Joe Rogan Experience #2180 - Jordan Peterson

Joe Rogan podcast check it out The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day you don't use headphones huh messes up my hair good to see you what's going on your uh your coat today every day is a new one yeah well I've got this suit maker lgfg Dimitri the Crazy Russian and he you know pays attention to what I'm doing and makes me the suits that he Thinks are suitable and uh you've got quite extravagant though like sometimes like one half of the suit is one color like looks like

you're getting bored you just want to switch it up a lot he sends me these damn things and I get them and I think there's no way I I wear that there's no way I'll wear that and then I put it on I think huh I like that yeah yeah yeah and Tammy puts up with it so is it everyday Suits now with you is that pretty I'm in a suit pretty much All the time you know is there a reason for that well the original reason was because um probably because of my father he

was a teacher and uh he always wore a suit even in the 70s when that started to become you know like 1950s thing and uh I asked him one time why he did that and he said it was to show respect for his students and then when I was a professor well when you start to be a professor you're not that much difference in age from your students to Begin with it's a good way of laying out a demarcation and that was helpful that's useful you know people like to know how the hierarchies are delineated

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

was that people started to come to the lectures in suits and so about I'd say about 40% of the audience dresses formally and lots of the young guys who come they tell me when I meet them afterwards and the meet Greets for example that they bought their first suit to come to the lectures and so you know I wouldn't have ever expected that and then Dimitri showed up about two years ago with his portfolio of Suits he designed one for each of the rules for my first book and he put the rule underneath the collar

at the back and designed the lining custom lining on all the suits as well and so I gave him a crack at it because he' put so much work into it and and that worked out Real well he's very very creative yeah that two uh color suit there's Lamb's wool on one side and goat's wool on the other and it's a Heaven and Hell suit so oh uhuh yeah no kidding e this is covered with iconography um Christian or uh Catholic and Orthodox I've got one of each and uh that's because I was out on

tour with my new book for my new book which is called we who wrestle with God which we will talk about today I hope so how how does One wrestle with God do you wrestle with god with every word so what does that mean well look man well you know look what here part of the reason that you're so successful in my opinion is because you actually say what you think like you're not putting on a show actually you have no reason to put on a show you put on a whole bunch of shows and

they've already been successful you know and you're actually asking the questions that are genuine Questions and people can trust you because of that and that means that you're letting the words emerge as they come to you and each of doing that with each word that's a decision you know because you can use your language to manipulate and you can use your language to for your own say hedonistic purposes or to gain power or you can just say what you think every like all of those different choices are a decision that's a wrestling that's a moral

decision and It it shines in every word and so it's it's super important that's part of the reason why in the Christian Canon the word is the basis of reality right it's the force that it's the process that generates the order that's good out of possibility and Chaos right and so that's and Israel the word Israel means we are we who are we who wrestle with God so that's the chosen people right and so what that means at a deeper level even is that if you're genuinely Wrestling with your conscience then you're someone who's chosen

by God and I think that that's that's right that's accurate it's interesting what you just said U one of uh Terence McKenna's lectures he talked about a very profound psychedelic experience that he had where he was given this Revelation that the world is made out of words that everything is made out of words like he has just some sort of a Profound understanding of what words really mean well how much of the reality that surrounds you has been what would you say uh has emerged out of the realm of possibility because of what you've said

a lot and you've have this huge influence on the world that's all a consequence all all almost all a consequence of what you've said and so there's an insistence in the judeo-christian Canon that whatever that The capacity that words have to shape possibility is Akin or identical to the process that generates reality itself and I think that's true that's that's why in the opening chapters of Genesis were described as formulated in the image of God or like a microcosm of the process that gives rise to order itself it's a very different view than the than

the bottomup materialistic view let's say of the of the Enlightenment in the scientific world it's a different Way of looking at things it's the notion that what is in front of you is a field of indeterminate possibility it's got some implicit structure as the scientists insist but it's it's open and you grapple with it like you grapple with your Dawning conscience in the morning Consciousness in the morning what confronts you in the morning is a field of possibility and you approach that with a a certain kind of orientation and you use your words and Your

linguistic capacity to think to shape that possibility and if you do that properly then you make this is the Genesis 1 insistence again you make the order that's good or very good and that depends on your orientation so in The Sermon on the Mount for example which is an instruction manual Christ tells his listeners how to orient themselves in the world properly so he says first aim with all your heart at the highest good you can imagine now now you'll get Better at that as your vision clears but that's the orientation to do what's right

now you might say like Pontius pilot said well what is right what is truth but most people know the difference between right and wrong you know at least step by step what would move you forward and upward so you Orient yourself to the highest possible upward place then you make the assumption that other people have the same intrinsic Value that you do so that's your initial aim and presumption and then you pay attention to the moment and that's well that's that's often the statement that gets Christ confused with the hippies you know to consider the

lies of the field who don't toil or spin but that's not the instruction the instruction is to aim up with everything and then having that firmly in mind to pay attention as much attention you as you can to each moment to allow the Words to come to you that best suit that upward aim not to subordinate your language to your own machinations or manipulations or your own hedonistic desire but towards what's right and if you do that then what emerges out of possibility is akin to the Garden to the original Garden in in Genesis 1

and it's the order that's good truth truthful language brings about the order that's good and that's well I that's a very accurate way Of portraying the role Consciousness plays in bringing about reality so and that's a it's not that that Viewpoint by the way isn't limited to the judeo-christian Canon you see the same thing in the DST representation because in the DST world you have a domain of order that's the black Serpent and you have a domain of chaos sorry I have It reversed the domain of order is the white Serpent and the domain of

chaos or possibility is The black serpent in the DST image the two snakes head to tail and your job is to walk the line between them and you can tell when you're walking that line because that's where things are maximally meaningful and so that's another element of this Vision which is that if you Orient yourself with upward aim and you straddle the line between Order and Chaos then Things become maximally meaningful around you so and musk you know I I just did a podcast With Elon Musk and he talked about resolving his existential crisis the

existential crisis that he experienced when he was about 11 or 12 was a crisis of Faith essentially and the way that he resolved that and then motivated himself so intensely was by understanding that if he pursued the path of the of the expansion of knowledge that that would be intrinsically meaningful that's the path of growth that's the path of Adventure All of that it's aligned with what matures you and makes you more responsible and sets the world in order and the the the Instinct of meaning signifies all that and so I've written a lot about

that in in this new book we we who wrestle with God and that's what I've been lecturing about in 60 different cities walking through these biblical stories um one by one partly because we have this wrestling match going on in our culture let's say Between the nihilists and the atheists and the and the True Believers you might say and one of the false of that war is that no one stops to elucidate or delineate exactly what it is that we're arguing about so you have people like Dawkins they parody the traditional conceptions of God a

superstitious being nothing more than a defense against death anxiety or the opiate of the Masses the old man in the sky the conceptualization of God in the Old Testament and the New Testament is unbelievably sophisticated and to reduce it to that kind of parody is a stunning disservice doin is an odd duck he's an odd duck because I think he knows also that there is some value in psychedelic experiences but he's scared to have them and won't look through Galileo's telescope yeah but you know he's had major health crisises right didn't he Have some sort

of a stroke or something like that I don't know I don't know I think he did I believe he did I believe he had some a major Health crisis it's like how much time you have left you know like what are you going to do you going to just not try it forever you just going to dismiss everything forever and I feel like people that dismiss things like that this reductionist perspective you're essentially saying you have the Answers and to dismiss the whole question of God or of whatever you want to call it higher power

a creator of the universe the universe itself as a conscious entity whatever it is to dismiss it just because you're trying to decipher the writings of fairly comparatively unsophisticated people because we're talking about people from many many thousands of years ago without access to the information we Have today and then you're also dealing with the fact that many of these stories were of an oral tradition for over a thousand years before they ever written down so to just dismiss that as Superstition and silliness without any curiosity about the root of these things why they resonate

with people and to just say that this is superstitious nonsense that people choose to believe in and this reductionist perspective of the known reality that we currently Exist in it's it's a foolish way of interfacing with something and it's shocking when a obviously brilliant man has a foolish way of interfacing with a very complex situation well it's especially odd in his case because he's also the for Ator of the idea of Meme and like a religious story is a meme that's been selected by by time and and crowd that's a good way of thinking about

it it it strikes to the heart of The matter in ways that that are sophisticated Beyond conscious understanding can I tell you a story sure okay it's a good story for the Psychedelic experience perhaps at least as an analog so in the story of Exodus there's a number of circumstances under which Moses has an encounter with God and they're very useful stories to understand because they point you to how that make can make itself manifest in your own life so the First real encounter that Moses has with God is in the story of the burning

bush and by this time Moses is an adult he's left his home he's gone out and he's got married he's apprenticed as a Shepherd which was a very very hard job in those days because Shepherds not only had to protect the weakest and serve them but also keep the Lions and the Wolves at Bay by themselves out in the wilderness it was a very hard job and Moses has mastered this so he's grown up and he's Adopted a role that's like a standard social role you know he's he's he's a husband he's a Shepherd he's

an adult okay and so kudos to him but then one day he's out in the wilderness by the Holy Mountain I think it's Horeb in that story but the Holy Mountain is always the place where Heaven and Earth touch and so there are all sorts of transformation stories that occur in the biblical Accounts at Mount Horeb or at Mount Si where God and Earth meet and He's out near the Holy Mountain and something attracts his attention and he goes off the beaten path to investigate okay so that's the first thing that's the first bit of

wisdom to derive from the story you'll have your role and you should have your role as a socialized adult right so you're kind of a type that way you're maybe even a cookie cutter type but you've adopted this this this uh mature social role it hasn't make you a full individual but it's Better than being immature and staying in your father's tent for example which is what Abraham does until he's very old so something attracts moses' attention and he goes off to investigate okay so and then he sees that it's a burning bush and so

what's a burning bush well it's the tree of life and life is often represented as a branching tree and it's on fire because it's compelling because fire is compelling and fire is alive and it's a symbol of life because Everything that is alive Burns that's what metabolism is and so a burning bush is like life itself intensified to the ultimate degree and that's what attracts moses' attention and he gets closer and closer to it which means he investigates more and more deeply and as he investigates more deeply he starts to understand that he's nearing The

Depths he's on sacred ground he takes off his shoes and that's an indication of his willingness to transform in identity and He continues to investigate and then the voice of being itself speaks to him from the depths and it tells him that that it reveals itself to him as the ground of being itself and it transforms him into the leader who enti invites his people away from slavery and who stands up against tyranny and so that's the story of Moses baptism and so what does that mean for the ordinary person well it means that you

need to grow up and adopt a Role you need to mature you need to become an adult you need to be a good man in your time but then you have to pay attention to see what attracts your attention what calls to you because there's an autonomy about that right you don't get to pick what interests you it picks you and you can respond to that call and investigate or reject it those are your options and if you reject it you stay in your box but if you follow it something will call to you and

then If you investigate that that will transform you and if you investigate it deeply enough it'll transform you into the person who can stand up against tyranny and who can lead his people away from slavery and that's how God is defined in that story God is the thing that calls to you to take you out of your role that will shape the manner in which your psyche transforms itself as a consequence of your diligent investigation into what calls to you and So that's the god that's portrayed that's one image of the god that's portrayed in

the Old Testament are you aware of uh some of the more recent um work that's been done by scholars in Israel where these guys have now come up with this hypothesis that the Burning Bush was actually uh it was a DMT experience and that the Burning Bush was most likely an acacia tree that the acacia tree is apparently rich with DMT and they think you know The way you get a DMT experience is you smoke it right and that they had some method of achieving psychedelic States through this and this is where Moses is encountering

god well we have one of the things have you read any of that stuff I know about the theorizing and it's certainly the case that people have been using psychedelic experiences for we don't know how long right hundreds of thousands of years no doubt and they've had a profound cultural consequence um One of the things that a psychedelic experience does is amplify that sense of intrinsic interest right so it strips it strips your perceptions of their inhibition by memory that's a good way of thinking about it so that you see what's there instead of your

habits of perception and so it's a way of amplifying you could think of it as a way of amplifying what's represented in the biblical Corpus as a calling and the the thing that's odd about the calling Well you know when you're you can think about it this way when you're when you're laying out a podcast when you're participating in a podcast you're following a golden thread right you're following where your interest takes you and your curiosity takes you and that's not something you can pre-plan right it's something that happens in the moment so imagine that

