAKER_00
Not known, not ultimately.
4
SPEAKER_00
Now.
4
SPEAKER_00
Today.
4
SPEAKER_00
Today.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s a crucial distinction because they say, well, ultimately the poor will benefit.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, except the dead ones.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_00
Today.
4
SPEAKER_01
Today, right.
4
SPEAKER_01
It seems like the story of war too is a time when the poor people suffer.
4
SPEAKER_01
from the decision made by the powerful, the rich, the political elite.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, let me ask you about the war in Ukraine.
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh yeah, I got into plenty of trouble about that too.
4
SPEAKER_01
You re just a man in a suit talking on microphones and writing brilliant articles.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s also people dying, fighting,
4
SPEAKER_01
It s their land, it s their country, it s their history.
4
SPEAKER_01
This is true for both Russia and Ukraine.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s people trying to ask, they have many dragons and they re asking themselves the question, who are we?
4
SPEAKER_01
What is this?
4
SPEAKER_01
What is the future of this nation?
4
SPEAKER_01
We thought we are a great nation.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think both countries say this and they say,
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, how do we become the great nation we thought we are?
4
SPEAKER_01
And so what, first of all, you got in trouble.
4
SPEAKER_01
What s the dynamics of the trouble?
4
SPEAKER_01
And is it something you regret saying?
4
SPEAKER_00
No, no.
4
SPEAKER_00
I thought about it a lot.
4
SPEAKER_00
I laid out four reasons for the war.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then I was criticized in the Atlantic for the argument was reduced to one reason, which was a caricature of the reason.
4
SPEAKER_00
I gave a variety of reasons why the war happened.
4
SPEAKER_00
Mismanagement on the part of the West in relationship to Russia and foreign policy over the last, since the wall fell.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s understandable because it s extremely complex.
4
SPEAKER_00
Hyper-reliance on Russia as a cardinal source of energy provision for Europe in the wake of idiot environmental globalist utopianism.
4
SPEAKER_00
The expansionist tendencies of Russia that are analogous in some sense to the Soviet Union empire building.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then the last one, which is the one I got in trouble for, which is Putin s belief
4
SPEAKER_00
or willingness to manipulate his people into believing that Russia is a salvific force in the face of idiot Western wokeism.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that s the one I got in trouble for.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like, while you re justifying Putin, it s like... It s not only the Russians that think the West has lost its mind.
4
SPEAKER_00
The Eastern Europeans think so too.
4
SPEAKER_00
And do I know that?
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like...
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, I went to 15 Eastern European countries this spring, and I talked to 300 political and cultural leaders.
4
SPEAKER_00
And you might say, well, they were all conservatives.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like, actually, no, they weren t.
4
SPEAKER_00
Most of them were conservatives, because it turns out that they re more willing to talk to me.
4
SPEAKER_00
But a good chunk of them were liberals, by any stretch of the imagination.
4
SPEAKER_00
And a fair number of them were cancelled progressives.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, because you re very concerned about the culture wars that perhaps are a signal of a possible bad future for this country, for this part of the world.
4
SPEAKER_01
That reason stands out and...
4
SPEAKER_01
Do you, sort of looking back at four reasons, think it deserves to have a place in one of the four?
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh, absolutely.
4
SPEAKER_00
Because it is, you know... Well, the four was bifurcated, because I said, look, Putin might believe this, and I actually think he does, because I read a bunch of Putin s speeches, and I have been reading them for 15 years, and my sense of people
5
SPEAKER_01
Generally, and this was true of Hitler.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s like What did Hitler believe?
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, did you read what he wrote?
5
SPEAKER_01
He just did what he said he was going to do and you might think well, some people are so tricky.
5
SPEAKER_01
They have a whole body of elaborated speech That s completely separate from their personality and their personality is pursuing a different agenda and this whole body of speech is nothing but a front and
5
SPEAKER_01
It s like, good luck finding someone that sophisticated.
5
SPEAKER_01
First of all, if you say things long enough, you re going to believe them.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s a really interesting and fascinating and important point.
5
SPEAKER_00
Even if you start out as a lie, as a propaganda, I think Hitler is an example of somebody that I think really quickly you start to believe the propaganda.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, you ve thought a lot about AI systems.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s like,
5
SPEAKER_01
Don t you become what you practice?
5
SPEAKER_01
And the answer to that is, well, absolutely.
5
SPEAKER_01
We even know the neurology.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s like when you first formulate a concept, huge swaths of your cortex are lit up, so to speak.
5
SPEAKER_01
But as you practice that, first of all, the right hemisphere stops participating, and then the left participates less and less until you build specialized machinery for exactly that conceptual frame.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then you start to see it, not just think it.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so if you re telling the same lies over and over, who do you think you re fooling?
5
SPEAKER_01
Think, well, I can withstand my own lies.
5
SPEAKER_01
Not if they re effective lies.
5
SPEAKER_01
And if they re effective enough to fool millions of people, and then they reflect them back to you, what makes you think you re going to be able to withstand that?
5
SPEAKER_01
You aren t.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so I do think Putin believes, to the degree that he believes anything, I do believe that he thinks of himself as a bulwark for
5
SPEAKER_01
Christendom against the degeneration of the West and that s that third way that Dugan and Putin have been talking about the philosopher Alexander Dugan and Putin for 15 years now what that is is very amorphous Solzhenitsyn thought the Russians would have to return to the incremental development of Orthodox Christianity To escape from the communist trap and to some degree that s happened in Russia because there s been a return to Orthodox Christianity
5
SPEAKER_01
Now, you could say, yeah, but the Orthodox Church has just been co-opted by the state.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I would say there s some evidence for that.
5
SPEAKER_01
I ve heard, for example, that the Metropolitan owns—now, I don t know if this is true.
5
SPEAKER_01
Owns five billion dollars worth of personal property and I would say there s a bit of a moral hazard in that and it s possible that the Orthodox Church has been co-opted But there has been somewhat have an Orthodox revival in Russia and I don t think that s all bad now even if Putin doesn t believe any of this if he s just a psychopathic manipulator and unfortunately, I Don t think that s true
5
SPEAKER_01
I ve read his speeches.
5
SPEAKER_01
It doesn t look like it to me.
5
SPEAKER_01
And he is by no means the worst Russian leader of the last hundred years.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, there s quite a selection there.
5
SPEAKER_01
There certainly is.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I say that knowing that.
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SPEAKER_01
Even if he doesn t believe it, he s convinced his people that it s true.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so we re stuck with the claim in either case.
5
SPEAKER_01
And that s the point I was trying to make in the article.
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SPEAKER_00
people that explain things.
5
SPEAKER_00
And a lot of people have reached out to me, experts, telling me how I should feel, what I should think about Ukraine.
5
SPEAKER_00
Oh, you naive, Lex, you re so naive.
5
SPEAKER_00
Here s how it really is.
5
SPEAKER_00
But then I get to see people that lost their home.
5
SPEAKER_00
I get to see people on the Russian side who believe they re, I genuinely think that there s some degree to which they have love in their heart.
5
SPEAKER_00
They see themselves as heroes saving a land from Nazis.
5
SPEAKER_01
How else would you motivate young men to go fight?
5
SPEAKER_00
It s just, it s these humans destroying not only their homes, but creating generational hate.
5
SPEAKER_00
Destroying the possibility of love towards each other.
5
SPEAKER_00
they re basically creating hate.
5
SPEAKER_00
What I ve heard a lot of is on February 24th of this year, hate was born at a scale that region has not seen.
5
SPEAKER_00
Hate towards not Vladimir Putin, hate towards not the soldiers in Russia, but hate towards all Russians.
5
SPEAKER_00
Hate that will last generations.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then you can see on the,
5
SPEAKER_00
just the pain there.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then when all these experts talk about agriculture and energy and geopolitics and yeah, maybe like what you say with fighting the ideologies of the woke and so on, I just feel like it s missing something deep that war is not fought.
5
SPEAKER_00
about any of those things.
5
SPEAKER_00
War started and war is averted based on human beings, based on humanity.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, here s another ugly thought, since we haven t had enough so far.
5
SPEAKER_01
We locked everything down for COVID.
5
SPEAKER_01
How much face-to-face communication was there between the West and Vladimir Putin?
5
SPEAKER_01
How about none?
5
SPEAKER_01
How about that was the wrong amount?
5
SPEAKER_01
Especially given that Europe was completely dependent on Putin for its energy supplies.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, not completely, but you know what I mean.
5
SPEAKER_01
Materially and significantly.
5
SPEAKER_01
Maybe he had to go talk to him once every six months.
5
SPEAKER_01
Maybe he s in a bit of a bubble.
5
SPEAKER_01
Probably.
5
SPEAKER_00
And not just an information bubble, how all these experts tell me about.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
No, a human bubble.
5
SPEAKER_00
You bet, man.
5
SPEAKER_01
Look, one of the things I ve really learned, there s a real emphasis on hospitality in the Old Testament.
5
SPEAKER_01
I just brought all these scholars together to talk about Exodus.
5
SPEAKER_01
I have this security team with me, and they re tough military guys, but they re on board for this mission, let s say.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so they went out of their way to be hospitable to my academic guests.
5
SPEAKER_01
They laid out nice platters of meat and cheese and crackers.
5
SPEAKER_01
They spent all day preparing this house I had rented so that we could have a hospitable time with these scholars, most of whom I didn t know well, but who said they would come and spend eight days talking about this book with me.
5
SPEAKER_01
We rented some jet skis.
5
SPEAKER_01
We had a nice house.
5
SPEAKER_01
We had fun.
5
SPEAKER_01
We got to know each other.
5
SPEAKER_01
And we got to trust each other, because we could see that we could have some fun, and that we could let our hair down a bit.
5
SPEAKER_01
We didn t have to be on guard.
5
SPEAKER_01
And that made the talks way deeper.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then we found out we couldn t get through Exodus in eight days, and so...
5
SPEAKER_01
I had proposed very early on that we re going to double the length.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so I pulled eight people out of their lives for eight days.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s not an easy thing to do.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s also quite expensive.
5
SPEAKER_01
And the Daily Wire Plus people picked all that up.
5
SPEAKER_01
And they said, yes, right away.
5
SPEAKER_01
They said, we d love to do this again.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, why?
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, partly because intellectually, it was unbelievably engaging.
5
SPEAKER_01
I learned so much.
5
SPEAKER_01
It ll take me like a year to digest it, if I can ever digest it.
5
SPEAKER_01
And, but they had, they had a really good time.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so when they were offered that combination of intellectual challenge, let s say in hospitality, it was a no brainer.
5
SPEAKER_01
They just said, every one of them said, if I can do it in any way, I will definitely be there.
5
SPEAKER_01
And this, I went to Washington a bunch of times and the culture of hospitality has broken down in Washington.
5
SPEAKER_01
40% of congressmen sleep in their offices.
5
SPEAKER_01
They don t have apartments.
5
SPEAKER_01
Their family isn t there with them.
5
SPEAKER_01
They don t have social occasions with their fellow Democrats or Republicans, much less across the table.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so, and I tried to have some meetings in Washington that were bilateral a couple of times, get young Republican congressmen and Democrats together to talk.
5
SPEAKER_01
And as soon as they talk, they think, oh,
5
SPEAKER_01
It was so interesting because one of the lunches was about 15 people, half Democrats and half Republicans, and all I d ask them to do was just spend three minutes talking about why you decided to become a congressman, which is not a job I would take, by the way.
5
SPEAKER_01
You spend 25 hours a week fundraising on the telephone.
