Welcome to this curated educational transcript of the Joe Rogan Experience. In this session, we provide a deep-dive examination of the critical perspectives and historical dialogues presented in Episode #1769. Our mission is to offer a high-fidelity, searchable research resource for students of cultural history, emerging technology, and global discourse. This transcript has been specifically optimized for academic reference, linguistic study, and archival preservation regarding Clinical Psychology, Value Systems Analysis, and the Psychology of Individual Sovereignty Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan
Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by
night, all day. That state of intense concentration
on that before you can really manage it. I think
there's mental endurance involved too, because
I think that, are we up? I think there's mental
endurance that comes with anything that you do
on a day -to -day basis, whether it's writing.
whether it's doing podcasts, whether it's doing
stand -up comedy. I think anything we have to
think and manage. like complex ideas and manipulate
your language and your, the way you're speaking
and, and be able to engage in the dance between
two people. I think you got to do it all the
time. I think if you just do it every now and
again, like, especially like if you took time
off of speaking to people, like if you hadn't
talked to anybody in a long time and then you
talk, have you ever done that? We haven't talked
to anybody in a long time. Then you talk to them.
It feels odd. It feels awkward. Cause I think
there's like a thing where you have to get used
to it. You've got to get used to it. Yeah, I
found that was particularly the case with the
podcasts is that it's hard to do that sporadically.
Yeah. You also lose that rhythm of preparation
because you get it. Well, I did. I'm not sure.
How do you prepare for your podcast? Like if
you have an author, come on. I usually read their
book. When? I have two books that I'm reading
right now that are future people that are coming
in February. So they're a lot ahead. Yeah. Well,
you know, it's like one of them is a climate
change book and it's intense. And so it's requiring
a lot of thinking. And then I have to like look
at the criticisms of this guy and criticisms
of the work. And, you know, you know, who believes
that in 10 years Miami is going to be underwater?
Who believes that this is probably hyperbole
and that it's a gross exaggeration? And the reality
is, you know, the world sort of always goes through
these cycles of change. But human beings are
definitely having an effect on it. But a small
effect compared to. cows and other other things
it's like it's hard to sort out the climate change
one is a weird one so that well that's because
there's no such thing as climate right climate
and everything are the same word and i that's
what bothers me about the climate change types
it's like this is something that bothers me about
it technically it's like climate is about everything
so okay but your models aren't based on everything
your models are based on A set number of variables.
Yeah. So that means you've reduced the variables,
which are everything, to that set. Well, how
did you decide which set of variables to include
in the equation if it's about everything? And
that's not just a criticism. That's like, if
it's about everything, your models aren't right.
Because your models... Do not and cannot model
everything. What do you mean by everything when
you say... Well, that's what people who talk
about the climate apocalypse claim in some sense.
We have to change everything. It's like everything,
eh? Okay, what... And the same with the word
environment. That word doesn't mean... It means
so much that it actually doesn't mean anything.
Like when you say everything, in a sense, that's
meaningless, right? Because... Well, what are
you pointing to? Well, I'm pointing to everything.
Well, what's the difference between the environment
and everything? There's no difference. What's
the difference between climate and everything?
Well, there's no difference. So this is a crisis
of everything? It's like, no, it's not. Or if
it is, well, if it really is, then we're done
because we can't fix everything. Well, specifically,
what they mean specifically is the human, what
human beings are doing. that's causing the Earth
to warm. Right, right. But you have to include
all these factors in the models to determine
that. All these factors. Well, what can you not
include? Well, then, by deciding what you don't
include, you decide which set of variables are
cardinal. And you have to make that decision
in some sense before you even generate the models.
This is a big problem. It's partly... It's not
the only reason, but this... There's another
reason that another... problem that bedevils
climate modeling too, which is that as you stretch
out the models across time, the errors increase
radically. And so maybe you can predict out a
week or three weeks or a month or a year, but
the farther out you predict, the more your model's
in error. And that's a huge problem when you're
trying to model over 100 years, because the errors
compound just like interest. And so at some point,
it's all error. In fact, it's already the case
that even if the climate models are right, the
error bars are so wide by 100 years out that
we'll never be able to measure the effects of
the changes we're making now. We'll never know
if the changes we're making to save the climate
actually worked. We can't measure it. The errors
are too large 100 years out. What do you mean
by the errors? Like what errors? Well, prediction
errors. So look, imagine that you're going to
predict how your life goes. Okay. Well, you can
kind of do that. you kind of know that tomorrow
is going to be somewhat like today. Okay, but
how much is next year's day going to be like
today? Well, somewhat, but less certainly, because
you might get sick, for example, and then over
a five -year period, well, there's much more
that has to be accounted for, and so the probability
that your prediction is correct decreases as
you move forward in time. That's why we discount
the future. So if you ask people, you want $5
now or do you want $5 in a month? They're going
to say, well, I want $5 now. Well, you think,
well, why is that? Well, if I have it now, it's
certain. A month, well, there's a lag in there
and anything could happen. And you can play games
with people this way because people differ in
the degree to which they discount the future
because how seriously to take the future is actually...
a near computationally impossible task to solve.
How seriously should I take the future? Well,
it depends on how uncertain things are. How uncertain
things are, are they? Well, I don't know. Classic
example. There's a chicken. And the farmer goes
out every day and feeds the chicken. And the
chicken thinks, man, I've got a good friend in
this farmer. And then one day it's dinner time.
And the chicken's the main course. Right? And
so the poor chicken used induction to derive
certainty. The farmer comes every day. He didn't
realize there was a massive flaw in his theory.
And one day that flaw reveals itself and everything
falls apart. Well, that makes sense when you're
talking about chickens and farmers. But when
you're talking about human beings and CO2...
Well, we could play a future discounting game.
So this is how this sort of thing is calculated,
this discount curve. So I could say... I'll give
you $5 an hour, $5 in a week. Which one do you
want? And people say $5 in a week. Then I say,
okay, I'll give you $5 an hour. I'll give you
$10 in a month. It's like, hmm, okay. $10 in
a month. Okay, I'll give you $5 an hour. I'll
give you $750 in two weeks. Or I'll give you
$50 an hour. I'll give you $500 in 10 years.
And so imagine you do that. with all sorts of
amounts, over all sorts of time frames, then
you can compute a discount curve, which is how
much people devalue the amount a dollar is worth
as it progresses out into the future. And what
you generally find is that impulsive people discount
the future more heavily. That's actually the
definition of impulsive. And you might think,
well, the impulsive people are wrong. It's like
the ant and the grasshopper. You know, the grasshopper
is fiddling all summer and then he starves to
death in the winter and the good old ant who
packed away the supplies, he's doing fine in
the winter. He sacrificed the present to the
future and isn't that sensible? Yeah, it's sensible.
You should save. Except, well, what if it's 1920
in Germany, 1923, let's say, and you're in a
period of hyperinflation? It's like grasshopper
one. Because he spent all his money before it
became worthless. So should you save or not?
The answer is, it depends. And then there's a
further answer, which is, it depends on things
that you actually can't predict. And so it's
actually a computationally impossible problem
to figure out how much to discount the future.
It's actually impossible, which is why we vary
so much in it. Part of that reason is... The
magnitude of our prediction error increases the
farther out we predict. Yeah, but the grasshopper
and the ant analogy doesn't work because they're
based on food. And the food that the ant supplied
and stored and stocked away is still good. Inflation
doesn't mean jack shit to an ant. Because they
don't deal with currency. Well, the other way
an ant could follow up is... But you know what
I'm saying? Well, fair enough. But, I mean, ant
colonies also have wars. And so it's just as
possible that the ant will store up all this
food and another ant colony will move in and
that'll be the end of that. And this is a huge
problem. Well, you're very unlikely to be robbed
and pillaged unless you have wealth. Right. And
so the ability to store wealth across time...
To decrease the risk of the catastrophes of future,
that's the problem in some sense that civilization
set out to solve. How can we stabilize things
over a long term enough to make long term investing
a reasonable proposition? Here's a positive spin
off of that. I worked on the UN committee that
wrote the Secretary General's report on sustainable
development. I worked on the Canadian subcommittee,
to be technically accurate. And I was by no means
the head of that. I worked with the team that
worked on that. But we edited and wrote and rewrote
a fair bit of the document. And so I did a lot
of work in the background, learning what I needed
to learn to work on that committee with some
degree of, what would you say? I read maybe 200
books on ecological development and economic
development, the relationship between the two.
200 books? Oh, yeah, yeah. I was over about a
two -year period. And a lot of it was on oceanic
management, because I did realize that one thing
we're doing that's extraordinarily stupid on
the ecological front is... destroying all the
marine life within 40 miles of the shores. And
all the marine life is within 40 miles of the
shores. Like you think, the oceans, they're vast.
It's like, yeah, but they're empty. Except for
where the sun can shine to the bottom, and that's
the 40 to 200 miles, say, on the coastal shelves.
And we've trawled those bare like seven times.
Isn't that wild? It's a catastrophe. But that
was the only real environmental catastrophe.
that I encountered in all that work that I thought
was both credible and addressable. We know how
to fix that. You make marine protected areas
like national parks that you need about 15 %
of the total coastal territory really protected.
And that solves that problem, essentially. And
then everybody has fish because the fish, they
don't just stay there. They move around. You
can have your cake and eat it too with marine
protected areas. But mostly what I learned, and
this was really cool, was that this was so cool.
And I really believe it's true. The fastest way
to make the planet sustainably green and ecologically
viable is to make poor people as rich as possible
as fast as we possibly can. Because the thing
about poor people is that, well, first of all,
they live in... They're not resource efficient.
They use a lot of resources to produce very,
very little outcome. And so that's a problem.
Slash and burn agriculture, for example. But
even more importantly... When you're insecure
on a day -to -day basis, you don't know where
your next meal is coming from. You're not paying
attention to the broader environment, that hated
word, around you. And you can't even really worry
about your children's future in some real sense
because it's like, no, no, you don't understand.
Lunch is the future. We don't have lunch. We're
hungry. And that goes on for like a month. We're
dead. That's the future. So what happens? if
you can get resources to the poorest section
of the population, as soon as they get to the
point where they have some hope of a genuine
future, especially for their children, they immediately
become concerned about broader environmental
considerations. And then the attempt to make
the environment habitable and sustainable...
That comes up of its own accord at a grassroots
level and spreads everywhere. And evidence for
that is clear. So this is one of the things that
really bothered me about COP26. And that was
based in part on this. What is that? That was
the big climate meeting in the UK just a few
months ago. You know, the one where all the COVID
rules were suspended so the important people
could talk about important things. In any case,
I thought, if the politicians who were discussing...
environmental sustainability, we're serious,
especially the left -wing ones. And I say especially
because the left -wing ones always say, well,
we care about the poor and dispossessed. It's
like, do you really? When push comes to shove,
it's like, is it the environment or poor people?
If your idea is that we have to limit growth
to save the planet. If we limit growth, poor
people starve. Because whenever we put limits
on economic development, who suffers? The rich?
Are you really? That's what you think? And you're
on the left. You think if you put limits on economic
development, the rich will suffer. That runs
contrary to every theory that your whole political
philosophy is based on. You put limits to growth
on, the poor stay poor or get worse. Doesn't
matter because the planet has too many people
on it anyways, which it most certainly does not.
If you are serious about the environment. and
even vaguely concerned about poor people. All
of your policies would be devoted to making the
poor rich as fast as possible. But that would
violate the anti -capitalist presumption, let's
say, that the reason for environmental degradation
in the first place is, say, entrepreneurial and
free market development, which it most certainly
isn't. That's actually completely backwards.
Make poor people rich. So what should a COP26
been about? That's fairly straightforward. It
should have been about trying to generate as
much energy as we possibly can to be distributed
as widely as possible in the cheapest possible
manner. And what would that be, nuclear? Well,
I would say ultimately, likely nuclear, and probably
not fusion, because fusion has always been a
year away, 10 years away for the last 50 years.
We haven't managed it. Nuclear, likely. France
managed that very effectively. We can do it.
And we still have a weird idea of nuclear because
of the several, you know, whether it's Three
Mile Island, Chernobyl, there's been a few disasters.
More people die every year from solar energy
than die from nuclear. Who dies from solar? Guess
how you die from solar? Sunburn? No. You fall
off the roofs when you're installing it. Oh.
Yeah. That's gravity, right? Yeah, gravity. Gravity.
And, you know, that's a good example of unintended
consequences. Because systems are complex, and
when you change them, you think only good things
will happen. It's like, well, you know. Oh, so
I was going to, you asked about energy. Yeah.
There's also an environmental progression towards
clean energy. Yeah. And so the poorest people
burn wood. Well, that's not so good because,
first of all, they cut down the trees and burn
the trees. And second, if you're concerned about
pollution, especially particulate pollution,
especially indoors, which kills, I think, 7 million
children a year. 7 million children a year are
killed by indoor particulate pollution. What?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. How is that possible? 7 million?
Yeah. Indoor particulate pollution, meaning from
starting fires in homes, like to keep warm? Yeah,
without good ventilation systems. Yes, exactly.
These people are poor. Is that a real number?
Can you look that up? Yes, that's a real number.
I need to know that that's a real number. That
seems insane. That's good. We should double check
it. 7 million children die every year from indoor
particulate pollution. Yeah. And so you want
to burn wood. Well, charcoal's better. Coal's
better than that. in terms of pollution as well.
And then fossil fuels are better than coal. And
then natural gas is perhaps the cleanest of the
fossil fuels. And maybe, I don't know if you
know this, but this is also, this is so funny
too. The United States has cut its carbon emissions
15 % in the last 20 years. It's gone down, not
up, down. Why? Fracking. Fracking. Yeah, fracking.
This thing that environmentalists hate. It's
like, don't frack. But it's a double -edged sword,
right? Because fracking has definitely polluted
some water supplies. Not really. No? It hasn't
polluted any water supplies? Look. Did you ever
see that? Everything pollutes something. So the
idea that there's any source of energy that we
can derive that's not going to produce some pollutant
as a consequence, that's the kind of nonsense
you hear from people who say things like net
zero. We're going to hit net zero by 2050. Right,
but fracking does have issues. Okay, more than
90 % of the world's children breathe toxic air
every day. Yeah, how many of them, Joe? How many?
93 % of the world's children under the age of
15 years, 1 .8 billion children. But this is
about polluted air. I don't think this is necessarily
about indoor particulate pollution. But that's
all indoor. Okay, it says World Health Organization
estimates that. Sorry, it's 600 ,000, so I must
have been citing figures over a decade. There
is a part on here that says it lowers the life
expectancy of up to 7 million people per year,
but it doesn't say they all die. Oh, okay. Thank
you for clarifying that. They're talking about
what, though? They're talking about pollution,
right? Air pollution? The second line there.
Together, household air pollution from cooking
and ambient air pollution causes more than 50
% of acute... But that's both things. Yeah, but
it's still almost all of the inside. Yeah, but
the outside air pollution is trivial. Let's just
read it so that people understand what we're
saying, because we can read this. Together, household
air pollution from cooking and ambient outside
air pollution cause more than 50 % of acute lower...
respiratory infections in children under five
years of age in low - and middle -income countries.
Right, and read the next one, too. Air pollution
is one of the leading threats to child health,
accounting for almost one in ten deaths in children
under five years of age. That's fucking wild.
Well, it's just poor children, and the world
has too many people on it anyway. But you say
that, you're being facetious. Yeah, yeah, definitely.
I still want to, like, we've kind of, like, you
went on these rants, so I want to, like, bring
you back. to this idea of climate and environment.
We should be concerned not just about particulate
pollution, but shouldn't we be concerned about
the effect that we're having on the CO2 that
we're releasing in the atmosphere? Now, from
what I've read, it has an impact. They don't
exactly know what percentage of an impact it
has, but it's most certainly something that we
can reduce. Well, that's not so certain. What
I've also read... One of the problems is when
people start talking about electric cars, is
that it's literally impossible. There's not enough
minerals. These conflict minerals they use for
these batteries, there's not enough to give a
car. As many cars as we have in this country,
as many cars as there are in the world that are
mostly internal combustion engines, if we replace
those with battery -powered cars, I don't think
that's possible. Well, where are we going to
get the electricity? Well, there's that. Well,
yeah, that's a big problem. Yeah, fair enough.
But even if we did get the electricity from nuclear,
which, by the way, is fairly clean, it's all
in whether or not there's a disaster and whether
or not they have these precautionary measures
set in place to have systems that will be able
to shut down the core when there is a disaster.
Fukushima didn't, right? And those were large
scale reactors and they have small scale reactors
now, thorium salt reactors that are small and
modular in some sense. And when those sorts of
things happen, they shut down by themselves.
But we should talk about it because those Fukushima
when I mean, OK, let's look this up. When was
Fukushima first online? I want to say it was
in the 1970s. Is that correct? Likely. That's
when most of the nuclear development took place.
I remember reading about it at the time and finding
out that they couldn't shut it down. I was like,
what? Okay, 67. Construction began 67, commission
date 71. Okay, so yeah, so 70s essentially. Imagine
getting a car from 1970 and expecting it to be
compliant with whatever emission standards we
have today. Or braking. You ever drive a car?
I'm an enthusiast. I love old cars. But I take
them and I bring them to these craftsmen and
they put modern brakes on them. They put modern
suspensions on them so you don't kill yourself
driving them. But if you drive an old car, like
if you get a 1970 Pontiac and you just try to
drive it around, the brakes are fucking terrible.
The steering is like you kind of have a rough
estimate of where you're going. They're awful.
You take a 2022 Chevrolet, like a Corvette, and
drive that. My God, it's like telepathic. I know,
I know. The acceleration is like time travel.
New cars are so good. Oh my God, they're so good.
Plus they have airbags. And the stereos are great.
The old stereos in those 60s and 70s cars, it
was like listening to the end of two tin cans
with a string between them. Not just 60s and
70s. You go into the 2000s. Everybody used to
buy... aftermarket stereos. You used to get a
car and then you'd bring it to a place and get
a stereo place. Shout out to my friend Kenny
Fong, Darkside Motors. I would bring my cars
to Kenny and Kenny would hook me up with people
that would do the stereo, fix the wheels and
all kinds of stuff. You always had to do that.
But then car manufacturers realized, why are
we leaving all this money on the table? Let's
just give them an option to have better stereos
and better wheels and better suspension and all
that jazz. So they fixed that. But my point is,
Anything from 1971 sucks, including the nuclear
power reactors. But if you get a nuclear reactor
from 2022, you know, all that advancement in
technology and innovation, you're going to have
a far better system. Yeah, well, we're... See,
part of the problem... I've been very curious
about why the left -wing types, particularly,
seem willing to sacrifice the poor to their utopian...
I don't think they're thinking that way. I just
don't think they played it all out. When push
comes to shove, that's what they do. And it wouldn't
take much thought to figure it out because let's
say you increase the cost of energy and that's
the price you pay to move forward to a hypothetically
green economy. But you increase the price of
energy. Okay, so what happens is that in any
system that's hierarchical, and the left -wingers
know this because it drives their whole philosophy,
in any hierarchical system, when you stress the
system, the disproportionate amount of that stress
falls on the people who are in the lower rungs
because they're barely hanging on anyway. So,
you know, you get a 1 % increase in unemployment.
You get a 5 % increase in psychiatric hospitalizations.
Well, why? It's because there's a bunch of people
there who are right on the threshold of psychiatric
hospitalization, and then they lose their job.
That's the end of that. So even among birds,
even among birds that don't live in... strict
hierarchy, so non -social birds, not ones that
hang about in flocks like crows. The birds will
move into an environment, any environment, and
the more able, in some sense, healthier birds
get the best nesting spots. They're closest to
the food, they're sheltered from rain and wind
and all of that, so they're not psychophysiologically
stressed. And so then when any kind of avian
flu comes through, let's say, to challenge the
bird population, the birds die from the bottom
up. That's the old saying, when the aristocracy
gets a cold, the working class dies of pneumonia.
It's like, okay, so fine, increase energy costs.
Well, what happens? A bunch of poor people fall
off the map, like a bunch of them. And the more
you increase the energy costs, the more that
happens. And so if the... The price we have to
pay to move towards a sustainable environment
is increased energy costs, and it isn't. That's
a policy decision. It doesn't have to be that
way. Absolutely 100 % inevitable consequence
of that will be that you sacrifice the poor.
Except the left, the real hardcore leftists,
they want to implement socialism. And implementing
socialism will solve a few of those problems.
Yeah, well, that's part of the issue is that
the pro -environment stance is contaminated by
an anti -capitalist rhetoric. Now, the problem
with the socialists, so let's take this apart
a little bit. always point out something that's
true. And Marx pointed this out. But it wasn't
Marx's discovery. And he's like seriously wrong
about it in an important way. So Marx observed
that money tends to aggregate in the hands of
fewer and fewer people. Okay, the first question
is, is that true? And the answer is, not only
is that true... It's so true that you can model
the distribution of money in a population using
equations derived from physics. Like it's really
unbelievably true. But then Marx said, that's
capitalism. That is not true. And it's actually
an underestimation of the problem because...
If the problem of inequality, which is an actual
problem, was as simple as, let's change capitalism,
well, yeah, let's change capitalism. Unfortunately,
the problem is so deep that changing capitalism
won't change the problem at all. And in fact,
in most of the places where it's being attempted,
especially the more radical forms of communism,
let's say, rather than socialism, because we
can distinguish the two, and should, it's important
to do so, in countries that became communist,
It wasn't like a small percentage of the people
still didn't own all the resources. It's just
that there were hardly any resources and almost
everyone had nothing. There was still a tiny
fraction of people who were the privileged elite.
And so, you know, if you play Monopoly, what
happens when you play Monopoly? Everybody starts
out equal. Yeah, exactly. And so you can actually
model this problem with something as simple as
a Monopoly game. that's actually a fairly good
model of how money distributes itself in the
environment. And you can blame that on capitalism,
but you can get the same, you can get exactly
the same result if you have people trade because
they flip a dice. So if you took 100 people,
let's say give 100 people $10 each, and then
they had to trade with each other. If I, you
flip a coin and I flip a coin, and if it's, we
flip a coin, if it's heads, you get a dollar.
And so that's your game. Heads gives you a dollar.
If you play that out, Until it concludes, what
happens is some people lose, let's say they have
$10. They lose 10 times in a row. Well, then
what happens? At zero. Well, they can't trade
anymore. So what happens is people lose at different
rates, but if you lose enough, even if it takes
you 100 trades to lose all your money, as soon
as you hit zero, you're done. If you play that
out to its conclusion, even though it's random,
completely random, the trading, one person ends
up with all the money, and everyone else ends
up with zero. And so I'm a member of a native
Canadian family, West Coast Indian family, native
family. And this particular culture had a tradition,
the potlatch. And they had the same problem in
their culture. And the problem was that some
of the big chiefs over some period of time would
end up with like all the stuff, all of it. And
that wasn't good because... Well, for obvious
reasons, you know, it would destabilize the society.