you're focused on your goal of having the most interesting conversation Possible and communicating what's deriv to the broadest number of people so that's the overarching goal okay now you focus on the moment and a spirit arises within you that's a good way of thinking about it that's the logos a spirit arises within you that leads you on a pathway that's an investigation into the truth that's part of that calling the Psychedelic chemicals What would they they heighten that they heighten The manifestation of the underlying mystery that's another way of thinking about it they do that

neurochemically and so now what's the association between that and religious Revelation in the Bible we don't know we don't know have you read any of Marco uh Allegro stuff no no no uh John Marco algro uh wrote a book called The Sacred mushro the cross yes oh yes yeah yeah yeah I read I read that back oh my God 1974 long you probably read it before it Was bought up by the Catholic Church oh I didn't even know about that yeah it was bought up by the like you used to have to get old copies

of it if you wanted to buy it and then it was recently republished yeah yeah I I read that a long long time ago I had no idea what to make of it when I read it I thought oh huh I have no idea what to do with this it's a problem because to really understand what he's saying you'd have to have a deep understanding of Those ancient languages yeah right that's very difficult book to evaluate because there's very few people that are even qualified to like many people have disputed some of his like he

has one claim that the word Christ can be traced emically how do you say itally emically to uh an ancient Sumerian word that means a mushroom covered in God seman and so it was his assertion that the idea was that they when it rained that rain was The Giver of life and it was literally God's semen that made things grow and that these mushrooms cuz they would show up so quickly you know if it rains out if you go to bed you could look out at just your lawn and it's complete grass not a mushroom

in sight and you can go to bed and then wake up in the morning there'll be big mushrooms there it's really weird and that these things when they would eat these psilocybin mushrooms that would appear out of nowhere they Genuinely were referring to them as God that this was like a gift from God and that that was tracing back to the origin of the word Christ but it's very tortured like to really understand and to be able to dispute it you'd have to have a deep understanding of Aramaic you'd have to you'd have to have

a deep understanding of Aramaic you'd have have to have a a deep understanding for of the original doctrines like what what is the actual translation what do it mean You'd have to understand the ancient Hebrew version of it how does it differ of associations oh God it's so crazy when we read it in English I mean what was the original version the original version all the ancient letters in ancient Hebrew also doubled as numbers right so words had numerical value like the word God and the word love apparently have the same numerical value that is

a bizarre concept for us to try to wrap our heads Around a language which you know that words also have numbers in them that your letters also mean numbers and that there's value certain numerical value to certain words and that you would use them in the context of these conversations you would understand where I don't understand I don't have that I have English it's like we have math we have language they're separate and you're missing something in what they're Trying to say so what John Marco algro is doing he's taking taking the oldest version of

these stories on record right he's taking the Dead Sea Scrolls he's taking stuff that's literally written on animal skins and one of the ways that they deciphered it to try to put it all together they had to take the DNA samples of these parchments to try to figure out which ones are from which cows if they're from different cows and that's part of the way they figured out How to put all the stuff together this guy studies this for 14 years 14 and he was the only ordained minister that was a part of this deciphering

committee I think there was 14 people I I don't remember how many people might have been 20 but it was the only one of them that was agnostic so he had become when he had started studying theology he kind of lost his faith apparently you know he started realizing there's so many versions of these Stories they're coming from different places he became sort of like hey I I think I'm agnostic I'm just going to like step back and have this approach of not knowing not not not having a Doctrine not having an ideology that I'm

attaching myself to and so then when he goes through all of the this is a straight lace Scientist by the way it's not like some guy looking for psychedelics to be a part of very serious book right and there's a lot of Those people that are doing that they're looking for psychedelics to be a part of everything sort of to validate or Justify their own use of these things he wasn't doing that at all you know and he wasn't like Wasson where a guy who went down and experienced the the Psychedelic experiences in Mexico and

then came back and described them for mainstream literature this guy was doing it like and his whole purpose was just to decide for the Dead Sea Scrolls but it Was so compelling to him when it was over he like had to break ranks and he had to write this book and then they they took that book out of circulation I believe find out what happened with the sacred Mushroom in the cross how it was because he published another book shortly afterwards that was um the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian myth and I think it

it felt to me when I read that one it's almost like he has to write a book because they took the other one Away because it's kind of like saying most of the same stuff but he believed that it was that what they were writing about a lot of it was fertility rituals and psychedelic experiences and that he would that they were hiding a lot of these stories like they're hiding the knowledge underneath these stories to try to in Parables and all these different ways to try to obscure it from the Romans and obscure it

from the the People that conquered them so they wouldn't know the they would know the secrets of this thing this ritual in which would they experience God so you're so why why is it that psychedelic use has played the role that it's played in your interests and your pursuit of knowledge what do you think it's done for you that that's been valuable I think we are in a weird place in society where the term drug is a is a blanket and it covers Things that have vastly different effects it covers caffeine it covers nicotine and

it covers dimethyl tryptamine which is crazy it's crazy that all those things are drugs Aderall is a drug benzo dipene is a drug Xanax there's a million of them they're all different and they're all drugs and the idea that psychedelics are a drug for lack of a better term that's what we use I don't think that's what they are at all I think they are Probably why we became people I think they are probably why Society Advanced and I think every great ancient culture probably C librated them and used them it seems like there's so

much evidence out of Egypt of the use of psilocybin various different drugs various different psychedelic experiences the the the the iconography of the pineal gland seems to be a big part of multiple cultures not just Egyptian but even Catholicism if you go to the Vatican there's this enormous pine cone that is a statue there and I I was very lucky when I went to the Vatican we got a guide we hired a private guide that was a scholar from France and when he's not working in the Summers he gives these tours and they're very thorough

and he was brilliant guy I wish I could remember his name I I should probably find it out to give him credit brilliant guy so he takes us through showing us all this artwork this incredible Explaining why they had little penises and that was explaining the whole thing that big puses were thought to be barbaric and it was not representative of like someone of class and dignity and education and so we get to this pine cone and he says to me he goes do you know what this represents and I said is it the pineal

gland and he goes yes and then we start this conversation of what why why these Catholics would have this enormous representation of the pineal Gland which they they reference as the seed of the soul and that this this gland which is in the center of your brain is is thought to be literally a third eye and on reptiles it actually has a a a cornea and a lens this gland like literally it's exactly where the third eye of Eastern mysticism is and they've got a representation of it right here and it's thought to be where

dimethyl tryptamine is produced and and this this whole this Whole connection to it is so old that I it seems like you go back to the John marro leer stuff you go back to the the Dead Sea Scrolls which are the oldest version of the Bible the only version I I believe the only version they have in Aramaic of all those stories and if he's right if John Marco algro is right it all kind of makes sense that these people were having these experiences much like the Greeks were with the ucini Mysteries much like Multip

different cultures in the Amazon all over the world have experienced these profound ceremony experiences that lead to these Journeys into the spirit world these connections with higher Consciousness this something that when you're experiencing it seems very very real but also very Preposterous when you try to explain it to people that aren't experienced you know it's like Hendrick Like the are you experienced have you ever been experienced well I have like it's that like with with that understanding that that's possible the world changes because now you know that that's possible you could live your whole life

and not know that the most shocking profound thing in existence is three hits away three hits away and all of a sudden you're in a completely different Universe in 20 30 seconds that's nuts and the fact that that is Dismissed uh that people look at it as like oh you're just escaping reality and you're like it might be the source of civilization itself it might be the source of language it might be the source of the expansion of the human mind over a period of two million years the doubling of the human brain over a

period of two million years which Terence McKenna felt directly coincides with the shifting of the tropical rainforest was turning into grasslands Which would force these primates to experiment with new food sources and these undulate cows that were everywhere that would [ __ ] and then these psilocybin mushrooms would grow in their [ __ ] observed primates flipping over these Cow Patties looking for beetles and grubs and things to eat there it's everywhere like you could see it all over Africa if there's something on that they're going to try it out and if these things are

trying it out and they're Doing this over a period of 2 million years and they they develop language and culture and weapons and they start thinking about things and they become different than every animal around them and this was McKenna's Stone date Theory which I'm sure you're familiar with and Dennis McKenna who is you know a legitimate scientist Dennis explains it even better because he explains it with the actual mechanisms that your brain that the things that fire up when you Encounter high dose psilocybin experiences that would lead you to the development of language glossal

the the connection of sounds and and objects and and bringing things together in a in a manner of communication also they they realized that in low doses it increases visual Acuity it makes people more uh Amorous makes people hornier they're going to have more sex they're going to be better Hunters because they could see better They're going to be a little more sensitive to the the environment they're going to be more aware Edge detections different there's like so many different things that happen that if you're if you're thinking about what made people people it's a

mystery we want to pretend that we understand things because of the fossil record and this and that sure we kind of understand but every now and then we find a new human that we didn't even Know exist like Dennis hovens what was that not even 20 years ago I don't think so now there's a whole other branch of human beings that they weren't even aware of 20 years ago whatever the [ __ ] happened that took us from all the other primates that are still here and made us this it's pretty profound and I have

a feeling that psychedelics were at least involved in that process that's my belief and my belief is that the Sweeping psychedelics Act of 1970 that they passed essentially to Target civil rights activists and anti-war activists that's what they did they wanted to go after the hippies and they went after the hippies with MK Ultra with Tom O'Neal so brilliantly outlines in his book k OS they went after it and they created the Manson family they created that family they they taught that guy how to do that so that that guy would kill people and He

would be a psychopath and now hippies would be Psychopaths and then all this anti-war [ __ ] would just get stopped by sensible people then schedule one everything everything Sil ayid marijuana all down the board everything becomes schedule one the most illegal of illegal things so all these people who are experien all these Ken keesy people and you know all the LSD people of the 60s all those people become criminals instantly and they just threw water on The whole movement and it worked it really worked it was Nixon and and all the people that were

in charge back then if you look at what happened from 1960 to 1980 this confusing era of the 70s where the effects are wearing off and then you get into the 80s and everybody's doing coke and they have makeup on and big hair and and the music sucks it's like something happened something happened and what happened was they completely REM removed the very Thing that had changed culture so radically from the 50s to the 60s like I'm a gigantic fan of 1960s automobiles I love them there's something about the shapes of them the way they

sound I mean part of it is that I grew up in the'80s and those are the cars we all wanted when we were kids you know if a guy drove bying a 1969 Camaro we would all be like w look at it look at that thing it was but there's something about those shapes there's something about the Designs of those cars that resonate so strongly today a 1990 car ain't worth [ __ ] nobody wants your [ __ ] 1990 car 1990 Camaro get the [ __ ] out of here with that thing but if

you have a 1968 Camaro people will stop in a parking lot and stare at it what is is that I think those guys were on drugs I think all those guys were on drugs I think the guy who created a Corvette had to be on drugs these guys were they they they felt something the same way Hendrick Felt something when he was on stage playing guitar and a way nobody had ever heard before that guy came out of nowhere and everybody was like what the [ __ ] is he doing it was so different that