5
SPEAKER_01
Your family isn t there with you.
5
SPEAKER_01
You have to run for re-election every two years.
5
SPEAKER_01
You re beholden to the party apparatus, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
You re vilified constantly.
5
SPEAKER_01
This is not...
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, people think, well, this is a job for the privileged.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s like, yeah, you go and run for Congress and find out how much fun it is and put your family on the line and then have to beg for your job every two years while your enemies, the worst of your enemies and the worst of your friends are viciously hen-pecking you.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so anyways, we had them all sit around a table and said, okay, just say why you ran for Congress.
5
SPEAKER_01
It was so cool, especially for a Canadian, because you Americans, you re so bloody theatrical.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s something to watch.
5
SPEAKER_01
It was like Mr. Smith goes to Washington for every one of them.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s like, well, this country has given us so much.
5
SPEAKER_01
Our families have been so... We ve benefited so much from our time here.
5
SPEAKER_01
We think this is a wonderful country.
5
SPEAKER_01
We really felt that we should give back.
5
SPEAKER_01
Then the next one would talk, and it was like exactly the same story.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then it didn t matter if they were Republican or Democrat.
5
SPEAKER_01
You couldn t tell the difference.
5
SPEAKER_01
No one could.
5
SPEAKER_01
And was it genuine?
5
SPEAKER_01
It s like, well, are you genuine?
5
SPEAKER_01
You think these people are worse than you?
5
SPEAKER_01
First of all, they re not.
5
SPEAKER_01
Second of all, they re probably better, all things considered.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s not that easy to become a congressman.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I m sure there s some bad apples in the bunch, but by and large, you walk away from your meetings with these people and you think,
5
SPEAKER_00
Pretty impressive.
5
SPEAKER_00
They really are giving a part of themselves in the name of service.
5
SPEAKER_00
Maybe over time they become cynical and become jaded and worn down by the whole system.
5
SPEAKER_01
But I think a lot of it- Yeah, could you imagine that?
5
SPEAKER_00
Is healed, I think.
5
SPEAKER_00
and I don t think I m, well, I m in part naive, but not fully, that a lot of it is healed through the power of conversation, just basic social interaction.
5
SPEAKER_00
I do think that the- You bet, man.
5
SPEAKER_00
The effects of this pandemic- Especially by listening.
5
SPEAKER_00
Listen, just sitting there, and it doesn t have to be talking about the actual issue.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s actually humor and all those kinds of things about personal struggles, all those kinds of things that remind you that you re all just humans.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, the great leaders that I ve met, and I ve met some now,
5
SPEAKER_01
They go listen to their constituents.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s not a policy discussion.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s not an ideology discussion.
5
SPEAKER_01
They go say, okay, what s your life like?
5
SPEAKER_01
And what are your problems?
5
SPEAKER_01
And tell me about them.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then they listen and then they re struck by them.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then they gather up all that misery and they bring it to the congressional office or to the parliament.
5
SPEAKER_01
And they think, here s what the people are crying out for.
5
SPEAKER_01
And the good leaders, that s a leader, leader listens.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I talked to Jimmy Carr about comedy, and he s sold out stages worldwide on a tour being funny.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s hard.
5
SPEAKER_01
He said, comedy is the most stand-up comedy, which is what I do in some real sense.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s a thing I do that it s most akin to what I m doing on my book tours, I would say.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s the closest analog.
5
SPEAKER_01
He said, it s the most dialogical enterprise, and I thought,
5
SPEAKER_01
Why?
5
SPEAKER_01
What do you mean?
5
SPEAKER_01
Because see, it s just the monologue and it s a prepared monologue.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you have to interact dynamically with the audience while you re telling your jokes and you ve got to get the timing right, but you have a body of jokes.
5
SPEAKER_01
He said, well, here s how you prepare the jokes.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I ve been told this by other comedians.
5
SPEAKER_01
You go to 50 clubs before you go on your tour and you got some new material and you think it s funny and you go into a club and you lay out your new material and people laugh at some of it.
5
SPEAKER_01
And you pay attention to what they laugh at and what they don t laugh at.
5
SPEAKER_01
So you subject yourself to the judgment of the crowd and you get rid of everything that isn t funny.
5
SPEAKER_01
And if you do that enough, even if you re not that funny, the crowd will tell you what s funny.
5
SPEAKER_01
So you can imagine, imagine you do 50 shows and each is an hour long and you collect two minutes of humor from each show.
5
SPEAKER_01
So you throw away 90, you throw away two hours, more than 98% of it, collect two minutes per show.
5
SPEAKER_01
So you re not very funny at all.
5
SPEAKER_01
You re like funny 2% of the time.
5
SPEAKER_01
You aggregate that, man, you re a scream.
5
SPEAKER_01
So that s what a leader does.
5
SPEAKER_01
That is what a leader does, is goes out and he aggregates the misery, you know, and the hopes.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then I do think that s revivify to someone who would otherwise be cynical and jaded, because then the person can say to themselves, despite the inadequacies of the system and my inadequacies, I m
5
SPEAKER_01
I m gathering up the misery and the hope, and I m bringing it forward where it can be redressed.
5
SPEAKER_00
Giving it a voice.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s right, giving it a voice.
5
SPEAKER_00
Can you actually take me through a day, because this is fascinating, through your comedy tour?
5
SPEAKER_00
What does a day in the life of Jordan Peterson look like, which is this very interesting day?
5
SPEAKER_00
Let s look at the day when you have to speak.
5
SPEAKER_00
preparing your mind, thinking of what you re going to talk about, preparing yourself physically and mentally to interact with the crowd through the actual speaking, how do you adjust what you re thinking through and how do you come down from that so you can start all again as a limited biological system?
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, I m usually up by seven and ready to go by 7.30 or eight.
5
SPEAKER_00
Coffee?
5
SPEAKER_01
No, steak and water.
5
SPEAKER_00
How many times a day steak?
5
SPEAKER_01
All, that s all I eat.
5
SPEAKER_00
How many times?
5
SPEAKER_01
Three or four, depending on the day.
5
SPEAKER_00
Steak and water.
5
SPEAKER_01
Steak and sparkling water.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so monastic asceticism, man.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, I did the proper, I usually eat just once a day.
5
SPEAKER_00
I did the proper Jordan Peterson last night and just ate two steaks.
5
SPEAKER_01
And how was that?
5
SPEAKER_00
It was wonderful.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well, if you have to only eat one thing,
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, could be worse.
5
SPEAKER_01
So anyways, I m ready to go at 8, because we re generally moving.
5
SPEAKER_00
What does moving mean?
5
SPEAKER_01
You re constantly... Flying somewhere.
5
SPEAKER_01
And we usually use private flights now, because the commercial airlines aren t reliable enough, and you cannot not make a venue.
5
SPEAKER_01
So that s rule number one on a tour.
5
SPEAKER_01
You make the show.
5
SPEAKER_01
So everything, and then rule number two is anybody who causes any trouble on the tour is gone because there is zero room for error.
5
SPEAKER_01
Now, no, there s zero room for unnecessary, unaddressed error.
5
SPEAKER_01
So there s going to be errors.
5
SPEAKER_01
The guys I have around me now,
5
SPEAKER_01
If they make a mistake, they fix it right away.
5
SPEAKER_00
And that s great.
5
SPEAKER_00
There s a lot of people relying on you to be there, so you have to be there.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, like 4,000 people, typically.
5
SPEAKER_01
So then I m on the plane, and I usually write, or often, because there s no internet on the plane, and that s a good use of time.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I m writing a new book, so I write on the plane.
5
SPEAKER_00
Typing or handwriting?
5
SPEAKER_00
Typing.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, typing.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then we land and we go to, it s usually early afternoon by then, we go to a hotel, it s usually a nice hotel, it s not corporate, I don t really like corporate hotels.
5
SPEAKER_01
My secretary and one of my logistics guys has got quite good at picking kind of adventurous hotels, boutique hotels.
5
SPEAKER_01
They re usually in the old parts of the city, especially in Europe, somewhere interesting.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so we go there.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then lunch, usually.
5
SPEAKER_01
And sometimes that s an air fryer and a steak in the hotel room.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I leave a trail of air fryers behind me all across the world.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then
5
SPEAKER_01
Tammy and I usually go out and have a walk or something and take a look at the city, and then I have a rest for like an hour and a half, or an hour, half an hour.
5
SPEAKER_00
Like a nap?
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, a nap.
5
SPEAKER_01
I have to sleep for 20 minutes, and that s about all I can sleep, but I need to do that in the late afternoon.
5
SPEAKER_00
And that refreshes your mind.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that gives me, that wakes me up again for the evening.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then Tam has to sleep longer, she s still recovering from her illness, and so...
5
SPEAKER_01
She has to sleep longer in the afternoon, and that s absolutely necessary for both of us, or things start to get frayed.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so then we go to the venue, and then I usually sit for
6
SPEAKER_02
an hour if I m going to lecture.
6
SPEAKER_02
I ve been doing a lot of Q&As and that s a little easier, but if I m going to lecture, I have to sit for an hour and then I think, okay.
6
SPEAKER_02
What question am I trying to investigate?
6
SPEAKER_02
I have to have that, that s the point.
6
SPEAKER_02
What mystery am I trying to unravel?
6
SPEAKER_02
It s usually associated with one of the rules in my book, because technically it s a book tour, but each of those rules is an investigation into an ethic, and each of them points to a deeper sort of mystery in some sense.
6
SPEAKER_02
There s no end to the amount it can be explored.
6
SPEAKER_02
And so I have the question My question might be something like Put your put your house in perfect order before you criticize the world Okay, what does that mean exactly put you what does house mean?
6
SPEAKER_02
What just put what does put mean that active?
6
SPEAKER_02
verb.
6
SPEAKER_02
What does perfect and order mean?
6
SPEAKER_02
Why before you criticize the world?
6
SPEAKER_02
What does it mean to criticize?
6
SPEAKER_02
What does it mean to criticize the world?
6
SPEAKER_02
How can you do that properly or improperly?
6
SPEAKER_02
So I start to think about how to decompose the question.
6
SPEAKER_00
And you start to think which of these decompositions are important to really dig into.
6
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, well then they ll strike me.
6
SPEAKER_02
It s like, okay, there s something there that I ve been maybe noodling around on that I would like to investigate further.
6
SPEAKER_02
Then I think, okay, how can I approach this problem?
6
SPEAKER_02
I think, well, I have this story that I know, and I have this story, and I have this story, but I haven t juxtaposed them before, and there s going to be some interesting interaction in the juxtaposition.
6
SPEAKER_02
So I have the question, and I kind of have a framework of interpretation, and then I have some potential narrative places I can go.
6
SPEAKER_02
And then I think, okay, I can go juggle that and see what happens.
6
SPEAKER_02
And so then what I want to do is concentrate on that process while attending to the audience to make sure that the words are landing.
6
SPEAKER_02
And then see if I can delve into it deeply enough so that a narrative emerges spontaneously with an ending.
6
SPEAKER_02
Now, I m sure you ve experienced this in podcasts, right?
6
SPEAKER_02
Maybe I m wrong, but my experience has been if I fall into the conversation and we know about the time frame, there ll be a natural narrative arc.
6
SPEAKER_02
And then so you ll kind of know when the midpoint is and you ll kind of see when you re reaching a conclusion.
6
SPEAKER_02
And then if you really pay attention, you can see that s a good place to stop.