That's, in some sense, the least of the problems.
And so they evolved this mechanism. They'd have
these big celebrations that rich people would
put on where status was determined by how much
of that wealth you would give away. Right, right.
And that was the potlatch. Yeah, yeah. They had
to do it. Well, that's philanthropy, right? People
really looked very highly upon very wealthy people
that engaged in a lot of philanthropy. Yeah,
well, and I haven't, this might be a biased sample,
but I don't think so. And if it is, it's biased
towards entrepreneur conservative types who you
would think in the parody sense would be the
least likely to do this. I haven't met anyone
who has a vast fortune whose primary concern
is, isn't. what the hell can I do with all this
money that's beneficial as fast as possible?
They're not sitting around thinking, I need another
super yacht. Now, look, there's going to be people
like that, you know, but I haven't met any of
them. Have you met Jeff Bezos? No, I haven't.
I haven't met Bezos. I bet he's got a couple
super yachts. I'm sure he does. I'm sure he does.
But, like, I'm pretty happy about the fact that
he's building rocket ships, and that actually
takes a lot of capital. Yeah. You know, and the
other thing that, there's a couple of other things
about. that are worth thinking about. One is,
all the evidence suggests that relatively free
markets are the best way to make the absolutely
poor richer. That's not an inequality issue.
It's just that while they're not starving, and
that's something. We've lifted more people out
of poverty in the last 15 years than in the entire
course of human history. Can I pause you for
a second there? Oh, one point that I forgot.
I read this the other day, that where Karl Marx
is buried, they have to charge money because
they have to maintain it. Uh -huh. Very funny.
And they need money to maintain it. Yeah, yeah.
Make sure that's true. Yeah, yeah. Because it's
hilarious. I read that, and it was like a meme.
And I was like, is that real? Because it is kind
of funny. My daughter once bought me a 50 % off
Karl Marx doll, which I thought was just ridiculous.
And she bought it for that reason. That's adorable.
She told me it's so funny. It was so funny. Now,
capitalism. Yeah. When people start talking about
capitalism, and we talk about capitalism uplifting.
Poor people. One of the issues that a lot of
people have in this country is when you ship
jobs overseas and you ship companies start manufacturing
things overseas for essentially pennies on the
dollar. Yeah. I mean, this is like it's one of
the great contradictions to the progressives
in America that they complain about capitalism
on a fucking iPhone. Because if you went down
to the factory where that iPhone was manufactured,
you'd be heartbroken. If you went further to
where the minerals are dug out of the ground
in the Congo, you'd be devastated. That's the
reality of capitalism. That's the reality of
sending jobs overseas. The cure to that is a
more even distribution of wealth within the company.
The company would have to, and I'm not picking
on Apple like any company, name them. They would
have to pay the people that work there a decent
living wage with great benefits and health insurance
and dental and all the stuff that people want
and need in order to feel secure and safe. Give
them a great working environment. Don't overwork
them. And now how much money do you have? Because
the amount of money that Apple has put aside,
and obviously I'm an Apple fan. I have an Apple
phone right here. I'm not picking on Apple. But
they are one of the richest companies. that's
ever existed on the face of planet Earth. But
how are they doing that? One of the ways they're
doing that is by paying people very little to
make their products that they sell for a giant
amount of money. So what's the solution to that?
Is the solution to pay people a fair amount?
And if you do that... Is the solution to pay
people a fair amount in another country? Or is
the solution to pay people a fair amount here
where we can regulate it? Because we do manufacture
some things here, but we manufacture way less
than we used to because it costs too much money
to do so. But that word too much or that phrase
too much is bullshit. It's not that it costs
too much. It's just that it costs more. And they
don't want to pay it. They would rather just
reap in profits. And the way they do that is
on the backs of poor people. Now, if you do that
on the backs of poor people. We can take that
apart a bit. Right. But here's my question. If
you really wanted to make these other countries,
like third world countries, and raise them up
and really increase the economy, what you would
do is pay people in third world countries where
you have these plants the same amount that you
would have to pay them in America. then you'd
have a complete change in those environments.
Okay, so we can take that apart a bunch of ways.
I mean, part of the advantage to manufacturing
things where wages are relatively low is you
give those countries a competitive advantage.
So part of the reason that there aren't millions
of people starving in China is because even the
Chinese communists woke up enough to realize
that if they opened up their economies, that
free market, Free market is nothing different
than allowing unrestricted choice among consumers
in some sense. So when we're talking about the
free market, we should be careful about what
we're talking about. It's like you get to have
choice about what you buy. That's the central
spirit of free market capitalism. Exporting those
jobs stopped a huge proportion of the Chinese
from living in absolute privation and likely
decreased the probability of a broad -scale war.
And it also brought the Chinese into the economy,
which is a big deal. The Chinese produce more
engineers every year than Americans have engineers.
And so now we've unlocked an unbelievable amount
of brain power. And that's produced an insane
technological revolution. Now, I think it's unfortunate
that a lot of that was done on the backs of the
American working class. And I think that the
Democrats abandoning the working class when they
were in that... state of privation was a catastrophe
of public policy. And also part of the reason
why Trump got elected. But it isn't obvious to
me that exporting those jobs was a bad long -term
decision. Because, well, you want a world where
20 million Chinese are starving? That's not good.
By any measure, right? But is that the only way
that they don't starve? The only way they don't
starve is if iPhones are manufactured there for
pennies on the dollar? Yes. Really? Well, no
other solutions ever worked. But that doesn't
mean they can't work. Yeah, it might. If they
work in America, it might? Really? Well, I don't
know, Joe, because either... Look, that's a good
question, you know, but for me, the problem with
utopian theories is that... They're hypothetical.
So I like to look at what's actually worked.
And what's clearly worked is the introduction
of free market principles into poor countries.
So, for example, Africa has the fastest growing
economies in the world, particularly sub -Saharan
Africa. That's really something. And some of
those countries are really getting on a reasonably
solid footing. And most of that's happened, almost
all that's happened since the Berlin Wall fell.
that continent isn't being riven by a terrible
conflict between the communists and the capitalists.
And most of the reason the eradication of that
conflict has been beneficial is because they're
not doing unbelievably stupid and counterproductive
things at the policy level. They're letting markets
flourish to at least a limited degree. And that's
making, that's, people aren't, you know, there's,
I talked to some people, I was in Washington
for a week, last week, and I talked to some people
who are, working with a UN committee that's prime
goal is the eradication of hunger. Well, there
isn't any hunger in the world anymore that isn't
caused by political conflict. Everyone has enough
to eat. In fact, it's so interesting that one
of the emerging problems, especially among the
poor all over the world, is that they have too
much to eat. And so we're seeing diseases of
affluence replace diseases of privation. And
you think, isn't that too bad, these Western
diets? And, you know, fair enough, but you want
to be fat or dead? And fat's better. And fat
isn't optimal, let's say, but it beats the hell
out of dead. How many people starve to death
in the world? Now? Almost none. Let's look that
up. Almost all those who do, do it because of
political conflict. Like, it's purposeful starvation
now. So someone has put a blockade on ships and
goods. Yeah, to starve them. Right, as a political
weapon. When you're talking about the prosperous
areas that have prospered because they brought
in the market and these companies have shipped
these jobs over to these places and allowed these
people to flourish, the flip side is Detroit.
Right. Detroit was one of the wealthiest cities
in this country and hence one of the wealthiest
cities in the world just a few decades ago. It
wasn't that long ago. When they were in the height
of their manufacturing, all the American automobiles
were made in Detroit. Cadillacs and Chevys and
Fords and that was where everybody worked. And
then it was also where the union auto workers
had established a strong foothold and they made
good money. You bet. People got paid a great
wage. Everyone who worked in those places, they
had a good lifestyle. Well, Henry Ford did what
you said that capitalists should do. I mean,
when Ford was pressed on how much he paid his
workers, because he paid them a lot, he said,
I want to pay them enough so that they can afford
a car. And so he ramped up wages dramatically.
And that was partly part of his, you could say,
self -interested vision, although I think that's
an oversimplification. It's like, well... If
we want to sell our product, why don't we expand
the consumer market? Well, those people have
to have some money. That was Ford's notion. When
I was a kid, I had friends that had done gigs
in Detroit when I was just starting out doing
stand -up. And they were like, whatever you do,
don't go to Detroit with a fucking Japanese car
because they will fuck your car up. I go, really?
They go, yeah, these guys are autoworkers. They
don't want to see foreign cars that they don't
make in their city. It's a proud city that makes
American cars. There was a thing. Yeah, well,
they were responding to a real threat. You were
talking about old cars with me earlier. So one
of my friends in the little town I grew up in,
this was back in the mid -70s, had a Dodge Colt,
and it was one of the first Japanese cars. And
that thing was a real piece of junk in a sea
of pieces of junk because cars in the mid -70s,
they were not good. They fell apart. They rusted
fast, but nothing rusted faster than a Japanese
car in Canada. Those bloody things, you could
put them outside in the winter when there was
salt on the road and watch them dissolve. But
what was very interesting about that, I saw this
with the Chinese too because in Alberta, I went
to Edmonton, I think this would be 1975 about.
It was the first Chinese trade fair in Canada.
So they had Chinese manufactured implements at
this display. It was really interesting because
it was like walking back into 1945 or 1950. We
looked at all these things and we thought, oh,
that looks like exactly like what grandpa was
using on the farm, you know, 40 years ago. So
with the Japanese, it's like their cars were
junk to begin with. Yeah, to begin with. And
then they got to be Toyota. And just think what
Toyota did. You talked about how good cars are
now. Well, the net consequence of opening up
that competition was the Japanese got their act
together. I mean, in the 80s, particularly, Japan
got so powerful that everyone thought it would
be the dominant world economy for like 10 years.
And they just went from nothing after World War
II to like superstars in 40 years. And it's really
hard to see how that wasn't everyone's benefit.
Now, to your point, when you open up competition,
But internationally, especially in manufacturing,
you pose a tremendous threat to the current working
class in your country, a tremendous immediate
threat. It might be a long -term benefit because
it stabilizes international relations between
countries that might otherwise go to war, in
which case it would be working class people that
would be being slaughtered like mad. But it's
no doubt that, to me, there's almost no doubt
that the freeing of trade... worldwide, and the
benefits that that produced were paid for disproportionately
by the American working class. And it also raises
another really complicated problem, which is
when your economy switches to information and
services, which is more complex cognitively,
to deliver, what do you do with people who would
have been really good at working class jobs but
aren't going to be good in the knowledge economy?
And the answer is, we don't know. Which is not
a very good answer. And the idea that we could
just somehow give them money. You can't solve
people's problems by giving. I had a client who
had a cocaine problem. And he was rather intellectually
limited, this client. And would have agreed with
that assessment, by the way. I'm not being rude.
That's an adorable statement. I'm going to use
that from now on. I've dealt with many people
in my life who weren't going to university. They
probably weren't going through high school. And
it isn't because they didn't work hard. Sometimes
that was why. But it was because, no, they couldn't
do that. They couldn't do it. And so they struggled,
man. And this guy in particular, it was so interesting
because he wasn't doing too bad when he had almost
no money. but he got a disability check because
he'd been hurt at work. And every time he had
a disability check, he was gone for three days
on a cocaine and alcohol binge, and he'd just
drink up all his money. Then he'd end up in a
ditch somewhere, like really 80 % dead, and then
eventually dead, because eventually it was that
kind of behavior that killed him. But more money,
he would have just died sooner. You need to be
able to handle money. It's a tremendously destabilizing
technology. Okay, now about that man. Do you
believe that that was a genetic situation or
was that a situation of nurture? Was the way
he was raised? Is it the environment that he
grew up in? Oh, it was a couple of things. I
mean, he really liked alcohol. And there's a
huge biological contributor to that. Some people...
I worked with a researcher in Montreal who had
a monkey farm on St. Kitts. Green monkeys. And...
He was interested in studying alcoholism, and
he would capture monkeys in the wild and bring
them to his compound, and then allow them to
access a pretty sweetened mixture of rum and
water. Well, they used something else other than
water. And most of the monkeys could take it
or leave it. 5 % of them would drink themselves
into a coma on first exposure. And he has videotapes
of this. It was like watching the frat house,
you know, on Saturday night. So it's really,
it's comical. Drunk monkeys are actually pretty
funny, as you might imagine. But 5 % of them
would drink themselves to coma on first exposure.
And those are the monkeys that would become alcohol
dependent if you gave them unlimited access.
Right, but you know the problem with those monkey
studies, right? Those monkey studies is the same
as rat farm studies. When they've done studies
on rats, they've done studies with rats in cages
with cocaine. Yeah, these were monkeys in natural
environments. Natural environments, how so? Yeah,
we knew about that. Well, they were housed in
colonies. Housed in colonies. How large are these
colonies and what kind of land are they on? Well,
okay, let's separate this. It's very hard to
get rats addicted to cocaine if they live in
a natural environment. If you put them in a cage
and bore them to death. Let's explain that to
people what we're talking about because there
are studies that were done where initially people
thought that cocaine was so addictive that if
you gave it to rats, they would just take the
cocaine until they died. Right. And they wouldn't
even engage in sex. But then they realized that
if you take these rats, that when you were doing
this, you're taking these rats in these highly
stressed out environments. You're putting them
in cages. Nothing's natural. And if you take
these rats and you put them in a far larger environment
with trees and Everything that a rat normally
has. Like other rats, for example. Yeah, like
real normal. Like a normal rat environment. And
then you give them cocaine. They're not interested.
Yeah. They're only interested in it if you stress
them out by putting them in cages. Now, is that
the same with these monkeys? Imagine the natural
rat environment there. Yes. Okay, so now you
have your rats in the natural environment. Now
imagine you gave them access to cocaine and you
stressed them. So what would happen is a certain
percentage of the rats would start using cocaine
in proportion to the amount of stress. Like if
you let a bunch of cats loose. Yeah, exactly.
Exactly. And maybe in that case, maybe they'd
prefer alcohol or benzodiazepines because that
would specifically alleviate anxiety. And so
it is the case. And this was brilliant research
showing that, see, a lab rat is not, a lab rat's
actually a pretty good model of a human being
for reasons we can go into later. An isolated
lab rat who's been genetically bred is not that
much like an actual rat. And when Skinner did
all his studies on lab rats, not only were they
isolated, which rats never are in the real world
because they're communal and social. They play.
They laugh. They wrestle. They have very complex
social environments. They're not that interested
in... artificial forms of psychomotor stimulation
if they're in a natural environment. But some
of them will still be more interested than others.
There's still that variability that's lurking
in the background. And with these monkeys, most
of them wouldn't take alcohol repeatedly, but
a small percentage of them would. And you see
very much the same. And all I'm saying, I'm not
saying anything revolutionary here. I'm saying,
for example, if you experiment with 20 different
drugs, you'll probably find the one for you.
And people react differently to pharmacological
substances, and a huge part of the variation
in that reactivity is genetically determined
or genetically influenced. So that's not a surprise.
It's not much more surprising than saying some
people are born more anxious than other people.
Can I bring you back to this, though? What kind
of an environment were those monkeys in? Are
they in a cage? They were in a cage, but it was
a large cage. The cage wasn't stressing them.
Oh, these cages would have been... See, the monkeys
actually didn't mind being in the cage. How do
we know this? Do we talk to the monkeys? Oh,
you can tell because they won't run out of it
if you open the door. Like there is ways of...
So you say, what does a rat want? Well, how do
you know what a rat wants? It's like, that's
easy. What will he work to obtain? And so rats,
we know what that rats like play. It's like,
how do you know rats like play? Well, you...
you put two rats in a little arena where they
can wrestle. And then the next time that they
know they can go into the arena, so maybe do
it a couple of times so they learn that, then
you can make them press a bar to open the door
to get into the arena. Well, then you measure
how many times they'll press the bar and how
fast they'll press it, and then you can derive
insight, direct insight, into how motivated they
are, because motivation is directly proportionate
to the willingness to expand energy, logically
enough. And so... And you can do the same thing
with drugs. How hard will the animal work to
obtain a given pharmacological substance is an
indication of how rewarding that drug is to them.
Those studies have been done unbelievably carefully,
and we know there's tremendous variation. So
you can have your cake and eat it too. You can
say, look, under most normal and natural conditions,
it's not that easy to addict animals to an addictive
substance, but there's still a... a percentage
of them that are more susceptible to that than
others. And even in highly stressed human environments,
not everybody becomes a cocaine addict or an
alcoholic. And then you might say, well, why
do some people become cocaine addicts and some
people become alcoholic? And some of it is availability,
but some of it is, well, they like alcohol better
or they like cocaine better. Other people can
take it or leave it. And so when you say—because
you asked me, is it nature or nurture? Right.
Right. And that's where this argument stemmed
from. But I was talking also about his limited
intelligence. That seems to be completely independent
of susceptibility to drug addiction. Right. But
do you think that—you were talking about him
being intellectually limited. Yes. Do you think
that that intellectual limitation— Made his life
harder. Is it genetic? Yes. Yeah. Yes, it's not
only genetic, mostly because you can really impair
people by putting them in situations of deprivation.
And so one of the things that's happened over
the last century is the mean IQ has gone up seven
points per generation, which is a lot, like it's
really a lot. So 15 -point IQ difference is the
average difference between the typical high school
graduate and the typical college graduate. So
15 points is four years of university. roughly
speaking, seven points in a generation is half
the difference between a high school student
and a college graduate. And it's gone up seven
points a generation every 15 years. It's a lot.
And so is intelligence mutable? Well, there's
some evidence that it is. Why did it happen?
Well, partly because there are far few extremely
deprived people, even on the information front.
Some of this was the introduction of television.
You know, you hear, television makes people stupider.
It's like, no, it makes smart people who could
have been even smarter if they would have read
Shakespeare stupider than they would have been
if they read Shakespeare if they're watching
TV. But if you're a deprived kid and sitting
in the crib with no one paying attention to you
for like three years, TV is way better than that.
And so if you give people access to information
and access to enough food, let's say, you pull
up the bottom end of the cognitive distribution
tremendously. And a lot of that, a tremendous
amount of that has happened all over the world
in the last hundred years. And that's a great
deal for everyone because, well, that's that
much more brain power that's available for everyone
to benefit from. Like it's unbelievably valuable.
You can see the cascade in that part of our technological
transformation. It's so incredibly fast. It's
like, well, the Chinese are producing as many
engineers every year as the Americans have engineers.
It's no wonder that things are accelerating at
such a rate. Now, they don't innovate at the
same rate as the US innovates, but they're not
doing too bad. And soon, you know, depending
on how much they continue to flirt with totalitarianism.
Just think of all that billion people, all that
creativity unleashed. Man, all that intelligence
unleashed. So that is the dance over there, right?
The totalitarianism versus innovation, versus
giving people the freedom and also removing the
fear of that totalitarian government so they
have the ability to take risks. No, it's the
dance here too, right? In some sense, it's the
eternal dance. It's the eternal dance. It's the
part of the eternal dance between... freedom
and structure even. And that's a tough one because
there's no freedom without structure. Like I
used to play a game with my students when we
were talking about Jean Piaget, who was very
interested in the development of morality through
games. So I say to them, so we're talking about
freedom. It's like, okay, freedom. It's freedom
from constraint is freedom. All right, fine.
Let's play a game. Do you want to play this game?
Sure. Okay. You move first. What do you mean?
That's the game. You can do anything you want.
You move first. You think, that's not much of
a game. It's like, no, it's a complete, it's
the perfect game. You're absolutely free to do
anything you want. Okay. Well, everybody does
what you did. You just sit there. The right amount
of rules for freedom is not zero. Say, now I
put a chessboard in front of you, you think,
oh my God. all the limitations. I can't throw
a basketball on the chessboard, which you certainly
can't, not if you're playing chess. But now,
you know, you move first. I move the pawn two
spaces forward. I see what you're saying. Having
some structure and some rules to follow gives
people more of a path to go out. To everything.
Yeah, yeah. And so, and I think this is modeled
by music. This is really worth knowing. This...
Like, almost took the top of my head off when
I realized it. And it took me about four months
of thinking to figure this out. Because when
I was in graduate school at McGill, I was really
interested, I became really interested in the
reality of evil. And I was very interested in
the viability of nihilistic beliefs. You know,
why bother if everything's going to disappear
in a hundred years? Who cares? You know, it's
meaningless. In the final analysis, life is meaningless.
Right. Okay, well, you know, you can make a credible
case for that. Now, it's an upsetting case. Because
once you accept that, first of all, you're anxious
and hurt by it. So that's not so good. And second,
it kind of makes you aimless. And that's part
of nihilism. It's like, you know, you're anxious
and upset, but you're also aimless. Because why
bother? And fair enough, but you can make a credible
case for it. But then I thought, well, When that
gets out of hand, maybe you're nihilistic because
you're mortal and life ends in death. So you're
sort of nihilistic because of suffering. And
so then you become nihilistic as a logical response
to that, and then what happens? And then what
you see is that nihilistic people definitely
make suffering worse. Definitely. They make it
worse for themselves, for sure. But then... They
get bitter because their lives are so unbearable,
and then they start to take it out on other people.
So if you are nihilistic, that's not neutral.
It gets bad real fast. So then I thought, well,
are there any antidotes to meaninglessness? And
rational antidotes are hard to come by, because
you can just say, well, who cares if in a thousand
years we're all going to be dead, why get out
of bed in the morning? You can't really mount
a rational case why that's not reasonable. I'm
not saying it is reasonable, but I thought about
music. Music is a very strange art form. I had
a great journalist friend of mine. He said to
me the other day, he said, all art aspires to
the condition of music, which I thought was great.
But music, you think about the revitalizing effect
music continues to have in our culture, especially
among young people. And that's really, really
been the case since the beginning of the 60s.
It's like... We got more nihilistic and less
religious and all of that as our culture became
more secular and more rational, more materialistic.
And at the same time, the power of music as a
cultural phenomenon just grew and grew and grew
and grew. Music gives you the intimation of meaning
directly. So I used to watch punk rockers. I
went to a Ramones concert once, which was really
fun. We were up in the second floor of this theater
in Montreal, and the Ramones were playing on
stage like 100 feet away with their huge stadium
equipment. It was so loud in there. I had to
listen to the whole concert with my ears plugged,
and I was still like three -quarters deaf for
three days. And beneath us on the... that stage
sort of in front of the stage there was a flat
place and all these punks were down there smashing
into each other and and and and doing this this
really rough dance and i thought this is so cool
we got all these nihilistic punks in here like
half beating themselves up dancing and in and
and being taken in by this rough music that gave
them even in their aggressive nihilism a sense
of meaning i thought that was so cool so why
does music do that That's a good question because
people think of music as a non -representational
art. It doesn't represent anything. It's not
like a drawing or a picture or even dance where
you can act something out. Really? Non -representational.