Eric Clapton watched him for the first time and was like I should probably quit playing guitar like like what the [ __ ] am I doing compared to this guy like Jesus Christ everybody was like humbled and confused by it psychedelic inspired 100% 100% And there's something about throwing water on that in the 1970s that I think has done a massive disservice to our civilization a massive disservice because it's equated these things with people that have poor discipline and bad social skills and Nar duells who fail in society and that's not true so and all

these people that I know that are billionaires I know people that are like super rich people that run these uh financial institutions and I know a lot Of like brilliant venture capitalist guys and Brilliant Tech Guys and almost all of them are enthusiasts almost all of them have had these experiences and they're all kind of quiet about it and it's very unfortunate it's very unfortunate because of these stupid laws that were passed 50 years ago we've gotten ourselves in this weird crunch where we've made things illegal that could massively help people progress in life and

sort things out if we could Figure out how to manage them correctly if we could run proper studies about what is the correct dose is there a person that has a certain sort of biological uh you makeup that makes these drugs problematic should we find out who's maybe someone's allergic to them there's many medications and many different compounds and many plants and natural things that people are allergic to Let's avoid that let's try to figure out what Works for some people what work what doesn't work let's have legitimate counselors that could guide people through experiences

people that have experienced it themselves and can understand how to do this with intent and possibly a your life they have been shown to be hugely beneficial for soldiers for our military men coming and women coming back from overseas experiencing horrific trauma to help them get past that and yet they're Illegal still by in we're both middle-aged men right so who is telling us what we can and can't do this is preposterous this is other men our age that haven't had these experiences Main maining this control on them in an a completely ignorant way they

don't even know what they are they don't know what these things are they don't know what the experience is and yet they want it to be kept out of the hands of kids we got to keep it off the streets we've got To keep drugs away from our society and you don't know what you're talking about it might be why we're here and it also the absence of it might be why we're so [ __ ] up it might be why we're so disconnected why we're so disjointed Ed and our society is so hypocritical I

mean the most pro-life people are also pro- death penalty it's like across the board everything the people that you know want no crime but don't want to stop the emergence of Crime by funding programs to try to fix the inner cities and they want to there's our whole thing is disconnected and I have a feeling that a big part of that is that we have not been given access to tools that have helped people literally become what we are today and if if if they're to you know if you readed Brian M rescue's work and

if he's correct and these people that are studying the ucini Mysteries and the the literal emergence of democracy as we Know it probably all of it came out of psychedelic experiences so I had Timothy Larry's old job at Harvard that comes with a lot of weight H yeah and I knew some of the people that knew him and so you could say that what happened in the 1960s and this is relevant to the Psychedelic experience let's say is that the emergence of mushrooms in particular and then LSD indicated to a swath of the population Like

liry and like Ken KY that our perceptions were locked in kind of a box in a in a box that we didn't even really that we weren't even conscious of I suppose that's the box of Conformity and the psychedelics released a wave of non-conformity and ly crystallized that with his TuneIn turn on and drop out now there was a major problem with that and that was partly what led to the kickback so you might say that the first stage of something Approximating a religious Revelation is the understanding that your perceptions have been uh um constrained

by forms of Conformity that who that were so extensive that you didn't even understand them you didn't even know they were there and so you're freed from that and then maybe the first response to that is the celebration of an unlimited hedonistic freedom but the problem with that is That freedom from constraint and Hedonism is not Freedom it's just it's just subjugation to to a kind of instinctive chaos and that emerged with the hippie culture and uh ly in particular made a huge mistake when he said tune in turn on and drop out he should

have said tune in turn on and grow up I'm dead serious about that because there's there's a different form of responsibility that emerges once you realize that you were constrained by a Conformist box let's say like Moses when he was being a normal Shepherd that you can step outside of that but you don't step outside of that into worship of the golden calf like in hedonistic orgies you step outside of that with a more conscious upward aim and if the use of transformative Technologies like psychedelics isn't accompanied by that framework of enhanced responsibility then it

can degenerate into a kind of hedonistic chaos and that's what the Nixon types were reacting to they were terrified by it and they had the reasons to be terrified because as you're intimating these Technologies are unbelievably unbelievably potent and destabilizing now that destabilization can be used for bet let's say For Better or For Worse and it should be used for better that's complex it's a very complex thing to manage and so Carl Yung said that the one of the Main functions of religion was to stop people from having religious experiences and what he meant by

that was that a direct experience of the Transcendent is enough to shake you to the foundation and to destabilize not only you but your culture this is why for there's another scene in the story of Exodus could you explain further like expand on what he was meaning by that but the keep you from having religious experiences well if everybody goes their Own enlightened way let's say there's no there's no social cohesion there's no Unity of purpose there's nothing but fragmentation and part of the danger of the hippie movement in the 1960s was a counter social

fragmentation right now so you can imagine you know things get so constrained that everybody's exactly the same and that's a complete totalitarian catastrophe but you can imagine the opposite catastrophe which is that well everyone's letting it all Hang out and doing their own thing and that's equally dangerous right and so there's some balance in the middle well that's that balance between Chaos and Order that we were referring to earlier it's also an ignorance of the structure that's involved in man maintaining a society definitely you need discipline and people need to work to maintain the society

that you enjoy to be so free and to be yeah well you can imagine that that complex social order can be Maintained by something like Mindless obedience right that's suboptimal what you'd really want is enlightened respons ability right right that's a great way to put it right that's a very hard thing to pull off though because it means that you have to LEAP out of the the box of social constraint and you have to take the responsibility onto yourself now that's a hell of a lot better if you could manage it but that is definitely

not what key or or ly for example were Preaching to the masses is like an admirable thing that people just should aspire to should be it's the best possible the highest go let me give you another example of this if you don't mind I'm I'm going to use another biblical story why you biblical the lights are flickering behind you almost like God is interacting with us there's spirits in the room Jamie have you noticed the life flickering you haven't noticed it keep an eye on it hopefully They're the right spirits well I think they always

are yeah yeah yeah well uh so in the story of Abraham Abraham is a um he's an old man when the story starts soon as you start talking about Abraham start flickering again it's going out see one of my tricks I'm telling you dude it's never happened before this is wild so Abraham is like 70 years old when the story starts and we don't know anything about him he's completely Non-descript he's a case of Failure to Launch so he has Rich parents and he has everything he needs at hand so he can live the life

of a satiated infant ah like like he's in the throws of of what would you say materialistic plenty okay and the voice of God comes to him now but it's character in a very particular manner so God comes to Abraham as the Call to Adventure and that's a very useful thing to know so in the Moses story God comes to Moses is that which Attracts his interest and takes him off the beaten path in the story of Abraham God comes as a spirit of Adventure and God makes Abraham a deal it's a very specific deal

and it's the best possible deal this is the Covenant by the way this is the Covenant so God tells Abraham if you leave your zone of comfort if you remove yourself from your father's tent if you move away from infantile materialistic satiation and go out into the terrible world and you do That voluntarily you have the adventure of your life this is what'll happen you'll be a blessing to yourself that's genuine so instead of being racked with self-doubt and being self-conscious and taking yourself apart with guilt and shame you'll ride the wave of Adventure and

and you'll feel that your life is a blessing not only will you feel that it will be a blessing that's the first thing that will happen the second thing will happen is that other people will Notice and your name will become renowned and that will be valid you'll be a blessing to other people in that regard your name will be upheld so you'll Stand Out Among your peers but in a justifiable manner that's a consequence of your own intrinsic Merit the third thing that'll happen is that you'll have the opportunity to establish something permanent for

Abraham it's a dynasty right he's offered the possibility of being the father of Nations and the fourth thing that happens is you'll do it in a way that's of cardinal benefit to everyone and so what happens in that story this is so cool it's so remarkable it's the answer to the selfish Gene by the way as well so what this story does is it takes the Call to Adventure which is the Instinct that makes children move out into the world it's the spirit that you encourage if you're a good father It lines that up and

it's says if you follow that and let It pull you out of your zone of comfort your life will be a blessing to you your reputation will grow you'll establish something permanent and you'll do that in a way that's good for everyone right so that's a hell of a good deal and that's that's the story of Abraham okay so why is that relevant to the Psychedelic debate because if you're going to move into the rone of the Transcendent you have to take on the requisite responsibility or the process Of transcendence turns into something like a

descent into unstructured chaos and that's not an improvement it's just a movement from tyranny into the desert that's a good way of thinking about it symbolically so in what happens in in The Exodus story because it also details out how this should be structured is that Moses has a vision of individual responsibility and social organization that's maximally responsibility based so Moses tells the pharaoh to let his People go go but that's not the phrase the phrase is God said tells Moses to say this he's let my people go so they may worship me in the

desert and so you move out of the Tyranny that's what happens let's say in the throws of a psychedelic experience is that the preconceptions are shattered now you're somewhere unstructured okay well you can't worship what's unstructured you have to find the proper structuring for your New Freedom the Vision that's put forward in the book of Exodus is a vision of multi-dimensional responsible identity so you take on responsibility for your own life you take on responsibility for the life of your wife or your husband you take on responsibility for your family you're a model for your

community you serve your state you do what you can for your nation and that's all United under your highest upward orientation and that's ordered Freedom that's Ordered Freedom it's not the same as the hedonistic freedom fre that the people like Nixon and the sort of right-wing conservatives of the 1960s were terrified by that kind of hedonistic Anarchy it's not Freedom it had erupted out of nowhere I mean we're we're right now in 2024 I want you to imagine 2014 it's the same it's the same there's nothing different other than the threat of AI And War

and socially the world's the same you go from 19 56 to 1966 you have a completely different world completely different world everyone's going crazy the the uh opposition to the Vietnam War has got people in the streets Ken key Tim lery tune in drop out all that this this world is changing in this radical way there had been nothing like it and in a lot of what you're saying about these experiences happening and people just disconnecting and and not having Discipline and structure and just experiencing these things and just disconnecting completely from society was the

problem that was the problem it's a major problem well it's still a problem now to some degree because people who are pursuing let's say non-conformist freedom don't understand that the replacement for Freedom isn't hedonistic Anarchy and that's partly because it's self-defeating it's also pointless it's also pointless and Meaningless and it's partly pointless and meaningless because imagine then this is part of the implication of the story of Abraham is that the Instinct of meaning comes to you when you pursue a pathway that specifies what would you say the Limitless development of your integrated psyche but it's

not just the psyche it's the integration of the psyche with all the different levels of society like for example in so far as you're well put Together you're going to be a highly functional husband to your wife right like you're own psychological organization integration cannot be divorced from the union that you make with your wife they're the same thing and then you can extend that to your kids for you to get your act together means simultaneously that you establish the proper relationship with your wife and with your children those are the same thing and then

if you can manage That you do the same thing with the broader Community it all Stacks up musically and so then mental health doesn't become how your Psych is organized internally which is what the clinical psychologists misled people into believing it it's more like the harmony that obtains from the psyche upward through society when everything is stacked up properly to the up to the highest level possible of being and that that's Another definition of God so one of the things I tried to do in this book is to actually Define what it is that we're

arguing about because the old man in the sky superstition doesn't cover the territory so for example if you look at God in the story of Abraham and you say Do you believe in that God what you're asking even though you might not know it is do you believe that there is a call to Adventure and that following that call Will Not only integrate you but Serve Society in the highest possible Manner and that's a very that's a pretty straightforward question has very little to do with anything that's even vaguely superstitious like is that call there

you certainly reward it in your children if you have the least bit of sense and so I've been trying to Define what it is that we're arguing about and so there's another definition too that you see this in the story of Adam and Eve so in the story of Adam and Eve one of the ways God is characterized is as the spirit that calls you on your pride and presumption so then you ask yourself your well do you believe that exists it's like how often in your own life has Pride gone before a fall is

there some Spirit that's operative in being that shows you the air of your ways when you get ahead of yourself or not and if the answer to that is no you say well you have no conscience nothing calls you On your moral impropriety you're overreaching no one wants to be near you if you're one of those people that's for sure and is that real so one of the ways God is presented in the Old Testament is this dynamic between calling and conscience right so there's the calling that is indicated in the story of Abraham and

Moses that pulls you forward to the adventure of your life and the other side of that is the constraint of conscience that tells you when you're Wandering off the straight and narrow path right that's more the voice of negative emotion and threat detection and calling is more like the voice of positive emotion that pulls you forward and invites you but you need the dynamic between those two that's the pillar of light and the pillar of Darkness that guides the Israelites across the desert Jonathan Paso helped me figure that out just flattened me when I when

he laid it out because I could see the dowst view Of the world and the ancient Jewish view of the world stack on top of each other and the implication of the story is very straight it's like you leave a tyranny and you're lost what guides you when you're lost the the interaction between what calls you forward and upward and the constraints of your own conscience that warn you when you're deviating from the straight and narrow path that's the definition of God that emerges from Exodus and the balance of the mind to be Able to

figure out which is which and how to apply them and the balance of the mind this is why you have to have the least amount of problems in your life and keep your body as healthy as possible so you don't have all these other things that are influencing the way you interact with the world you got to have a balance of everything all of it has to be kind of balanced together in order for you to have the Judgment yes mm otherwise you can't see right you Yeah yeah you have to be able to see

it and it's hard and you have to want to see it yes so why do you want to see it me yeah it's just my instinct that's just I follow my instincts with everything I always have why I don't know I think because I didn't have a lot of guidance when I was young and because you know I was a latch key kid and parents divorced split you know a lot lot of moving I think I developed my own appreciation of my instincts of my Thought and I had seen enough people by the time I

was a young boy ruin their lives and make poor and I'd seen these poor decisions right in front of me I'd seen poor thinking and excuse making and laziness so you could see the negative consequences I had seen all these things and because I didn't feel protected um I I genuinely felt like I was on my own and I had to figure things out on my own I developed a very early trust and recognition of the importance Of that and it's led me through my entire life everything that I ever did that was like a