6
SPEAKER_02
And it s kind of, you come to a point, and you have to be alert and patient to see that.
6
SPEAKER_02
And you have to be willing to be satisfied with where you ve got to.
6
SPEAKER_02
But if you do that, and then it s like a comedian making the punchline work.
6
SPEAKER_02
It s like, I ve got all these balls in the air, and they re going somewhere, and this is how they come together.
6
SPEAKER_02
And people love that, right?
6
SPEAKER_02
They say, oh, this and this and this and this and this.
6
SPEAKER_02
Whack!
6
SPEAKER_02
Together and that s an insight and it is very much like a punchline.
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, that s interesting because your mind actually some I m fan of your podcast too and You are always driving towards that.
6
SPEAKER_00
I would say for me in a podcast conversation.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s often a kind of a
6
SPEAKER_00
Alice in Wonderland type of exploration.
6
SPEAKER_00
Down the rabbit hole, man.
6
SPEAKER_00
And then you just, a new thing pops up.
6
SPEAKER_00
The more absurd, the wilder, the better.
6
SPEAKER_00
Conversations with Elon are like this.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I bet.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s like, actually, the more you drive towards an arc, the more uncomfortable you start to get in a fun, absurd conversation because, oh, I,
6
SPEAKER_00
I m now one of the normies.
6
SPEAKER_00
No, I don t want that.
6
SPEAKER_00
I want to be... I want the rabbit.
6
SPEAKER_00
I want the crazy.
6
SPEAKER_00
Because it makes it more fun.
6
SPEAKER_00
But somehow, throughout it, there is wisdom that he tried to grasp at, such that there is a thread.
6
SPEAKER_02
Well, that s the thing, man.
6
SPEAKER_02
You re following the thread, eh?
6
SPEAKER_02
Well, that s right.
6
SPEAKER_02
That s what we re trying to do.
6
SPEAKER_02
That thread.
6
SPEAKER_02
That thread is the proper balance between structure and spontaneity.
6
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And it manifests itself as the instinct of meaning.
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And that s the Logos in the Dialogos.
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And it really is the Logos.
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And God only knows what that means.
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You know, I mean the the biblical claim is that logos is the fundamental principle of reality and I think that s true I actually think that s true because I think that that meaning that guides you Well, here s a way of thinking about I ve been writing about this recently What s real?
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Matter it s like okay.
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That s one answer.
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What s real?
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What matters is real?
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That s how you act Okay, that s different than matter
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It s like, okay, what s the most real of what matters?
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How about pain?
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Why is it the most real?
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Try arguing it away.
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Good luck.
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So pain is the fundamental reality.
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All right.
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Well, that s rough.
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Doesn t that lead to nihilism and hopelessness?
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Yeah, doesn t it lead to a philosophy that s antithetical towards being?
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The most fundamental reality is pain.
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Yes.
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Is there anything more fundamental than pain?
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Love.
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Really?
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If you re in pain, love and truth.
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That s what you got.
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And you know,
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If they re more powerful than pain, maybe they re the most real things.
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When you think about reality, what is real that is the most real thing?
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Well, it s a tough one, right?
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Because you have to, because if you re a scientist, a materialist, think, well, the matter is the most real.
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It s like, well, you don t know what the matter is.
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And so, and then when push comes to shove, and it will, you ll find out what s most real.
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I feel like this is missing, physical reality is missing some of the things.
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So of course pain has a biological component and all those kinds of things, but it s missing something deep about the human condition that at least the modern science is not able to
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describe, but it is reaching towards that.
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One way to describe it as you re describing is the reason it s reaching it is because underneath of science is this assumption that there s a deep thing to this whole thing we re trying to do.
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Well, you know, there s two traditions, right?
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In some sense, there s two Logos traditions.
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There s the Greek rational enlightenment tradition.
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That s a Logos tradition.
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And it insists that there s a Logos in nature, and that science is the way to approach it.
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And then there s the Judeo-Christian Logos, which is more embodied and more spiritual.
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And I would say the West is actually an attempt to unite those two.
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And it s the proper attempt to unite those two, because they need to be united.
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And I see the union coming, in your terms.
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You know, I talk to friends to all, for example, about the animating principle of chimpanzee sovereignty.
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And that s pretty close, biologically.
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Is it power?
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Because that s the claim, even from the biologists often.
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The most dominant chimp has the best reproductive success.
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It s like...
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Oh yeah?
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Dominant, eh?
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You mean using compulsion?
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Okay, let s look.
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Are the chimps who use compulsion the most successful?
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And the answer is...
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sporadically and rarely and for short, well that s sporadically, for short periods of time.
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Why?
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Because they meet an unpleasant end.
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The subordinates over whom they exercise arbitrary control wait for a weak moment and then tear them into shreds, right?
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Every dictator s terror.
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And for good reason.
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And de Waal has showed that the alpha chimps, the males, who do have preferential mating access often, are often, and reliably, the best peacemakers and the most reciprocal.
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And so even among chimps, the principle of sovereignty is something like iterated reciprocity.
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And that s a way better principle than power.
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And it s something like, I ve been thinking, what s the antithesis of the spirit of power?
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I think it s the spirit of play.
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And you know, I don t know what you think about that, but when you have a good podcast conversation, you already described it in some sense as play.
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It s like there s a structure, right?
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Because it s an ordered conversation, but you want there to be play in the system.
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And if you get that right, then it s really engaging.
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And then it seems to have its own.
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narrative arc.
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I m not trying to impose that, even though that s another thing I don t do.
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I didn t come to this conversation at all thinking, here s what I want out of a conversation with Lex Friedman.
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Like, instrumentally, I thought, I ll go talk to Lex.
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Why?
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I like his podcasts.
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He s doing something right.
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I don t know what it is.
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He asks interesting questions.
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I ll go have a conversation with him.
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Where s it going to go?
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Wherever it goes,
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Embracing the spirit of play.
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So you have this, when you re lecturing, you re going in front of the crowd, you thought of a question, you get on the stage.
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First of all, are you nervous at all?
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I m very nervous when I m sitting down thinking through the structure initially, which is why my wife and I have been doing Q&As, and that s easier on me.
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It s the way comedians are nervous, like Joe Rogan just did his special this weekend.
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And so he now has to sit nervously like a comedian does, which is like, I have no material now.
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I have to start from scratch.
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When I was doing the lectures constantly instead of the Q&As, basically what I was doing was writing a whole book chapter every night.
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You know now that s a bit of an exaggeration because I would return to themes that I had developed But it s not really an exaggeration because I didn t ever just go over wrote material ever So it was it s very demanding and that part s nerve-wracking because I sit down it s an hour before the show and I think oh
6
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Can I do this?
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And, you know, the answer is, well, you did it a thousand times, but that s not this time.
6
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It s like, can I come up with a question?
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Can I think through the structure?
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Can I pull off the spontaneous narrative?
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Can I pull it together?
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And the answer is, I don t know.
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And so then I get it together in my mind, I think.
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And that s hard.
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It takes effort and it s nerve wracking.
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Okay, I got it.
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But then there s the moment you go out on stage and you think, well, I know I had it, but can I do it?
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No notes.
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And then the question is, well, you re going to find out while you do it.
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And so then I go out on stage.
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And I don t talk to the audience.
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I talk to one person at a time.
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And you can talk to one person, you know, because you know how to do that.
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So I talk to a person, and no, it s too long, because I don t want to make them too nervous, and then someone else, and someone else, and then I m in contact with the audience, and then I can tell if the words are landing.
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And I listen, it s like, are they rustling around?
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Are they dead quiet?
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Because you want dead quiet.
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Oh, I see.
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That s what focus sounds like.
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You re in it together, then.
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You bet.
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Well, and I also—here s a good rule if you re learning to speak publicly.
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I never say a word.
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Till everyone is 100% quiet.
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And that s, it s a great way to start a talk because you re set in the frame, eh?
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And if the frame is, well, I ll talk while you re talking, the message is, well, you can talk.
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This is a place where everybody can talk.
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It s like, no, it s not.
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This is a place where people paid to hear me talk.
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So I m not going to talk till everyone s listening.
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And so then you get that stillness, and then you just wait, because that stillness turns into an expectation.
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And then it turns into a kind of nervous expectation.
6
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It s like, what the hell is he doing?
6
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It s not manipulative.
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It s a sense of timing.
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It s like, just when that s right, you think, OK, now it s time to start.
6
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Well, the interesting thing about that nervous expectation is, from an audience perspective, we re in it together.
6
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Yeah.
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I mean, there is, into that silence, there is a togetherness to it.
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Of course, it s the union of everyone s attention.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, and that s a great thing.
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I mean, you love that at a concert when everyone, it s not silence then, but when everyone s attention is unified and everyone s moving in unison, it s like we re all worshiping the same thing.
6
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Right is when that would be the point of the conversation the point of the lecture and the worship is the direction of attention Towards it and it s you it s communion because everyone s doing it at the same time.
6
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And so I Mean, there s not much difference between lecture theater and a church in that regard, right?
6
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It s the same fundamental layout and structure and they re very integrally Associated with one another one really grew out of the other the lecture theater grew out of the church So it s it s perfectly reasonable to be thinking about it in those terms
6
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And so, and then, okay, so after the lecture, we play a piece of music that is a piece of music that I ve been producing with some musicians for a couple of books I m going to release in the fall.
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Terrible books.
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ABC of Childhood Tragedy, they re called.
6
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Dark, dark books.
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Dark and comical books.
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Terrible books.
6
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Heartbreaking illustrations.
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We set them to music, and so we play a piece from that, and then afterwards, I usually meet about 150 people to have photographs, and so each of those is a little... Is there a little sparkle of human connection that you have to... A lot, a lot.
6
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It s very intense, 10 seconds with every person.
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You think, well, how can 10 seconds be intense?
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It s like, pay enough attention.
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It gets intense real quick.
6
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Does it break your heart to say goodbye so many times?
6
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It s like being in a wedding lineup, at a wedding that you want to be at and everybody s dressed up.
6
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And that s so weird, eh, because I bought these expensive suits when I went on tour and it broke my heart because I spent so much money on them.
6
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I thought, God, that s completely unconscionable.
6
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I thought, no way, man, I m in this 100%.
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And so I m going to dress with respect and
6
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Like 60% of the audience comes in two or three piece suits.
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They re all dressed up.
6
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Then there s this line to greet me and they re all happy to see me.
6
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That s not so hard to take, you know, although it is in a sense, right?
6
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Because normal interactions are pretty shallow and you think, I don t want shallow interactions.
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It s like, yes, you do.
6
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Yeah, it s intense.
6
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It s very intense and I don t know if you ve had a taste of this no doubt because people reckon yeah, but I also have When a person recognizes me and they come with the love and they re often brilliant people One of the thoughts I have to deal with one of the dragons in my own mind is You know thinking that I don t deserve that kind of attention.
6
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And so well, you probably don t and
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Right, I don t.
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So it s a burden in that I have to step up to be the kind of person that deserves that, not deserves that, but in part deserves that kind of attention.
6
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And that s like, holy shit.
6
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It s crucially important too, because if someone comes up to you in an airport and they know who you are and they re
6
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brave enough to admire you or who you are attempting to be, and you make a mistake, they will never forget it.
6
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So it s a high stakes enterprise.
6
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And the flip side of that, especially with young people, a few words you can say can change the direction of their life.
6
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One way or another.
6
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And so I really have to watch this too in airports.
6
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I do not like airports.
6
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I do not like the creeping totalitarianism in airports.
6
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They ve always bothered me.