I don't agree with that. What do you mean by
music being non -representational? Well, it's
not a picture of anything. Right, but it represents
the feeling of the person who puts out the lyrics.
Yeah. The feeling of the person who composes
the music. True. It's got emotional content.
That's fair enough because there's... There's
unhappy music and there's happy music, minor
keys and major. Definitely, it plays on emotions,
for sure. But it doesn't represent anything like
a picture represents it, let's say, or a sculpture.
That's all I mean. I didn't say it was without
content. I see what you're saying. We said representation.
Well, you could say it represents emotions, and
fair enough, fair enough. But I was thinking
more like a picture of an actual thing. Okay,
so let's think about what music is. First of
all, it's a pattern. So, non -patterned music
is noise. It's a pattern. But then it isn't one
pattern. It's multiple patterns layered on top
of one another in a harmonious manner and in
a manner that indicates, in some sense, communication
between all the patterned layers because they
have to go together. And so, what's the world?
Well, the world's made of objects. No, it's not.
It's made of patterns. So, music is just like
the world. Because the world's made of patterns.
And then music has layered patterns that are
all moving together in a harmonious manner. And
so what do you do when you hear that, especially
if it's got a beat? Well, then you move your
body. And you want to, right? The music calls
to you to move your body. So now you're moving
your body in sync with the patterned layers of
the world. That's meaning. And then there's more
to it. So that's so cool. Music is an analog
of the structure of existence itself. And it
calls to you to take part in that. So maybe you
dance by yourself, or maybe even better, you
dance with someone else. And so then you both
bring your bodies into this patterned relationship
with this. multi -layer harmony together in a
spontaneous way, indicating that you can both
play and are therefore potentially trustworthy
future mates. That's unbelievably cool. And birds
dance. It's not just human beings, you know.
So this is a deep thing. And then music does
something else, too. It puts you on the border
between chaos and order, because a boring song
does exactly what you expect it to do. and gets
dull very quickly. And an unlistenable song is
so random you can't follow it. And so what you
want is predictability with a leaven of unpredictability.
And then that puts you right on the edge. That's
the zone of proximal development. Vygotsky discovered
that. Like a Hendrix song. Yeah, like a Hendrix
song. Well, any great music does that. Yeah,
but I mean, Hendrix has so much... creativity
inside the structure of the song because there's
riffs that he'll do right right right and everyone
loves oh man I went to this bar in Nashville
this band was playing Kelly's Heroes a great
guitarist best guitarist I've ever seen and they
were playing old country music with a heavy blues
rock twist so they do this great version of Ghost
Riders in the Sky that's 15 minutes long and
this brilliant guitarist just goes way out on
a limb and Everybody in the crowd, it was so
fun to be there. They're just thrilled to death
because they're watching this man doing the same
thing that surfers do. He's like dancing on the
edge of chaos and order in this virtuosic manner.
And everyone is so taken by that that it just
lifts them out of the normality of their existence.
You see this joy just transfuse them. And that's
because they got an intimation of genuine meaning.
And it's not amenable to rational criticism,
which is the thing that I thought that struck
me as so miraculous about music and why it has
this element of salvation. It's like it puts
you directly in touch with the meaning that sustains
you in life, directly. And it shows you what
that would be, which is something like to observe
the harmonious interplay of the patterns of being
stuck. on top of one another. And then to bring
yourself into alignment with that, which is what
yogis strive to do and what disciplined athletes
strive to do and what we celebrate in athletics.
And it's all a reflection of the same thing.
And that's real. It's real, that meaning. It's
real also in what it imparts on other people.
It's not just, it doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Like, even though people can play beautiful music
when no one's around, it's not the same as playing
beautiful music in front of people, because there's
a thing that happens when people interact with
that music. Well, you see that, you know, if
you get lucky, you go to a music... I went to
a Leonard Cohen concert, one of the ones he put
on when he went on tour when he was old. He lost
all his money when he was in a Buddhist monastery.
dangers of being in a Buddhist monastery, by
the way. Did he really? Yes, his manager Shanghai.
Stole his money? Yeah, so he had to go back on
tour, which turned out to be a great thing because
he made way more money on that tour than he did,
I think, in his whole life. Did he get a new
manager? Yeah, it was an old friend of his as
well. It was really a catastrophe. He got better
and better as he got old, kind of like Johnny
Cash, you know, because Cash got damn near transcendent
just before he died. He put out some songs like
The Man Comes Around that are just unbelievable.
He wrote a book on St. Paul, by the way. He did?
Yes, yes, he did. On St. Paul? Yes, yes, yes.
Yeah, yeah, so that's pretty interesting. So
Colin, when he came onto the stage, everybody
gave him a standing ovation, and then he... He
played his sets. And it was like a religious
experience, you know. And every, well, it was.
It was a religious experience in the most fundamental
sense. And everybody in the audience was there
in the same place at the same time doing the
same thing with him, you know. And you know what
that's like when you go to a great, well, that
can happen too. I'm sure it happens to you at
your comedy shows when the whole audience is
united and the stories are unrolling and everyone's
focused on it. It's not exactly the same thing.
It's similar. There's a hive mind. Well, it's
also the good comedians are right. They're like
musicians. They're right on the border between
order and chaos because the place of maximal
funny is when you're just about pushing it too
far. Right? You think, oh. Do I have to say this?
You know, do I have to say this? Like, yeah,
you have to say this. Oh, yeah, I'm going to
say it. And everyone cracks up and they crack
up, you know, and it blows apart their sterile
preconceptions. That's part of cracking up, you
know, when you laugh. And it's so cool because
it's the antidote to their totalitarianism. And
that's why you can tell anybody who goes after
a comedian. It's like, oh, yeah, I know who you
are. You're the king who can't stand the fool.
That's the tyrant. So you reveal yourself, same
as people who go after musicians or dancers.
Well, I think people are going after comedy for
a different thing today because they're going
after comedy for a literal representation of
what the words mean if you put them in print.
And that's nonsense. Yeah. That's not what a
comedian is doing. Well, they're doing that.
They're doing that because there are some things
they believe that can't be made fun of. Yeah,
but really what they're doing is just looking
for targets. They're playing a game. The rules
of the game have been established. Comedy violates
the rules of the game. Yeah, what are the rules?
Because comedy take those things. Well, there's
a lot of things you can't joke about. You can't
joke about. Sacred things. Yeah, there's protected
classes now. We all know who they are. We don't
even have to bring them up. Whether it's trans
people, gay people, people of color, Asian people,
whatever those things are. One thing you can
mock relentlessly is white people, specifically
white males. Well, they are pretty funny, you
know. Oh, sure. We're ridiculous. But there's
a funny pejorative that people will say about
a group of folks. They're primarily white males.
That's a pejorative. It's my audience. That's
what everyone says. Oh, you're talking to those
angry young white males. But isn't that funny
that that means something negative? It's not
funny. It's horrible. But it's a horrible generalization
because you're taking an enormous group of people
and you're looking at their ethnic background
and their gender and then you're dismissing them.
Well, for a while, you know, because people kept
coming and telling me that, you know, your audience
is only angry white, young white men. I thought
I kind of approached that wrong to begin with.
I mean, I knew my audience was primarily male,
as I suspect yours still is. But then I looked
at the YouTube stats and 70 % of people who listen
to YouTube were males. So the fact that 70 %
of my audience was male was not an anomaly. It
was just a consequence of the technology. What
do you think that is? Why are 70 % of the people
that watch YouTube male? Does that make any sense?
Women are more interested in fiction than nonfiction.
And men are... Opposite to that. So if you look
at book buying preferences, for example, women
tilt towards fiction and men tilt towards fiction.
And if you want to know why that is, it's because
the most reliable difference that psychologists
have ever found between men and women, the biggest
difference, is interest. So women are reliably
more interested in people and men are reliably
more interested in things. Now, there's still
overlap. It's one standard deviation, which is
a big difference. That isn't to say no women
are interested in things, because some are, and
no men are interested in people, because some
are. Like, I'm a man who's more interested in
people than things. That's why I'm a psychologist.
You know, I actually have a relatively feminine
personality structure, because I'm pretty high
in negative emotion, and I'm pretty high in agreeableness.
And that's the typical feminine structure. And
that's an interesting discussion to have, too,
because, you know, we have this idea in our culture
that you can be a woman born in a man's body.
And that's not true. But you can definitely be
a man with a feminine personality structure.
Like, 10 % of men are as feminine in their personality
as the average woman is. And vice versa. 10 %
of women are as masculine in their personality
as the average man is. Now, you can move those
boundaries around and say, well, it's 5 % and
40 or something. It doesn't matter. But the point
is there's plenty of men who are as feminine
in their personality as the average woman. That
doesn't mean they're in the wrong body. It just
means that men and women are more alike than
different, even though they are different, and
that there's huge range within both genders.
And we need to know this. So what do you think
is happening with trans people then? Well, there's
a lot of different kinds of trans people. Okay,
trans men. Or, excuse me, trans women, men to
female. Well, then I would say it depends on
what period of time you're asking that question
about. Right now, if you look at teenagers, for
example, who want to switch genders, 95 % of
them are unbearably confused. That's what's causing
that. And I think there's other reasons, too.
I think this is a conjecture. When the trans...
teenagers came after me when I opposed Bill C
-16 in Canada on compelled speech grounds. I
spent quite a bit of time watching them. I already
kind of knew about that fluid identity crowd.
So when I was at Harvard, piercing and tattooing
started to become a cultural rage. And I was
interested in, well, who's doing this? Because
I knew it was a practice that was limited to
criminal subtypes and outcasts. For a long time.
So, for example, if you worked in the circus,
you were likely to be tattooed. You know, and
you toured around the circus and that was a kind
of carny life. And it was an outsider life. And
if you were a prisoner, same thing. But then
all of a sudden it started to make its inroads
into the popular culture. So we studied a group
of early adopters of tattooing and piercing from
the perspective of personality. Like, who are
these people? And they were all highly creative
people. And creativity is a trait. And all people
who aren't creative, that's wrong. In fact, most
people aren't creative at all. And I can explain
that later, but they're not. We developed a scale
called the Creative Achievement Questionnaire,
which assesses lifetime contribution to 13 different
creative domains. And your scores would range
from zero, I have no training or talent in this
area, to, I think it was eight. I'm an internationally
recognized expert in this area, right? And so
70 % of people, if you sum their scores across
all 13 domains, scored zero. And I ask audiences,
like, how many portraits have you painted? Zero.
How many songs have you composed? Zero. How many
plays have you written? Zero. How many recipes
have you invented? Let me stop you. The tattooed
types, they were high in creativity. Okay. And
a lot of these people who are fluid in their
identity are actually high in trade openness.
And they do have fluid identities. And some of
them are feminine men and masculine women. So,
yeah. But that doesn't mean that surgery is the
cure for that. That does not mean that. Not at
all. Well, what do you think it means when someone
is so attracted to the idea that they were born
in the wrong body? It means so much. They're
so compelled that they're willing to go through
surgery to change. God, it means all sorts of
things. I knew a kid in Toronto who was on the
autistic spectrum and a lot of the people who
were manifesting serious. issues with gender
identity are on the autistic spectrum. This is
like Abigail Schreier's work and rapid onset
gender dysphoria amongst women. Yeah, well, that's
a different thing, the rapid onset. That's more
like, so part of the reason I objected to Bill
Seesaw 16 to begin with was because I knew full
well as a clinician that as soon as we messed
with fundamental sex categories and changed the
terminology, we would fatally confuse thousands
of young girls. I knew that because I knew the
literature on psychological contagion. And it
stretches back like 500 years, that literature,
300 years. It's all outlined in a book by Henri
Ellenberger called History of... History of...
What's the name of the book? History of Psychoanalytic
Ideas. It doesn't matter. It's Henri Ellenberger
and it's his main work if you want to look it
up. And so psychological contagions are very
common. And so one of them, for example, was
the satanic... ritual abuse accusations that
emerged in daycares in the 1980s. And that was
a consequence of women going into the workforce
en masse, leaving their children with strangers
and starting to have pathological fantasies about
it, especially if they were borderline schizophrenic.
And those fantasies propagated into the population.
So what does this have to do with creativity?
You were talking about creativity and people
that are... Well, okay, so you see people with
blue hair, the blue -haired crowd. Well, they're
the same people that were doing tattooing and
piercing, and they often are literally the same
people because they have piercings. It's like,
well, they have mutable identities. They're not
stable in their identities. They're creative.
Creative people, by definition, aren't stable
in their identities. That's what makes them creative.
Creativity is a high -risk, high -return strategy.
Your new idea is probably stupid and wrong, and
maybe it's fatal. But now and then it's unbelievably
successful. And also, now and then, our culture
would die without it. So we always have this
problem, because we have to maintain stability,
because otherwise everything degenerates into
chaos. But mere stability won't work because
the future is different from the past, like technically
different, different in a non -deterministic
way. It's actually different. And so then we
have to figure out, well, how do we modify our
memories or our traditions at a rate that enables
us to keep up with the culture? And the answer
to this is, in part, we let creative people play
multiple games on the fringe, and some of them
are radically successful, and then we copy them.
So you think that a lot of what's going on with
people that want to change their gender identity
is creativity? No, I don't think so. I know so.
You know so. Yeah, that's not all of it, but
that's definitely part of it. But there are for
sure a lot of people that transition, and there
has been work on this that shows that if they
didn't transition, they wanted to transition
at one point in time, and then they eventually
wound up becoming gay men. Yeah, that's definitely
the case. Males to females, right? Yeah, well,
it's confusing. Look, I mean... I also think,
by the way, that part of what we're seeing in
late adolescence with this insistence on the
primacy of felt identity is the reemergence of
suppressed fantasy play that should have taken
place at between, say, three and five. That's
been suppressed by... the imposition of technological
artifacts like television and phones, and by
the absence of free play among children who are
hyper -supervised. So the fantasy play is imperative
to develop your identity by trying out a bunch
of different patterns of behavior and ways to
be. Yes, so when my son was about two, his sister
was about three and had a little gaggle of friends,
and they used to dress him up like a fairy princess.
And this didn't happen for like years. It happened
for a couple of weeks, you know, and he was playing
along. And I went down there and I'm a Northern
Albertan, you know, and so the gender roles there
were fairly finely defined. And I was watching
this. I thought, is it really a good thing that
he's like got wings on a little fairy hat and
a wand and a dress? It's like, is that okay?
And I talked to Tammy about it. I said, the girls
are dressing Julian up like a princess. And it
kind of... I have qualms about it, but I'm not
sure what to do. Because he was having a good
time, and he was playing with the girls. What
qualms would you possibly have about that? Because
from my personal experience of having daughters,
they think it's funny to put me in a dress. It
is funny. Yeah, well, there was a dress that
my wife was throwing out, and my daughters made
me put it on. They forced me to, and they took
pictures of me. They thought it was hilarious.
Yeah, yeah, my daughter... decorated me up like
a woman one day in her makeup class. Right, so
what's wrong with that? Nothing, right? It's
just fun. Well, that's it. That's what I concluded.
You know, I thought, well... But why would you
worry about anything else other than it being
fun? Well, probably because I had... Why was
I worried about it? I suppose because I hoped
that his pathway towards adulthood would be...
Normal? Yeah, sure, sure. Normal biological male
progression to marriage and children. Yeah, yeah,
and so I saw this plague, but then I thought,
I only had qualms for like about two hours. I
went and thought about it. I thought, okay, what's
going on here? Well, he's playing with the girls.
Okay, should he play with girls? Yes, definitely
he should play with girls. Absolutely. Adult
males should play with women. Like, we should
be able to play. With people of the opposite
sex. So he's learning to play with the girls.
Good. Is he enjoying it? Yes. Are they bullying
him? No. Are the girls enjoying it? Yes. That's
all good. Okay, so what does it mean he's playing
at being a girl? Oh! He's trying to understand
what it means to be a girl. Well, how do you
understand that when you're three? Or maybe when
you're 50? You play at it. which means you allow
that pattern of being to inhabit you, and you
experiment with it. Now, a lot of older transgender
types, the late -onset types, they're playing.
They just don't know it. Now, there are often
people who have kind of a rigid identity, and
part of their escape from that rigid identity
is to develop some of the characteristics that
are typical of the opposite sex. They need it.
What is the term? There is a term. for a man
who derives a lot of sexual pleasure. He's heterosexual,
but he derives sexual... I think it's autogynephilia.
Yes, that's it. Yeah, but I think the sexual...
Fully explain that. Yeah, well, I don't think
it does. I think the reason they derive... Because
the question is, why do they derive sexual pleasure?
Finish the sentence. You're not finishing the
sentence. Explain what we're saying. Yeah, well,
they derive sexual pleasure. They would get turned
on by seeing themselves in the clothes of women.
Yes. Or feeling it. Yes. But I think the... the
sexual instinct is directing them towards personality
expansion. I look at it in Jungian terms. So
part of the process of personality expansion
in the deep psychoanalytic sense is first you're
a persona, or first you're nothing. Then you
develop a persona, which is a way of presenting
yourself in a socially acceptable way to the
world. And maybe you confuse yourself with your
persona. Now, you've had conversations with people
on your podcast who are stiff and you can't get
a dynamic conversation going. That's because
they're acting out their persona. You're not
really talking to them. You're talking to an
act that they've constructed. It's a puppet.
An act that they've constructed to make themselves
socially acceptable to the world. And sometimes,
maybe sometimes it's just anxiety. Yeah, sure.
It can be anxiety, too. But then often, under
anxious conditions, people will revert to their
persona because it's a well -rehearsed set of
routines and that they know is socially acceptable.
Okay, so for the Jungians, the first step outside
the persona was the shadow. Jungians being Carl
Jung. Carl Jung, followers of Carl Jung, or students
of better terminology, was discovery of the shadow.
Oh, I thought I was the good person here, but
it turns out that I've got... like some darkness.
And you often see this with, imagine you have
hyper -compassionate people who are dependent,
and they won't engage in conflict, so they're
always oppressed. And so then when you talk to
them, you find out they're really, really resentful,
and they have a lot of fantasies of revenge,
like a lot. And so then you work with them, and
you think, okay, you have something to say and
do here. You've got some harsh words to say,
maybe to your partner. You've got some things
to say to your boss. You've got to spine up and
say it. And that's part of incorporating that,
especially aggression. So agreeable people, compassionate
people, don't like aggression. But that's like
not liking sex. It's dangerous. But it's necessary.
And so you want to integrate it. And if you don't,
it has its own life. You know, you see people
all the time who, they're so nice. You can't
even be in the same room with them. They're that
nice. But they're resentful and passive -aggressive.
They take it out in all sorts of ways, partly
because they're always unhappy. They're often
moralistically judgmental because they're not
saying what they have to say. They've got to
integrate that shadow. So that was part of it.
And the shadow consists of, in part, all the
things about you that you've deemed morally unacceptable
and failed to develop. And so sometimes that's
aggression, often. Sometimes it's sexuality.
And so it'll manifest itself in impulsive, aggressive
sexuality, say under conditions of alcohol intoxication
when it leaks out. Aggressive, meaning like rough
sex? Yeah, forced. Forced. Yeah, yeah. Definitely.
Forced. So you mean like rape? Well, or it doesn't
have to go all the way to rape. It can be like
over -aggressive, sexual. compulsion in a dating
situation. So does that account for certain men
that like violence in their sex? Like they like
abuse in their sex? Yes. Because there's a subset
of men that like to hit women during sex. And
a lot of them... turn out to be these like kind
of male feminist types, which is really strange.
No, it's not. But it's really strange on the
outside. Definitely. It's strange to those men
too, because it's often, it's very unsettling
for them to see, you know, in the cloud of their
niceness and their harmlessness, this deep, dark.
Desire making itself manifest. Do you remember
that case of that Canadian broadcaster? Who was
this guy who was like really talks like this?
Very calm and then a bunch of women came out
the day to them said he beat the shit out of
them And he would want to beat them up during
sex. Mm -hmm, like really beat them up punch
them in the face Yeah, well, you know, it's an
open question how much assertiveness there should
be in sex and that The answer is zero. No, I'm
not saying in the least that that's acceptable.
Let me be absolutely clear here. That's not acceptable
at all. That's not assertiveness. No, it's not.
It's repressed. It's repressed. It's what's repressed.
There's no clearer way of saying it. It's like,
look, many men are terrified of women. Many.
And so that terror might manifest itself even
in a relationship. in the inability to ever let
the partner know what they really want. They're
terrified for what reason? Because of rejection?
Yeah. And then the feelings of inadequacy that
produces, often which are necessary. They're
necessary. Right. I was trying to explain this
to a friend once where we had a friend of ours
who had developed what seemed to be like a real
hate for women. And he wasn't an attractive guy.
And so we're having this conversation. And I
said, imagine if all of your interactions with
women hurt your feelings. And you're not a very
thoughtful and introspective person. You would
immediately associate women with negative feelings
and you'd be angry about them. And that's what's
happening to that guy. He got a bad roll of the
dice in terms of his facial features and his
genes. It just wasn't that good. And so girls
were not interested in him. So he had developed
this anger. And it was shocking. Welcome to the
human race. Well, that's incels, right? Yeah.
Well, it's not even incels. It's like, okay,
so I'll finish one thought because we were talking
about transsexualism. So the second stage of
development in the Jungian sense is the integration
of counter -sexual possibilities. So I just watched
Joachim Phoenix in Joker. And he's a very charismatic
actor. And I was thinking, oh, God, because he
carried that whole movie on single handedly.
It's a dark, dark movie. And it has to do with
resentment. This man who was forced to be nice
by his mother, you know, who turns out to be
absolutely crazy and abused him like mad when
he was a kid. And then he becomes this role model
for the dissemination of complete catastrophe
into the entire society. It's a story of Cain
in part. But Phoenix really carries that. And
part of the reason that he does that is because
he creates a compelling character who's sympathetic.
Like he can be sympathetic to him because he
really did have. a hard life like really hard
but phoenix is an extraordinarily charismatic
person partly because he's so unbelievably he's
masculine in his features and carved but he's
so graceful every single thing he does in the
entire movie is a dance like he's conscious of
every single movement he makes every turn of
his head is It's dance -like, and you can't take
your eyes off it. And a lot of stellar performers
had that ability to integrate, male performers
had that ability to integrate that feminine grace
into their masculine character. You saw that
with Bowie, David Bowie. You saw it with Mick
Jagger. They're good examples. A lot of those
70s glam rockers were gender benders, long hair,
a lot of flashy outfits. And they did show, and
they weren't exactly androgynous. That's not
the right way to think about it. is they manifested
a higher -order integration of masculine and
feminine, and that made them charismatic. That's
Prince. He's the best example of that. Prince,
sure, sure, sure, sure. And so that's high -order
integration. And I would say that part of the
compulsion between adult -onset transsexuality
of the autogynephalic type is a consequence of
the sexual instinct manifesting itself as a guide
to the integration of... of personality across
the sex divide. I'm sure you're familiar with
Douglas Murray's work. Yes, and Murray, who's
very funny, who I like very much, and who's one
of the most courageous people I've ever met.