big risk was like a calling to me every single thing that I ever did from getting into martial arts I went from not doing it to doing it every day all day s days a week it was a calling like I was call it was like my my mind interfaced with whatever that was martial arts was and said this is my ticket out of here like this is my ticket to be a different person was that Discipline what was the ticket do you think I don't even know if you call it discipline back then because

it was more of an obsession so when you're obsessed with something it doesn't require discipline because you can't wait to do it again discipline Mike real was a real calling for you Mike Tyson said best he said discipline is doing something you hate but doing it like you love it m you know like when you're in training camp like Mike Tyson was for a big Heavyweight fight you're pushing the limits of your physical endurance and Recovery because you're trying to achieve an adaptation you can't maintain fight ready Fitness all year round one thing that people

don't understand about like fight ready like when a guy like uh Islam makev who is the UFC lightweight champion the pound-for-pound best fighter on earth when that guy is fighting when he gets into the cage on the day whatever it is that Saturday Night this is a peak of performance and training that cannot be maintained you want he wants to catch it right when he's right there when the body hasn't broken down yet the immune system hasn't broken down yet the endocrine system isn't fried the adrenals aren't fried you you're getting it to right when

your body can recover and is forced to maintain this insane level of fitness and then you have to take a break like you cannot maintain fight Camp all year Round you will not be able to do it your body will break down so you you this so it's not what my point is like that requires discipline right because that is no longer you're no longer in the in in the inspiration realm you're not in the obsession you are I'm sure as well but you're also in there's no [ __ ] way you want to do

it there's no way you want to do more Sprints there's no way you want to do all the stuff you must do it though you must do the calisthenics You must do the live wrestling drills you must do the Shark Tank where they throw in a new Fresh opponent every round for five rounds so you're dealing with rested killers and you're exhausted you have to do that and that's not that's pure discipline and generally enforced discipline by coaches cuz it's so rigid it's so hard to do that you need someone over you with a stopwatch

go let's go let's go let's go and everybody has to get up and go at it Because even the most disciplined their body recognizes they need a break right so that's pure discipline what I had was this Obsession that made that hard work easy right so that's a key thing so that's a key thing okay so so now imagine that underneath that there's a um implicit or unconscious goal okay so I'm saying this for a very specific reason so the positive emotion that motivates people is always experienced in relationship to A goal now this is

a very important thing for everyone to understand because it means that if you don't have a goal you have no positive emotion and it also means that the higher your goal the more positive emotion you experience when you're moving towards it cuz positive emotion signifies progress towards a goal so you need a goal the goal of the what deepest religious TR the deepest religious Traditions is the ultimate goal by definition so the Idea is that you need a goal and so you should pick the utmost possible goal that's another good definition of something like the

kingdom of heaven or the realm of the Divine the ultimate goal now you have a goal and every time you see movement towards it you're going to get um what would you say you're riding on the energy that's associated with movement towards that goal that's dopaminergically mediated that's the same systems that are affected by Cocaine and methamphetamine and so forth all the positive emotion drugs so you need a goal that goal now you can imagine this that if you're attentive to the action of your own instincts or the Divine voice I don't think those are

distinguishable then a goal is going to emerge that catalyzes a series of Transformations this is what happens to Abraham so he has a series of Adventures after he decides that he's going to go Out in the world and every Adventure is marked by the erection of a sacrificial Altar and a recommitment of his upward AIM now there's two reasons for that one is that he reminds himself that he's aiming upward and he's on an adventure and the second is he admits to himself that with every transformation of character something has to be sacrificed so you

know so now I I'm I'm curious about this in your own life right so you Started obsessively committing to martial arts what did you have to give up to do that social life okay what else that's basically it I was a kid okay social life I didn't really have responsibilities other than school so I would to leave from school and go right to training okay so there's an there's an emergent idea in that story of Adventure Le transformation that with every profound transformation of character something that's not Appropriate has to be let go of that's

why by the way that's why Abraham's story culminates in the sacrifice of his son cuz the sacrifices get higher in value as the developmental progression upward continues and that's basically the story of individual development right follow the call of Adventure aim upward continually remind yourself of your fundamental goal and then let go of everything that isn't appropriate as you Transform forward so Abraham ends up with a new name because of doing that that's how different he becomes in the course of his Adventure it's like Jacob Jacob becomes Israel and Abraham becomes Abraham because the consequence

of him following the pathway of Adventure the calling is a transformation that's so complete it's as if he's a different person and that those stories are maps of that transformative process so they culminate they culminate in the Christian view of things with the ultimate sacrificial offering so that's the idea that lurks in the New Testament is that the ultimate in transformation is brought about by your willingness to put absolutely everything on the line no matter what right and that's very different view of the religious Enterprise than something like defense against death anxiety right it's the

ultimate Adventure and that's the willingness to welcome everything about life that's terrible and painful and malevolent to welcome that with open arms to accept that and that that's predicated on a deeper idea even which is that sacrifice is the basis of community which is exactly right because you have to give up something to be in relationship to the Future and to other people right right so the biblical Corpus is an examination Of what would you say levels of sacrifice moving downward to the ultimate possible level of sacrifice so in the abrahamic story Abraham is requested

by God to offer up his son right now he does he gets him back the threat isn't carried through and what does that mean it means first of all that everything in your life no matter what it is including your relationships should be made subservient to the Highest possible aim it also means that a good father sacrifices his children to what's highest that's the offering of your child to the world the faithful offering of your child to the world that's what Mary does it's a famous statue of Mary in St peters's in Rome Michelangelo made

it when he was like 23 some ridiculous early age brilliant statue Mary is holding the body of her son broken in her arms looking Serene he's an adult off the cross it's like The female crucifixion and the idea is that the good mother the proper father offers their children to be broken by the world in the pursuit of what's highest there it is yeah yeah yeah yeah he was 23 when he made that that is insane God what were you doing when you were 23 telling shitty jokes single block of marble yeah and so so

see that that's that's that's an indication of sacred femininity because see the Psychoanalyst said in the early part of the 20th century that the good mother necessarily fails and so what does that mean well every woman who brings a child into the world knows that the child is going to be broken by death and malevolence right and so motherhood in the highest in its highest aspect is the offering of the child to the world to be broken that's what's portrayed in the abrahamic story too with regards to Abraham to get to get your child back

You offer them to the world that's a profound indication of Faith right that life is worthwhile despite its suffering and its evil and it's so good like the the work like look at his foot just look at like the the detail on the way the toe bends the heel it's insane how good it is he was so good the fact that he figured out how to be that good at 23 years of age is just so shocking well also so inspiring you know So inspiring but stunning like stunning how good it is yes and stun

what it means and where it's placed and the understanding of anatomy did he really wow insane I mean that guy left behind so much like what is that about what is it what is it about this these Unique Individuals like him that their work transcends time and they that's life eternal that that ability to transcend Time yes yeah yeah thousands of years later so what happens in the abrahamic story cuz it's relevant to your question so God offers Abraham the opportunity to be the father of Nations okay so imagine this imagine this as a father

so we use father as a generic word right everybody has a father so there's a generic aspect to it there's a role that you play if you're a father and then you could imagine there's a role you could play as a good father and if you're a good Father you're you're radically encouraging and you encourage your children to go out into the world and Prevail you teach them to handle serpents you don't protect them you don't shelter them you you push them out and you say no matter what comes your way kid I've Got Confidence

that you can handle it no matter how terrible it is no matter how challenging or daunting or malevolent it is you've got it and when you see your children doing that if You're a good father it fills you with what it fills you with gratitude and love to see your children acting that out even at an early age to take taking the risks of their first steps or climbing their first play structure or going out in the playground to make new friends when they're strangers or going off to school alone all of that you think

it's dangerous out there it's like good go I know you can handle it okay so that's what Abraham Plays out he plays out that archetypal role and the idea there this is why I made reference earli to the idea of The Selfish Gene Dawkins characterized human reproduction as selfish that's wrong because the human reproductive pattern is multigenerational and if you want to establish the pattern of fatherhood that's going to Cascade down the generations that will make your descendants successful in the multigenerational manner then you follow The spirit adventure and you EMB your children with that

confidence and that's how that pattern that establishes the D y so Abraham is the father of Nations is established so human reproduction is way more complex than just sex far more complex it's a multigenerational commitment so now the promise that God makes to Abraham in part is that if you fall into that pattern of maximal Adventure and courageous movement forward that your Life is imbued with a meaning that with the meaning that transcends time and that you embody something like an archetypal and eternal spirit and that's the spirit of the father that's why Abraham understands

that he's made contact with the god of his ancestors and if you're a good father you have that Spirit dwelling within you and the Christian insistence is that that's the that spirit's identical to the logos that bears the weight of the world on Its shoulders voluntarily and that that's what brings everything into being stunning it's a stunning conceptualization and I think it's right it looks right to me and the idea that sacrifice is the basis of the community that's just obvious like the fact that you're married so what's the sacrificial gesture there well all other

women that's sacrifice number one then it's not about you it's also not about your wife it's about the stability of your Union across time and it's about the stability of that Union in so far as that's a reliable foundation for your children so that's sacrificial too you give up your whims in the present so that the future is stabilized you give up your immaturity so that your children can Thrive that's all sacrificial gesture and we figured that out that's why we put the crucifix at the center of our society because we figured out even though

we didn't know it we figured out That the stability of the community is predicated on the willingness of the individual to sacrifice and the exploration in the New Testament is the limits of sacrifice right so do you think that that's what people think of when they think of the Cross it's very hard to think about it's very hard to know what people think about I would say it depends on their level of sophistication right that's What I'm getting at I don't think it's ever been explained to me that way and I don't think most people

think about it that way when they think about it they think Jesus died for our sins there he is Praise Jesus right right that's it's a very formul surface formulaic surface level understanding part because it's partly and there's a merciful element of it and this is what Yung was referring to when he said that religion helps protect people against religious Experience the full revelation of the significance let's say of the imitation of Christ which is supposed to be the foundation of Christian belief is in fact the demand that you walk the same pathway and that's

a Terri it's the most terrifying demand because so Yung described the Christian passion as an archetypal tragedy now there was a reason for that so think about it this way think about it technically so Imagine that a 100 great storytellers told the most painful possible story and then imagine that you aggregated all those stories and you distilled them into one story where all the terrible elements were present okay so now you have a representation you have a representation of the worst life can throw at you okay so let's take that aart a bit so the

first thing that makes a tragedy tragic is that the tragedy befalls a good person because if a Tragedy befalls a villain it's just Justice it's not a tragedy so it has to be a good person so then to amplify that you would not only have the tragedy befall a good person you'd have it befall a good person that everyone knew was good but was not only good was the best and that was persecuted because he was good so that sort of limits it out in that direction then you might say well what does he have

to face well the answer would be well the worst life has To offer okay early death early painful death early painful humiliating unjust death at the hands of his friends at the hands of the mob under the thumb of a tyrant right brought about by people who knew that he was not only good but the best of men that's an archetypal tragedy and then it doesn't limit out so then you have the death that occurs in consequence of that and its voluntary acceptance but that's not where it ends because the mythology Surrounding the crucifixion story

insists that Christ harrowed hell after the crucifixion which meant that he confronted not only death but malevolence itself and in consequence transcended both and so what's the underlying psychological message it's something like the calling and the voice of conscience informing people that in order to thrive properly in life and to become who you could be if you could be Everything you could be you have to voluntarily take on the weight of the worst life has to offer including the depths of malevolence itself and you think well obviously Joe you know this like how are you

going to adapt to a situation you won't even admit to right well so how could it be otherwise than for you to become everything that you could be you have to embrace all of the catastrophes that life has to offer like how could it all How could it be other than that you're going to hide you're going to pretend right how's that going to work no one thinks that'll work right and so and you're right there there is this defensive element to the particularly the Protestant religious tradition although I don't want to single out the