6
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Yes.
6
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They really bother me.
6
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And I m an unpleasant travel companion for my wife sometimes because of that, although I think we ve worked that out.
6
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Thank God, because we re doing a lot of traveling.
6
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But most of the security guards and and the border personnel, all those people, they know me.
6
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And as a general rule, they re positively predisposed to me.
6
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And so if I m peevish or irritable,
6
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Then, well, that s not good.
6
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It s not good.
6
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And so that s a tight rope to walk to because I do not like that creeping totalitarianism.
6
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But by the same token, you know, if you re just one of the crowd, just.
7
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You know sometimes you it s good just to be one of the crowd and then you re a little irritable and people can just brush that off but if you re someone they have dared to open their heart to because that s what admiration is and then you re Be and you betray that then that s a real they ll never forget it and then they ll tell everyone to and
7
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So it takes a lot of alertness.
7
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And so Tammy and I, our life has got complicated, because in Toronto, for example, we can t really just go for a walk.
7
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It s always a high drama production, because always people come up and they have some heart-rending story to tell.
7
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And I m not being cynical about that.
7
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It s a hard thing to bear, because people don t do that.
7
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They don t just open themselves up to you like that and share the tragedy of their life.
7
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But that s an everyday occurrence.
7
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And so when we go up to our cottage, which is out of the city, it s a relief, you know, because...
7
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As wonderful as that is, like it s a weird, I have a weird life because everywhere I go, it s very weird.
7
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It s like I m surrounded by old friends.
7
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Because I walk down the street in any city now, virtually, and people say, hello, Dr. Peterson, so nice to see you.
7
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Or they say better things than that.
7
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Very rarely bad things.
7
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One experience in 5,000 maybe, very rare.
7
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Although you don t forget those either.
7
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But it s very, it s very strange.
7
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So.
7
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And there s an intimacy, they know you well.
7
SPEAKER_00
And because they leap into, they avoid the small talk often.
7
SPEAKER_00
They leap into familiarity.
7
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It really is like it s an old friend and it feels like that.
7
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For me personally, the experience is the goodbye hurts.
7
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Because, you know, there s a sense where you re never gonna see that friend again.
7
SPEAKER_01
Right.
7
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Yeah, that s a strange thing, eh?
7
SPEAKER_00
So to me, a lot of the,
7
SPEAKER_00
A lot of it just feels like goodbyes.
7
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And it is.
7
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You re right about that.
7
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And I mean, that s, I suppose, in some sense, part of the pain of opening yourself up to people.
7
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Because they also... Tammy has been struck particularly.
7
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She said, I really never knew what men were like.
7
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I said, what do you mean?
7
SPEAKER_01
She said, I cannot believe how polite
7
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the men are when they come and talk to you.
7
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Because it s always the same, the pattern s very similar.
7
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The person comes up, they re mostly men, not always, but mostly.
7
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And they re tentative, and they re very polite.
7
SPEAKER_01
Very, very polite.
7
SPEAKER_01
And they say, I hope I m not bothering you, do you mind, you know, do you mind that I say that they re not bothering me?
7
SPEAKER_01
And I m doing everything I can to not be the guy who s bothered by that.
7
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It s like, who do you think you are?
7
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You re the guy that, what, is famous and now is above that?
7
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You don t want to be that guy.
7
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So you want to be grateful all the time when people open up like that.
7
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And so you ve got to be alert and on point to do that properly, like right away.
7
SPEAKER_01
Because for you it s 5 seconds or 10 seconds or 20 seconds, whatever it is.
7
SPEAKER_01
But for them, they ve opened up and so you can really nail them if you re foolish.
7
SPEAKER_00
After the 150 people, how do you come down from that?
7
SPEAKER_00
How do you find yourself again?
7
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Well, that was often when I got caught in Twitter traps, you know, because I m so burnt out by then from the talk and the audience interactions and the whole day.
7
SPEAKER_01
Because it s a new city, it s a new hotel, it s a new 5,000 people, it s a new book chapter, it s a whole new horizon of ideas, and it s off to another city the next day.
7
SPEAKER_01
I m so burnt out by then that I m not as good at controlling my impulses as I might be, and Twitter was a real catastrophe for that, because it would hook me, and then I couldn t... Like I used to, when I was working on my book a lot, I used to call Tammy and say, look, you have to come and get me, I can t stop.
7
SPEAKER_01
I can t stop.
7
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I got tired.
7
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Because it s part of a kind of hypomanic focus.
7
SPEAKER_01
I couldn t quit.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s like, oh no, I m still writing.
7
SPEAKER_01
I need to get away from this.
7
SPEAKER_01
But I couldn t stop.
7
SPEAKER_01
And so, it s better to read something.
7
SPEAKER_01
A book.
7
SPEAKER_00
Fiction, non-fiction?
7
SPEAKER_00
Fiction.
7
SPEAKER_01
Stephen King.
7
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I was reading a lot of Stephen King when I was on tour last time.
7
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That was good.
7
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I like Stephen King a lot.
7
SPEAKER_00
Great narratives.
7
SPEAKER_01
Great.
7
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And great characterization, you know.
7
SPEAKER_01
And there s a familiarity about Stephen King s writing, too.
7
SPEAKER_01
He writes about people you know.
7
SPEAKER_01
And so, I really found that a relief.
7
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And so, that was useful.
7
SPEAKER_01
And in order to tolerate this, let s say, or to be able to sustain it,
7
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Well, that s taken a lot of negotiation on the part of Tammy and I because she s dragged into this and you know her life is Part of this whatever this is and she s had to find her way and has For example now she has a different hotel room than me when we travel
7
SPEAKER_01
And she found that she didn t want to be on the tour this spring, and I was ill again for part of it, and that made it complicated.
7
SPEAKER_01
But she went away back home, and she came back, and she was nervous about it.
7
SPEAKER_01
She said, I think I need my own room.
7
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And part of me was not happy with that.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s like, what do you mean you need your own room?
7
SPEAKER_01
Are we not married anymore?
7
SPEAKER_01
It s like, you need your own room?
7
SPEAKER_01
And she said, well, you know, I can t.
7
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She has to do exercises because she was really sick and she has to keep herself in shape.
7
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And she has to have some time to do that.
7
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She does a lot of prayer and meditation, and she needs the time.
7
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And she has her own podcast, which is going quite well, and she needs the time.
7
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And I trust her.
7
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And she said, well, I need this in order to continue.
7
SPEAKER_01
And I thought, well, OK, if you need this in order to continue,
7
SPEAKER_01
Yes, because she went away and didn t say, well, I I don t want to be on the tour.
7
SPEAKER_01
I don t want to do this anymore.
7
SPEAKER_01
She went away and prayed.
7
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Let s say, how can I continue to do this?
7
SPEAKER_01
And that was the answer.
7
SPEAKER_01
And so she has her own hotel room.
7
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And that was a really good decision on her part.
7
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And she s very good and getting better all the time at figuring out what has to happen for her to make this sustainable.
7
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And all that s been is a plus.
7
SPEAKER_01
Because I don t want to travel without her, and I don t want her life to be miserable, and I want her to be fully on board.
7
SPEAKER_01
And so she has to be properly selfish, like everyone does in a relationship.
7
SPEAKER_00
Not just that, this is a weird thing that you re doing, and both you and her have to figure out how to manage this very intense intellectual social journey.
7
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Well, there s another element to it, too, that I didn t tell you about.
7
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typical day, but it s missing a big component because usually we also have a dinner with like 30 cultural representatives, I suppose, 10 to 30 from each country, because I have a network of people who have networks who are setting me up with key decision makers in each country.
7
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And so then we have like an hour and a half of that.
7
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Now, sometimes that s on a day when I don t have a talk, but sometimes the talks are back to back.
7
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And so she also has to manage that and to be gracious.
7
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And then people are showing us exciting things and tours in the cities, which is all, like it s a surf fight of wonderful.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yes, exactly.
7
SPEAKER_00
But it s still, yeah, you have to be there for it.
7
SPEAKER_00
You have to be present for it mentally as a curious mind, as an intellectual mind.
7
SPEAKER_00
How do you get to sleep?
7
SPEAKER_01
Fortunately, that is almost never a problem, even when I was unbelievably ill for about three years.
7
SPEAKER_01
I thought about that a lot too, you know, that I didn t do a really good job of explaining that while I was ill, because it appeared in some sense that the reason I was ill was because I was taking benzodiazepines.
7
SPEAKER_01
But that isn t why.
7
SPEAKER_01
I was ill and then I took them, and very low dose, and I took that for a long time, and it helped whatever was wrong with me, and it looks like it was an allergy, or maybe multiple allergies.
7
SPEAKER_01
That stopped working, and so I took a little bit more for about a month, and that made it way worse.
7
SPEAKER_01
And so then I cut back a lot, and then, then things really got out of hand.
7
SPEAKER_00
So there was a deeper thing in the Benzo.
7
SPEAKER_00
Oh yeah, definitely.
7
SPEAKER_00
Can you put words to...
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, I had a lot of immune... Well, my daughter, as everyone knows, has a very reactive immune system.
7
SPEAKER_01
And Tammy has three immunological conditions, each of them quite serious.
7
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And I had psoriasis and peripheral uveitis, which is an autoimmune condition, and alopecia areata, and chronic gum disease, all of which appeared to be allergy-related.
7
SPEAKER_01
And so Michaela seems to have got all of that.
7
SPEAKER_01
And so that, and that I think was at the bottom of, because I also had this proclivity to depression that was part of my family history.
7
SPEAKER_01
But I think that was all immunological as far as I can tell.
7
SPEAKER_01
So one of the things that s happened to me, I always noticed I really couldn t breathe.
7
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Like I could breathe about one fifth as much as I sometimes could.
7
SPEAKER_01
And so I was always short of breath.
7
SPEAKER_01
And it looks like what that was perhaps was
7
SPEAKER_01
I was always on the border of an anaphylactic reaction, which is not pleasant.
7
SPEAKER_01
And that s hypersympathetic activation, no parasympathetic activation.
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SPEAKER_01
I couldn t relax at all.
7
SPEAKER_00
That s an immunological response.
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SPEAKER_01
Allergic response, yeah.
7
SPEAKER_01
So anyways, that was what seemed... Now, I don t like to talk about this much because it s so bloody radical and, you know, I don t like to propagate it, but this diet seems to have stopped all of that.
7
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I don t have psoriasis.
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SPEAKER_01
All of the patches have gone.
7
SPEAKER_01
My gum disease, which is incurable, I had multiple surgeries to deal with it, is completely gone.
7
SPEAKER_01
It took three years.
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SPEAKER_01
My right eye, which was quite cloudy, has cleared up completely.
7
SPEAKER_01
What else has changed?
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, I lost 50 pounds, like instantly, and kept it off.
7
SPEAKER_00
I should mention that I too am not a deep investigator of nutritional science.
7
SPEAKER_00
I have my skepticism towards the degree to which it is currently a science, because like a lot of complex systems, it s full of mystery.
7
SPEAKER_00
and full of profiteers, the people that profit of different kinds of diets.
7
SPEAKER_00
But I should say for me personally, it does seem that I feel by far the best when I eat only meat.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s very interesting.
7
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And I discovered that a long time ago.
7
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First of all- How did you discover it?
7
SPEAKER_00
So the discovery went like this.
7
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I started listening to ultra marathon runners about 15 years ago.
7
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and they started talking about fat adapted running.
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SPEAKER_00
So I first discovered that I don t have to run super fast to enjoy running.