Yeah, he's brilliant. And he had an amazing point
about... civilizations collapsing and that when
they start collapsing, they become obsessed with
gender. And he was saying that you could trace
it back to the ancient Romans, the Greeks. Yeah,
Camille Pellia has made much of that. I think
probably it's not so much an obsession with gender,
it's a disintegration of categories as a precursor.
So it's a marker for if categories dissolve,
especially fundamental ones. The culture is dissolving
because the culture is a structure of category.
That's what it is. So in fact, culture is a structure
of category that we all share. So we see things
the same way. Well, that's why we can talk. I
mean, not exactly the same way because then we'd
have nothing to talk about. But roughly speaking,
we have a bedrock of agreement. That's the Bible,
by the way. So I just walked through the Museum
of the Bible in Washington. That was very cool.
It's a very cool museum. So the structure, that's
what the Bible provides. Yeah, that's what I
figured out. I just figured this out this week.
So it was a cool thing to walk through because
it's chronological. They have one floor, which
is the history of the Bible. But it's not exactly
that. It's really what it is, is the history
of the book. Now, in many ways, the first book
was the Bible. I mean, literally. Because at
one point there was only one book, as far as
our Western culture is concerned. There was one
book. And for a while, literally, there was only
one book. And that book was the Bible. And then
before it was the Bible, it was scrolls and it
was writings on papyrus. But we were starting
to aggregate written text together. And it went
through all sorts of technological transformations.
And then it became... books that everybody could
buy, the book everybody could buy. And the first
one of those was the Bible. And then it became
all sorts of books that everybody could buy.
But all those books, in some sense, emerged out
of that underlying book. And that book itself,
the Bible isn't a book, it's a library. It's
a collection of books. And so what I figured
out was, partly because I was talking to my brother
-in -law, Jim Keller, who's the world's greatest
chip. and has now designed a chip that's as powerful
as the human brain, which is optimized for artificial
intelligence learning, by the way. And so I talked
to him about that. He said, you heard of the
Internet? I said, yeah, Jim, I've heard of the
Internet. He said, this is way more revolutionary
than that. So in any case, we were talking about
meaning in text because we were talking about
translation and the problem of understanding
text. And Jim said, The meaning of words is coded
in the relationship of the words to one another.
And the postmodernists make that case, that all
meaning is derived from the relationship between
words. That's wrong, because, well, what about
rage? That's not words. And what about moving
your hand? That's not words. So it's wrong, but
part of it's right, because the meaning we derive
from the verbal domain is encoded in the relationship
between words. So now then you think, well, let's
think about the relationship between words. Well,
some words are dependent on other words. Some
ideas are dependent on other ideas. The more
ideas are dependent on a given idea, the more
fundamental that idea is. That's a definition
of fundamental. So now imagine you have an aggregation
of texts in a civilization. You say, which are
the fundamental texts? And the answer is, the
texts upon which most other texts depend. And
so you'd put Shakespeare way in there in English
because so many texts are dependent on Shakespeare's
literary revelations. And Milton would be in
that category, and Dante would be in that category,
at least in translation. Fundamental authors,
part of the Western canon, not because of the
arbitrary dictates of power, but because those
texts influenced more other texts. And then you
think about that as a hierarchy, okay, with the
Bible at its base, which is certainly the case.
Now, imagine that's the entire corpus of linguistic
production, all things considered. Now, how do
you understand that? Like, literally, how do
you understand that? The answer is, you sample
it by reading and listening to stories and listening
to people talk. You sample that whole domain,
you build a low -resolution representation of
that inside you, and then you listen and see
through that. And so it isn't that the Bible
is true. It's that the Bible is the precondition
for the manifestation of truth, which makes it
way more true than just true. It's a whole different
kind of true. And I think this is not only literally
the case. Factually, I think it can't be any
other way. It's the only way we can solve the
problem of perception. You said the precondition
of the manifestation of truth? Yeah. What do
you mean by that? How do you know when what you
and I are saying is true? Well, it depends on
what we're saying. Not exactly. You know this,
Joe. The fact that you're so popular, this is
a mystery. And I've been tweeting about it while
people have been attacking you. Why is Joe Rogan
so popular? He's a gateway to the alt -right.
It's like, no, he's a psychedelic hippie. That's
a stupid hypothesis. That's wrong. Well, he's
a propagandist. It's like, no. Joe is an honest
man. And he actually says what he believes to
be true. But let's think about that. Because
that isn't exactly what you do. You follow the
conversation and you listen. And you spontaneously
manifest words that indicate your reaction. And
it isn't the words themselves exactly that are
true, because you might be wrong and you might
be right, right? I mean, what do you know or
what I know? We're going to be wrong a bunch
during this conversation. The process that we're
manifesting in the discovery of truth and untruth,
that's not wrong. That's exactly right. And you
know when we're doing it because it's so engaging.
The process that we're manifesting. You bet.
Meaning? The mutual exploration of structures
of truth through dialogue. In good faith. In
good faith. In good faith. That's the most important
thing. Yes. And then we could ask, well, what
does in good faith mean? Okay, so first of all,
I can trust you. And that's been my experience.
You've never played games with me. We disagree.
That's fun. I can trust you. You don't play games.
I can talk to you. You listen and you say things.
We have a conversation. It's real. It's fun.
We fall into it. The time flies by, right? That's
a cool thing. that the burden of temporal mortality
lifts in the face of genuine dialogue. You think,
well, there's a marker for paradisal meaning.
It's like a bit of transcendence of death right
there and then. You think, no, it's not. It's
like, yeah, yeah, you go for five years without
a meaningful conversation and see if you're dead.
Because if you're not, you're sure going to want
to be. Well, it's akin to isolation. Hmm. I mean,
you can be around people but not have a good
conversation and you might as well be isolated.
You are isolated. Yeah, you are. In the prison
of your own thoughts. That's the problem if you
do, like, if you are stuck somewhere where the
only conversation that's available is with dull
people. Like, if you have a job and the people
at the job are like your friend who was on cocaine
and alcohol and wound up dying from it. Like,
those kinds of people, if you're only around
them, it can severely limit. the way you express
yourself and the way you see the world and the
amount of stimulation you get out of interacting
with people. So it'll inhibit your intellectual
development because you won't be interested in
expanding ideas and you may look to escape. It
inhibits not just your intellectual development
but the entire unfolding of your existence. One
of the things that I hope to talk to people about
a lot about on this tour is the idea that there's,
I did a series on Genesis that became quite popular,
and one of the stories I analyzed was the story
of Abraham's very cool story, because Abraham's
like 80 years old, living in his father's tent,
talk about failure to launch, and God shows up
one day and says, you have to leave everything
you know and journey out into the unknown. And
you think, well, what is that? Well, that's the
call to adventure. That's what it is. And so,
and what happens to Abraham is it's a bloody
catastrophe. Like, the first thing he runs into
is a war, and then he goes into a totalitarian
state, Egypt, and they try to steal his wife,
and it's like, man, he's thinking, things are
pretty good in that tent. But, well, he goes
on this tremendous adventure, and then he's the
forefather of, you know... biblically speaking,
half the people on the planet. He has this tremendous
adventure. Think, well, what do you set against
the suffering of your life? Well, the adventure
of your life. That's what you set against it.
It's not safety. Forget about that. There's no
safety for mortals. That's for sure. And besides,
safety? That's what you want? You don't want
that. You want adventure. So then the question
is, where's adventure to be found? In exploitation.
Well, try it and see. Hell is to be found in
exploitation. How about truth? Who thinks adventure
is to be found in exploitation? Well, that's
kind of the claim that everything's about power.
Everything's motivated by power. Is that really
what people say, though? Who says that? All the
postmodernists all say that. That's such a silly
expression. Yeah, but that is what they say.
What about love? Is love motivated by power?
Yes. That's why they distrust love. Is art motivated
by power? Yes. It's the mouthpiece of political
ideology. When you're making paintings, that's
motivated by power? Yes, because you want to
climb up the socioeconomic status hierarchy.
By painting? Play the stock market. That's ridiculous.
You're just not very good at it. Okay, what about
music? Same thing. Motivated by power. You bet.
Everything's motivated by power. Well, that was
the answer that came out of France in the 1970s,
and that was the answer that all the universities
accepted. Why do you think the whole cultural
critique is patriarchal oppression? Don't you
think that that is done a lot by people that
have not taken those chances, that diminishing
of effort by calling a painter or a musician
and saying that those people are motivated by
power? These are from career intellectuals who
don't venture outside of the universities. They
don't venture outside the prisons of their own
imagination. Or the echo chambers that exist.
Yeah, yeah. No, I think a tremendous amount of
it. I mean, this was Nietzsche's observation
and Orwell's too. A lot of that's motivated by
resentment. Tremendous amount of it. I think
that's 100 % true. And I think we should be very
careful people aren't charitable. Very careful
people aren't nice. And people that, I mean,
there's people that make a career. Just insulting
and shitting on people all the time. And they
never can look at things from that person's perspective.
Well, that is the expression of power then. Yes.
Yeah, I always think you think everything's about
power. It's like that's a confession, buddy.
The problem with that is it also attacks your
own perceptions of yourself. Yes. Because you
know who you are. You know what you're doing.
You know, if you're just doing that. Yeah, well,
what attitude do you have to yourself if you
believe the only... true expression of human
existence is to be found in the will to power.
It's crazy. It's like, okay, you're a psychopath.
Right. And even more when you're pretending not
to be. Exactly. God, a dismal viewpoint. What
about friendship? Like, is that power too? It's
all manipulation. That's great. That's a person
who's never hung out with good buddies. Yeah,
that's for sure. Ridiculous. Yeah, yeah. The
best part of... is laughing and joking around
with each other. Yeah, that's for sure. That's
the play, for sure, absolutely. It's the best
part. Yeah, well, so you know, if you're in a
humorless group, what's going on. But that's
the same thing as killing the comedians. It's
the same thing. That is an issue with people
without humor. It is a problem. Because if they're
not capable of generating it themselves, they
resent it, for sure. Well, that's another reason
why I trust you. I've watched your comedy specials.
It's like, oh yeah, he's funny. He's actually
funny. Like, seriously funny. Like, seriously
funny. Because you go very dark places very successfully.
And it's very funny to watch. It's like, is he
really going to do that? Well, thank you. Your
Kardashian devil is like, that's one of the funniest
things I've ever seen. And it's dark. You know,
that's a good indication of that investigation
of the shadows, right? You went way in there.
What spirit is possessing this manifestation?
Satanic spirit crouching on a bedpost. So funny.
I couldn't believe you did it. It's really hilarious.
Well, I was trying to figure out a way to attack
a sacred cow. I know, and you did it. You didn't
get canceled for it either, which is amazing.
I attacked myself. Yeah. Far more than I attacked
that. Yeah, well, that's what I did. That's also
the sign of someone who's got their sense of
humor. That's one of the things I really like
about English comedians in particular. The English
are really good at making fun of themselves.
Yes. And the Monty Python troupe was particularly
good at that. Yeah, they were brilliant at it.
Well, it's the people who don't like comedy.
I mean, you cannot like comedy, but that means
you don't like good conversation. That means
you don't like camaraderie or you're incapable
of it. And there are some people that are brilliant
people that don't like comedy. They don't like
conversation. They're brilliant at very specific,
maybe non -social things. And maybe they're brilliant
at engineering or maybe they're brilliant at
mathematics or maybe they're brilliant at something
that doesn't require. The kind of back and forth
play. Yeah. The play. They can't play. Yeah.
That's so important. My favorite people to hang
out with are all funny. Absolutely. Yeah. My
favorite friends. I'm going to New York. So I'm
going on a 40 city tour, which is going to be,
I hope, playful and fun, you know, as well as
serious because we're trying to. maintain a spirit
of play while we undertake it. That's part of
the goal. And I'm inviting some old friends from
high school to join me in New York. And they
were this group of people that I knew who were
competitive comedians, essentially. And all we
ever did when we hung out together, all of the
status jockeying was all... Who's the funniest?
Who can say the most outrageous thing? And take
it, too. Yes. Oh, you have to take it. Oh, we
take it. So that's so fun. And I missed that.
I found it was really characteristic, that culture
of healthy, working -class groups, affiliative
groups. And as I sort of climbed the intellectual
ladder, I found a lot of that fell away. It does.
And I missed it a lot. You know who's really
good at it? Sam Harris. Sam Harris's lectures
and his debates and his conversation, one of
the things that really highlights them is his
humor. Like, he has a wonderful way of making
things seem really silly with jokes. And I talked
to him about it once. Like, there was one that
I watched that I laughed really hard. And I called
him up. I go, hey, dude. I go, you could be a
comedian. Like, a real, legit comedian. Like,
your takes on things are very funny. Like, they're
funny and they're clever. Murray's like that,
too. They're sneaky. Douglas, yes. Yeah, he's
got a great sense of humor, man. Brilliant people
are oftentimes, they're capable of anything.
And Sam, 100 % could be a stand -up comedian.
I was walking through New York Times Square with
Douglas Murray about a month ago. And we had
gone to an opera and we were on the way to this
unbelievably fun Russian bar. And we were walking
through Times Square. And then in Times Square,
there's these people dressed up like superheroes,
eh? And kids that have been hired to do this.
And Spider -Man ran up to me and he said, are
you Jordan Peterson? And I said, are you Spider
-Man? And that was pretty damn funny. And then
Douglas Murray, we were walking by and Douglas
Murray said, I wish he would have asked me if
I was Douglas Murray. It was ridiculously funny.
He's very, very witty. You and Douglas Murray
drinking at a Russian bar must have been awesome.
It was really good. We had a blast in New York.
I'm sure. It was ridiculously funny. He's got
this sparkling sense of humor that goes along
with his insane courage. He's very courageous.
I've met a lot of people in the last five years,
and a lot of them have been the subject of unbelievably
vicious attacks. Out of that, I've seen emerge
some unbelievably brave people like Brett Weinstein,
for example, and his wife, Heather. They're unbelievably
brave. And Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she's like that.
But Murray is like, Murray, that guy's got a
spine of steel. He certainly does. And he backs
it up with consideration and thought. Like he's
thought these things through. He's not being
flippant. He's not talking off the cuff. He knows
what he's saying. And, you know, he shuts people
down. a pretty beautiful way. So I went to Cambridge
and Oxford in December after I had been disinvited.
And that's a whole interesting story in and of
itself because there's a real free speech movement
developed at Cambridge and centered on the school
of divinity. That's so interesting. Yeah. So
it's really starting to manifest itself in all
sorts of fascinating ways. But I tested out some
of the ideas that I talked to you about today,
about the idea that we look at the world through
a... We have to look at the world through an
ethical structure, not an objective structure.
A literary structure, in fact. And I developed
a little bit more when I was talking to you today,
because I hadn't realized at that point that
this literary structure was composed in part
of the relationship between foundational texts,
and that the Bible was by definition at the bottom
of that. It has to be, technically, because I'll
go back to that for a minute, because imagine
that as we moved forward through time, at one
point, we had no books at all. We had no writing.
Well, then the question might be, well, what
did we write down? And the answer is, well, stories.
Well, what are stories? Well, they're descriptions
of people moving through time and space doing
things. Now, that isn't all they are because
they can be boring. So they're interesting stories
about, they're interesting descriptions of people
moving through time and space. Those are the
ones that stick. You bet. Well, no one will listen
to them otherwise or write them. They have to
be interesting. So that means that our sense
of meaning orients us to certain types of stories.
Well, those are the ones that get written down
and remembered. And so we aggregated those stories
across time. Those are our first basic documents.
We're like a self -description. What are we doing?
Well, here's what interesting people are doing.
Well, how do we know? Well, because we're interested
in them. And so then you think, well, what's
manifesting itself? And that's that spirit of
engagement. And so there's also a religious twist
in this. And so you and I are engaging in dialogue.
That's dia logos, right? So it's the manifestation
of the logos duly. And what is that? Well, it's
the redemptive. It's redemption in action. That's
what it is. I mean, technically, that's what
it is. So imagine this. You've got a bunch of
worn -out ideas, and they're blinding you. And
I've got a bunch of worn -out ideas, and they're
blinding me. And if we stumble forward in our
blindness, we will fall into a pit. So what do
we do about that? Well, I talk to you about what
you think, and I listen, because, man, Maybe
you know something that I don't, that I need
to know. Yes. Well, so how is that not a redemptive
process? Obviously it is. And what's its signal?
Because it redeems you from your own totalitarian
idiocy and the hell that leads to. You just told
me that. You said, what happens if you're isolated
for five years? I think it's more as expansive
than redemptive. That's fine. I think of it more
in terms, I mean, that's my personal experience
in doing this podcast, which is... It's not just
expansive, though. I agree with you, it's expansive.
But it's not just that, because while you're
expanding, you're also discarding, right? Yes.
Yeah, so that's part of it that makes it redemptive,
right? And that's, there's a reason that in Revelation,
Christ comes back with his sword to judge the
elect and the damned. There's a reason for that,
because that's a symbol of the operation of the
Logos. And the Logos, even in dialogue, says,
that's an interesting point. We'll keep that.
Let's focus on that. Well, we can ignore that.
We can get rid of that. We can junk that. And
it's this constant, part of it's mercy, because
let's keep what's good, because we want everyone
to flourish. But part of it's judgment. That's
the sword. It's like, no. No. Not this. And you
get rid of most things, right? You can't keep
most things. You have to put them aside. Well,
that's that. There's an old idea that Jung elaborated
on that God rules with two hands, mercy and justice.
And the mercy is, well, let's let everyone flourish
and welcome people and forgive them, all of that.
But justice is more, yeah, but let's do the right
thing and leave what's wrong behind. And that
requires judgment, judiciousness, I talked to
Jimmy Carr about how he prepared for his comedy
tour. And maybe you do exactly the same thing.
And he said, stand -up comedy is the most dialogical
of artistic enterprises. And I thought, well,
what do you mean? Because you're just talking
like I do on lectures. I'm listening to the audience
all the time. Just making contact with them,
watching how they're reacting. I'm listening.
Carr said, well, I do 100 shows before I go out
on tour and I try out new material. So he generates
new material, a lot of it. That's the creativity
part. Then he goes and tries it out in audiences.
And they either laugh or they don't. And because
he's brave and listens, he notices when he's
not funny, and he stops being not funny. And
so the audience just tells him what's funny,
and then he collects that across a hundred instances.
And then that's funny and verified by the audience,
and he goes out and tells those jokes. And so
that's dialogical and redemptive as well. It's
like... What jokes need to be told? Well, our
culture has some sacred cows. Those are idols.
The idols that the Israelites worshipped in the
desert. The golden calf. Sacred cows. They need
to be punctured. Why? Because they're impeding
our progress. Well, how do we puncture them?
Well, one way is we show that we can transcend
them. And the Canadians are doing that all the
time. Here's something we can't laugh about.
Let's laugh about it. Everybody breaks down.
Everybody cracks up. You know, it's so cool when
people laugh, they can't fight. I used to go
work out with Jim Keller, this chip designer,
and we did this for years. And one of our jokes
was, you know, we'd be striving to bench press
whatever we were managing at the time, 175 pounds,
like it's really straining. And then we'd crack
a joke. And that was always funny. We spotted
him, of course, because as soon as you laugh,
all your muscular tension disappears. Right.
So that's so cool, Ace. When you laugh, you can't
fight. You can't fight when you're laughing.
So how much laughing should we be doing? It depends
on how much fighting we want to do. And maybe
if we didn't want to do any fighting, we'd be
laughing all the time. And that's how you said
that cements your group of comrades together.
Well, you're not fighting. What are you doing
instead? Playing. Yeah. Well, that's what we
need to do, man, is we need to play. All of us.
Yeah, well, I agree with that. For sure. There's
a thing going on with stand -up where you're
working with the crowd, too. It's really interesting.
Tell me about it. I'll have a bit, and I'll have
the bit fully structured. I'll write it out,
and then I try to go on stage. On stage, I'm
informed by the feeling that I have interacting
with the crowd to take it to a different place.
to take the subject to a different place, to
abandon parts of it that just don't feel organic
to me. And you learn through the crowd that you
can't just write. Sometimes you can. Sometimes
jokes come out in full force. There's some jokes
that I wrote that I literally wrote them down
and then I did them on stage the exact way that
I wrote them down. And they always stayed that
way. I don't know why. But some of them, they
don't come that way. They come like as... They
come like as a thing that you have to piece together.
Like you have part, like here you have some material.
You have some raw material. And I guarantee you
this could be a house. But you're going to have
to figure out what the layout is. That's what
happens when I'm lecturing. Because I never give
the same lecture twice. And I don't use notes.
But I do the same thing. I have a whole, I think
about it like jazz improvisation. I have a whole
bunch of stories that I know. And I have a whole
bunch of questions that I've investigated. And
what I try to do in a lecture, and that's what
I do on the tour, is I have a question that I
haven't investigated to my satisfaction. Then
I sit backstage and I think, okay, what question
am I investigating? It has to be one I actually
want to investigate. It can't be a lie. This
is a good hint for people who want to write essays.
Don't write an essay about a question that you
don't want an answer to, because that's a lie.
And it'll be dull, and you'll hate it, and you'll
hate writing, and you'll get a bad grade, and
you'll get cynical, and you'll drop out. It's
not good. So you've got to be a real question.
So, okay, this is a question. I think it's worthy
of pursuit. I'd like to get farther with it.
Okay, here's... A theory I know about that we
could explore it with. Here's another one. Here's
some examples of that that make good stories.
Here's another place I could go to investigate
that. So I have that in my mind. And then I go
out and I'm watching. I always watch single people
in the audience. One at a time. The lights kind
of interfere with that. Because I like to be
able to see the people at the back. But I can't.
So I watch the front people. And I see, is this
landing? Like, are the lights going on? Because
you can tell. I think the thing that's most similar
to what I'm doing in my book tour is stand -up
comedy. So you can tell if it's landing, people
are nodding, and they're not fidgeting, and the
crowd isn't rustling. They're all focused, and
some of them are looking like this. And then
you see someone who's kind of nodding off, and
if there's a lot of them, that's a problem. But
if it's one guy, you don't look at him. Look
at someone else. Maybe he had a bad day. You
don't take that personally. And then the crowd,
you said, informs you. And inform is really an
interesting term. Information. So now you're
looking at the crowd and you're looking at their
eyes in particular and their face. And their
eyes tell you what they're focused on, so what
they think is important. And their face tells
you how they're reacting. And then you glance
around the crowd and then you get a sense of
the whole crowd and you map that onto your body.