Protestant specifically that insists that you know the work has already been done but there's a lot of ambivalence about that in the Christian Cannon because there's an equal insistence that no you're supposed to uh you're supposed to take all this on voluntarily and that not only that not only that that that's it's such an interesting idea because it makes so much sense psychologically so imagine that as your courage grows so that you can confront more and more of the horror of life that a spirit begins to develop within you that gives you a strength that's

commensurate with your daring That's walking with God that's the same thing so the promise is that if you had the courage something would be with you to allow you to Bear up nobly under the burden and I all the clinical evidence supports that proc because what you see in people in the therapeutic transformation is that in so far as they're willing to confront what terrifies them voluntarily they get stronger and then imagine that there's no there's nothing but a metaphysical Limit to that and I think that's right I I can't see how it cannot be

right it makes sense and it it resonates with how we know people that have overcome great things in their life and become these very unusual and unique people I got to pause have to use a restroom but let's jump right back into that where were we well we were kind of bringing we who wrestle with God to a close I would say I've got other projects I want to talk To you about okay all right sure we're launching Peterson Academy today so online university we hope we'll see we've got we're launching with 20 courses best

lectures in the world very very high quality production we invited the best lectures I could find down to Miami 8 Hour courses on the topic they really want highest possible production quality and uh we're hoping we'll make a high level University level University equivalent education available to everyone for approximately 12 12th the cost so that's the plan you want to see the opening the opening Salo sure yeah P it up put it up Jamie yeah look I ran this before my lectures this last tour you got to put the headphones on if you want yeah

yeah okay why did I decide to build an online university well there is a crisis now in higher education the president of Harvard University resigned today weeks calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's code of conduct we have a problem of affordability and cost spiraling student loans we have a group emerging and that warps the entire academic Enterprise I experimented with putting my lectures online and found that I could teach far more people at very low cost than I could at the University and I thought well why not scale that what I'm hoping to

do is to find The best lectures in the world and to bring them to as wide as possible an audience he came to me and he basically said I want you to do the best course that you've always wanted to do we want to bring you the highest quality education possible at the lowest possible price it's extremely high level content that anybody can use to educate themselves and it's available to everybody well that would be good I think it's funny CU I got Counselled at the University so I could try to return the [Music] [Laughter]

favor I think they're doing that to themselves right yeah well we couldn't have better marketing campaign than the universities themselves it's uh similar to what's going on with mainstream media yeah it really is kind of the same thing yeah well it all derives from the same Source right is the capture of higher Education by this godforsaken ideology that's bizarre yeah bizarre how successful it is and and how how many people just are compliant yeah it's that's for sure that's for sure yeah well do you see it turning around though it seems like it is a

little seems like more people are pushing back against it now than ever when when you have institutions that are thoroughly captured it's very difficult to retrieve them you know we've been Arguing about this I've been arguing about this with with my team Fort Peterson Academy I mean are the is it possible to rejuvenate the bricks and mortars institutions of higher education and well one answer to that is um things that are dead rot and the universities seem to be rotting everywhere and maybe that's because they're dead maybe it's because their time has come and it

could be that that's the case I mean I I hope not I Loved working at Harvard in particular it was a amazing institution I had a very good time at Migel I had a good time at the University of Toronto it's a real pain to see these institutions degenerate but they're ideologically captured that's not good and thoroughly and it's a very rot in ideology it's the spirit of can the resentful Spirit of can it's not good they're unbelievably expensive they take terrible advantage of their students plus the average Quality of the educational experience is actually

very low at most places not everywhere Hillsdale College I think is a marked exception but most places the lectures aren't good and we're in a situation now it's kind of like what happened with YouTube in a way you know YouTube enabled you for example and Spotify as well to emerge as an independent commentator and you know you've cornered the market in some ways on that there's No reason the universities could have seen this coming 20 years ago they could have found their best lectures and they could have filmed their courses in the highest possible quality

Manner and taking advantage of this new communication technology and they didn't and that that's not a good sign you know we've it's so funny we bring our professors down to Miami you know professors from Oxford and Cambridge and they're so relieved to come there and The reason they're relieved to come there is because they're treated badly by their own institutions these great professors they're treated with contempt they're paid miserably that's especially the true the K case in the UK all we have to do is appreciate them I I tell the professors who come to Peterson

Academy like here's the deal you can say exactly what you want in exactly the way you want you can teach what you love we'll put us studio audience together That actually wants to listen to you that's the only reason they're there will offer you a financial deal that's better than you can get with any book will give you more reach than you could ever also hope to get with any published manuscript you can bring what you know to the world for next to nothing we figure we can offer a university quality highlevel University quality equivalent

for about $2,000 over four years wow yeah yeah we Have a great social media platform so I don't know you tell me what you think about this so we've been wrestling with price right because pricing something is very difficult and part of the problem with social media platforms is that they're free and you might say well that's not a problem it's like it is a problem because things that are free get overrun by parasites instantly and so you get the trolls you get the Bots you get the bad corporate actors you get the Scam artists

because there's no barrier to their participation right and so we put uh $450 cost on our offering per year um for the early adopters that's available now and we're hoping that the fact that there has to be a bit of a financial sacrifice in the front end will make our social media Network high quality and clean because it there's a little bit of skin in the game to participate so we've taken the Best elements of the popular social media networks and Amalgamated that and we're hoping that we can produce a community of people who are

responsible and achievement oriented and upward striving and intellectually curious and bring them together so they can form their own communities as well as participating in the lectures and so we're I'm extremely excited about this the courses we we got lucky too a because we set up a Production Studio in Miami and we have state-ofthe-art uh uh film crew and editors but just when we started to film the AI illustration capacity came online and we filmed everyone against a white background and so we can fill the whole background with uh with imagery and graphs and comments

there's can you run a trailer for just pick one of the courses at random because this is actually how the courses look so the trailers are very tightly edited but so Are the courses and so so let let me let me show you one of them so you get a sense of what we've managed to accomplish lot of fascinating questions where do we come from where are we going what is the universe made of how can we possibly understand the grand landscape of the cosmos when you look back in space you look back in time

it's amazing we've been able to do this to study the properties of the Cosmos time scales of billions of years size scales billions of times bigger than our own and now the question is can we go back to time equals zero can we go Back to Before Time equals z and what does that even mean I hope in this course to keep striving and asking these great questions because without great questions there can be no great answers and without great answers there can be no Understanding wow Brian keading fun Joe pretty bad yeah well and

I was so happy when I saw the trailers you know because Michaela and her husband Jordan Fuller they they've been working very diligently on this for about 3 years and they basically built it from scratch you know and I didn't have any idea how the courses would look you know cuz that's actually a pretty difficult thing to pull off but I'm very happy with the trailers they're Extremely engaging every course has its own stylesheet like so each course has its there's a there's an overarching style to the platform but every single course has its own

illustration ethos and quality yeah well you can see them now will you be is this just for personal education or you will you be giving degrees we're going we're going to we're going to approach that in two ways so we'll offer certification at different time spans so you know Generally it takes you four years to get a degree but you could imagine that it would be useful to have a one-year certificate a 2-year certificate a threeyear certificate fouryear certificate like there's no compelling reason why it has to be four years we'll keep very detailed records

of our students academic progress and they'll be able to offer them Direct ly to employers so we want to be able to assure employers that anybody who's gone Through the certification process that's part and parcel of Peterson Academy has done the work and met the standards and the standards will be high now simultaneously we're working on technical accreditation right so that we can pull this so that we can have this operate as a standard university now there's trade-offs on that because the accreditation processes themselves are captured by the same forces that have Capt the universities

and we're not Going to compromise the quality of the offerings by cow Towing to accreditation processes that are producing the same problem that we're trying to address right now I'm in discussion with a number of different jurisdictions to move accreditation forward and if that happens it can also be applied retroactively so if we can figure out how to do it with a with an Administration or a jurisdiction that's willing to do it and we don't have to Compromise the quality then we'll go the classic accreditation route other otherwise I'm just going to go directly to

employers and say look we're going to be very very careful about who we Grant certification to and you'll be able to rely on the certification from Peterson Academy as an indication of intellectual ability and also work ethic and will document that by the recordkeeping process that we use as part and parcel of the platform so I think we can do it We're going to do it one way or another how are you going to be able to assure that these students because it's all remote right Y how are you going to be able to assure

that they're actually doing the work that they're not utilizing AI like are you going to have them write things I can't tell you how but we are going to oh okay yeah well look I've tested tens of thousands of people online so I set up an online testing service that was used primarily By a company called the founder Institute and we tested 50,000 people 60,000 people over 5 years in about seven different languages and we built and developed technology to capture people who are Che so they don't know how we're capturing and I'm not going

to tell you but we know how to do it and you know and that's that's obviously a problem but it isn't an insoluble problem and I think we've already solved it so and then once We move towards more formal and stable accreditation there are lots of companies have emerged as a consequence of the covid lockdowns to make sure that remote compliance with testing requirements can be achieved so there's lots of ways to solve that problem so it's very exciting it's really exciting and it's you know the there's all sorts of weird possibilities that emerge from

this too because the technology now exists and we've had some Of the videos converted already to have the lectures translated into the world's major languages and the the technology that's Cutting Edge uses the professor's voice and intonation in the second language and matches the mouth movements to the language they're going to do that at Spotify yeah it's seamless man it's seamless they're doing it with podcast I think they're they're initially going to do Spanish German and French I believe those are the first three languages but They eventually will scale out y yeah so that's just

like that's justred it is unbelievable have someone teach a lecture in Russian and actually make the mouth movements and everything well it's it's extremely exciting especially in regard to the developing world because there's an you know there'll be more people in Nigeria by 2100 than are than in China and the median age of an of African is 19 so there's an immense opportunity in the developing world to Capture the market for higher education and it would be a wonderful thing to be able to bring this to the world and I just can't see why not

you know the the courses are very efficiently taught we have ai mediated testing services and we can use the tests themselves as Educational Tools you know so you can imagine you have a test you get a question wrong and you get feedback that it's wrong and it'll tell you where in the lecture in the reading material that You made the mistake so you can go back and review and so even the testing itself will be educational and you know we're hoping to develop a community that is composed of people who want to engage in lifelong

learning and it also means that you don't have to be like 18 to 22 to attend this University you can stay a part of it for the rest of your life and we're hoping that spontaneous communities will develop and that we can bring people together for conventions so You know if we can get enough people on the platform we'll have convention in different cities where we bring our lectures you know to a stadium or to a theater for a weekend and everybody who's part of the University can come and listen to their favorite lectures and

we've got educational institutions who are already interested in partnering in that regard so that they can be brought to their Institution for like summertime three-day courses and so and It's so fun too because we can use video and audio and that's a wonderful thing as well because as you know well far more people can listen and watch then can read now you have to read to partake in our courses as well but it's a great opportunity and it's so fun to have the professors come down there and be thrilled about it most of like we

want the professors we already have to teach multiple courses because they're very good lecturers and they've they've I Think all without exception enthusiastically agreed to continue participating because we took the idiot restrictions off them it's like teach what you want to the people who want to listen no holds part it's so fun it's so fun with the state of higher education the way it is today how does it recover or does it just get replaced well I guess what I'm hoping at least that the Peterson Academy will do with the production Quality of our courses

is up the ante it's like even if we fail financially because you know we don't know how to price this how the hell do you figure out something like that we've argued about it a lot and we don't know what the potential Financial Market might be but at minimum you know we'll be able to launch the courses independently if the platform itself doesn't take off we're going to show Harvard and Stanford and Oxford and Cambridge what's possible with regards to lecturing with the new technology I mean they're stuck in like 1860 right and you know

with these M these like online large courses that places like MIT for example have launched basically all do is put up a camera and videotape a lecture it's like you can't do that that's the the the YouTube and and the the technologies that allow for the dissemination of video they have their own they're their own medium right the Medium is the message you have to use the bloody technology you can't stay stuck a century back which is why we've done tight edits and filled in the backgrounds with images and there's just no reason that that

can't be everywhere right so and why why would you pay look people probably pay $300,000 for an Ivy League education because that's where they meet their wife or their husband when it gets right down to it is that really what it is Well Joe look you never know what an institution is doing okay so what does a university do lectures accreditation okay but that's not all it gives you an identity for four years while you sort your life out it gives you an opportunity to mature away from your parents it gives you the opportunity to

build a new network of peers Not only living peers but peers in the historical tradition and it gives you an opportunity to meet the person that you Might be with for the rest of your life that's a big deal and it's a selective opportunity because you bring bright kids together who are hardworking and they get a chance to meet each other that might be the whole value of an IV League education it's hard to specify these things now we're trying to replicate that on Peterson Academy with the social media side and you know that's a

new technology and we don't know how it'll work but the fact that It's selective and it won't be full of trolls and Bots and bad corporate actors should mean that people will build to build social networks that are of high value because that's one of the things obviously that's what you do in a bloody MBA program you know it's not what you learn at an MBA program that confers the value of the degree it's the fact that it was Bloody difficult to get in because the GMAT is an IQ test essentially and The Social Network

you Build in the MBA program you carry that with with you well we're doing what we can to replicate that online and we're going to make sure that we offer potential employeers a record of our students progress and success so that they have some sense that the person who they hire has done the apprenticeship work on their own necessary to accredit them as a say a valid student and a hard worker and I think we can do that and I think we can do it more effectively than Universities do it I know how to measure

these things it's going to be very interesting if that becomes a criteria in which people are hired you know if if if someone if it really does become a thing and it becomes something where people are accepting that as as as an education and and seeking people out in that regard is going to be very interesting to see if more of those emerge if you start a trend and then well at at minimum we can assure we can Assure a potential employer of two things we didn't attract a woke crowd and we didn't indoctrinate our

bloody students so that's not a bad minimum you know you can ensure intelligence you can ensure a work ethic because they've completed the course material and properly we can ensure that's properly measured but we can also say here's a bunch of things they didn't learn right right and when the the courses are subversive in the most traditional Possible way so we have Larry Ain for example who's the president of Hillsdale he did a lecture series on Churchill now where are you going to go to university to get a lecture series on Churchill and AR was