7
SPEAKER_00
And in fact, I really enjoy running at a slower pace.
7
SPEAKER_00
So that was like step one.
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SPEAKER_00
It s like, oh, okay, if I maintain, this is something called the math rule, which is pretty low heart rate.
7
SPEAKER_00
If I maintain that, you can actually get pretty fast while maintaining a pretty slow average speed in general.
7
SPEAKER_00
Anyway, they fuel themselves on low carb diets.
7
SPEAKER_00
So I got into that.
7
SPEAKER_00
On top of that, they also fast often.
7
SPEAKER_00
So I discovered how incredible my mind feels when fasted.
7
SPEAKER_00
You know, people call it intermittent fasting.
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s an optimization of death, eh?
7
SPEAKER_01
Because when you fast, your body, logically and obviously, if you think about it biologically, is, well, what does your body scavenge first?
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, damaged tissue.
7
SPEAKER_01
So,
7
SPEAKER_01
I know the literature on fasting to some degree, and it s very compelling literature.
7
SPEAKER_01
If you starve dogs down, I think it s 20% below, rats too, below their optimal body weight, they live 30% longer.
7
SPEAKER_01
That s a lot, 30%.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s like, 30%!
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, 30%.
7
SPEAKER_00
Well, there is aspect to a lot of these things that make me nervous because I always feel like there s no free lunch that I m going to pay for it somehow.
7
SPEAKER_00
But there is a focus that I am able to attain when I fast, especially when I eat once a day.
7
SPEAKER_00
My mind is almost like nervously focused.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s almost like an anxiety, but a positive one or one that I can channel into just like an excitement.
7
SPEAKER_01
I wonder how much of that s associated with
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, imagine that that signifies lack of food, which is not that hard to imagine.
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, maybe you should be a lot more alert in that situation, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
Biologically speaking, because you re in hunting mode, let s say.
7
SPEAKER_01
You know, not desperate, but in hunting mode.
7
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And God only knows.
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SPEAKER_01
Maybe human beings should be in hunting mode all the time.
7
SPEAKER_00
Often, but we don t know that, so I wonder if it has a stress on the system that long-term causes the system to get it.
7
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t look like it.
7
SPEAKER_00
It seems, in case of fasting, not.
7
SPEAKER_00
And then on top of that, I discovered that the thing I enjoy, I just don t enjoy eating,
7
SPEAKER_00
fat as much, so I love eating meat when you talk about low-carb diets, so I just discovered through that process, somewhat fatty meat, but just meat, I just feel, a lot of the things that make me feel weird about food, like a little groggy, or like full, or just whatever, I don t know.
7
SPEAKER_00
the aspects of food that I don t enjoy, they re not there with meat.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I m still able to enjoy company.
7
SPEAKER_00
And when I eat once a day and eat meat, at least in Texas, you could still have all the merriment of, you have dinner with friends.
7
SPEAKER_00
Now, I don t do the, you know, you have a very serious thing that, you know,
7
SPEAKER_00
there s health benefits that you are very serious about.
7
SPEAKER_00
For me, I can still drink whiskey.
7
SPEAKER_00
I ll still do the things that add a little bit of spice into the thing.
7
SPEAKER_00
Now, when you completely remove the spice, it does become more difficult.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s more difficult socially, and Tammy seems to only be able to eat lamb, although she might be able to eat non-aged beef.
7
SPEAKER_01
And that makes traveling complicated too, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
Because, well, for obvious reasons, it s like, really, that s all you can eat?
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well, c est la vie.
7
SPEAKER_00
And maybe that s a form of craziness, but... If we could return to actually the thing you were talking about when you were thinking about a question before the lecture.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
Let me ask you about thinking in general.
7
SPEAKER_00
This is something maybe that you and Jim Keller think a lot about, is thinking how to think.
7
SPEAKER_00
How do you think through an idea?
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, first of all, I think, okay, that s a really good question.
7
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We tried to work that out with this essay app that my son and I have developed, because if you re going to write, the first question is, well, what should I write about?
7
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What s the name of the app?
7
SPEAKER_01
Essay.app.
7
SPEAKER_01
And well, the first question is, well, what bugs you?
7
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What s bugging you?
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SPEAKER_01
This is such a cool thing.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s like, where is my destiny?
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, what bothers you?
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s where your destiny is.
7
SPEAKER_01
Your destiny is to be found in what bothers you.
7
SPEAKER_01
Why did those things bother you?
7
SPEAKER_01
There s a lot of things you could be bothered by.
7
SPEAKER_01
Like a million things, man.
7
SPEAKER_01
But some things grip you.
7
SPEAKER_01
They bug you, and they might make you resentful and bitter.
7
SPEAKER_01
Because they bug you so much, like, they re your things, man.
7
SPEAKER_01
They ve got you.
7
SPEAKER_01
So then, I look for a question that I would like the answer to.
7
SPEAKER_01
And I would really like the answer to it, so I don t assume I already have the answer.
7
SPEAKER_01
Because I would actually really like to have the answer.
7
SPEAKER_01
So if I could get a better answer, great.
7
SPEAKER_01
And so that s the first thing.
7
SPEAKER_01
And that s like a prayer.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s like, okay.
7
SPEAKER_01
Here s a mystery.
7
SPEAKER_01
I would like to delve into it further.
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, so that s humility.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s like, here s a mystery, which means I don t know.
7
SPEAKER_01
I would like to delve into it further, which means I don t know enough already.
7
SPEAKER_01
And then comes the revelation.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s like, well, what s a revelation?
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, if you ask yourself a question, it s a real question, do you get an answer or not?
7
SPEAKER_01
And the answer is, well, yeah, thoughts start to appear in your head.
7
SPEAKER_00
So from somewhere that s right from somewhere.
7
SPEAKER_00
Where do they come from?
7
SPEAKER_00
Do you have a sense?
7
SPEAKER_01
Depends on what you re aiming at Depends on the question.
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, no, no, it does to some degree It depends it depends on your intent So imagine that your intent is to make things better Then maybe they come from the place that s designed to make things better
8
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Maybe your intent is to make things worse.
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Then they come from hell.
8
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And you think, not really.
8
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It s like, you re so sure about that, are you?
8
SPEAKER_00
Is your intent conscious?
8
SPEAKER_00
Like, are you able to introspect?
8
SPEAKER_01
It s conscious and habitual, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
Because as you practice something consciously, it becomes habitual.
8
SPEAKER_01
But it s conscious.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s like, when I sit down before I do a lecture, I think, okay, what s the goal here?
8
SPEAKER_01
To do the best job I can.
8
SPEAKER_01
To what end?
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, people are coming here.
8
SPEAKER_01
Not for political issues, they re coming here because they re trying to make their lives better.
8
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so what are we doing?
8
SPEAKER_01
We re conducting a joint investigation into the nature of that which makes life better.
8
SPEAKER_01
Okay, what s my role?
8
SPEAKER_01
To do as good a job about that as possible.
8
SPEAKER_01
What state of mind do I have to be in?
8
SPEAKER_01
Am I annoyed about the theater?
8
SPEAKER_01
Or am I clued in and thrilled that 4,000 people have showed up at substantial expense and trouble to come and listen to me talk?
8
SPEAKER_01
And if I m not in that state of mind, I think, well, maybe I need something to eat, or maybe I need to talk to someone.
8
SPEAKER_01
That ingratitude is no place to start.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s like I should be thrilled to be there.
8
SPEAKER_01
Obviously.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so that orientation has to be there.
8
SPEAKER_01
And then I, is it conscious?
8
SPEAKER_01
All this is conscious.
8
SPEAKER_01
What am I serving?
8
SPEAKER_01
The highest good I can conceptualize.
8
SPEAKER_01
What is that?
8
SPEAKER_01
I have some sense, but I don t know it in the final analysis, which is why the investigation is being conducted.
8
SPEAKER_01
Who s doing it?
8
SPEAKER_01
Me, whoever I m communing with, and the audience.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so I try to get myself, and I chase everybody away for that.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s like I have to do that by myself.
8
SPEAKER_00
Are you writing stuff down?
8
SPEAKER_01
Yes, at that point I just make point notes.
8
SPEAKER_01
And it s usually about maybe 30 notes.
8
SPEAKER_01
But then on stage I never refer to them.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I often don t even use the structure that I laid out.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s kind of an interesting thing.
8
SPEAKER_00
From where do powerful phrases come from?
8
SPEAKER_00
Do you ever, do you try to encapsulate an idea into a sentence or two?
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, when I talk, I ve practiced this consciously since 1985.
8
SPEAKER_01
I try to feel and see if the words are stepping stones or foundation stones, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
It s like, is this solid?
8
SPEAKER_01
Is this word solid?
8
SPEAKER_01
Is this phrase solid?
8
SPEAKER_01
Is this sentence solid?
8
SPEAKER_01
It s a real sense of fundamental foundation under each word.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I suppose people ask me if I pray, and I would say, I pray before every word.
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, when you re asking questions, you re very clear-headed and present in your ability to ask questions and inquire.
8
SPEAKER_01
So how do you do that?
8
SPEAKER_00
So first of all, I m worried that my mind easily gets trapped when I step on a word and I know it s unstable.
8
SPEAKER_00
you kind of realize that you don t really know the definitions of any words you use.
8
SPEAKER_00
And that can be debilitating.
8
SPEAKER_00
So I kind of try to be more carefree about the words I use.
8
SPEAKER_00
Because otherwise you get trapped.
8
SPEAKER_00
You don t want to be obsessional.
8
SPEAKER_00
Like literally, my mind halfway through the sentence will think, well, what does the word sentence mean?
8
SPEAKER_01
Right, right, right.
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, you know, neurologically... And then everything else just explodes.
8
SPEAKER_00
Your big picture idea explodes and you lost yourself in the minutia.
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, neurologically, there s a production center and an editing center, and those can be separately affected by strokes.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so often when people are writing or talking, they try to activate both at the same time.
8
SPEAKER_01
And that s so people will try to write an essay and get every sentence right in the first draft.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s a big mistake.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so then you might say, well, how can you be careful with your words, but carefree?
8
SPEAKER_01
And the answer is orient yourself properly.
8
SPEAKER_01
Right.
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, in the conversation we re having, you have an orientation structure.
8
SPEAKER_01
You want to be prepared.
8
SPEAKER_01
You want to be attentive.
8
SPEAKER_01
Then you want to have an interesting conversation and you want to have the kind of interesting conversation that other people want to listen to, that will be good for them in some manner.
8
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so that s pretty good frame.
8
SPEAKER_01
And then you kind of scour your heart and you think, is that really what you want?
8
SPEAKER_01
Are you after fame or after notoriety?
8
SPEAKER_01
Are you after money?
8
SPEAKER_01
I m not saying any of those things are necessarily bad, but
8
SPEAKER_01
They re not optimal, especially if you re not willing to admit them, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
And so they can contaminate you.
8
SPEAKER_01
So you want to be decontaminated.
8
SPEAKER_01
So you have the right trip, let s say.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so you have to put yourself, that s a meditative practice, you have to put yourself in the right receptive position with the right goal in mind.
8
SPEAKER_01
Then you can, and I think you can get better and better at this, then you can trust what s going to happen.
8
SPEAKER_01
You know, so for example, before I came here, I mean, I presume you have a reason for doing the podcast with me.
8
SPEAKER_01
What s the reason?
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, we wanted to talk for a long time, so the reason has evolved.