And that gives rise to a set of intuitions that
allows you to communicate because otherwise you
couldn't communicate. And that's listening, although
you're doing it with your eyes, but you're still
listening. And that does inform this dance, and
that's partly also why people love stand -up
comedy. That's partly why they like my lectures,
is because they don't know what's going to happen,
and neither do I, and it could fail at any moment.
Have you had lectures that failed spectacularly?
No, but I've certainly had ones, oh, I certainly
have felt that it might, because I'll go out
on, my thought tends to be quite tangential,
because I try to link lots of things together,
so then I'll go way out on a limb, It's like
I'm addressing this question. Idea, idea, idea,
idea, idea, idea. Uh -oh. I'm away from the tree
and I don't know how to get back. Right. And
then sometimes that'll happen mid -lecture and
I think, then I get self -conscious. Then I forget
everything I'm talking about. And then that can
be real awkward. Yeah. But luckily, generally,
so far, knock wood, if I pause, I can recreate
the argument. And then I can figure out where
I was headed. And then I can think, oh, yes,
that's why I made that point. And then I can
go back. And people like that. You know, one
of the things comedians often do is they'll tell
a joke early in the set. And then quite a bit
later in the set, they'll reintroduce the joke.
It's a callback. Callback. Callback. Yeah, I
do callbacks all the time in my lectures. And
people love that. Yeah, yeah. Well, people love
that because it shows them. That they followed
along. Yeah. And that we're in the same place.
Right. And they love that. They love that. And
it's just as satisfying as a punchline. Yes.
And it is a punchline in some sense. It's like,
all this is related to this. Yes. Click. Yeah.
Fun. You can see lights going all the time in
the crowd. It's such fun. Yeah. People love that.
Yeah. Well, and no wonder it puts them in the
zone. So here's a cool thing. Vygotsky, Russian
psychologist, studied the acquisition of language
in children. So he thought, how do children learn
to speak? Because no one teaches them. They just
learn. It's a weird thing. Even very intellectually
impaired human beings learn to talk. It's really
deeply embedded in us. So he looked at how parents
talk to their children while they were developing
language. And he found that parents talk to children
at a level that slightly exceeds their current
level of comprehension. And they do that without
knowing they're doing it. And so then you think,
well, what are you doing? Think what you're doing.
You've got the child and he knows some things.
But he doesn't know enough. But you don't want
to punish him and exclude him because he doesn't
know enough. But you don't want to leave him
undeveloped. So you speak to him so he almost
catches on. And that way he gets something, but
there's a horizon, right? And the horizon keeps
moving. And so the child's right at that edge.
Vygotsky called that the zone of proximal development.
That's the zone. That's the term. So when you're
in the zone, which you love to be in, and you
know when you're in it, and so does the audience,
so does everybody, they're in the zone, man.
Athletes are in the zone. Everyone's like, oh
my God, they're in the zone. Isn't that cool?
It's like, yeah. It's the precondition for cool.
It's like everything. I think what's going on
with comedy, at least I can speak to that. I've
never really done any lectures. But with comedy,
what's happening is it's kind of a mass hypnosis.
And the audience is trusting you with their thoughts.
If your thoughts are clean enough, meaning if
they're precise enough that someone can follow
you with wonder. Like not knowing where you're
going with it. It can't be too obvious. One of
the worst things a comic can do is have too many
words to set up a premise and to set up a punchline
because then it allows the person to formulate
their own punchline. And oftentimes they come
with the same punchline. A little sooner. Right.
Because if a person is going to write, if that
person is going to use too many words to describe
something, oftentimes they're unskilled. So their
punchline will also be obvious. And it's a real
problem. But that same punchline, even though
it's obvious, would be effective if you hit it
with an economy of words. So that wonder is really
an interesting thing. So most of the things around
us we don't attend to. And that's because there's
an infinite number of things around us. Well,
except maybe if we're on psychedelics, in which
case we attend to everything. Everything all
at once. Yeah, and that's too much. And everyone
says, oh, that was too much. It's like, yeah,
that is literally the definition of too much.
And we know why. I never feel like it's too much.
Well, that's good. Never? No. No, I feel like
I can't handle it at the moment. Okay, okay,
that's fine. I'll settle for that. Not even that
I can't handle it. I can't categorize everything.
Right. Like it's overwhelming in its possibilities.
Yeah. But one of the things that I love the most
about psychedelics is that it informs me of that
just by existing. It informs me that all of my
notions of reality itself are bullshit. They're
all bullshit. And I live in this sort of confined.
this this restrained narrow carved pathway world
because that's where i live all the time but
then sufficient yeah and then but then you have
a psychedelic experience and it just boom so
that's gone that wonder that you described that's
like a fractional psychedelic experience so you
say well they entrust you with their wonder it's
like yes they do so so when we're sitting in
this room most of the things that are going on
around us, we're not attending to. So basically,
we perceive them as equivalent to zero. So that's
kind of interesting because everything around
us is infinitely remarkable. And yet, we perceive
everything as if it's zero. Now, the reason we
do that is so that we can use our limited attention
on a few things. Yes. So it's necessary, but
it's also blinding. When you start to wonder
about something, what you're actually doing when
you wonder about it is freeing your perception
from the constraints of memory. And that's a
place of dancing. It's a place where memory itself
is updated. And if you trust someone and you
express that sense of wonder in the confines
of that trust, then you are in fact participating
in the process that reveals the underlying complexity
of the world to you. And then does literally
inform you. And you feel that. I've been very
interested technically in the instinct of meaning.
Because what is meaning? And is it illusory?
Because that's the fundamental question in some
sense. It isn't even, is suffering real? It's,
is the meaning that keeps suffering at bay, is
that real? That's a more fundamental question.
And the answer to that is, it's not only real,
it is the most real thing. And you have an instinct
that signals its presence to you. And part of
that manifests itself as wonder. It's the openness
to transformation. Because it isn't even the
new ideas that are redeeming. It's the process
of continually opening yourself up to the transformation
of new ideas. And that's signaled by wonder.
When you're talking about ignoring all the things
around you, it made me think about sensory deprivation
tanks. I don't know if we've ever discussed this
before. No, I don't think so. Have you ever done
that? Yes. What did you think? Well, I thought
a bunch of the things that we just talked about.
You know, what happens is that in a sensory deprivation
tank, you become increasingly sensitive to less
and less because there's almost nothing going
on. the threshold for perception, you get more
and more and more sensitive as you're trying
to pick up signal where there's no signal. And
that can open these gates of imagination, for
example. You know, you know this already, because
to some degree, imagine you want to go figure
something out. You usually go somewhere where
you can be by yourself. You're not flooded by...
sensory information. Maybe you go for a walk,
maybe you go sit on your bed. You kind of shield
yourself from outside input. And then by concentrating,
you open yourself up to this internal revelation
that's otherwise blotted out by the external
world. And that really happens to a huge degree
in the sensory deprivation tank, or can. And
I think that is akin in many ways to, and people
have made this case many times, is that it's
analogous to a psychedelic experience. And I
think that's technically true. It certainly is
because if that experience was achievable through
a psychedelic, I think it'd be a very popular
psychedelic. If the experience of having no sensory
input and being able to be alone with your thoughts,
like completely without the influence of even
gravity on your body and a seat or the floor
on your feet, you don't feel any of it. Yeah,
you start to get... Because you've eliminated
all that external stimulation, you allow yourself
to become aware of things happening that would
otherwise be in the background. Jung believed,
for example, as Carl Jung, that we're always
dreaming. Always. We just don't perceive it because
the outer world blots it out. And there's definitely
truth in that. So daydreaming, fantasy... Well,
even... It's even deeper than that because, look,
there's a thread of meaning that guides this
conversation. and neither of us know what it
is. We know when it manifests itself, because
we get interested, right? Oh, that's interesting,
and then, you know, I say something, you think
it's interesting, and you nail it with a bunch
of words, and then I pick up some of the words,
and I think that's interesting, and I nail it
with a bunch of words, but there's this thread,
it's the golden thread, that leads you out of
Ariadne's maze, by the way, and that's part of
the redemptive process, is by following that,
manifestation of spontaneous interest, truthfully,
we participate in this process that revitalizes
our perceptions. And that's technically true.
That's what's happening. And then what's even
more cool than that is that there's nothing we
can experience that we would rather do than that
if it's happening intensely. And that's because
that is the best thing we can do. That's the
logos. That's the logos. By definition. When
you have done sensory deprivation experiences,
how many have you ever done? About six. Six of
them? Yeah. Recent? No, it's been 10 years probably.
Do you think you would benefit from that? It
would depend on how I did it. Conceivably. Why
haven't you tried to incorporate that into your
life? I have other things I do that are probably...
partial substitutes for it or reasonable substitute.
I do Kundalini yoga in the morning. Oh, do you?
With my wife. I have for 20 years, not every
day, but I'd say a third of the time and often
for months on end. And so, and I've learned what
that means. So, you know, when you do those yoga
poses, that's not yoga. That's training for yoga.
It's like, imagine that you go to a dance studio
and they teach you moves. That's not dancing.
Dancing. is what you do on the stage after you've
written your jokes. And yoga is what you do with
your body after you've mastered the poses. Because
it's all spontaneous. And so when my wife and
I do kundalini yoga in the morning, it's a series
of flexion exercises and breathing. But mostly
what it is, so maybe one is rotation of the head.
Like that. But you're paying attention. It's
like, okay, oh, my back hurts there. Okay. I'll
move my head back and forth a little bit. Relax.
Move my head. Relax. Okay, it doesn't hurt anymore.
Oh, that hurts. Oh, got to explore there. Let
that go. Let that go. And you go through your
whole body. It's like, oh, I'm cramped there.
Oh, that hurts. And what's so cool, it's like
massage. You know, if you're hurting and someone
massages that, the pain goes away. What the hell
is going on there? Facilitation of... of circulation,
removal of toxins from that locale, but also
the drawing of your reparative attention to that
spot. Well, yoga's like that. It's like, oh,
I'm out of alignment there. Oh, I'm out of alignment
there. So what you're doing, and this is akin
to stacking the chakras, which is the same as
a musical experience, is imagine that to get
that process of optimal self -revelation right,
you have to be aligned. atoms aligned with the
molecules above them, the molecules aligned in
the cells, the cells aligned in the musculature,
the muscles aligned in the body, the body aligned
with the environment, broadly speaking, all stacked
up. That's the cosmic tree, by the way. That's
the tree the shaman climb up and down in the
psychedelic experience, that cosmic tree that
unites levels of being. We can climb that with
our consciousness. We do it all the time. If
you're writing a book, you concentrate on the
word or the paragraph or the whole chapter. And
when we're conversing, I could concentrate on
each word or the phrase or the sentence or the
context, or I could look around the room, up
and down these levels of analysis. In yoga, you're
trying to get your body psychophysiologically
aligned so communication between all those levels
isn't interfered with unnecessarily. And then
that opens you up in some sense to the possibility
of... speech emanating from the depths. That
would be one way of thinking about it. One of
the things that people who do Kundalini talk
about is that they are able to achieve psychedelic
states and psychedelic states that ordinarily
are achieved through drugs. I have many friends
who have done Kundalini and for whatever reason
I never have, but they have said that through
it, with long -term commitment to practice, they
can achieve these bizarre states. where they
have hallucinations. Have you ever had that?
No, but what I would say is that this process
of alignment makes everything into the equivalent
of a psychedelic experience, like everything.
Because part of the manifestation of the truth
is a consequence of the alignment of these levels.
It's like... That's what we mean when we talk
about someone having integrity or being authentic.
It's like they're the same all the way down.
And not only that, they're where they are completely.
So not only are they aligned internally, they're
aligned with everything that's happening around
them. And you know this perfectly well. But you're
a master at it because otherwise you wouldn't
be where you are. The fact that you can focus
your attention almost completely on the current
conversation. means that the conversation becomes
deep. And that's obviously manifesting itself
in a psychedelic way in your existence. It's
like, what the hell, Joe? Who the hell are you?
You started this podcast just talking to people,
zero production value, you don't edit it, you
talk to people for three hours. What kind of
stupid business model is that? That's insane.
Yeah, and look what's happened. Yeah. Yeah, it's
pretty insane. No, it's completely insane. It's
completely, utterly... It's insane for me, and
not me. Like, people think I planned this. That's
what's hilarious. Yeah, well, what's so cool
about that, I think, is that, well, the best
laid plans of mice and men, we all know that.
But, so, there's a doctrine in the Sermon on
the Mount. It's often viewed as a hippie sort
of doctrine, right? The problems of the day will
take care of themselves. Don't worry about the
future. That is not what that sermon says at
all. Not even a bit. Not a bit. It says, align
yourself firmly with what is the highest. So
that's what you're committed to. So what is the
highest? Well, we can argue about that, but we
don't have to argue that much. Beauty? Okay.
Yes. Truth? Sure. Why not? Courage? Yeah, that's
a good one. How about love? What's love? The
desire that everything will flourish, rather
than the desire that everything will suffer.
So you aim at that. Aim at the highest good you
can conceive of. So we'll call that God. Because
we've got to call it something. And it's the
integration of all things good. That's by definition.
Do you believe in God? Do you believe in the
good? Well, the integration of all things good,
that's the superordinate thing. It's ineffable.
So that's God. Aim at that. And then concentrate
on the day. And you'll get, not only, you won't
even get what you want, because what the hell
do you know? You'll get way more than you could
possibly imagine. And that's right. That's the
adventure of the truth. It's like, you won't
get what you want if you tell the truth. But
how do you know that you're right in what you
want? You don't. So how do you operate when you
don't know if you're right in what you want?
And the answer is, Tell the truth. Why? Well,
not least because it's the adventure of your
life. Like, think about it this way. Imagine
you conduct yourself in deceit. You lie to yourself.
You manipulate other people to get what you want.
That's a form of lie. It's instrumental manipulation.
It's psychopathic, Machiavellian. It's like,
well, that's how you should treat people. It's
like, no, you shouldn't. Why not? You won't get
what you want. Yeah, but you don't know what
you want. Okay, so given that... Well, doesn't
that entirely depend on what your endeavor is?
I mean, there's a lot of people in business that
do lie and manipulate, and that's how they become
successful. No. I'm not saying they should. No,
I also don't think they become successful. You
don't think that there's a lot of successful
business people? No, I think they drive around
in their $60 ,000 Corvettes and their flashy
blonde thinking about when they're going to cut
their throat. You don't think that Donald Trump
has... You don't think he's engaged in deception?
I didn't say that people don't engage in deception.
I said that they do not become successful by
engaging in deception. That doesn't mean they
don't make a lot of money. But there's a long
history of businessmen who are total sociopaths,
who've achieved immense wealth. No. No? No. You
don't think so? No, no. I wouldn't say I think
that. Okay, what about oil sheiks that have had
slaves and have treated people like total garbage,
had people assassinated for criticizing them,
heads of state of these bizarre countries where
you do have these oligarchs that are running
the military and they're in charge of massive
amounts of currency? Yeah, well, that's the postmodern
question in some sense. in a small way. But dictators.
Yeah, I know. Look, I'm listening, man. I get
it. Don't you think that dictators, like we don't
even have to name them. Partly why I'm obsessed
with the story of Exodus. But don't you think
that there's many examples of quote -unquote
successful dictators today? No. You don't think
so? No, because I don't think they're successful.
You don't think Kim Jong -un is a successful
dictator? Only if you think that ruling over
hell constitutes success. And you might say,
and this is what Milton Satan did say, better
to rule in hell than to serve in heaven. Kim
Jong -un, fine. Yes, he's a ruler. What's his
domain? Hell. You're a psychopath, you're successful,
you're ruling over hell. I see what you're saying.
So not successful in that he doesn't engage in
love and camaraderie and he doesn't have a full...
Yeah, that. Full and balanced life. Yeah, but
he's got lots of money. He's got lots of money
and power. And he's terrified people into kowtowing
to him. Good. You want that? Go ahead, man. That's
how you define success. So I see what you're
saying. But success in that he's able to maintain
that position. Yeah, we'll see, man. Hey, here's
an example. This is a prime example. Our hierarchy
is dominance hierarchy. So one of my graduate
students, I used the word dominance hierarchy
for years. He took me to task, former student,
brilliant guy, slow to speak, but never says
anything he hasn't thought through for like five
years. So when he talks, I listen. He said, stop
using the term dominance hierarchy. Shocked me,
because it's like a term used in biology everywhere.
I said, why? He said, it's full of implicit Marxist
suppositions. I thought, okay, I'll think about
that for a while. He said, here's the dominance
hierarchy. I strip you naked, put a choke chain
around you, and lead you around on the floor.
It's like, that's dominant. That's not what's
happening in most human hierarchies, and you
know that, because you have comrades you joke
with, you play with. You said that organizations
that are functional aren't based on power. What
are they based on? Well, not power. So not dominance.
It's like, okay, I thought about that for about
two years. It's like, oh, that's a really fundamental
criticism. And I didn't realize that implicit
Marxist presuppositions had been structuring
biological thought. And that's exactly right.
And so what's the proper hierarchy constituted
by? It's not the expression of the will to power.
That's basically the admission that satanic forces
rule the world. It's the same idea. Well, what
rules? Well... Satanic forces rule hell, and
yes, you can be successful as a hellish ruler.
Now, whether you can maintain that, Franz de
Waal, world's greatest primatologist, studies
chimpanzees. They're tough, and they're male
-dominant, unlike bonobos. They're male -dominant,
so they're patriarchal hierarchies. Okay, rough,
tough chimp, can pound everybody flat, maintains
the highest power through intimidation. He's
got preferential sexual access to the females.
He does that by chasing away the subordinates.
It's like heaven. He's dominant. What happens
to him? One day he has a bad day, and two subordinate
males that he hasn't really been attending to
and has been harassing quite a lot jump him,
and they castrate him, and they tear him to pieces.
That's what happens. But it doesn't always happen.
Ah. Yes, it does. Genghis Khan. It depends on
what you mean by always. Like, it's a time frame
problem. I mean, that guy. Yeah, I know. He's
like progenitor of a third of the human race.
Yeah, I know. I understand. I mean, he was successful
being a dominator for his entire life and was
responsible for the death of somewhere between
50 and 70 million people. Yeah. He changed the
carbon footprint of the planet Earth during his
lifetime because he killed so many people. Well,
let's not underestimate the utility of oppression
as a means to ruling hell. We can agree on that.
But, I mean, you're asking an absolutely germane
question. In the book of Exodus, the Pharaoh
is a tyrant. But he's up against God. And the
Pharaoh loses. And you might think, well, what
does that mean? Well, it's complicated. It's
a complicated story. That's why it's been around
for like 3 ,000 years. And why it's the fundamental
narrative, for example, it was the narrative
that black Christians really identified with
in the United States, which is something that's
really worth thinking about, the fact that that's
the case. The pharaoh is tortured by God. Well,
what's God? Well, we said already, at least to
some degree, God is the amalgamation of all that
is good. I'm not speaking religiously when I
say that. I'm speaking conceptually. God is the
union of all things that are good. Okay, but
that's not conceptual exactly, because that's
also something that you exist in a relationship
to and that you act out. It's not just an idea.
Okay, so God is that spirit that calls to Abraham
to have the adventure of his life instead of
languishing in his father's tent, so it's called
to adventure. It's truth. It's the burning bush.
It's the psychedelic experience. It's God against
the pharaoh. The pharaoh is a totalitarian, and
he keeps imposing his edicts, running contrary
to freedom, promoting slavery, let's say. Well,
the kingdom fractures and crumbles continually,
continually, continually. And you might say,
well, time frame. Time frame's a problem, man.
Maybe you can be a successful tyrant even over
the course of your lifetime. But maybe you doom
your country to death. You doom your country
to hell. Is that success? It depends on what
you mean success is because these things do depend
on definitions. But all countries collapse. All
of them. Every civilization that has ever existed
has fallen apart. No, I don't think so. Which
one's still around? Ours? Yeah, but we haven't
been around that long. I don't know. You can
trace... We're falling apart right now. You know
this, Joe. You can trace the religious experience,
the religious revelation, the central religious
revelation, back at least 25 ,000 years of continued
transmission. 25 ,000? Really? Sure. All the
way back to the Stone Age shaman. For sure. For
sure. Is that 100 %? Proven that they were experiencing
altered states of consciousness and that they
were imparting these lessons in a form of a religion?
A hundred percent's a lot. Okay. For certain?
I think, I can only say what I have concluded
by looking in as many places I could possibly
look, ranging from the theological through the
literary, through history, through the scientific.
the biochemical, all of that, trying to stack
all that up. So it's multiple. It's called a
multi -method, multi -trait construct analysis.
The idea is if something's true, it will manifest
itself in multiple different places with independent
methodologies. So it's like your senses do that.
Is this real? Well, I can see it. I can hear
it. I can touch it. I can taste it. Five things
say it's real. Is this cup there, Joe? Yes. Okay,
now you said it's real too. Okay. Real. Now,
is that finally real? No. But that's a different
question. It's real enough for the purposes.
Same thing here. I think the idea that, like
Jack and the Beanstalk, the magic beans, climbing
up the magic stalk to heaven, that's a shamanic
tale. We know some fairy tales are 15 ,000 years
old. That one's... 100 ,000 years old? Is it
really? We don't know. Right. But that story,
like Mircea Eliade wrote a book called Shamanism.
He's a great historian of religions. And he looked
at the commonality of shamanic experience across
multiple cultures. It's very stable. He thought
that psychedelic -induced shamanic practices
were a corruption of the original tradition.
I don't think that's right. I think it's wrong.
We had a conversation before the podcast started
about Brian Murawski's work and The Immortality
Key, which is an amazing book. And I was, you
know, we were talking about that. sort of field
of study that has emerged in harvard now because
of brian's work and that they're now and ruck
yeah yes um and gordon wassell yes gordon was
crazy bastards mexico from the 50s right so it
was life magazine let's discover psilocybin mushrooms
yeah oops um that is now being really it's not
fringe anymore Yeah, it still is. It is sort
of, but... Yeah, wait till it's not, man. Yeah,
well, it is right, and there's a lot of people
that still aren't aware, but at least... at least
in academia, at least in Harvard, it's now being
pursued with sincerity. Roland Griffith's work
has helped that a lot too. The work he's done
with psilocybin in the lab, which is like really
solid scientifically. That's John Hopkins, right?
Yeah, yeah. And also who did the DMT work, Rick
Strassman. Yes. Poor Rick. I love that guy. Yeah,
he had to stop doing it really. It's like, uh
-oh. Look what's happening. What do you mean?
All these people get shot out. Well, he didn't
know what to do with it. He's a really traditional.
biological, psychological researcher and he said,
well, we'll measure people's heart rate and we'll
check their psychophysiological responses and,
you know, we'll see what this DMT does. It's
like, and then all these people came back from
the experience and said, Hey, I got shot right
out of my body, and I went into a domain where
I met alien beings. It's like, you were dreaming.