Churchill's primary biographer one of his primary biographers so that's a big deal you know we've got Nigel biger from from um Oxbridge lecturing on the legacy of UK colonialism well you're not going to get that anywhere else and he's a great Lecturer and he's a brilliant man and very very courageous and Larry AR is in exactly the same category so the technology we're using is revolutionary in a variety of different ways the lectures are high quality but the whole ethos of the educational offering is completely different than what is on offer say at the typical

ivy league Harvard for example which is such a catastrophe like I was there at Harvard in the 1990s I loved that place it was Really forward-looking and aimed at Excellence with very minor exceptions like truly minor exceptions it was a Powerhouse man and I went back and saw a bunch of my old Professor friends month ago you know and they've all joined Free Speech movement at Harvard and they're fighting against their own Administration and these were like the best professors I ever met in my life and that's what they've been reduced to when did it

Start the specifically in the universities yes it started with the incursion of what would you say a modified Marxism in the 1960s and then really accelerated in the 70s it sort of went like this you know how things fail gradually gradually gradually then suddenly and it hit a critical it hit critical mass in terms of failure probably around 2014 15 pretty much when things blew up around me that's why they blew up around Me you know I mean what do you think ultimately caused it to not course correct what do you think ultimately caused these

universities to give into that okay let's talk about ultimate so let me tell you a story an old story so there's a myth from Mesopotamia called the enuma Elish which is one of the oldest stories that we have and let me just lay out the story because these ancient myths capture the fundamental dynamics of culture they're winnowed to Do that okay so the Mesopotamians believed that the world emerged as the interaction of two forces we already alluded to them Chaos and Order they had a god of order absu he was a male God he's the

patriarchal patriarchy that's you can think of absu as the patriarchy and a fe female god Tiamat Tiamat is a dragon and a dragon of chaos and the word Tiamat is the same word etymologically as the word toou vabo and that's the chaos that God makes the World out of at the beginning of time in the Hebrew accounts okay so you have absu and Tiamat and they come together Chaos and Order come together and they produce the first world and in the mesop amian account of things that's a world of higher ordered Gods now those higher

order Gods forget their ancestors and go about their business and they get increasingly fractious and undisciplined and noisy and hedonistic and immature and at one Point they kill their father absu and they try to live on his corpse right so you see an echo of this is very complicated you see an echo of this in the story of Pinocchio you know there's a scene in Pinocchio where jepetto ends up in the body of a whale okay so here's the underlying biological Dynamic it's so remarkable so imagine a society sets itself up according to a set

of principles and it stores uh it creates a giant Storehouse of wealth Okay that's what a carcass is right so if you're a primordial herder you're wealth is in the bodies of your herd animals okay a body is a symbol of stored wealth in the Mesopotamian Pantheon the careless kill their father and live on its corpse okay that's what's happened to the universities so since World War II the West has gathered huge storehouses of value everywhere Harvard's a great Example immense endowment it remarkably valuable brand Disney's another example and what's happened is and this happens

all the time if you have an unguarded Storehouse of value the parasites come marching in right and they try to live on the corpse now they can for a while because it's a storehouse of value but they kill the spirit now what happens in the Mesopotamian story is that chaos itself comes flooding back in the form of Tiamat who extremely the goddess of chaos who's extremely angry that her husband has been sacrificed by the careless Denis of the world that's the death of God so yeah and the Savior emerges in the Mesopotamian story it's so

interesting so the Savior that emerges to set things right has eyes all the way around his head so he pays attention and he speaks magic words that's Marduk and so the Mesopotamian Emperor was an Avatar of Marduk and he's the spirit of responsibility that sets the world right okay so what are we seeing we're seeing the invasion of storehouses of wealth by the parasites fundamentally has that killed them I don't I can't think through how you would Rescue an institution a typical upper level University institution what are you going to do how are you going

to do that you going to fire 80% of the people Who's going to do that right no one's going to do that now you could say well we'll make Dei initiatives forbidden they're kind of doing that in Florida but all you do is change the words I mean that's what the postmodernists did with Marxism in the 1970s when it no longer was fashionable to worship Stalin after everybody re re realized that he was a psychopathic murderer all that happened was the French intellectuals changed the terminology and they invented a form of Marxism that was even

worse than Marxism which was really quite the bloody achievement do do I think they can be rejuven ated I can't see how well when you have people like the president of Harvard yeah that get gets fired for plagiarism but maintains the exact same salary in a different job yeah as if demotion to a full Harvard Professor was well you know she's not suitable to be President but she can still be a fully tenured professor at Harvard it's really she can e with that publication record I just interviewed Carol Swain do you know who Carol Swain

is no black law professor who from whom a plagiarized much of her work ah yeah fun so what do you do with an institution that's that far gone you saw what those University professors did at Congress yeah and they thought they were right they didn't even look put upon they looked no sorry they Looked put upon and shocked when they were challenged by the right Congressman they're not accustomed to being questioned and also to communicating outside of their bubble and their bubble which where their opinion is held in high high esteem everyone else is an

idiot as far as they're concerned well when the woman from pen when she was smiling every time she was answering these questions it was it was I'd never seen anything like that like I knew that The universities had become warped and the warp is very deep so I talked about the Mesopotamian Story and there's a there's another angle of deep warping so the the spirit of Marx is a very old Spirit it was alive in the French Revolution it was alive in the Soviet Revolution it's you can trace it all the way back to the

story of Cain and Abel as far as I'm concerned and the story of Cain and Abel is the story of the fundamental Human Dynamic after the fall of Man so in so far as we're historical creatures the story of Adam of Cain and Abel lays out the essential psychological conflict that characterizes human beings and so you have Cain on the one side so Cain Cain doesn't bring his best to the table he makes second rate offerings and lies about it and then they're not accepted by him or his fellow man or women or by Society

or by God and that makes him bitter and instead of learning he takes His complaints to God and he says something like well like what the hell's going on here I'm breaking myself in half making my sacrificial offerings and everything's being rejected what kind of stupid Cosmos did you predict produce and God says to him something very interesting and complicated he says something like you're blaming your bitterness on your failure but and you have failed and you know it and you didn't have to but it isn't your failure That's making you bitter you've invited something

in to inhabit you that's turned you against yourself and what's good he says to him sin coues at your door like a sexually aroused predatory animal and you invited it in to have its way with you and there's a sexual metaphor there oh yeah oh yeah that's it's it's rough man it's rough you don't get to be a high school shooter till you've had a thousand hours of brooding over your misery and so that's what God Tells Cain and that's that makes him violently angry and murderous and so he kills Abel he kills his own

ideal and Abel you have Cain who makes poor sacrifices and whines about it he's The Perennial victim shaking his fist at God in the world refusing to learn from his experiences and he becomes and you have Abel who makes the right sacrifices and nams upward that's the pattern two Spirits that's the Joker and Batman that's Lex Luther and Superman that's Voldemort and Harry Potter it's Satan and Christ like it's it's this eternal recurrent pattern and one of its manifestations is Marxism and another one of its manifestations is postmodernism and so this is a very old

story it's a very old story and you can understand Kane's point you know because people do break themselves in half in life trying to struggle forward and they're they're not successes in their own eyes and they're rejected by other People and it undermines their faith in being itself you can understand that but but you're called upon to bring your best to the table no matter what happens to you and to maintain your faith and your courage and to aim up there's no excuses your past trauma there's no excuses doesn't matter what it is and so

there's this battle and what's happened in the universities is the universities have been captured by the resentful Spirit of Cain and so that's all Flowered up with postmodern language there's no ultimate unity that's the claim of the postmodernists there's no overarching narrative it's like that's what the post modist claim skepticism with regards to meta narratives it's like well what do you mean by that you mean that everything culminates in disunity that's your theory of being so how the hell do we come together as a society then and around what well everyone goes their own way

yeah that's Called War so there's some is there a higher unity in which everything participates or not while the postmodernists is like no have it your way nihilism disunity anxiety hopelessness social disintegration conflict that's that pathway and that's that's just where it starts that's just that's the optimistic view so we're trying to present at Peterson Academy and the other Enterprises that I'm engaged in we're trying to present a unified underlying vision and a traditional unifying underlying V underlying vision and I think that it's it's understandable what we talked about it in the first part of

this interview like once you understand that sacrifice is the basis of community and once you understand that there's a ultimate form of sacrifice and that that's what's demanded of you if you're Going to strive upward then the Contours of the religious story that undergirds the West fall into place and that's a very remarkable thing to observe and I think that's going to happen I think that's I think we're at the end of the Enlightenment and something new is striving mightily to emerge well it's also interesting that these higher education institutes even though they do have

you know the way you're describing They're extremely wealthy they're extremely valuable the the the name brand to them is still extremely potent they have so so many things going against them in terms of like an objective analysis of what's good for your education and what's good for preparing for your future and then on top of that they're burdened with this insane financial problem the insane problem of first of all student loans being something you never get out of Indentured servitude yeah and the fact that we all know that the human frontal lobe especially on males

doesn't even fully develop until you're 25 so you're kind of taking advantage of a developing mind and locking them into an insane burden of debt and ideology and ideology and so you're strapped with debt so you must work and then you must work within these structures that have been infected by this ideology because everyone's coming out of the universities into Those places into those businesses and corporations and they're deeper and deeper interwoven into the structure of these businesses to the point where they're inescapable and then can't leave because you have Financial burdens and you have

all the student loan debt to pay off mhm right something is an alternative to that if it can become effective to the ter like if if people can get employment you know it's interesting Like well as soon as as soon as we determine the accreditation route like like I said I'm in active communication with the number of people who are interested in accreditation but I have to figure out if that's the right route if it isn't I'm going to work directly with interested employers to make sure that what our students obtain as a consequence of

going through the Peterson Academy process is recognized by them as a marker of a highquality Applicant yes and I I'm I I I know that that problem is solvable because I know how to do that well there's a lot of employers now that are kind of discounting the ideas of degrees and Elon is a big one of them yeah yeah yeah there's absolutely yeah there's quite a few people that like you shouldn't dismiss someone as being qualified for a certain position just because they've gone through some very formal process not if the formal process isn't