8
SPEAKER_00
One of the reasons is I ve listened to you for quite a long time, so you ve become a one-way friend, and I have many one-way friends.
8
SPEAKER_00
Some of my best friends don t even know I exist.
8
SPEAKER_00
I m a big fan of podcasts and audiobooks.
8
SPEAKER_00
Actually, most of my friends are dead.
8
SPEAKER_00
The writers of- The definition of a reader.
8
SPEAKER_01
I ve worked with a lot of dead, great dead friends.
8
SPEAKER_00
So I wanted to meet this one-way friend, I suppose, and have a conversation.
8
SPEAKER_00
And then there s this kind of puzzle that I ve been longing to solve, the same reason I went to Ukraine, of asking this question of myself, who am I, and what was this part of the world, what is this thing that happened in the 20th century?
8
SPEAKER_00
that I lost so much of my family there, and I feel so much of my family is defined by that place.
8
SPEAKER_00
Now that place includes the Soviet Union, it includes Russia and Ukraine, it includes Nazi Germany, it includes these big, powerful leaders, and huge millions of people that were lost in the beauty, the power of the dream, but were also the torture
8
SPEAKER_00
that was forced onto them through different governmental institutions.
8
SPEAKER_00
And you are somebody that seemed from some angle to also be drawn to try to understand what was that.
8
SPEAKER_00
And not in some sort of historical sense, but in a deeply psychological human sense.
8
SPEAKER_00
What is that?
8
SPEAKER_00
Will it repeat again?
8
SPEAKER_00
In what way is it repeating again?
8
SPEAKER_01
And how can we stop it?
8
SPEAKER_00
And how can we stop it?
8
SPEAKER_00
That s the crucial issue.
8
SPEAKER_00
I felt I wanted to, from very different backgrounds, pull at the thread of that curiosity.
8
SPEAKER_00
You know, I m an engineer, you re a psychologist, both lost in that curiosity and both wear suits.
8
SPEAKER_00
And a talk with various levels of eloquence about sort of,
8
SPEAKER_00
the shadows that that history casts on us.
8
SPEAKER_00
And so that was one.
8
SPEAKER_00
And also the psychology, I wanted to be a psychiatrist for a long time.
8
SPEAKER_00
I was fascinated by the human mind.
8
SPEAKER_00
Until I discovered artificial intelligence, the fact that I could program and make a robot move, until I discovered that magic,
8
SPEAKER_00
I thought I wanted to understand the human mind by being a psychiatrist, by talking to people, through talk therapy, psychotherapy.
8
SPEAKER_01
Now you ve got the best of both worlds because you get to talk to people and you get to build robots.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, but the dream ultimately is the robot.
8
SPEAKER_00
That I felt like by building the thinking, you start to try to understand it.
8
SPEAKER_00
I think that s one way.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, we all have different skills and proclivities, so like my particular one has to do with,
8
SPEAKER_00
I learn by building.
8
SPEAKER_00
I think through a thing by building it.
8
SPEAKER_00
And programming is a wonderful thing because it allows you to build a little toy example.
8
SPEAKER_00
So in the same way you can do a little thought experiment, programming allows you to create a thought experiment in action.
8
SPEAKER_00
It can move, it can live.
8
SPEAKER_00
and then you could ask questions of it.
8
SPEAKER_00
So all of those, because of my interest in Freud and Jung, you re also, in different ways, have delved deeply into humanity and the human psyche through the perspective of those,
8
SPEAKER_00
psychologist.
8
SPEAKER_00
So for all those reasons, I thought our paths would cross.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so that s quite a frame for a discussion, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
You had all sorts of reasons, and then you think, well, are you just letting the conversation go where it will?
8
SPEAKER_01
It s like, well, not exactly.
8
SPEAKER_01
You spent all this time.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s not like this came about by accident, this conversation.
8
SPEAKER_01
You spent all this time framing it.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so
8
SPEAKER_01
All of that provides the implicit substructure for the play in the conversation and if you have that implicit Here s another way.
8
SPEAKER_01
This is very much worth knowing is If you get the implicit structure of perception, right everything becomes a game And not only that a game you want to play and maybe in the final analysis a game you d want to play forever so You know, that s obviously a distant beckoning ideal but
8
SPEAKER_01
We know games need rules, or there s no play.
8
SPEAKER_00
Is there advice you can give, now that we know the frame, to give to me, Lex, about how to do this podcast better, how to think about this world, how to be a good engineer?
8
SPEAKER_00
how to be a good human being.
8
SPEAKER_01
Take your preoccupation with suffering seriously.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s a serious business.
8
SPEAKER_01
And that s part of that, to circle back to the beginning, let s say, that s that willingness to gaze into the abyss, which is obviously what you were doing when you went to Ukraine.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s gazing into the abyss that makes you better.
8
SPEAKER_01
The thing is, and this is maybe where Nietzsche s idea is not as differentiated as it became.
8
SPEAKER_01
Sometimes your gaze can be forcefully directed towards the abyss, and then you re traumatized.
8
SPEAKER_01
If it s involuntary and accidental, it can kill you.
8
SPEAKER_01
The more it s voluntary,
8
SPEAKER_01
the more transformative it is.
8
SPEAKER_01
And that s part of that idea about facing death and hell.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s like, can you tolerate death and hell?
8
SPEAKER_01
And the answer is, this terrible answer is, yes, to the degree that you re willing to do it voluntarily.
8
SPEAKER_01
And then you might ask, well, why should I have to subject myself to death and hell?
8
SPEAKER_01
I m innocent.
8
SPEAKER_01
And then the answer to that is,
8
SPEAKER_01
Even the innocent must be voluntarily sacrificed to the highest good.
8
SPEAKER_00
That s such an interesting distinction.
8
SPEAKER_00
Voluntary suffering.
8
SPEAKER_01
Voluntary, yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s why the central Christian doctrine is, pick up your cross and follow me.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I m speaking not in religious terms saying that, I m just speaking as a psychologist.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s like one of the things we ve learned in the last hundred years is voluntary exposure to that which freezes and terrifies you in measured proportions is curative.
8
SPEAKER_00
So a form of, at least in part, involuntary suffering is depression.
8
SPEAKER_00
Do you have advice for people on how to find a way out?
8
SPEAKER_00
You re a man who has suffered in this way, perhaps continue to suffer in this way.
8
SPEAKER_00
How do you find a way out?
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The first thing I do as a clinician, if someone comes to me and says they re depressed, is ask myself a question.
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Well, what does this person mean by that?
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So I have to find out, because maybe they re not depressed, maybe they re hyper-anxious, or maybe they re obsessional.
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There s various forms of powerful negative emotion, so they need to be differentiated.
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But then the next question you have to ask is, well, are you depressed, or do you have a terrible life?
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Or is it some combination of the two?
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So if you re depressed, as far as I can tell, you don t have a terrible life.
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You have friends, you have family, you have an intimate relationship, you have a job or a career, you re about as educated as you should be given your intelligence, you use your time outside of work wisely, you re not beholden to alcohol or other temptations, you re engaged in the community in some fundamental sense, and all that s working.
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Now, if you have all that and you re feeling really awful, you re either ill or you re depressed.
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And so then sometimes there s a biochemical route to that, treatment of that.
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My experience has been as a clinician is if you re depressed, but you have a life and you take an antidepressant, it will probably help you a lot.
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Now, maybe you re not depressed.
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Exactly.
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You just have a terrible life.
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What does that look like?
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You have no relationship.
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Your family s a mess.
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You ve got no friends.
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You ve got no plan.
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You ve got no job.
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You use your time outside of work, not only badly, but destructively.
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You have a drug or alcohol habit, or some other vice, pornography addiction.
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You are completely unengaged in the surrounding community.
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You have no scaffolding whatsoever to support you in your current mode of being or your move forward.
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And then, as a therapist, well, you do two things.
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Well, if it s depression,
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Per se well, like I said, there s sometimes a biochemical route a nutritional route.
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There s ways that can be addressed It s probably physiological if you re at least in part if you re depressed, but you have an okay life.
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Sometimes it s conceptual you can turn to dreams sometimes to help people because dreams contain the seeds of the potential future and If your person is a real good dreamer and you can analyze dreams that can be really helpful But that seems to be only true for more creative people and for the people who just have a terrible life.
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It s like okay
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You have a terrible life well Let s pick a front How about you need how about you need a friend like one sort of friend?
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Do you know how to shake hands and introduce yourself?
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I ll have the person show me so let s do it for a sec.
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So It s like this.
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Hi, I m Jordan and people don t know how to do that and then they can t even get the ball rolling and
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For the listener, Jordan just gave me a firm handshake.
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Yeah, as opposed to a dead fish, you know?
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And there s these elementary social skills that, hypothetically, if you were well cared for, you learned when you were like three.
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And sometimes people have... I had lots of clients.
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to whom no one ever paid any attention.
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And they needed like 10,000 hours of attention.
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And some of that was just listening, because they had 10,000 hours of conversations they never had with anyone, and they were all tangled up in their head.
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And they had to just... One client in particular, I worked with this person for 15 years, and
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What she wanted from me was for me just to shut the hell up for 50 minutes, which is very hard for me, and to just tell me what had happened to her.
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And then what happened at the end of the conversation, then I could discuss a bit with her.
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And then as we progressed through the years, the amount of time that we spent in discussion increased in proportion in the sessions until by the time we stopped seeing each other,
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my clinical practice collapsed.
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We were talking about 80% of the time.
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But she literally, she had never been attended to properly, ever.
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And so she was an uncarved block in the Taoist sense, right?
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She hadn t been subjected to those flaming swords that separated the wheat from the chaff.
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And so, you can do that in therapy.
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If you re listening and you re depressed, I would say if you can t find a therapist, and that s getting harder and harder because it s actually become illegal to be a therapist now because you have to agree with your clients, which is a terrible thing to do with them.
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Just like it s terrible just to arbitrarily oppose them.
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You could do the self-authoring program online because it helps you write an autobiography.
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And so if you have memories that are more than 18 months old that bother you when you think them up,
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Part of you is locked inside that.
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Developed part of you is still trapped in that.
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That s a metaphorical way of thinking about it.
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That s why it still has emotional significance.
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So you can write about your past experiences, but I would say wait for at least 18 months if something bad has happened to you.
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Because otherwise you just hurt yourself again by encountering it.
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You can bring yourself up to date with an autobiography.
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There s an analysis of faults and virtues.
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That s the present authoring.
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And then there s a guided writing exercise that helps you make a future plan.
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That s... Young men who do that could go to college.
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Young men who do that, 90 minutes.
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Just the future authoring, 90 minutes.
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They re 50% less likely to drop out.
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That s all it takes.
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So sometimes depression is this heavy cloud that makes it hard to even make a single step towards it.
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You said isolate, make a friend.
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The first step is extremely difficult.
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Oh my God, sometimes it s way worse than that.
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Like I had clients who were so depressed, they literally couldn t get out of bed.
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So what s their first step?
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It s like, can you sit up once today?
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No.
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Can you prop yourself up on your elbows once today?
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You scale back the dragon till you find one that s conquerable, that moves you forward.
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There s a rubric for life.
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Scale back the dragons till you find one conquerable.
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And it ll give you a little bit of gold.
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Commensurate with the struggle but the plus side of that because that s you think that God that s depressing.
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You mean I have to start by Sitting up while you do if you can t sit up but the the plus side of that is it s the Pareto distribution issue is that I
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aggregates exponentially increase.
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And failures do too, by the way.
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But aggregates exponentially increase.