No, no, you don't understand. I've dreamt before,
and this was not only real, it was the most real
thing I've ever experienced. He said, well, that's
a Jungian archetype. He said, well, no, it was,
you don't get it. It was more real than reality
itself. And every single person came back and
said that. And so I read The Spirit Molecule,
which is a very interesting book, and by the
end of it, Strassman is... Well, he kind of got
shell -shocked like our whole culture did when
it discovered LSD. Well, he had to be very careful
in his depictions too because he can't talk about
personal experiences because he wants to be taken
seriously as an actual researcher. And good for
him because he should be treading lightly in
that domain just like the Johns Hopkins teams
does. They're very careful. But it's such a tragedy
that you can't talk about it. Yeah, well, we're
talking about it more than we did 10 years ago.
Yeah. And much more carefully than we did in
the 60s. Yeah, well, there's no Timothy Leary
guy that's telling everybody to tune in, turn
out, and drop out. I had his old position at
Harvard. Yeah? No kidding. Yeah, no kidding.
Isn't that something, eh? Wow, that's pretty
wild. Yeah, that's for sure. I knew people there
that knew him. Yeah, it was really something,
I thought. Oh, he taught personality at Harvard.
He had the same position as me. The whole Kesey
thing and the Merry Pranksters. And I just think
it was such an upheaval. That's Electro -Kool
-Aid Acid Test. Man, that's a great book. It
was such an upheaval of the current state of
culture in the 1960s. It's like the very definition
of upheaval. Instead of bringing people along,
so many people were opposed to them. Yeah, well,
tune in. Yeah. Okay. Turn on. Yeah. Okay. Be
better. Yeah, that would have been better than
dropout. Yeah, a lot better. Yeah. A lot better.
That's why the hero, in the hero's journey. So
imagine you're taking psychedelics. You're the
hero. Out there into the unknown to gather new
information, to confront the dragon, the terrors
of your imagination, to bring back the gold,
to acquire the gold. Now what? You got the gold.
Right, now what? Share it with the community.
Right. So when the Hobbit comes back from his
great trip, and that's also a retelling of the
oldest story we know, the Lord of the Rings and
the Hobbit. And Tolkien knew this. I'm not making
this up. And he talked to C .S. Lewis a lot,
who is a radical and extraordinarily well -informed
Christian. All of this is lurking in the background
of that. That's why that book had such... captured
the imagination to such a degree. It reintroduces
shamanic level religious preconceptions back
into popular culture. That's why it has that
power. Because how else do you account for it?
It has religious significance. That's why everyone
read it. It's the definition of religious significance,
that it was attractive enough that everyone read.
Well, when The Hobbit comes back, it's like all
the heroes who come back from that journey...
share what they have with the community and integrate
it. It's the opposite of dropping out. Timothy
Leary let his political, his unformed political
preconceptions contaminate the sacredness of
his experience. And he warped the entire culture
in doing so and pretty much put an end to psychedelic
drug research for like 50 years. Drop out? No,
no. Man up. Get your act together. Get your act
together. Because you get an intimation in states
like that of, first of all, the fact that things
are infinitely more than you could possibly realize,
including you. Like, really? Like, really? And
that's unbearable in some sense. Don't you think
that it was in response to the rigidity of the
times, though, that you're dealing with this?
No, I'm not saying it's an excuse. But yes, it
was. The 1950s were, I mean, and then also dealing
with the Korean War and then Vietnam. There was
so much to oppose from their perspective that
society was... almost impossibly flawed. I got
a good story for that. So I went and met Guy
Ritchie when I was in the UK. So that was real
fun. Yeah, he's so hospitable. He built these
huge barbecues. He's manufacturing these bloody
things, same size as your table here. He makes
barbecues? Copper top, yeah. Really? Yeah, he
wants everybody to gather around a fire so he
can be hospitable. So he built a bloody barbecue.
Like it took seven years to build the prototypes
properly. They're worth like $50 ,000. He's marked,
it's such, and he's so hospitable. Where do you
buy a Guy Ritchie? barbecue. From Guy Ritchie.
Come on. Yeah, there you go. The gentleman. Get
the fuck out of here. Yeah, so there's these
braziers on both sides. Outdoor grill table is
now available. You sit outside in the cold in
his tent and there's cloth around the outside
of the table so you can put your knees underneath
and a stove in the middle so it keeps you warm.
Look at this craziness. Yeah, well that's where
we were. So it's a whole structure. Yeah, and
then he was roasting these huge steaks in this
charcoal brazier and cutting them up and feeding
them to us. Wow. And he wanted everybody to gather
around the fire. He's such a fucking interesting
guy. He is, man. You know, he's a legitimate
Brazilian jiu -jitsu black belt. I didn't know
that. There's not a lot of them. I mean, there's
quite a few of them. There's not a lot of them
that are like a successful movie producer, director.
Well, it's like UFC fighter podcast geniuses.
He's not just a Brazilian jiu -jitsu black belt.
He's a black belt under Henzo Gracie. It's like
one of the most esteemed schools in the world.
It's like the lineage is from the original source
of Brazilian jiu -jitsu. I mean, he's from the
Gracie family. Right, right. It's a very respected
black belt. You know, his characters in the movies,
they ad -lib that dialogue. What? Absolutely.
I talked to Matthew McConaughey about this first.
I said, Richie, and then I asked Guy Ritchie
about it. He sets up the scenes, and he has the
story in mind, and then he pays real attention
to the context, and he lets the actors ad -lib.
Well, that makes sense because it seems so organic.
No kidding, and the dialogue's so sharp and witty
and on point. So I watched... King Arthur. And
it's a chaotic movie. He's trying to do a lot
of things at once. And I don't think that technically
it's one of his most successful movies. But there's
parts of it that are extremely interesting. And
so one part is, this is very, very cool. So when
Arthur first grips the sword, he's blown off
it. Now he can pull it out of the stone because
he's the guy. He's the long lost son of the rightful
king. Long lost. He said, well, wasn't everybody
opposing the tyranny of the times? It's like,
yeah, welcome to the world, man. Welcome to the
world. We're all long lost sons of the rightful
king. And the king's now a tyrant. And don't
we have to deal with that? And the answer is,
bloody well, right, we do. So Arthur, who's got
his eyes open, and he's... born in straightened
circumstances and has to grow up street smart
and his friends are all funny and they engage
in witty repartee. He knows the world from the
ground up, grabs the sword, he can pull it out
of the stone, but he's blown right off it. He
can't wield it because he has visions of his
evil uncle who conspired with feminine forces
of chaos and killed his father, murdered his
father and his mother. So his uncle is a murderer.
His uncle's a murderer. Well, so is your uncle.
And so is my uncle. That's our historical guilt
that the lefties weaponize all the time. It's
like the soil we walk on is soaked with blood.
And Arthur can't wield the sword that's his rightfully
because he has visions of historical atrocity.
It's like, welcome to the world, man. It's like,
how do you know your masculine ambition isn't
part of the world -destroying force? Because,
yes, it is. So then why, when I accuse you of
racism and so forth, and your white privilege
and your masculine privilege, why don't you just
wander off in a corner and feel terrible and
apologize? And the answer is, you probably will.
Because most people do. You don't, but most people
do. And I know why. Partly because they're reasonable.
If 30 people come after you and say, you're a
racist tyrant, and there's 30 of them, You go
home and you think, 30 people think I'm a racist
tyrant. And like, I got my flaws, man. And I
might be a little racist because we all have
in -group preferences. And I shoot my mouth off
sometimes. And I haven't always been the way
with women that I should be. And maybe I've mistreated
some people. And maybe I did it too much. And
sorry. And then you're a shell, right? Another
mob comes for you. It doesn't work at all. Do
you think that this is a factor? this new way
of communicating where everyone's communicating
all at once it's not just these small groups
of people that you're familiar with that are
in your tribe or that you interact with from
other tribes this is the whole this is like unprecedented
volume of human beings I think I think that's
part of it I mean I've stopped almost stopped
reading Twitter comments Almost. Yeah, well.
Still hanging in there? Yeah, and I'm not exactly
sure why. Some of it's like pathological curiosity.
I don't think it's good for you. No, I don't
think so either, but in any case, Twitter really
can be a cesspool, and people say things to me
on Twitter that they would never say to me face
-to -face. They certainly see things about you
that they would never dare to say face to face.
But I mean, not only because probably it wouldn't
end well if they said something like that face
to face. That's part of it. But also partly because
people just don't do that face to face. Well,
you know what it is? It's talk. So if you are
working on an assembly line and you're next to
some other guy. And, you know, he brings up Ricky
Gervais. And you're like, fuck that guy. That
guy's a piece of shit. And he starts saying all
these horrible things about the guy. That's just
talk, right? Well, this is just talk, but it's
written down. The first person to say that to
me is Louis C .K. He was talking to me about
the way people talk on Twitter. He goes, it's
just talk. Like, people talk like that all the
time. But now when you see it written, you think
it is different than just talk. Because it's
not the way they would talk to you. So Ricky
Gervais visited that assembly. And he was talking
to those guys. Then they would have to reflect
on the fact that he's a human being. Right. He's
right in front of them. You would never say the
things that you, even if he was not an imposing,
threatening person, but you would never say the
things that you would say to that guy when Ricky's
not there. You say the same thing if you're in
your car, you know, and somebody cuts you off.
That's different. Son of a bitch. Well, it's
kind of the same because there's a barrier between
you and him. Right, but you know why. Do you
know why they're so accelerated? It's because
of the speed the car's moving. Your reactions
have to be very quick. So you're in a heightened
state. It's a completely different... People
always want to say that... No, if people were
stationary... and they were in cars, and they
looked over at each other, they would never talk
to each other the way they do when they're driving
fast. Yeah, yeah, that's true. It's a physiological
condition. Because you're reacting to potential
emergencies. You're going 65 miles an hour. You're
like, hey, hey, hey. Ah, you fucking idiot! What
are you doing in front of me? It's natural. It's
natural. Yeah, that's a good point. You have
to learn to manage that, and that's not disgust
or talk to people. People say don't get road
rage, but they don't tell you why you're getting
road rage. A lot of you are getting road rage.
It's just your physiological response to the
fact that you're going fast and your body's required
to make very quick movements. Yeah, yeah. Fair
enough. You're in a heightened state because
of the speed. That's very different than talking
shit about Ricky Gervais if he's not next to
you. Right, but it might be akin to what's happening
on Twitter because everything is happening very,
very fast on Twitter. It is, but it's also because
people are addicts. The real problem with a lot
of what's going on on Twitter, and there's a
bunch of people that I follow on Twitter that
don't have anything to do with me. They're just
negative people. And I don't even follow them,
follow them. I bookmark their page. And then
I go visit them because they're so fucking crazy.
And I see them 12, 13 hours a day. tweeting.
It's straight madness. And it's 100 % an addiction.
And the amount of interactions that they have
that are negative, the amount of expressions
they have that are negative are overwhelming.
That is an addiction. It's an outrage addiction.
They're addicted to recreational outrage and
the response to their recreational outrage. It's
constant and consistent. It doesn't vary. They're
not learning anything. They're not growing and
expanding the way they communicate with people
and becoming better human beings. and more kind
human beings. They're addicted to outrage. Imagine
you do get a kick from that sort of spontaneous
outrage. But when you manifest that in the real
world, there's a cost. Yes. And the cost is,
look the hell out, because maybe you said it
to the wrong person. Well, you also can't get
that many interactions in the real world. So
one of the problems, I like that. I think that's
very interesting that there's a hit. Because
the thing about anger, anger is a mix of two
emotions. It's negative emotion. Yes. But it's
also positive. It's approach. Because if it wasn't,
you couldn't fight when you were angry. Let's
talk about your own comments. When you read your
own comments, you could read many comments like,
thank you, Jordan, that book was really enlightening.
And then one will come in and go, you transphobic
piece of shit. You're responsible for the death
of thousands of children who've killed themselves
because they can't express their true gender
identity. And you'll see that one. That won't
have an effect on you. That's the same as these
other people. These other people that are interacting,
we are designed to seek out danger. When danger
comes our way, we're prepared to react to danger
in a much different way than a friendly smile
or a casual compliment. Casual compliments and
friendly smiles are nice, but danger is something
you have to pay attention to. That's the addiction
of Twitter. So the kind of comment that you described
where someone will say, I don't agree with your
views and you're hurting all these people. Those
comments don't make me angry. The misrepresentation
of your positions. Yeah, that doesn't really
make me angry. What makes me angry is, like,
I think it's something like, it's like casual
insult. That makes me angry. And it's because
I think... That's a tough one, man. It's just
shitposting. Yeah, but it's... The problem with
Twitter is that the price of being a prick has
fallen to zero. Yeah. Okay, but that's not true
in real life. So the question is, if someone's
being a thoughtless prick to you on Twitter,
I mean, maybe one, and maybe this is the proper
answer, is that you should just ignore it. Yes.
But the thing is, ignoring psychopathic behavior
does not make it go away. Well, it goes away
to you. Yeah. That's all that's important, Jordan.
You can't control the interactions of the 7 .5
billion people on Earth, but you can control
how you interface with them. Yep. That's the
difference. And if you continue to interface
with people who one out of ten is going to say
something fucked up to you, and that's going
to hurt your day, it's going to hurt your feelings.
I have friends that will go on Twitter all day
long, comics, and they'll read comments about
them. And then you'll see them at the club. They'll
be a fucking wreck. Yeah, yeah. And they'll be
like, hey, bro, stop reading that shit. And I'll
tell them. I'll do podcasts with comics, and
they'll say something that's fucked up, or they'll
go a little too far, or they'll talk over people
too much. And I'll tell them afterwards. Don't
read the comments. Just stay the fuck out of
the comments. They never listen. They never listen.
It's impulsive. You want to know. You look at
it. You've got to learn how to. Well, it's also
the case that people, you know, it's not all
bad that drives people to that, too, because
someone who's immune from social criticism is
a psychopath. And so you want to be open to feedback,
you know. And so I'm not. Discounting what you're
saying. And Twitter in particular is hard to
deal with. I read YouTube comments, thousands
and thousands of them. But that's a different
game. It's more men. Well, it's also way more...
It's also... Almost all the comments on my YouTube
channel are positive. Really? It's like 99%.
That's interesting. Unless we're talking about
political issues. I found that YouTube comments
were the first things I stopped reading. Because...
They were so negative sometimes and so disproportionately
angry about takes on certain subjects and the
way they would exaggerate interactions with people
and make it seem like these were horrible, aggressive
exchanges when they weren't. They were just casual
disagreements between people that sometimes are
clunky. Right, right. Well, I've been fortunate
with the YouTube channel in particular because
it – It has become a very, very positive place.
And so I'm very happy about that. I'll give you
an example. I was going to say something, but
let me finish my thought. Because what I was
going to say was what I realized is I don't need
to read those. And those don't necessarily represent
truth. But what they do represent is someone
having a clunky reaction to my clunky reaction.
And maybe they've drawn all sorts of conclusions
and they've... decided to look at it in the least
charitable way, and I can choose whether or not
I let that affect me. And the best way to not
let that affect me is to not read it. And the
best way to make sure that I'm not immune to
criticism is my own self -criticism, which is
ruthless. I'm very introspective, and I'm a horrible
critic of myself. Well, you're also talking to
people all the time. And if you don't manage
that, properly you're going to be punished in
the discussion yes and you're going to be punished
afterward because people won't listen to it like
well also i'll be punished because i'll hate
myself right i'll be angry at myself for my poor
handling of any sort of verbal situation but
in doing that i have become much happier i've
become much nicer because it's made me think
of all of my interactions like the way i interact
with people all of them are for person to person
Right, right, right. All of them are face -to
-face. Even though this podcast is reaching fucking
millions of people, all of my interactions with
people are face -to -face, and it's a much healthier
way to communicate with people. Yeah, well, all
the interactions I have with people face -to
-face, I might as well say all, because I've
had, like, I don't know how many interactions
with strangers in the last five years, but it
would be at least... It's at least... 75 ,000,
like, at least. It might be way more than that,
but it's definitely at least that. There's been
three that weren't positive. And weirdly enough,
there's only been three that weren't extremely
positive. They're so positive that it's almost
unbearable. Because one of the things that's
very strange now, I don't know what happens to
you when you're out on the street. What happens?
Come with me. Tell me what happens. Let's go
out tonight. We will. It's fucking wild. Yeah,
so tell me what happens to you. I get mobbed.
It's weird. Okay, and how often have you had
a negative interaction? Very, very, very, very
rare. Most people are friendly. Even most people,
if they didn't like me before for whatever reason,
they say hi, I say hi to them. Yeah. And we're
usually like, oh, he's just a person. Just a
person. And I'm a nice person. I'm very nice.
I go out of my way to be nice. It's something
I practice. Like I practice martial arts. I practice
being nice because I think it's valuable. It's
not just valuable to me. I think it's valuable
to the people I encounter. I think I have a responsibility
to the way people react to me. And if I misstep,
it bothers me a lot. Well, the other thing about
being in a position like the one you occupy is
because people know you in a way that you don't
know them. They approach you. Yes. And the reason
they approach you is because you're an idol of
sorts, because otherwise they wouldn't hold you
in esteem. And that is even the case if they're
negatively attracted to you in some sense, right?
And so the problem with those interactions is
that if you make a mistake, that person will
never forget it for the rest of their life, and
they will tell everyone about it. Well, more
importantly, the way they feel could have been
avoided. Yes, absolutely. You could have done
a better job in interacting with them. And then,
you know, sometimes people come up to you and,
look, one of the things that I've done when I've
met famous people that I really admired is I've
been awkward and clunky. Yeah, yeah. Very likely
to be the case. And if you're awkward and clunky,
especially when I was younger, and you catch
someone who's tired, maybe someone who's jet
lagged or hungover, you can have a bad interaction.
You bet. And then you're like, duh, that guy
was a dick. And then it's fun. It's fun to say
that guy was a dick. Oh, yeah. It's fun. It's
exciting. Yeah, well, it's also an expression
of your profound sense of betrayal. Yes. Because
you're kind of hoping, when you go up to the
person, that they're the real thing. Yes. And
then you get burned, and you're really betrayed
by that. Like, it's a deep betrayal. I spent
a lot of time in my clinical practice working
with people who were socially awkward, and so
analyzed social awkwardness at the level of detail.
And one of the things I do when people come up
to me, because they're often awkward, and they'll
say things like, oh, you know, I'm fanboying
or something like that. And I always shake their
hands, and I always look at them, and I always
ask them their name. And no matter how awkward
they are, they can almost always remember their
name. And so once they say their name and they
look back at me, 95 % of that awkwardness goes
away. So I can put them at ease instantly, and
then we can have a real interaction. Not long,
because otherwise I would only be doing that.
And that always goes wonderfully, and it's amazing.
But I think it was hard on me. It's hard on me
in a way, because a lot of the people who come
up to me are emotional. And so... It's weird.
My life is so weird because wherever I go, it's
like being surrounded by old friends because
I'll go down the street and everybody says hi,
you know, or they'll come up to me in this friendly
way and open, eh? Like there's no defenses. Right.
They come up to me. Like they're people I know,
which is very weird. Yeah, I'm sure it is. Same
exact thing. Yeah, yeah. And so you really have
to handle that carefully because they have made
themselves vulnerable in that moment. And you've
had an impact on their lives. I'm sure your work
has shaped a lot of the people that are very
happy to see you. You've had a personal impact
on their lives. Yeah, and it's been a positive
one. And so wouldn't I be the ultimate bloody
fool to do anything to put any sort of twist
in that at all? Because wouldn't that be a catastrophe?
But human interactions are messy, and sometimes
things go clunky. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, my
wife has got good at this and I have a good team
around me and they help me manage this. And so,
because we try really hard to make sure that
all these interactions go as well as they possibly
can. And that's, it is really wonderful because
it's really something to be received as a friend
by strangers everywhere. And you think, this
is back to this idea of success. You talk about
these successful power mad psychopath types.
That isn't what happened when they walked down
the streets. Like, people are plotting murder,
or they always are lying to them. Like, everywhere
they go, it's literally hell. Saddam Hussein
at the mall. You bet, you bet. Or Stalin, who
got hyper -paranoid. Everyone's a liar. Everyone's
a liar. Well, yeah, everyone lies to you. Everyone.
Right. You have no friends. They are terrified
of you. Not a single word anyone has ever said
to you for the last 40 years was honest. He's
got a bias control group. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and
he created it. So how's that for hell? What was
it like for you? Because you have a very weird
experience in life. You were... It's very weird.
There's not a lot of people like you where you
were a university professor and then all of a
sudden you were famous. And you were famous in
your late 40s. And really famous. Not just famous,
but famous as a worldwide... Depending on who
you ask, either you're a voice of reason and
rationality and... And, you know, personal responsibility
or you're a voice of intolerance and bigotry
and anger and hateful. Sexual oppression. What
did Michael Dyson call you? Mean, mean, white
man. Yeah. And a mean, angry white man. Hilarious.
Yeah. Yeah. You're not mean at all. That's what's
dumb about that statement. You're not mean at
all. I am white. Actually, that's a lie, too.
I'm kind of tan. And he was actually not black.
He was sort of brown. What the fuck am I? Because
I'm darker than you. Yeah, yeah. That's ridiculous.
But neither of us are white. Well, I'm Italian.
And he was brown, not black. Well, isn't that
weird? Yeah, it's really weird. The black and
white thing is so strange because the shades
are so... Tan and brown. There's such a spectrum
of shades of people. Unless you're talking to
someone who is like 100 % African from the darkest
place where they're not wearing any clothes all
day and they've developed all that melanin to
protect themselves from the sun. Even the term
black is weird. And when you use it for people
that are literally my color, it becomes very
strange. Yeah, yeah. This is true. So you were
asking me what it was like. What is it like to
be you? What is it like to... And then I know
you've gone through a lot of shit. And this latest
thing with getting off of the benzodiazepine,
that to me was a real shocker. Because first
of all, I had no idea that you were taking it
and then to find out that it's that difficult
to get off of and then to hear from other people
that have tried to get off of it how difficult
it is and then to realize how many people around
me have an issue with that stuff. Xanax is a
motherfucker. And I didn't know what a motherfucker
it was until I talked to a friend who is a counselor
at a drug rehab center. We were saying that that
is one of the ways that people get locked back
into drinking and doing drugs is a psychiatrist
will prescribe Xanax. And sober people who get
on Xanax all of a sudden start drinking. He said
it's super common. He said that it's one of the
most difficult drugs to get off of. I love him
to death. He's brilliant. He speaks so openly
and honestly about drugs. And, you know, the
guy's a professor at Columbia. He said that there's
two drugs that will kill you when you get off
of them. He goes, it's alcohol and benzodiazepine.
Those are the two that if you just quit, you'll
fucking die. Or you wish you would. Meanwhile,
they're handing those things out like Tic Tacs.