Predicated on General cognitive ability and conscientiousness right if it's if it's predicated on [ __ ] and a grift which a lot of it is yeah what do you think is going to happen with Society in general with the implementation of AI and the inevitable erosion of jobs I don't know if the erosion of jobs is inevitable no you know well we've thought that before well first of all the first thing I would say is like all bets are off right right all bets are Off right we're going to have hyper intelligent AI within five

years fact we already have it well I'm being pessimistic right I've used chat GPT and Gro and some systems that my colleagues have developed for we built our own large language models in house so I built a my colleague Victor Swift built a large large language model for me trained on my books and I used it to help me write this next book because I could come across biblical passages that I couldn't understand and I could ask this AI system for a first pass interpretation and it could do a good job and we're going to

release that along with the book yeah so that was really something and I'll tell you chat GPT and grock were unbelievably useful as research assistants so they're about as smart as high-end undergraduates they lie a lot you have to Corner them like mad to get them to provide you with information that's Valid what have you found them lying about oh they make up references that don't exist so for example about for chat GPT about a quarter of the academic references it produces for you don't exist what yeah yeah well it doesn't know like it's it

will produce a reference for you that's completely plausible except that it doesn't exist so if I ask chat GPT a question it'll answer and it'll give me the references cuz I asked for the references then I Have go and look up all the references and read them first of all cuz you're supposed to read the things you refer to but also I have to make sure that it's not you know wandered off into some hallucinatory pathway but that'll that'll be taken care of in no time flat as far as I'm concerned and musk has already

got plans to do that so what will the what will the addition of these AI systems mean to us God well I talked to Elon about this When we had our interview and it it's going to depend to some degree Joe on how we train the damn things so there's this problem called the alignment problem that's how the engineers describe it which is how do we know that these AI systems will have human interest in mind and you think okay how do we make machines that have human interests in mind and then you think oh

well we have the same problem with adolescence how do we ensure that we Train our children so that they have their own interests and Broad Social interests in mind and the answer is the answer always has been that you provide them with a classic religious and Humanities education because that provides an axis of stability around which all other organ all other knowledge can be organized now the problem with the large language models at the moment is they're hypert trained on Modern text and so they're Ideologically addled and woke and so we've been experimenting with training

llms on a more classic basis so we trained one on the King James Bible and we haven't released it because I don't know what to think about it it's like you can ask the James Bible a question I like what the hell does that mean right well like seriously what does that mean and before we release it we also want to make sure that we have it we've developed the underlying Technology properly okay so what's the answer to your question what a AI will do will depend on the intent of the people who design it

here's a terrifying thing you tell me what you think about this okay all right so your thoughts are are orienting phenomena so you think so that you can lay out a pathway to a desired destination and then you can evaluate the thought to see if that's a good strategy to get there okay so there's an Implication that comes along with that a thought enters the theater of your imagination in relationship to your goal so you can formulate that in religious language the spirit that ansers your prayers the nature of the spirit that answers your prayers

will be dependent on the nature of your prayer yeah that's for sure right so imagine that you're harboring feelings of resentment And bitterness as you're plotting your economic pathway forward and so you're trying to think about what you should do but you have the spirit of resentment bitterness sitting on your shoulder the thoughts that enter your mind are going to be a consequence of your possession by that bitterness to the degree that you've allowed it to shape your goal so so here's a corollary of that this is stunning it's a stunning thing to Understand if

you Orient your aim upward in the highest manner the spirit that informs your thought will be the spirit of the highest possible aim and God that's something to know man so that's what a religious practice a fundamental religious practice is for it's like get rid of the corrupt motivation get rid of it get rid of it pray for the Salvation of your soul that you're aiming right because your aim is going to determine the content of your Thoughts and that is how it works technically that's how it works neuropsychologically your thoughts are the handmaiden of

your aim right which is why we're always worried about sociopaths because they never abandoned that corrupt motivation yeah well they're they're basically the best way to think about the narcissists and the hedonists and the histrionic types and the borderlines and the antisocial personalities is that they never matured Cortically so like children come into the world in a way as a bundle of competing subcortical motivations right and they're very powerful motivations anger for example you watch a 2-year-old have a temper tantrum it's quite the show and they want short-term immediate gratification now what happens as as

your cortex matures you transcend those lower order instinctual motivations that would be the Freudian ID and you start to Regulate your behavior in relationship to your own future so you stop doing stupid pleasurable things in the moment that will compromise you and you start to be able to incorporate the views of other people that's how kids at three start to develop the ability to have friends and the more sophisticated you get the more other people and their perspectives are part of your perceptions and the more the future is taken into account in your actions and

The cortex is actually there so that that can happen and it has to happen in a social context because you have to pick up the Society of your peers obviously and so conditions like psychopathy or even power seeking for that matter are conditions of radical immaturity and so that's how you explain their emergence and one of the things that's interesting about that is provides a very powerful argument against moral Relativism it's like there's a real difference between maturation and and immaturity maturation is productive and sustainable and immaturity is divisive and destructive and there's no if

ends or buts about that right and so see it's a different view of mental health because the classic therapist produced view of mental health is that mental health is sort of inside you you know it's in your psyche it's in your mind But it's not like your mental health is the harmony of your existence in relationship to the Future and other people right and that that sense of well-being that can Infuse you if you get the balance right isn't a reflection of the proper structuring of of your M function of your mind or your brain

it's a phenomena that emerges when everything is in its proper place and operating harmoniously that's what you experience in music like music represents that Everything in its proper place that's what Adam is called upon by God to do in the story of Adam and Eve to subdue the world subdue everything in its proper place so that the whole structure operates in a harmonious manner as much more expanded view of what constitutes mental health anyways education should serve that right and so if you take the the staff of Moses that's planted in a single place the

community grows around that That's the same as the magic wand of Gandalf that idea of a magic wand it's it's the traditional ethos associated with transformation and sacrifice around which communities aggregate themselves and the a proper Humanities and religious education inculcates that Center structure so that knowledge can be organized around it the the last time we talked I suggested to you that we see The world through a Biblical lens literally see it I mean literally it structures our perceptions and I've investigated that far more deeply and what what seems to be the case with a

corpus of stories like the biblical library is that if you know know the stories it structures your psyche so that you have a place to put information and so that enables you to understand the current world and everything that's happening but to place everything in the Right context and so the transmission of an unbroken cultural edifice story- based edifice is the manner in which you solve the alignment problem unite your Society integrate your psyche pursue what's meaningful and protect yourself from chaos and anxiety so and and solid education has been the traditional way of ensuring

that that occurs and so well that's what we hope We can offer with Peterson Academy that's the purpose of my books as well to elucidate that and so can the universities do that I don't think so I don't know if they have that that philosophy the philosophy and the the the way you're laying it out resonates with me I think it's accurate I think it it when I'm in Harmony in my life that it all seems to make sense it all works together what you're saying it just Rings true I don't know if It if

they're so infected with this ideology that FES in the fa they FES wholeheartedly the premise of the postmodernists is that there's no uniting meta narrative if you had to Define postmodernism in one phrase that would be it and so and so what have they done here's the association with Marxism okay so the marxists have a counternarrative it's The Narrative of power and it is a very powerful counternarrative because if you don't Put the proper uniting principle at the Pinnacle it's power emerges immediately because people play power games and you can attain a certain degree of

success and a fair amount of domination by playing a power game and so Marx observed that one of the Cardinal power games is economic and it is probably the Cardinal power game right there's economic disparity those at the top do take advantage of their Position at the top to stabilize their position like in a functional Society productive people are at the top but even among those at the top there's still power seeking Crooks and so now Marx of course would say that well everyone who's economically successful is a power seeking Crook and you know that's

a great thing to believe if you're a re revent a resentful Satanist like Marx so the losers look at the world well that's for sure but but there Is some justification in it because among the successful there are yes right okay and a large percentage because that's the culture in which they're they're existing yeah well a a dangerous percentage and a critique of power is always a valid critique okay so what the postmodernists did when Marxism became ethically unacceptable and that happened in the 1970s is they just they metastasized it they said okay we've got

a victim victimizer narrative that's Played out in the economic sphere that's basically Marxism we'll just multiply that until the same interpretive framework can be applied to all possible group distinctions that's basically intersectionality so sex is a oppressor versus oppressed narrative gender is an oppressed versus oppressor narrative uh ethnicity race um ability attractiveness height any qualitative distinction is now recast as a battle between oppressor and oppressed It's it's an unbelievably brutal story it's basically equivalent to the claim that the spirit of power is the ruler of the cosmos how can they do all this and ignore

the possibility of an oppressor like a male adopting the identity of the oppressed of a female and and entering into female spaces and oppressing fem you can see that it can't be dealt with because Wild Well that is wild look one of the things you see that's very characteristic of the utopian left is The absolute insistence that anyone oppressed is a victim it's like okay we'll give the devil as due some oppressed people are victims but some people who claim to be oppressed aren't victims they are the worst kind of monsters that the most deranged

imagination could barely conceptualize utopian naive radical progressives refuse their imagination for evil and that delivers them into the hands of the absolute bloody Psychopaths Right right and they just don't see it it's like oh those trans people they're just striving to be free it's like you wait you wait until you have one of them in your house buddy and you're going to find out just exactly how naive you are so so how do they protect themselves they just deny the existence of malevolence or attribute it to you socioeconomic inequality all criminals are victims it's like

no first of all lots of people who are victims aren't Criminals in fact poverty does not cause criminality that's a lie and it's a it's a very damaging lie to the poor because if poverty was equivalent to criminality the logical thing to do is just to lock up all the poor right right well you there are many Pathways from poverty forward and one of them is criminality but you can say the same thing about wealth so the idea then that's basically a Marxist theory of causality it's like well those people's oppression is what's Causing their

lack of law- abiding what what conducts like no no wrong seriously wrong wrong and and dangerously wrong and ridiculously naive that's not how the world works at all right you're also in a sense you're encouraging this kind of behavior because you're not punishing people for it because you're saying it's not their fault or you're even valorizing it oh you poor thing right and you're allowing more of it to take place well we know that so the dark Tetrad types so those are the subclinical Psychopaths okay so they're psychopathic that makes them predatory and parasitic that's

the definition of a psychopath okay they're narcissistic so what does that mean they want unearned social status right they're mellan so what does that mean it means that their use of language is subordinated to their demand for hedonistic gratification and power so like you and I in principle we hope We're trying to pursue a thread of conversation that leads to further development let's say for us and for the audience but I could easily be in here thinking okay what the hell do I have to tell Joe to increase my social media status right right and

to play this situation as a game to enhance my own status or to further my selfish desires that's maav ellan that was the dark Triad and what further investigation revealed that you had to add an Additional Dimension to that to fully flesh out the picture sadism what's that positive Delight in the unnecessary misery of other others that's the dark tetrad types well dark tetrad types portray themselves as victims right that's one of their mellan strategies so now and your question is well how do we segregate the real victims so to speak from the false victims

and one of the answers to that is like beware of those who claim Victimization as a justification for their moral what would you say for their moral transgressions I did this because I victim it's like really right really that was your reason poor you that's your story you monster there are no monsters it's like if you think there are no monsters you you're you're naive and willfully blind to the point of delusion and what would you call it what do they say there are there are None so blind as those who will not see that

certainly applies on the malevolent side and then from the point of view of if you're looking at the people that are committing crimes there's the unfortunate reality that people mimic their environment and if you grow up in an environment where there are no positive role models and you see nothing but rampant crime around you even good people go down bad paths you get okay so antisocial personality is somewhat Heritable there is some familial trans Mission there there is a role played by fatherlessness in particular and that's perhaps because fatherless boys tend to turn towards a

gang orientation and The Gangs of adolescence have a short-term time Horizon so they future discount badly and that produces a proclivity for short-term gratification and that includes like idiot criminal Behavior right yeah yeah so what you need in a farther you need someone who encourages Encourages intelligent upward aiming sacrifice and an orientation towards others and future development right that's what the spirit of the father really does is that encouragement so and that what reward for delay of gratification so that's another indication of the relationship between say upward striving moral orientation and maturity if you're mature

you can delay gratification and what does that mean it means you've Integrated the future into your perceptions right and that has to be socially scaffolded especially for men women they they get initiated by nature in every society that we know of men have to be initiated right right because that catalyzation of maturity is a difficult thing difficult and unlikely but but possible and necessary so so how do you reach the people people that are young adolescents That are trapped in that vicious cycle y well I I think I can tell you the answer to that

you know I a lot of young men have been watching and listening to the sorts of things that I've been writing about and producing and I every time someone comes up to me and tells me that reading say 12 rules for life had help them I ask why it's like okay good what what changed and the overwhelming pattern of response is something like I started to understand the necessity of Responsibility now you might then ask well you hear from your parents you in principle you hear from the school system although that's probably gone that you

know you should grow up and be responsible why did it make a difference why did it make a difference to you to read that in what I wrote and the answer is I think the answer is I didn't take the standard conservative approach I didn't say you should you must you ought even though those things are true I said There's no difference between responsibility and Adventure that's a killer thing to know the heavier the responsibility the more profound the adventure and so everyone knows that but it's not it's not catalyzed hey so I just watched

The Hobbit a while back classic adventure story and of course what it's billbo mhm to begin with it's billbo he he's this little hobbit right s of like Abraham he's living his Comfortable life and The Wizard comes along and says it's time for you to develop your Shadow side because of course he becomes a thief and to go on your adventure and he agrees to do that and it's a weighty adventure he has to contend with the ring of power right that's the ultimate in Temptations that's the Temptation that Christ is offered by Satan in

the desert the temptation of power and that's what that's the Temptation that froto has to Bilbo has to contend with well he has this adventure well what's the adventure it's responsibility he has to carry that ring and it is one of the Rings that unites everything power it's just the malevolent ring that unites everything and so I've been suggesting to young men in particular it's like you want to get your life together take the path of Maximum responsibility not because you should even though you should that's not why It's because that's the pathway of maximal