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So once you start the ball rolling, it can get zipping along pretty good.
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This person that I talked about was incapable of sitting with me in a cafe when we first met, just talking, even though I was her therapist.
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But by the end, she was doing stand-up comedy.
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So, you know, it took years, but still most people want to stand up comedy.
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That s quite the bloody achievement.
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She would read her poetry on stage too.
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So for someone who was petrified into paralysis by social anxiety, and who had to start very small, it was a hell of an accomplishment.
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Yeah, it all starts with one step.
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Do you have advice for young people?
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In high school, a lot of people look up to you for advice, for strength, for strength to search for themselves, to find themselves.
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Take on some responsibility.
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Do something for other people.
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You re doing something for yourself while you re doing that, even if you don t know it, for sure, because you re a community across time.
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Find something to serve.
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Somebody to help someone else solve a job to find a job.
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Do your best with the customers.
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Don t be above your job.
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You re going to get an entry level job when you re a kid or what else would you want?
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You want to be the boss?
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What do you know?
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You don t know anything.
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You could be the boss of your job.
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You know, if you re working in a grocery store or you re working in a convenience store, assuming you re not working for terrified tyrants, you can be nice to the customers.
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You can develop your social skills.
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You can learn how to handle boss-employee relationship.
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You can be there 15 minutes early and leave 15 minutes late.
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Like, you can learn in an entry-level job, man, and I ll tell you, if you take an entry-level job and you learn, and it s a reasonably decent place, you will not be in an entry-level job for long.
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Because everyone who s competent is desperate for competent people.
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And if you go and show yourself as competent, there ll be a trial period, but if you go show yourself as competent, all sorts of doors you didn t even know were there will start opening like mad.
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So you strive for competence, for craftsmanship.
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Yeah, for discipline.
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You know, I mean, I said in one of the chapters in my books is focused on putting your house in order.
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It s like, well, how do you start?
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Make your bed.
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It actually took me quite a long time in my life before I made my bed regularly in the morning.
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Most of my life was in pretty good order, but that was one thing I didn t have in order.
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My clothes in my closet as well, all that s in order.
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Not all of it.
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I m cleaning out some drawers right now.
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Look around and see what bugs you in your room.
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Just look.
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It s like, OK, I m in my room.
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Do I like this room?
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No, it bugs me.
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OK, why?
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Well, the paint s peeling there and it s dusty there and the carpet s dirty and that corner is kind of ugly and the light there isn t very good.
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And my clothes closet s a mess, so I don t even like to open it.
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OK, that s a lot of problems.
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That sucks.
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That s a lot of opportunity.
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Pick something and fix it.
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something that bugs you.
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Yeah, but not too much.
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So the rule is pick something you know would make, pick a problem, pick a solution to it that you know would help, that you could do, that you would do.
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So you have to negotiate with yourself.
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It s like, well, I won t clean up this room.
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How do you know?
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I ve been in here for 10 years and I ve never cleaned it up.
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It s like, well, obviously that s too big a dragon for you.
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Would you clean one drawer?
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Find out.
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So imagine now you want to be happy when you open that drawer and you think well that s stupid.
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It s like is it?
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Maybe it s your sock drawer, which I cleaned up in my room the other day, by the way.
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You re gonna open that every morning.
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That s like 30 seconds of your life every day.
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Okay, so that s three minutes of
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week, that s 12 minutes a month, that s two hours a year.
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So maybe your life is made out of, you ve got 16 hours a day, let s figure this out, five, 12 in an hour, 12 in an hour, 144 in 12 hours.
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Yeah, let s say 200.
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200 five minute chunks, that s your life.
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Ladies and gentlemen, Jordan Peterson did just some math how many five minute chunks there are in a day.
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And I m pretty sure that s pretty accurate.
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It s approximately right.
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You got 200 five minute chunks and they repeat a lot of them repeat.
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So if you get every one of those, right, they re trivial, right?
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Who cares what my sock drawer looks like?
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It s fair enough, man.
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But that s your life.
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The things you repeat every day, the mundane things think I could get all those mundane things, right?
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That s the game rules.
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It s like now all the mundane is in place.
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Now you can play because all the mundane is in place.
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And this is actually true.
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So with children,
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Imagine you want your children to play.
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Well, play is very fragile neurologically.
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Any competing motivation or emotion will suppress play.
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So everything has to be in order.
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Everything has to be a walled garden before the children will play.
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That s a good way of thinking about it.
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So you put everything in order and you think, oh my God, now I m tyrannized by this order.
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It s like, no, you aren t, not if it s voluntary.
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And then the order is the precondition for the freedom.
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And so then all of a sudden you get all these things in order.
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It s like, oh, look at this.
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I ve got some room to play here.
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And then, then maybe you re not depressed.
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Now, it s often not that simple.
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You know, it s not that simple.
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Try putting your room in order.
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Perfect order.
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That s hard.
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I mean, it s a really powerful way to think about those five minute chunks.
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Just get one of them right in a day.
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Yeah, well, if you do that for 200 days, your life is in order.
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You know, I thought, I did that with my clients a lot, so a lot of them would come home from work, the guys, and their wives would meet them at the door, and it d be a fight right away.
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You know, and it s a clash there, because he comes home and he s tired and hungry, and he s worked all day, and he s hoping that, you know, he gets welcomed when he comes back to the home, but then the wife is at home, and she s been with the kids all day, and she s tired and hungry, and she s hoping that when he comes home, he ll show her some appreciation for what s happened today, and then they...
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clash and then they both have problems to discuss because they ve had their troubles during the day and so then every time they get together they re not like it s a bit of a fight for 20 minutes and then the whole evening is screwed and so then you think okay here s the deal it s knock and the door will open okay you get to pick what happens when you come home but you have to figure out what it is so now this is the deal you treat yourself properly
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You imagine coming home and it goes the way you want and need it to go.
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Okay.
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What does that look like?
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You get to have it, but you have to know what it is.
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What does it look like?
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And you think, okay, I want to come home.
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I want to be happy about coming home.
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I come home.
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I open the door.
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I say, hello, honey.
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I m home.
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My wife says, hi, it s so nice to hear your voice.
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She comes up.
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She says,
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Hi dear.
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She gives you a hug.
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She says, how was your day?
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And you say, well, we ll sit and talk about that.
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How was your day?
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Well, we ll sit and talk about that.
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Do you need something to eat?
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Probably.
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Let s go sit and talk about our day.
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It s like, that sounds pretty good.
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Okay.
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That sounds pretty good.
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Might not be perfect, but sounds a hell of a lot better than what we re doing now.
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So how about we go talk to, we ll go talk to your wife and say, okay,
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This is what s happening when I come home.
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I would like it to be better.
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What would you like to have happen, if you could have what you wanted? 
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And so she sits down, and she thinks, OK, if he comes home, what do I want to have happen?
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And then, now you ve got two visions, and you say, well, what would you like?
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And you listen, and she says, what would you like?
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And you tell her, and then you think, OK, now how can we bring these visions together?
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So not only do we both get what we want, but because we ve brought them together, we even get more than we want.
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Well, who wouldn t agree to that, unless they were aiming down?
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And that s so exciting.
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It s not a compromise.
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It s a union of ideals that even makes a better ideal.
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And then you get to come home, and then there s another rule that goes along with that, which is, please, dear, have the grace to allow me to do this stupidly and badly while I learn at least 20 times.
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and I ll give you the same leeway, and then we ll practice stupidly for 20 times, and we ll talk about it, and then maybe we ll get it right for the next 10,000 times, right?
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And you can do that with your whole life, and you can do that with your kids, and you can do that with your family.
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Like, it s not easy, but you can do it.
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It s a lot easier than the alternative.
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Let me ask for some dating advice from Jordan Peterson.
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How do you find, on that topic, the love of your life?
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That s a good question.
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I was asked that multiple times on my tour, three times in a row, in fact, because we asked people to use this Slido gadget.
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That s a popular question.
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To vary.
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It always came up to the top.
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And I got asked that three times in a row, and I didn t have a good answer.
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And then I thought, why don t I have a good answer?
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Oh, I know why, because that s a stupid question.
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So so why?
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Yeah.
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Why?
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Because it s it s putting the cart before the horse.
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Here s the right question.
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How do I make myself into the perfect date?
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You answer that question and you will not have any problem answering the previous question.
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It s like what I want in a partner.
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If I offered everything I could to a partner, who would I be?
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You work on that.
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Ask that question.
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Just ask.
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Just ask yourself.
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Okay.
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I have to be the person that women would want.
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Okay.
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What do they want?
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Clean.
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That s not a bad start.
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Reasonably good physical shape.
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So healthy.
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Productive, generous, honest, willing to delay gratification.
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SPEAKER_00
So you dance with a woman.
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It s like, what s she doing?
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What are you two doing?
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Well, it s a patterned, there s patterns happening around you.
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That s the music, patterns, patterns of being, that s the music.
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Now, can you align yourself with the patterns of being gracefully?
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That s what she s checking out.
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And then can you do that with her?
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And then can you do that in a playful and attentive manner, and keep your bloody hands to yourself for at least a minute?
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And so, can you dance in a playful manner?
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It s like, you can go through this in your imagination, and you know, you ll know, you know.
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And then you think, well, how far am I from those things?
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And the answer is usually, man, it s a pretty horrible abyss separating you from that ideal.
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But the harder you work on
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Offering other people what they need and want The more people will line up to play with you.
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And so it s the wrong question.
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It s like how can I be the best partner possible?
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and then you think well if I do that people would just take advantage of me and That s the non naive Objection, right?
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Because the naive person saying well, I ll be good and everyone will treat me, right?
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It s like the cynic says no, I ll be good and someone will Take me out
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And then you think, well, what do you do about that objection?
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And the answer is, well, you factor that in.
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And that s why you re supposed to be, what is it, as soft as a dove and as wise as a serpent.
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It s like, I know you re full of snakes.
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I know it.
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Maybe I know it more than you do.
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but we ll play anyways.
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Take the risk anyway.
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That s right, voluntarily, right?
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And what s so cool about that is that even though the person you re dealing with is full of snakes, if you offer your hand in trust and it s real, you will evoke the best in them.
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And that s true even, I ve dealt with people who were pretty damn criminal and pretty psychopathic.
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and sometimes dangerously so.
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And you tread very lightly when you re dealing with someone like that, especially if they re intoxicated.
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And even then, your best bet is that alert trust.
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It s the only fact, the only thing I know that
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I had one client who was a paranoid.
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He was a paranoid psychopath.
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That s a bad combination.
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He was a bad guy, man.
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He had like four restraining orders on him.
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And restraining orders don t work on the sort of people that you put restraining orders on.
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And he used to be harassed now and then by, you know, a bureaucrat in a bank with delusions of power.
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And he would say to them, he used to kind of act this out to me when I was talking to him, he d say,
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going to be your worst nightmare.
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And he meant it.
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Yeah.
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And he would do it.
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He had this obsessional, psychopathic vengeance that was just like right there.
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Paranoid to the hilt, and paranoid people are hyper acute.
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So they re watching you for any sign of
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Deceit or manipulation and they re really good at it because like they re 100% That s what paranoia is.
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It s 100% focus on that and Even under those circumstances if you step carefully enough you can Maybe you can avoid the axe.
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That s a good thing to know if you ever meet someone truly dangerous
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Absolutely, I believe in that, that being fragile nevertheless, taking that leap of trust towards another person, even when they re dangerous, especially when they re dangerous.