Yeah. Well, they were regarded as a safe substitute
for barbiturates. And you could easily overdose
on barbiturates, especially with alcohol. Well,
when did they know? When did they know? When
was it in the literature, the difficulty of detoxing
yourself from these? Very recently. Really? Yeah.
Jesus Christ. And when did they start being handed
out? 20 years ago. Fuck. More. So what happened?
People just stayed on them? Often. I have one
good friend that takes it every day and takes
it oftentimes with alcohol, which I know you're
absolutely not supposed to do. There's not a
damn thing I can do about it. This is a friend
that I love to death and I just go, I put my
hands up and I go, there's nothing I can do.
And he's been on it for more than 10 years. Yeah,
well, I started taking them because I was ill.
Yeah. You know, and they helped because I couldn't
sleep. I couldn't sleep at all. I don't know.
I don't know. I still really don't know what
happened to me. You couldn't sleep. And so an
anti -anxiety medication. Do you think that any,
this is one of the things that I want to talk
to you about. This is why I brought up the fame
thing. How much of the pressure? of being attacked
by all these different people and having these
people write these horrible articles about you.
And I know you read that stuff, which is different
from me. I don't read stuff about me. And I think
that's helped me tremendously. And that, like,
my gauge of how I deal with people is, like I
said— Tucker Carlson doesn't read things about
him either. You can tell. You can tell by the
way he communicates. He seems free. You know,
there's a burden. that people carry around when
they read things about themselves. Like Eric
Weinstein has that burden sometimes. You know,
when people read... Yeah, well, part of the reason...
So did I read things about me? Well, yeah, but
that wasn't what was stressful exactly, although
it was. But it's a multitude of things. Well,
what was stressful when I first got... I've had
a history of depression, and that runs in my
family, and that probably stems back for me right
to the time when I was a kid. And I think when
I really got sick in 2016, it was partly a manifestation
of that. But at the time, my job was threatened,
like actually. And my clinical practice was threatened.
And the Canadian Revenue Agency was after me
all at the same time. And they were after me
because of a mistake they had made, which they
admitted three months later. And the college
was after me because of a vindictive client who
came after me with a pack of lies. And basically,
I... emerged from that unscathed, but that was
by no means obvious that that was going to be
the case. I was accused of sexual misconduct.
And the evidence? When I was dealing with this
client, I would turn my wedding ring around.
You'd spin it? Well, I'd play with it. Right.
And that was sexual misconduct? Yeah, well, to
her it was a signal of some dark underlying desire
that I wasn't... That was polluting our therapeutic
relationship. I've been doing that with you the
whole conversation. Yeah. I have this silicone
wedding ring. Yeah, well, I'm going to report.
I'd report you if you had. Stick my finger in
there. Yeah, exactly. I do that all the time.
Yes, well, there you go. It's really bad. And
if there was a college that governed the behavior.
like you, I would definitely report. No, don't
do that. That's terrible. I stretch it out. No,
that's Freudian to the extreme. Although I don't
know what turning it means. How could stretching
a silicone wedding band be Freudian? Well, you're
putting your finger in the little hole. It's
rubber. What kind of vaginas are you dealing
with? Rubber is, you know, that's good. Anyways,
we don't have to go there. So that was all you
had done was turn, play with your wedding ring.
Yeah. And I was really, I really helped her a
lot. Well, unfortunately, Secondly, when you're
dealing with people that are extremely troubled,
oftentimes they look for external reasons why
they're troubled and they find oppressors. Well,
she was also angry with me because when all this
blew up around me, it interfered with my clinical
practice. And she had come to rely on our weekly
meetings. And so she was angry about being abandoned.
And it was really sad because I didn't want to
abandon my clients. I had to stop my clinical
practice, which was also very upsetting to me
because I had like 20 clients and I knew these
people, man, like they were, I knew these people.
You know, I'd fold them through thick and thin.
And then all of a sudden, so many things piled
up around me that I found when I was in a clinical
session that I was distracted. So you can't be
distracted in a clinical session. Right. And
so anyways, what emerged from that, and it was
in the middle of the winter and I have seasonal
affective disorder, I couldn't sleep. And at
all for quite a long time. And I went to my doctor
and I said, I can't sleep. And he gave me a sleeping
medication and an anti -anxiety drug. And I took
a little bit of the anti -anxiety drug and I
could sleep. And my life was pretty stressful.
And I thought, okay, I'm much better. I'm just
going to leave this be. This is working. I'm
not going to muck with it because I could barely
go back to work. And was it a low dose? Yeah,
yeah. I couldn't even feel it. Really? Yeah,
it was a low dose. So it alleviated the anxiety,
but it didn't affect your cognitive performance
or it didn't affect the way— Well, it didn't
affect it as much as how sick I was. That really
affected it. So sick meaning depressed. No, no.
When you say you're sick. No, no. When it hit,
if I stood up— My blood pressure was really low.
If I stood up, I'd faint. I was fainting five
or six times a day. When are we talking about
here? 2016. Okay, so this was when all the pressure
from all these different sources was coming at
you. Yeah. And that was making you sick. So it
was physically. Yeah, that was part of it. I
think what it did was it stressed me enough so
that I was susceptible, more susceptible to whatever
was wrong with me in the first place. Because
I've had a lot of immunological problems. But
this was also when you got on this diet, which
has been very beneficial, right? When did you
get on the diet? Seems to be. Yeah, it was around
the same time. 2016, 17. And that seemed to be...
Part of my weird life. Yeah, the cure to a lot
of your woes was to eliminate processed foods
and eliminate sugar and bread and pasta and all
those different things, which... Yeah, I hate
to talk about it because I don't really recommend
this to people, you know, because I'm not a dietician
and I'm not really that interested in it in a
sense, you know. Yeah, but it's okay. Partly
because I'm not an authority. But it's your personal
experience. Yeah, yeah, well... So your personal
experience in just this all -meat diet. Well,
my wife has a lot of immune problems, and some
of them are quite serious. And I have a number
of immune problems, and some of them are quite
serious. And our daughter got both of them and
was really affected by it. And she told her mom,
this is Michaela, she told her mom, when she
was starting to come out of it a bit, she said,
Michaela was only staying awake six hours a day
in her late teenage years. And the only reason
she could stay awake was because she was taking
Ritalin, because otherwise she would have just
slept literally all the time. Jesus. And she
said, you know, Mom, I was dying. And slowly,
you know, which is not a pleasant way to die.
As a teenager. Yeah, it was terrible. I mean,
she had to have her ankle replaced as a teenager,
right? Yeah, and then re -replaced. Three years
ago. And this is all... No general anesthetic.
This is all... Because she can't be on general
anesthetic? She didn't want it to... Yes. Spinal.
But they still had to do all the hammer and sawing
while she was... I had my knee done that way.
Yeah, yeah. I watched it. Uh -huh. Because I
figured I was only going to have one knee surgery.
I should see it. That's not true. I had three.
Oh, yeah. But I thought it was true at the time.
I thought I was only going to have one knee reconstruction.
Yeah. So I started getting better in September,
and I'm not sure why. But let's go back to this.
So the meat diet, the all -meat diet, you lost
weight. And that alone, getting rid of excess
body fat, it oftentimes will help with a lot
of things. But also, you eliminated all these
inflammatory foods. Well, I seem to have. recovered
from all the inflammatory conditions. So I had
very bad gum disease, which is not good for your
cardiovascular system. What is gum disease? What
do you mean? Well, your gums recede and they
bleed. And it happens when people age. That's
the theory. And I had three surgeries to control
it because... you know, your gums will recede
all the way and then you lose your teeth. It's
like, it's not good. And plus you're way more
likely to have heart trouble because of it, because
it indicates a systemic infection. Yeah. And
so I had that for like 20 years and that's incurable
and it's completely gone. Completely gone, meaning
the gums came back? No, because they never quite
grow back, but there's no inflammation and no
bleeding. That's all gone. And no irritation.
Interesting. So that's interesting. I had psoriasis
and that's gone. Peripheral uveitis, which caused
my right eye to be full of floaters because there's
inflammation on the bottom producing tissue production.
And that would fill the aqueous liquid in my
eye. And I could see all these floaters all the
time. And that's pretty much gone completely.
And I lost 50 pounds in seven months. And now
I weigh exactly what I weighed when I was 23.
And I don't have an ounce of excess body fat.
What else? The sides of my legs were quite numb
for like two decades. Sides of your legs were
numb? Yeah, yeah. Were you having back pain?
No. No back pain? No. Not at all? No, no back
pain. But that went away. So now they were hard.
They got hard and rigid and kind of old because
you see that in older people that their muscles
start to rigidify and so forth. And that's all
gone completely. That's completely flexible again.
Five years. Five years? Yeah. And it's just meat?
Yes. Although there were times when I was eating
some other things, but that didn't seem to work
very well. What other things were you trying?
Low -carb vegetables, primarily. Like greens,
mushrooms? Did you eat mushrooms? No, it was
mostly greens. Any fruit? Some, yeah. I miss
fruit a lot. I miss a lot of things, but c 'est
la vie. So when you introduced fruit, that was
an issue? When I... I was still really sick in
August, and I was eating some more things because
I thought, oh, Christ, I'm so goddamn sick that
I don't care. I'm going to get something positive
somewhere. Right. So I started to eat some other
foods, but my daughter convinced me to stop that
entirely again, and another number of other things
happened, and I started to feel better in the
mornings when I woke up for like two years. It
took me like four or five hours before I could
stand up. And this is coming off of benzodiazepine.
It's hard to say. I don't know what happened
because, like I said, I was sick when I started
taking them. So do you think a lot of this is
pressure? I really don't know, Joe. When you
get sick and you don't know what it is, you actually
don't know. But it seems like stress, right?
Yeah, my mother and my sister were worried when
I decided to go on tour again. We decided to
plan this tour back when I was still literally
so sick I couldn't stand up. And we thought,
we're going to live like this is going to come
to an end. So we planned this tour. My mother
and sister were quite worried about it because
they thought that the tour, the last tour, was
part of what stressed me out. But I don't believe
that. I really liked it. I thought it was a really
affirming experience. I'm not interested in sitting
around relaxing. I don't even know how to do
that, really. Even if I have time off, I don't
relax. Well, enjoyment and stress, they're often
the same thing. Not if you're doing what you
love. I know, it can be too much. Yeah, but what
do you do instead? What do you do instead? Like,
relax? What does that mean? I have a... A pontoon
boat. I go out on my lake. We look at the sunset.
I love that. I'm not saying you should do anything
different. I know you are. But I'm saying physiologically,
enjoyment and stress often come hand to hand.
Yeah. Because some of the things that you enjoy
doing are challenging. And challenging things
create physiological stress. Yeah, they don't.
They don't? No. In fact, there's a whole literature
on this. Imagine that you... Challenging things
don't... Not if they're voluntary. Not if they're
voluntary. Okay, what if you like to fight? One
of the things that I noticed when I was young,
when I was competing, is I was always getting
sick, even though I loved doing it. I loved fighting,
but I was always nervous. Yeah, but you're taking
a fair bit of physical. No? No, that's not what
it was. It was stress. Look, an excess of anything
can push you beyond your limits. I'm just saying
that there's a tax. There's a thing that you're
doing, right, when you're interacting with thousands
and thousands of people. You're expressing controversial
viewpoints that are often criticized. You're
reading articles that are written about you.
There's a stress that comes with doing this thing
that you love that's undeniable. Yes. And I've
had to parse that apart carefully to decide what
was particularly stressful that I could let go
of and how and maintain the rest of it. And hopefully
Tammy's helped me with that, or my whole family
and my friends, everybody around me has helped
me with that a lot, a tremendous amount. And
hopefully I'm more and more able to separate
the wheat from the chaff. And I do more artistic
things now than I had been for a long time. Like
what? Oh, I've been writing a bunch of music.
We recorded a bunch of music. Five songs. Really?
Yeah, yeah. Do you sing? No, I do character voices.
Character voices? I wouldn't call it singing.
What does that mean? Yeah. Want to play some
of it? Well, the music. The music is very dramatic.
Do you want to send it to Jamie and he'll play
it? The music is very dramatic. I could give
you a taste of it. We need a taste. Okay, okay,
I'll give you a taste. So I wrote these books.
I feel like I should get drunk before I do this.
I wrote these books called An ABC of Childhood
Tragedy. Oh, boy. And they're really dark poems.
For children? No, definitely not. Oh, okay. Absolutely,
100%, decidedly. thoroughly, comprehensively,
not for children. Right. They're very dark. And
I had my illustrator for Beyond Order, who I
really like, Juliet Fogra, Julia Fogra, Juliet,
who's an Eastern European, got a dark side, brilliant,
brilliant artist. And when I was really sick
in January and trying to figure out what I could
do, Tammy said, you remember those poems you
wrote? And they're the sort of poems you read.
They're like four stanzas long. You read them
and you laugh and then you hate yourself for
laughing. And I wrote them when I was in the
midst of pretty intense clinical experiences.
I'm not sure exactly why. To blow off some steam.
But there was more to it than that. And I don't
know all of what it is. I'm kind of working at
the juncture between black comedy and beauty.
It's a weird space. And Yulia's drawings are
unbelievably beautiful and deep. She's so good
at this. And so I sent her these terrible poems
I wrote that are comical and horrible. And I
said, Tammy thought it would be good for me to,
because I thought about getting them illustrated.
Do you want to take a look at these and see if
you're interested? And then she sent me back
these stunningly beautiful illustrations. And
then she produced one every three days for like
three months. And I'll show you them. And maybe
you can post one if you want. And then we thought,
well, that's fun. That was fun and very worthwhile.
And then, like, they're all these Depression
-era children. And they're all beautiful, beautiful
children. And they're all... Her drawings are
full of pathos and sorrow for their suffering.
So they're very deep and dark and beautiful.
All of that at once with these terrible black
comedy poems. And then we thought, well, it'd
be fun to figure out how to... market this, which
is just communication. Well, why don't we write
some music? And so it turns out I can write verse.
I wrote a whole screenplay, which we've also
recorded three songs for it called The Water
of Life, which is a fairy tale. And I want to
make a musical out of it. And so that's quite
fun. And so we've written and recorded three
songs for it already. So this is what you were
doing when you were recovering from this? Yeah,
yeah, yeah. It was great because it really worked
out nicely because when I was so ill, I had something
to look forward to because I knew Yulia was going
to send me a beautiful image. And I didn't know
what it was going to be. And then we assembled
it into a book. And then I started working with
this musician, Marshall Tully, who I really like
and who's a good arranger. He can play all sorts
of instruments. And he's got a great musical
sense. And so we started working on music together.
So he'd write the music. And I wrote some of
it. But he wrote most of it. And he played almost
all of it. And we had a band involved for one
part. And we'll do that some more. And so he'd
write the music. And then I'd write the lyrics.
And then we'd record it. I'd send the music and
lyrics to Yulia, and she'd generate a bunch of
images. And so then we made a bunch of videos
out of it, set to music, which we'll release
on YouTube in fall of this year. And that was
part of marketing for the book, but then it turned
into its own complete enterprise. And so we're
going to put out an album of all these songs.
I love that. It's so fun. So that helped you
just having some sort of a creative expression.
Oh, yeah. It helped you. Yeah, it helped a lot.
How long did it take you to recover from the
benzos? Well, when I finally, two years. And
I haven't fully recovered. You haven't fully
recovered? But also, I was also sick. No, my
left hand is quite numb. and was way more numb.
Both my hands, both hands and my feet were like
completely numb. And I was in like excruciating
pain for two years, like pain at levels that
I didn't even know was possible. All the time
or on occasion? No, this is one of the things
that was terrible about it is that it was really,
really bad in the morning. And did it start right
after you got off of the Xanax? No, but it got
way worse. So it just started showing up eventually.
Yeah. It started to get worse about the same
time that Tammy went into the hospital because
she was fighting her way through catastrophic
cancer at the same time when this started to
happen. So this was additional stress. Yes. And
that heightened everything. Well, it certainly
didn't help. Right. I think it made me, again,
it made me more susceptible to something that
was already happening. So whatever this illness
has that's plagued my family, my father, my grandfather,
multiple cousins, and a lot of immunological
problems on my mother's side too. I have a cousin
whose daughter died of immunological problems,
the same ones that Michaela had. And this is
all mitigated somehow or another by this only
eating meat diet? I don't know. It certainly
is for Michaela. And for you as well? Well, I
don't know that for sure. I know what the diet
has done. Explain this. You were telling me about
this study that was recently done. Oh, yeah,
yeah. Well, Michaela was invited to Oxford to
debate, and that was fun because I was invited
about the same time, so we got to go there and
speak on the same night, which was really cool,
you know, because how unlikely is that, right?
Does she have a background in nutrition? No.
Well, yes, but... Yes, because she's done her
research, but not technically, no. No, she had
a background in trying not to die. And trying
not to be in agony and trying not to have all
her bones deteriorate because she had 38 of them.
But I was confused as to why they would ask her
to go to Oxford to debate. The topic was we should
move beyond meat. Right, but why her? Well, because
she's become a well -known advocate, I suppose,
of a carnivorous diet as an investigative tool
for chronic, untreatable disease. That's a good
way. So imagine, here's the rationale, Joe. Imagine
there's something really wrong with you, like
really wrong, and nothing's helping. Okay, what
might be causing it? Well, something complex
you don't understand. Okay, what complex things
are you doing? You're eating a lot of different
things. Okay, so how about... Elimination diets
do this. How about you simplify it? So Michaela
tried a bunch of elimination diets, but they
were dopey. It's like, why eliminate this and
not this? There was no rationale. And so she
wanted to find out, how much can I eliminate
and still survive? How can I bring it down to
the simplest possible thing? And it turns out
that you can pretty much live on meat, weirdly
enough. Not just live, but thrive. Well, you
know, people debate about that, but certainly
some people seem to thrive compared to how they
were. What about supplements? No. No. No vitamins?
No. Does that seem ideal? Because I would feel
like you don't have to do that. Like I said,
I'm not promoting this. You don't have to just
eat the meat. You can eat meat and get all of
your micronutrients and all of your minerals
and vitamins. Seems like you don't need them.
It isn't even obvious you need vitamin C. Now
I'm going to get killed for that. Apparently,
there's some indication that you only require
vitamin C if you eat carbohydrates. Really? Well,
you know, don't take anything I'm saying as gospel,
because what the hell do I know? But does she
eat organ meat? No. Because that's the healthiest
of all meats. No, she eats lamb. That's it? Yes.
Just lamb? No. Salt. But lamb and salt. Lamb
and salt. Not beef anymore? No. Okay. No. Tammy
eats only lamb too. Wow. Why lamb? It's more
of a game meat. They both seem to manifest fewer
immunological symptoms if they only eat lamb.
Hmm. Yeah. Tammy has some serious immunological
problems as well. But they're very well controlled.
Now, how did the Oxford debate go? Oh, God, I
hope they release it soon. Yeah? Oh, she did
very well, but she wasn't the star. She did very
well. And, oh, yeah, just before she debated,
a study was released that was published by Harvard
epidemiologists. I think they were epidemiologists.
They did a retrospective analysis of 2 ,400 people
who were on the carnivore diet for six months.
It was the only scientific paper I've ever read.
It was published by Oxford University Press,
by the way. It's in a high -quality medical journal.
The study's no joke. And you might argue about
the validity of retrospective self -report, but
if it's carefully done, it can be valid. And
it's a good initial foray into investigation.
It's not a definitive study, because you'd need
at least a randomized trial. That's harder. But
anyways, it was the only scientific paper I ever
read where the surprise of the authors was evident
in the manner in which they wrote. Because what
they showed was that radical weight loss first.
So that was pretty much experienced by all the
participants. 90 % reduction in all self -reported
disease symptoms. All. All. Enhanced well -being
and decrease in suffering. And... Yeah, that
pretty much covered the territory. So she introduced
this during the debate? Yes. So when did it came
out? The week of the debate? It came out two
days. We encountered it two days before the debate,
but it had been published very recently, like
within the last three weeks or something like
that. Did she have time to go through the entire
study and get all the relevant information? Yes.
Time enough for her section of the debate. She
only spoke for about... 10, 12 minutes. There
were three people on her side. But I really am
hoping that this debate is released soon because
one of the people on the other side who was rallying
against meat delivered the most preposterously,
unsaturizable, politically correct rant that
I'd ever seen anyone deliver anywhere. by a factor
of about five. She just about made me convulse.
And part of it was sympathy, you know, because
it was so over the top. It was so utterly miraculous
that anyone could, and two of her compatriots
were sitting in the audience, and she said things
like, every hamburger is served with a side order
of misogyny, which is a really good line. You
know they crafted that line. It's a pretty good
joke. Why misogyny? Oh, because she associated
the oppression of women with the oppression of
farm animals, which is like, it's a dangerous
territory to wander into, that analogy. And she
said that she compared the husbandry of animals
to slavery, which is also like a place that you
wander into with real care when you choose your
metaphors. And she said the reason we're bombarded
with images of sexy chickens and sexy cows is
because we feminize our... farm animals before
devouring them. Hold, please. Are we bombarded
with images of sexy chickens? Oh, sexy chickens
and pigs. It wasn't cows. Well, cows, you know
how sexy they are, so that's forgivable. Miss
Piggy? She's our only one. Is that bombarded?
Is this woman on a Miss Piggy rampage? Sexy chickens.
What fucking sexy chickens are there? Hey, man,
you tell me. That sounds crazy. Oh, you wait.
I'm praying they'll release it. This will go
viral. This is like Kathy Newman on steroids.
Like, I mean it. It was something, man. I was
sweating. I was really, really, really. It was
like being hit. And then there were two people
who helped craft her speech and they were sitting
in the audience. And while she was on this unbelievable
rant. It was just jaw -droppingly miraculous.
And they kept yelling genocide. It's like they're
sitting in the audience and she'd make a point
about meat and how appalling the human race was,
especially the men, especially the white men,
the oppressive, patriarchal, racist, white, supremacist.
Meat is a white supremacist exercise, by the
way. Where was she from? Was she English? Yes,
yes. She'd written a book on this, and that's
why they invited her. But then I get the English
accent with it, too. Yeah, yeah. And then her
compatriots were randomly yelling, genocide.
It's like, genocide, genocide. It's like, what?
Yes, we think that's bad. We think that's bad.
We've already established that. But that was
so, it was like theater of the absurd. It was
so, it was one, it'll be a, if they release it,
I think it will. It'll be a cultural moment because
it was the point, at least it was the point in
my life, where the politically correct argument
reached an apogee that cannot be exceeded. It
was like that is as absurd as it can possibly
get in every possible way in 10 minutes. It was
theater of the surreal. Everyone, well, the audience
was full of vegans, and so they were on the side
of the anti -meat people, and so they kind of
gave her a pass, although a lot of people walked
out during her, whatever it was she was doing.