ADV Venture so you say well what's the meaning of life it's like it's the meaning that reveals itself when you take the pathway of maximal responsibility that's that's exactly the message of the crucifixion that's precisely the message pathway of Maximum responsibility and that's a terrifying thing there's no difference between that and the the dragon and treasure stories That are you know unbelievably archaic the greatest possible treasure is to be found where the danger is most intense right always right the dragon guards the gold always right well and so one thing to know is that if

there's a dragon there's a treasure somewhere really right really right you know my family and I have really learned this in the last six years because we were subject to continued and and what what assaults in the public sphere that Were designed to be deadly and what do you mean by that designed to be deadly oh interviews with journalists in particular snake journalists whose every single utterance is designed to ENT trap the person being interviewed into saying something that will devastate their reputation personally to enhance the status of the interviewer like the Kathy Newman conversation

well Kathy at least had a bit of a sense of humor but um but the Intent oh yeah the intent that's the serpent man that's the intent it's like well Nelly BS who interviewed me for the New York Times now part of the Free Press she admitted that she said that her job at the New York Times like the job of many of the reporters was to find someone demolish their reputation by any means necessary and Elevate their status in consequence wow yeah what a terrible job brutal isn't it terrifying that that that's the old

gray lady that's the most Trusted and respected source of news and that their intent was just to destroy yeah it's was the news it wasn't real journalism the nuanced various elements of what a human being is the the pros and cons The Goods the bads the ugly the battle that they have not that no no no no not an accurate assessment not an objective analysis of the person just pursuit of status yeah the danger is that people know that now and people know who's Doing that now and then they go after them and you see

that now and journalists say oh it's attack on journalism like no you're not doing journalism you're doing hit pieces and to you're doing it under the guise of Journalism but it's not journalism it's kind of evil yeah it's kind of [ __ ] up yeah kind of I've seen quite a bit of it where I'm like where especially with people that I know the actual story and what was really going on behind the Scenes it's like this is maddening This is Wild Well we started to learn after this had happened two or three times like

there's a kind of a process a because you're exposed to that and then there's an intermediary period where it looks like it might succeed MH and that's very stressful that's usually when people come out with their apologies right cuz they're just terrified they're going to lose well I did lose my job and I lost my clinical practice right right so like the costs are real so your situation in Canada was that they wanted you to sign up for re-education no that's already that that's that's the plan I couldn't sign up they they they said already

that I have to do that but we have an appeal in at the moment that's blocking it and this is all just the only what it affects is what in Canada what is it I wouldn't they if I don't undergo the reeducation process Successfully they'll suspend my license and well also say why you know they'll say well Dr Peterson is uneducable he's unprofessional he's violated the ethical tenants of his profession right just because you have a different perspective on things than they do no it's because I'm actually telling the truth that clinicians bloody well know

and are too cowardly to admit so you know they went after me for four reasons probably one of them was The entire transcript of the last conversation I had with you whoops right that was submitted as a complaint because I was talking about the climate lies um they went after me because of the comments I've made about the trans butchers and Liars the surgeons and the and the theer therapists who are enabling them that's a major part of it that's a major part of it they went after me because I went after Trudeau and his

former Chief of Staff and what Else those are the major three there's probably four complaints aligned with each of those dimensions and so that's cost me about a million dollars in legal fees so far so it's a very hard battle to fight it's very annoying because the accusations continue to flow in even though that's a choice of the college and I've already been sentenced to re-education of indefinite duration right till they're satisfied that I've learned whatever the hell Lesson I'm supposed to learn so that the only reason that isn't happening is because we now have

an appeal in front of the Supreme Court in Canada and so I don't think it'll succeed but we'll see is it important to you to maintain your license or is it important to you to win this it's it's important there's two things that are important to me likely one is I'm not going to let a pack of ideologically addled moralists lying moralists who are facilitating The Butchery and sterilization of children take away my license not without a War so that's one thing the second thing is I'm likely I'm in a prime position in Canada to

undertake this battle against the woke licensing boards because I have the money and what the hell are they going to do to me I'm not practicing right they can't take away my income and likely they can't block in my reputation except among those who are willing to Assume that the licensing colleges are playing a straight game so really there's nothing they can do to me plus if it was only a personal thing apart from the fact that I'm not letting my license be taken by a pack of intellectually adult Hypocrites I don't really there's a

part of me that's deeply ashamed to be a psychologist at the moment I'm so appalled by my compatriots they know that this gender dysphoria pathology is a lie they all Know it and they won't say anything now partly they won't say anything cuz the consequences for saying something are not trivial but the consequences for not saying anything is that people like Khloe Cole end up with their breast cut off when they're 15 right right well that actually matters right so so practically speaking in a sense the battle doesn't mean anything to me because I'm fighting

to remain a member of a club that I don't really want to be Part of but there is a is there a principle at stake well there's a variety of principles at stake and so if I stop or lose all of the woke licensing Enterprises they'll just have their sway all the physicians in Canada are terrified to say what they think anybody who's governed by a professional College they censor themselves like Matt and it's really appalling for psychologists because all of the Psychologists who are properly trained they know that all of this is a lie

and not just a lie a malevolent vicious and destructive lie everything about it is a lie you know musk revealed the other day that the PE the professionals that were interacting with him in regard to his transitioning son told him that if he didn't abide by their dictates that his son was much more likely to commit suicide that's a lie no one who's educated as a psychologist believes that To be true no one at minimum if you're educated what you understand is that underneath gender dysphoria is something more substantial which is a proclivity towards depression

and anxiety if you're depressed and anxious you have a higher risk of suicide you have to account for that before you attribute any of the remainder to gender dysphoria as such and everyone who's a psychologist also understands that body focus discomfort for women at puberty is Normative because when women who have a higher probability of being depressed and anxious do become depressed and anxious it preferentially takes the form of bodily discomfort that's been known forever so Khloe Cole for example no one explained that to her no one sat her down and said well you're not

very she told me that the reason she decided to transition was because she kind of had a crush on uh Kardashian and that body type you know hyper curvy hyper feminine And Khloe realized when she entered puberty that she was probably going to have a boyish figure and Khloe's a very attractive person she would have had no trouble attracting the attention of men but you know she was 11 12 what the hell does she know and she wasn't going to be the woman she had envisioned she didn't really understand that you know there's a variety

of female forms that men find attractive that's for sure and she certainly would have fallen into that Category she didn't know that it was typical for girls to undergo a fair bit of confusion when they hit puberty and that that would take the form of negative emotion no one told her that they just rushed her down the puberty blocking and surgical pathway that's inexcusable it's evil yeah it is it's the worst thing it's the worst thing I've seen professionals do not only in my lifetime I've studied atrocity for 40 years I've never seen anything wor

than What's happening right now and that includes the sorts of things that were done in the camps in in Germany at least the godamn Nazis admitted what they did was wrong they tried to hide it we trumpeted as a moral virtue we're freeing the children it's like no I don't think so mothers I think what you're doing is sacrificing your child to the parading of your moral virtue oh my son he's so confused he thinks I a girl but I still love him That's how wonderful I am Jesus Christ Joel you have no idea how

dark that is it's dark it's unbelievably dark attached to an industry now is very scary there was an industry and an ideology it was an article that was recently released where this person admitted that they said it was what was the exact phrase that the way they described uh gender transition as a life-saving medical care in order to get insurance for it yeah yeah cuz Otherwise insurance won't pay for it so they were willing to describe it in that way to ensure that people would profit off of it yeah which is wild it it's it's

it's terrifying and it's so strange because I never would have believed that this could happen if you had asked me 20 years ago if this was going to be a main concern that people are worried about their children being roped into this ideology and convinced that they're and sterilized and mutilated yes exactly Yeah yes I know I know well it's no wonder people see even Michael shellenberger who broke the WTH files when we talked about the role the W paath played in establishing their own ideology addled Butchery as the standard of care for the American

Medical Association the American Psychiatric association the American Psychological Association shellenberger said that after he had listened to Abigail shrier and I talk about this Transmation he was so appalled that he literally couldn't believe it he just shelved it said there's no way this can be true and I can understand that because the more you look into it the worse it gets it's unbelievably bad these surgical procedures are so brutal and so experimental that they're they're I'm going to say it again they're worse than what the mangali types did in the concentration camps in the 30s

and 40s and that's a pretty godamn low bar and it's no wonder people don't want to believe it and people say the lefties I've talked to the centrists well it doesn't happen very often it's like oh yeah how often is too often like once is too often and it's not once that's for sure no it's happening policy in fact you're punished by your governing boards if you don't go along with it and what about the recent law That they passed in California where the schools don't have to tell the parents that the child has transitioned

at school they hide that information from the parents well they're just letting those children be free you know those ignored children who are looking desperately for a pathway to what would you call it inclusion and celebration oh you're so brave and then they're encouraged and they're given positive feedback which is real thing especially If they're alienated kids to begin with and who are unsettled in their identity yeah right and aren't being guarded by anyone and are vulnerable right right right right oh yeah and the parents are indoctrinated into this whole woke IDE as well or

terrified right indoctrinated or the mow and Bri proxy types who get off on the fact that they have a child that's such a burden but are still really you know what would you say bearing up nobly under the weight and That is a very dark inclination that is well documented yeah well that's the devouring mother for yes that was what Freud warned about back in like 1880 yeah she's a little too close you remember the witch in The Hansel and griddle story mhm yeah gingerbread house that's a little bit too good to be true when

you're lost what's inside it the witch that wants to fatten you up for her own delectation that's the devouring Mother that's the maternal Instinct gone mad right everything good is has the potential for pathology in proportion to its goodness so Lucifer is the intellect gone mad right the devouring mother is the mother who's a little too close to her kids right yeah a little too close Jesus brutal Joel It's just so stunning how widespread it is at least UK is pulling back from this stuff but they have socialized medicine so they actually have to go

on data and Canada Hasn't pulled back which is wild yeah entirely predictable yeah yeah most of the European countries have woken up but I don't think it's going to slow it much because there's a huge Underground Market in puberty blockers oh you know I've I've talked to experts who figure that the ratio of people on um black market puberty blockers to medically prescribed puberty blockers is at least 10 to One oh God so they're just self administering this stuff right oh God and it's essentially chemical castration drugs that they used to use on pedophiles y

oh God yeah that's for sure that's what it is and when you tell people that and they deny it because they don't know and then they find out it is so stunning they also don't want to know right and no wonder Yeah anyways that's why we're trying to educate people well Jordan uh I'm very happy you're doing this I really am it looks amazing I think it's fantastic I'm going to try some of them I'll try try some of your courses looks exciting yeah yeah well let's do go down a bit and I'll show you

some of them so we've got Brett Brett and Heather Weinstein so that's fun Jonathan Paso on symbolism and Christianity that's excellent James or he's from Cambridge uh lecturing on On on Plato Marian tupy on the economics of human flourishing that's a very optimistic course there's Bretton Heather evolutionary inference and is this available currently it's just it's up now man it's up now yeah yeah the greatest leaders of history that's a great course that's very inspiring John Veri I really like John he's so damn smart the boy crisis with Warren frell I did a course on

n on Beyond Good and Evil do you want to run that that's a Fun preview sure let's run that we'll wrap it up with this okay okay books I write in a single sentence what it takes other men a book to write that it wasn't egotistical because it happened to be true Beyond Good and Evil is a Cardinal work a PR droma to the entire intellectual and political history of the 20th century brilliant romantic insightful Deep psyche shattering dancing bit of literary genius he's had a remarkable impact on thought over the last 140 years it's

reasonable to say that he philosophized with a hammer because his thought is extraordinarily condensed to read n is daunting psychologically he's like a motivational speaker he's practical in a way that philosophers seldom are Nan philosophy is a call to Arms to familiarize yourself with him is to arm Yourself against the Sea of troubl and since you will encounter a sea of troubles you better pray that you're armed and this is one way to do it all right how to philosophy FES with a hammer Jordan thank you very much my friend hey man it's always a

pleasure to see you Joe it was very fun to watching you on kill Tony too oh thank you yeah yeah yeah that was fun and that was a good opportunity you were great too I Can't wait for that to come out because uh it's it's it's fun well thank you sir it's always a pleasure to be on your show always a pleasure to see you all right bye everybody [Music] [Applause] [Music]