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If you care, if there s something there in those hills you wanna find, then that s probably the only way you re gonna find it.
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find is taking that risk.
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I have to ask you about Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn that speak to this very point.
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There s so many layers to this book, we could talk about it forever.
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I m sure in many ways we are talking about it forever.
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But there is sort of one of the themes captured in a few ways that was described in the book is that line between good and evil that runs through every human being.
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As he writes, the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
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During the life of any heart, this line keeps changing place.
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Sometimes it is squeezed one way to exuberant evil,
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and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish.
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One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being.
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At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood.
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but his name doesn t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.
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What do you think about this line?
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What do you think about this thing where we talked about if you give somebody a chance, you actually bring out the best in them?
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What do you think about this other aspect that throughout time, that line shifts inside each person, and you get to define that shift?
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What do you think about this line?
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Are we all capable of evil?
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Well, you know, the cosmic drama that s Satan versus Christ.
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It s like, well, who s that about if it s not about you?
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I m speaking just as a psychologist or as a literary critic.
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Those are characters.
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At least they re that.
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Well, are they human characters?
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Well, obviously.
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Well, are they archetypal human characters?
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Yes.
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What does that mean cosmically and ontologically?
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I don t know, is the world a story?
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Maybe.
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But the way stories are often told is the characters embody a stable.
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Those are unsophisticated, not great literature though.
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It s very rare in great literature.
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What you have in great literature generally is the internal drama, right?
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As the literature becomes more pop, I would say, the characters are more unitary.
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So there s a real bad guy and he s all bad, and there s a real good guy and he s all good.
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And that s not as interesting.
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It s not as sophisticated.
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When you reach Dostoevskyan heights in literary representation or Shakespearean heights, you can identify with the villain.
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And that s when literature really reaches its pinnacle, in some sense.
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And also the characters change throughout, they shift throughout, they re unpredictable throughout.
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I ve been taking the speaking of Russian more seriously recently, and I ve gotten to talk to translators of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.
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Chekhov and those kinds of folks.
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One of the mistakes that translators made with Dostoevsky for the longest time is they would, quote unquote, fix the chaotic mess that is Dostoevsky.
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because there was a sense like he was too rushed in his writing.
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It seemed like there was tangents that had nothing to do with anything.
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The characters were unpredictable and not inconsistent.
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There s parts of phrases that seem to be incomplete, that kind of stuff.
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And what they realized, that is, that s not, that s actually crafted that way.
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It s not, you know, it s like editing James Joyce, like Finnegan s Wake or something, because it doesn t make any sense.
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They realize that that is the magic of it, that captures the humanity of these characters, that they are unpredictable, they change through all time.
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There s a bunch of contradictions.
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On which point I gotta ask, is there a case to be made that Brothers Karamazov is the greatest book ever written?
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Yeah, there is a case to be made for that.
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I don t know, is it better than Crime and Punishment?
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Yes, yeah.
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You think so?
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I m not arguing with you.
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Why do you think that?
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Well, every book is a person.
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Some of my best friends are inside that book.
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Yeah, it s an amazing book.
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There s no doubt about it.
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I think some books are defined by your personal relationship with them.
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And that one was definitive.
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And I almost graduated to that one because for the longest time, The Idiot was my favorite book.
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of all, because I identified with the ideas represented by Prince Mishkin.
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I also identified to Prince Mishkin as a human being.
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The holy fool.
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The fool, because the world kind of, my whole life, still kind of sees me, saw me in my perception, in my narrow perception as kind of the fool.
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And I
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different from the interpretation that a lot of people take of this book, I see him as a kind of hero to be a naive, quote unquote, fool, but really just a naive optimist, and naive in the best possible way.
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I do believe that- That s childlike.
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Yeah, childlike is a better, so naive is usually seen as,
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That s childish, naive.
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Yeah, but childlike.
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That s why no one enters the kingdom of heaven unless they become like a child.
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That s Prince Mishkin.
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Dostoevsky knew that.
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So that s why you like The Idiot, that s so interesting.
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See, I think I like Crime and Punishment, because while you identified with Mishkin, I think I identified more with Raskolnikov.
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Because I was tempted by Luciferian intellect, you know, in a manner very similar to the manner he was tempted.
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But I mean, I think you can make a case that the Brothers Karamazov is Dostoevsky s crowning achievement.
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And that s something, man.
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He ruined literature for me.
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Because everything else just felt insipid afterwards.
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Not everything.
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Not everything.
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I found some books that, in my experience, hit that pinnacle.
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The Master and Margarita.
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That s a deadly book.
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I ve read that, I think, four times, and still, it s unbelievably deep.
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There s a Nikos Kazantzikas, a Greek writer.
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Some of his books are...
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His writing is amazing as well.
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Did you ever connect with the literary existentialists, Camus, or people like Hermann Hesse, or even Kafka?
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Did you ever connect with those?
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To the same degree?
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Yeah, to the same degree.
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Enough to be an influence.
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You know, you have to be deaf in some fundamental sense not to encounter a great dead friend and fail to learn.
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And I mean, I tried to separate the wheat from the chaff when I read, you know, and I read all the great clinicians, all of them, perhaps not.
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those who are foremost in the pantheon.
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And I tried to pull out what I could.
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And that was a lot.
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I learned a lot from Freud.
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I learned a lot from Rogers.
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And I learned a lot from, well, from Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.
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I m going to do a course on Dostoevsky and Nietzsche for this Peterson Academy.
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This is coming up in January.
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Oh, that would be them together.
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I m really looking forward to it.
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You re weaving.
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I hadn t thought about doing them together.
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That d be fun.
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That s a good idea.
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That d be a good idea.
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You often weave them together really masterfully because there is religious, in the broad sense of that word, themes throughout the writing of both.
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You know, there s uncanny parallelisms in their writing and their lives.
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And Dostoevsky is deeper than Nietzsche, but that s because he was a writer of fiction.
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Nietzsche is almost a character in a Dostoevsky novel.
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He is definitely that.
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He is definitely that, yes.
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Apparently Nietzsche knew more about Dostoevsky than people had thought.
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There s been some recent scholarship on that grounds.
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Dostoevsky didn t know anything about Nietzsche, as far as I know.
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I could be wrong about that.
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The thing that Dostoevsky had over Nietzsche is Nietzsche had to make things propositional in some real sense, because he was a philosopher.
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It s hard to propositionalize things that are outside your ken, but you can characterize them.
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And so, in The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan is a more...
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Developed character than a Leosha in in in the explicit sense.
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He can make better arguments but a Leosha wins like Michigan because he s the better man and Dostoevsky can show that in the actions rather and
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He can t render it entirely propositional, but that s probably because what s good can t be rendered entirely propositional.
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And so Dostoevsky had that edge over Nietzsche.
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He said, well, Ivan is this brilliant rationalist, atheist, materialist, and puts forward an argument on that front that s still unparalleled, as far as I m concerned, and overwhelms Eliosha, who cannot respond, but Eliosha is still the better man.
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So, which is very interesting, you know.
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You know, the funny thing about those two characters is you, Jordan Peterson, seem to be somebody that at least in part embodies both.
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Because you are one of the intellectuals of our time, rigorous in thought, but also are able to have that kind of, what would you describe?
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If you remove the religiosity of Alyosha, there s a, what s a good word?
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Love towards the world?
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Spirit of encouragement.
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Yes.
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Yeah, well, you know, one of the things I did learn, perhaps, from looking into the abyss to the degree that I have had to, or was willing to, was that at some level you have to make a fundamental statement of faith.
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When God creates the world, after each day, He says He saw that it was good.
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You think, well, is it good?
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It s like, wow, there s a tough question.
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Do you want to bring a child into a world such as this?
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Which is a fundamental question of whether or not it s good.
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It s an act of faith to declare that it s good.
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Because the evidence is ambivalent.
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And so then you think, okay, well, am I going to act as if it s good?
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And what would happen if I did?
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And maybe the answer to that is, I think this is the answer.
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The more you act out the proposition that it s good, the better it gets.
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And so that s it.
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Dostoevsky said this is something else.
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Every man is not only responsible for everything he does, but for everything everyone else does.
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It s like,
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What, is that profound or are you just insane?
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Then you think, is what you receive back proportionate to what you deliver?
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And the answer to that might be yes.
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That s a terrifying idea, man.
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And it s certainly, you can see that it s true in some sense because people certainly respond to you in kind with how you treat them.
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That s certainly the case.
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I mean, it s terrifying and it s exciting.
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Yeah, right.
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But that s an adventure, isn t it?
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You, yeah, you create the world
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by the way you live it.
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The world you experience is defined by the way you live that world.
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And that s really interesting.
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And then taken as a collective, we create the world together in that way.
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What do you think is the meaning of it all?
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What s the meaning of life, Jordan Peterson?
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We ve defined it many, many times throughout this conversation.
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It s the adventure along the route, man.
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And I would say,
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Where s that adventure to be found?
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In faith?
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What s the faith?
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The highest value is love and truth is its handmaiden.
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That s a statement of faith, right?
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Because you can t tell.
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You have to act it out to see if it s true.
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And so you can t even find out without... And that s so peculiar.
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You have to make the commitment a priori.
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It s like a marriage.
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It s the same thing.
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It s like, well, is this the person for me?
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That s the wrong question.
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How do I find out if this is the person for me?
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By binding myself to them.
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Well, maybe the same thing is true of life, right?
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You bind yourself to it.
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And the tighter you bind yourself to it, the more you find out what it is.
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And that s like a radical embrace.
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And it s a really radical embrace.
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That s the crucifix symbol.
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And more than that, because like I said, the full passion story isn t death.
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It isn t even unjust death.
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It isn t even unjust death and the crucifixion of the innocent, which is really getting pretty bad.
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It s unjust, torturous, innocent death
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attendant upon betrayal and tyranny, followed by hell.
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Well, that s a hell of a thing to radically embrace.
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It s like, bring it on.
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I think a lot of people put truth as the highest ideal and think they can get to that ideal
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while living in a place of cynicism and ultimately escape from life and hiding from life, afraid of life.
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And it s beautifully put that love is the highest ideal to reach for, and truth is... It s handmade.
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I thought about that for a long time, right?
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This hierarchy of ideal.
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And the thing about truth, that bitter truth, let s say, that cynical truth, is it can
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break the shackles of naivety and actually a burnt cynicism is a moral improvement over a blind naivety even though one is in some ways positive but only because it s protected and the other is bitter and dark but still better but you re not done at that point you re just barely started it s like you re cynical you re not cynical enough
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It s like, how cynical are you?
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I m an Auschwitz prison guard level of cynical?
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Because you have to go down pretty deep into the weeds before you find that part of you.
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But you can find it if you want.
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And then you think, well, I want to stop this.
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Well, that was the question you posed.
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In some sense, you re obsessed with, say, what happened on these mass-scale catastrophes in the communist countries.
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It s like, well, millions of people participated.
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So you could ve, and maybe you would ve enjoyed it.
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So what part of that is you?
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And you can find it, if you want.
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Yeah, it s all there.
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The prisoner, the interrogator.
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The Judas.
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Pontius Pilate.
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All of it, and all of it is inside us.
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And you just have to look.
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And once you do, maybe eventually you can find the love.
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Jordan, you re an incredible human being.
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I m deeply honored you would talk to me.
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Thank you for being a truth seeker in this world, and thank you for the love.
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Hey, thanks for the invitation, man.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jordan Peterson.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, let me leave you with some words from Friedrich Nietzsche.
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You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.
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Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.