But I did feel bad for her while I was convulsing,
because... I really did because I thought, oh
my God, you're so crazy. You're so utterly crazy.
And there's no way that you can bring that set
of presuppositions to bear in a real human relationship
and have it go anything but terribly wrong. And
so that means that you're completely isolated
and all your so -called friends are never offering
you any corrective feedback whatsoever, right?
They're just feeding into this terrible ideological
mess you've wandered into. And so it was painful
at the same time, which is partly why it was
sweating. But it was, yeah, it was something,
man. I think I discovered the book. Yeah, that's
it. That's it. The pornography of meat. Yeah,
well, there you got your dancing hamburger there.
Eat me. Oh, my God. Late night menu, Friday and
Saturday. Oh, my God. But I defy you. I defy
you to find a depiction of a sexy chicken. Yeah,
where are the sexy chickens at? There, the sexual
politics of meat. Oh, so this is what she writes.
So it's like all sex and meat. Yeah. Living amongst
meat eaters. And look at the woman in this sort
of sexy pose here. Yeah, but she's surrounded
by plants, Joe, and so that makes it okay, apparently.
Okay. Yeah, that was her, all right. Yeah, it
was something, man. I tell you, I'm not exaggerating
this. I've never heard a speech like that in
my life. In its own way, it was like an ultimate
work of art. It was just something beyond comprehension.
Yeah. Every trope, every politically correct
trope you could possibly imagine was magnified
beyond its normal range of reference and then
applied in this utterly scattershot. It was like
she brought every ideological tool in the playbook
randomly to this issue. Imagine if it's all performance
art. At the end of the day, she's like, I was
just fucking around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well,
then it would be funny and remarkable. Well,
that's like Titania McGrath, right? Yes. But
Titania McGrath couldn't have held a candle to
her. She would have demolished. No, no, no, no.
No, they weren't even in the same league. No,
Titania at least has a facade of reasonableness.
Have you met Andrew? Yes. Yeah, he's great too.
He is. I really like him. I love him. Yeah, yeah.
He's very, very funny. He's brilliant. And very,
very smart. He's fucking so good. And multi -talented.
That character is so good. It is. It is. But
she's obsolete. She's obsolete. Yeah. So how
did the vegans react to the pro -carnivore position?
Oh, it was very civil. It was very civil, although
it was stacked to some degree because a couple
of the people on Michaela's side damned the freedom
to eat meat with faint praise. And I have my
suspicions that it was staged that way. How so?
Well, they basically said every reasonable person
thinks that eating meat is bad. And immoral,
but we should still let people do it. On her
side? Yeah. Why would they say that? Why would
they say it's bad and immoral? What about having
the argument that monocrop agriculture is immoral?
Yeah, well, that was part of Michaela's argument.
That's responsible for so much death. I mean,
it's just not natural at all in order to cultivate.
Yeah, and Nick talked about sustainable agriculture.
And made that case as well, that our relationship
with animals that we devour can be made as humane
as possible, and that's acceptable and perhaps
even desirable in a broader moral framework.
And a woman, I wish I could remember her name,
autistic professor at the University of Chicago
who revolutionized the treatment of animals in
the slaughterhouse industry, she made the case
that the animals that we eat... Don't suffer
a humane death in nature. They're all torn apart
by carnivores. All of them. None of them died
of old age. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And so I've been
working on these books. I have some other projects,
too, that I'm working on. I have a new book that
I'm working on called We Who Wrestle With God.
And I outlined some of the ideas we talked about
today. And I'm interested in the weaponization
of guilt and how to deal with that. Why it's
possible. and how to protect yourself against
it, and what we should do in face of the fact
that we walk on soil soaked with blood. You know,
how do we atone for that? Because we have to,
or we get guilty about it, and then we're exploitable,
even by ourselves. I have an app coming out in
a month or two, hopefully a month, called Essay,
and I've been working on that with my son Julian
and some other people. for four years and it
stemmed out of our project to sort of universalize
the university which was too big for me to manage
when i got sick and sort of we narrowed it in
scope because we wanted to teach people how to
write and that's really hard to scale because
you usually learn to write by having people write
read what you've written and critique it and
that's very labor intensive and expensive so
we built a a writing program like a word processor
that has built in conceptual tools that aid in
the conceptualization of an essay so imagine
when you're writing first of all you have to
pick a good question because you want to answer
it it has to be a genuine intellectual enterprise
and so the people kids have never taught that
and so pick something important that you want
to explore and then okay so what are you doing
when you're writing choosing words forming phrases,
organizing them into sentences, sequencing the
sentences and paragraphs, sequencing the paragraphs
into the chapter, and then chapter into books
if you're going that far. But so it's a hierarchical
enterprise. And so when you write, you have to
get the word right and the phrase right and the
sentence right and the sentence order right.
And you shouldn't do all that at once because
you can't because it's too hard. So you write
a rough first draft that's twice as long as the
thing you're trying to write, and then you edit.
You shorten the sentences, you pick the right
words, you pick the right phrases, you rewrite
the sentences. So we built in tools to guide
people through this process, to help them conceptualize
their essay at the level of the word and the
phrase and the sentence and the paragraph, and
to build those ideas of multi -level editing
into the process. And then we've tested it on
a lot of people, and we have a nice, elegant
user interface. Because one of the things I've
learned is that words are power. No. Wrong. Words
are authority. Words are legitimate authority.
And so, without having your words in order, you
have no legitimate authority. And that's the
last thing you want, unless all you want is irresponsibility,
but that isn't going to work out for you anyway.
And so, the pathway to success for... virtually
everyone, is facilitation of their capacity to
communicate. And so we're hoping, we really want
to pull young men into using this product because
they're the hardest market to target with such
things and the most in need of it. And part of
that is engaging them in an honest dialogue about
what exactly writing is. It's like, there's no
difference between writing and thinking. And
there's no difference between thinking and not
failing. So, you let your thoughts die instead
of you. That's thinking. You test everything
you do before you implement it. That's thinking.
And writing is a massive aid to that process.
And so, if young men, in particular, were taught
properly about writing and thinking, they would
come to view those as like arrows in their quiver.
So, or shields in their combat. the means by
which they aggregate their allies, or even more
importantly, the means by which they serve themselves
and the world properly. And like, really? No
moral overlay on top of this. Well, you know,
you're a communicator, like you're a comedian,
you're a master of words, you're a master of
wit, you're a master of listening. That's why
you're successful in this weird, radical way
that's completely unpredictable. And it's also
the pathway to adventure. Get your words in order.
And so that's Essay. And like I said, I think
if you go to my website or to Essay .app, Essay
.app or to my website, you can sign up for that.
We're going to do a beta release, test it broadly
to make sure it doesn't fall apart under use
pressure and before we release it completely.
But we're very excited about that because...
How to teach people to write is a really hard
academic problem to solve. And the idea of building
the writing tools into the software, if we got
it right, maybe could at least in part address
that problem. It's a massive problem, right?
Most people come through university now without
learning how to write. And that means they don't
know how to think. And that means they don't
know how to talk. It's not good. So there's that,
and it's the book and the music and the screenplay
and this essay app. Oh, yeah, I'm going to be
chancellor of a university, Ralston College in
Savannah. And I also started this thing that
we're going to launch called the Peterson Academy,
where I'm going to get all the great lecturers
I know to make courses. That'll be a free...
That'll be a universally accessible university.
It won't be free because I run things on a for
-profit model for all sorts of reasons. Efficiency
not being foremost among them. I recorded two
courses for this when I was in Nashville. One
on Jean Piaget, nine hours. I got way deeper
into his thought than I'd ever been able to at
the university. And then I recorded an updated
version of my Maps of Meaning course. I compressed
it from 40 hours to nine, which took me like
40 years to do. Forty. 35 years to do. And I
got way deeper into that too. I realized some
things about the Exodus story. There's a scene
in there in the Exodus story where God sends
poisonous. This is so cool. It's so stunning.
I'll tell you a little bit about it if you don't
mind. It's so cool, Joe. I can't believe it can
possibly be true. So Moses leads his people out
of the tyranny, right? But weirdly enough, they
don't go to the promised land. This is very weird.
They go into the desert. Well, why? Well, we're
all, say, prisoners of our own tyrannical misconceptions
and misperceptions, psychologically and socially.
So let's say we free ourselves from those. Well,
then we're nowhere. At least we were guided by
that. That's why people have nostalgia for tyranny.
It's like at least we had enough to eat then.
At least we knew who we were then. It's like
out of the tyrant's grasp. Into the desert. And
so you think, why don't people want to challenge
their own preconceptions? It's like, yeah, it's
out of the tyranny into the desert. And the worse
the tyranny, the worse the desert. So if you've
been tormenting yourself with tyrannical preconceptions
and totalitarian obligations and you decide to
drop it, or maybe you're shocked out of that
by trauma, you don't go to paradise. You go to
the desert. Maybe that's even worse. So no wonder
people don't do it. So now the Israelites are
out in the desert. You think, why are they there
for 40 years? And maybe it's because it takes
three generations to recover from tyranny. You're
in the desert, man. And so the Israelites start
worshipping idols. It's ideology. It's the same
thing. And that's why, because they don't have
anything to orient themselves, because they're
not tyrannized anymore, and they get all fractious,
and they fight with themselves, and Moses...
has to spend like all day judging their conflicts
because otherwise they're in each other's throats.
And anyways, they turn to false idols. And so
God isn't very happy about this. And he sends
poisonous snakes in there to bite them. So it's
like, out of the tyranny, into the desert. Now
we're fractured by ideologies. Now the poisonous
snakes come. And so the poisonous snakes are
biting them and biting them and biting them.
And they finally... break down and go to Moses
and say, look, you want to have a chat with God
and get him to call off the damn snakes? And
Moses says, yeah, okay. And so he goes and talks
to God. And God says, this is weird. This is
one of those impossibly weird stories. You think
this is either insane or it's true. Because that's
the only options. It's not boring. It's not predictable.
It's either insane or it's true. Okay. And maybe
we could start by thinking it's insane, but whatever.
Moses talks to God, and God could just call off
the snakes, right? That's what you'd expect him
to do, but that isn't what happens. He says,
go make an image of a snake in bronze, and make
an image of a stick, like a staff, and put the
snake on the staff, and then stick it in the
ground. And then have the Israelites go and look
at the snake. And then the snakes won't bite
them anymore. You think, what the hell is...
That's the same symbol physicians use. Why do
you think that that would be insane or true?
Well, what does it mean? What the hell does that
mean? What's he up to? What does many of the
stories in the Bible mean? Well, that's what
we're trying to figure out. Jesus coming back
from the dead. Walking on water. Moses partying
in the Red Sea. No, we're not. We're not going
to be able to get all there, but we can get to
this one. Okay. Okay, so... The caduceus. Yeah,
same symbol. You know the links to that in Mesopotamia?
Yeah, the ancient Sumerians. Yeah, and it's the
snake that sheds the skin. Yeah, I know. It's
a symbol of transformation. They also think it
might have had roots in the double helix of DNA.
That's what the wacky conspiracy theorists. Yeah,
I know. And they go deep down the rabbit hole
of the Anunnaki. stripped my skin off when I
went to Oxford to talk to him about that. He
said, you said that under some conditions shamanic
people might be able to see DNA. It's like, that's
complete nonsense. He doesn't know. The problem
with Richard Dawkins is he's had zero psychedelic
experiences. If you have psychedelic experiences,
you see all kinds of iconography from ancient
Egypt. You see hieroglyphics. You see geometry.
Is that true or insane? But it doesn't matter
if it's true or insane. It's repeatable. You
could have it over and over. I mean, people who
take mushrooms and people who take dimethyltryptamine
have these kind of images. They happen all the
time. It's not uncommon. So the idea that it's
impossible for those people from thousands of
years ago to actually see the double helix pattern
of DNA says who? Well, I'm glad you said it and
not me. Me, I'll say it. Okay. Richard Dawkins
is a brilliant man. Yes. But he stands on this
foundation of a lack of experience, the lack
of experience of psychedelics. And he's been
tempted to do it before under clinical settings.
He's talked about it, but he's never done it.
So the idea that that's preposterous, everything.
when you're on psychedelics is preposterous.
But they're real. Not real in the sense of you
can put it on a scale, but real in the sense
of if I give you DMT, you will fucking go there.
You will go there just like everybody goes there.
And if you try to hang on, good luck. You're
going to get shot through a cannon to the center
of the universe. And that's just how it goes.
And so you can either have experienced that or
you're talking out of your ass. So if you say,
do you think those people thousands of years
ago could have had a shamanic experience where
they saw the double helix pattern of DNA? Yeah.
Yeah, and you can too. You can too. And it's
not just because you know what the double helix
pattern of DNA is, because you can also see souls.
You can also see the very components. You're
talking just like the conservative that everyone
thinks you are. Yeah, that's me, bro. Let's go
back to this story. Okay. So the snake, the staff.
You have to go look on the snake. Yes. Okay.
Here's the doctrine from all fields of psychotherapy.
Okay. Look at what you're terrified of. and you
will get braver. Unless what you're terrified
of is a pack of wolves and they're going to fucking
eat you. Yeah, well, look, it's not like there
aren't real dangers, but look, if you're threatened
by a pack of wolves and you go out and study
them... You'll realize you're fucked. Unless
you have guns. Okay, so the classic therapeutic
treatment for terror and the poisoning that terror
induces is exposure, voluntary exposure. Okay,
so the pattern there is... Face what you're most
afraid of and you will be free. Okay. Okay. That
makes sense. Voluntarily. Yeah. Now that's a
doctrine of psychotherapy now. Right. Okay. So
now that's weird. That's weird. So God doesn't
chase away the snakes. He makes everyone braver.
Okay. Because that's better than being safe.
Bravery is better than safety. It's a more reliable
cure for terror. Okay. Now that's cool. But this
is even more cool. In the Gospels, Christ says
that he has to be lifted up like the serpent
in the desert. You think, what the hell does
that possibly mean? Because, well, that's a snake
first on a stick. And Christ is comparing himself
to a snake on a stick? Okay, so what can this
possibly mean? Well, I was thinking about that
in relationship to imagery of the crucifix and
the story that surrounds it. So Jung thought
that the... Passion story was archetypal because
it's a limit story, like this debate at Oxford.
You cannot write a more tragic story. It's impossible,
technically. Why? Well, because it's a story
of the aggregation of everything that people
are afraid of. So there was no death more painful
than crucifixion. That's why the Romans invented
it. It was to punish political miscreants. It
was a slow, agonizing death by suffocation. essentially,
and dehydration and exposure. It's extraordinarily
painful. Okay, so that sucks. That's pain, man.
Plus you know it's coming. That's part of the
story. Plus your best friend betrayed you into
it. Plus your people turned against you. Plus
they're led by a tyrant who doubts truth. Plus
you're a victim of the Roman Empire. Plus you're
completely innocent. Plus everybody knows it.
Plus they... They choose a criminal to be released
from this experience instead of you, even though
they know he's a criminal and they know you're
innocent. So, and you're young, and you've done
no wrong, and all you've done is help people.
So it's a limit story. Okay, so then you think,
we've been looking at that limit story for 2
,000 years, in the image and in the story. What
are we doing? Well, you're supposed to visit
the stations of the cross, let's say. Okay, here's
the idea. You hear the crucifixion story, and
you play with it. Who are you? Maybe if you're
female, you're Mary, and why is that? It's the
pieda. Because you have to offer your children
to the destruction of the world. That's female
courage. That's the mother that doesn't hold
her child back. It's like, go out. To what? Eventually
your death and destruction. Go out. Leave me.
Be in the world. That's... Feminine courage,
man, to let her baby go. You're a pilot. You
doubt truth. But you'll go along with the crowd.
You're Judas because you betray your best friend.
You're the mob. You're the criminal. All of that,
that's you. You look on all those things that
you hate and are terrified by. That's not a snake.
It's like the worst of all possible snakes everywhere.
That's what you're looking at. And what do you
see? You see death, you see destruction, pain,
terror, tyranny, frailty, betrayal. Look harder.
Look harder. Look harder. What do you see? The
death and resurrection. You look far enough into
the abyss, you see the light. Well... That's
the story. That's the connection between those
stories. And this unbelievably strange thing
is, is that connection exists. It's like, there's
this strange story of the serpent in the desert,
and we know that story. It's 3 ,000 years old,
something like that. We know that. And then we
know perfectly well that Christ said that he
was allied, that his image was allied with that
snake. That's written down. And even if you don't
believe in the historical reality of Christ,
someone still made that connection. And did they
know everything we were talking about today explicitly?
What do you think they did know? What do you
think? I mean, we were talking about this before,
that the roots of these religious experiences
almost certainly come from some sort of transcendent
experience. Well, when Eliot mapped out the shamanic
experience, he laid out the pattern. So shaman
die. They're reduced to a skeleton. They're reduced
to dust. And then they climb the axis that unites
heaven and earth and enter the kingdom of the
ancestors and the gods. They have a paradisal
experience and they come back and share it. That's
a death and resurrection. That's what they experience.
So what does that mean? I don't know what it
means. But that's what happens. And then we know
from Murerescu's book, people can read it and
make up their own bloody minds. Do your investigation.
It was probably the origin of democracy. It was
the origin of Greek culture. The Eleusinian Mysteries.
And was that a psychedelic experience? It's like...
Come up with a better hypothesis. Good luck.
Well, there's physical evidence now. Yeah, yeah.
Because of Meru Rescue. All these ethnobotanists.
Yeah, they know. And botanical archaeologists.
Yeah, they're messing about with ergot. Yeah.
And psilocybin. God only knows how long. I mean,
how long have they... And then there's DMT in
the Amazon. I mean... There's a massive shamanic
tradition, and it stems back way into the Stone
Age, and that's its pattern. Well, you know,
what university was it in Israel, in Jerusalem,
that made the connection between the burning
bush and Moses and DMT because of the acacia
tree, the acacia tree, which is rich in DMT.
And they made this connection, like, most likely.
We don't know what was in the Ark of the Covenant.
Right. We know that the people who were going
to approach it purified themselves before they
dared do it. You know, we know that a good psychedelic
experience will drag you through your sins. That's
known as a bad trip. Yeah. So what do we make
of the fact that the shamanic experience, which
is replicable cross -culturally and which dominated
the human landscape for at least 20 ,000 years,
we know that... It involves a death and a resurrection
and an entry into paradise and a reunion with
the ancestors. So what does it mean? Who knows,
man? This is way past my knowledge, but I know
that connection that I just told you about between
the story in the New Testament and that story
in Exodus. That took me like 30 years to figure
out. Because there's also the idea that the hero
goes into the abyss. to rescue his father from
the belly of the beast. But that's the same idea,
right? You go down, and I thought, I knew this
the last time I went to lecture too, is like,
you look into the abyss long enough and you see,
you see the spirit of the benevolent father manifesting
itself. That's the case. That is the case. If
you look into the depths of evil and suffering,
what you see is not the finality of evil and
suffering. You see the... The victory of the
spirit that obtains victory over that. And then
you might think biologically, well, how could
it be any different, Joe? That's the spirit of
life. Life is mortal suffering. It's like, but
we live. What's the spirit of victorious life
if it's not the benevolent Father who overcomes
the catastrophe of suffering? Like, what else
could it possibly be? Even if you think about
this just as an instinct. It's like you're threatened
by what's worse than death, and there are plenty
of things worse than death that you can be threatened
by. And yet you have a revelation that enables
your transcendence of that. Well, what could
it be other than the spirit that overcomes death
in some fundamental sense? Now, how fundamental?
Look, think about it this way. Maybe we're running
at 10 % capacity, us human beings. I don't mean
we use 10 % of our brain. That isn't what I mean.
I mean, we're not fully committed to the enterprise.
So let's say, here's the enterprise. Let's make
everything better and better as fast as we can
for everyone. Like full, flat, bloody out, 100
% committed. No resentment. Well, what's stopping
us from being committed to the enterprise? Like
when you say we're not committed to the enterprise.
Is that what it is, really? Oh, some. Don't you
think it's like individual desires for achievement
instead of thinking in terms of the greater good
of the group? Well, no, no, no. I think that
can be. That's a minor impediment in some sense.
But we're not working in cooperation. Well, that's,
yes. But that's individual desires for their
own personal achievement versus the greater good
of everybody. Yes, but I would say that's not
the worst problem. But isn't that like the origins
of the good concepts of socialism, the good concepts
of people working together? Like that's the origins
of it. It's like if we all just work together,
if we all just share, what it doesn't take into
account is human nature. Right. Yeah, sure. That's
fine. And I also think that, look, if you have
kid A and kid B on the playground and they're
both selfish, they don't play very well together.
Right. And so you could say, well, their selfishness,
which is like a narrow self -centeredness, makes
it impossible for them to cooperate. And then
they can't even play very good games because
it's actually more fun to play with other people
than to play with yourself. Even sexually, for
all you pornography addicts, by the way. So,
yeah. So in any case, it's a form of, but at
least, at least, The people who are selfishly
achieving value achievement. You can get way...
Look, I'll tell you a story. Someone wrote to
me two months ago, and Warren Farrell wrote The
Boy Crisis. We had a conversation about boys
who aren't encouraged and how bitter they can
become for all sorts of different reasons. And
somebody wrote us who was planning to shoot up
a high school. And he'd written a 53 -page manifesto.
And he was in touch with the last person who
shot up a high school. They were corresponding.
Because it's a competition, you know, that shooting
up high schools. That's a competition. It's a
very, very dark competition. You have to do a
lot of brooding over evil before you want to
emerge victorious in that competition. That's
like months of pathological fantasizing that
you nurse and nurse. And it's all resentment
driven. And so... that's way worse than just
a bit of a warped desire to achieve. It's like
Heath Ledger's Joker. He wasn't a criminal. Criminals
you can trust, man. It's like they want your
car. So do you. You've got lots of common ground.
It's the guy who wants to burn your car. That's
a whole different level of mayhem. And you think,
how do people get there? Well, their lives have
no positive meaning. Abuse. Resentment. Resentment.
Rejection. Yeah. But also, see, when God, when
Cain slays Abel, when Cain gets jealous of Abel
in the biblical story, and no wonder, because
Abel is like, he's everybody's golden boy. He's
good looking. He's successful. He works hard.
He's a really good person. He gets everything
and deserves it. The Harvard students were very
annoying in that way when I was there. It's like...
They had these positions of privilege, let's
say. It's a very terrible way of conceptualizing,
but we'll give the devil his due. And it's like
you'd hope that they'd be whiny, spoiled, self
-centered, narcissistic brats, because then at
least you could hate them in good conscience
for their success. But they weren't. They were
smart, attractive, hardworking, talented, athletic,
like, polite, cooperative. They were great. And
so how annoying is that? If you've rejected all
of that. How annoying is that? Well, so that's
Cain and Abel. So Cain goes to God to crab and
complain. You know, what's going on? Abel makes
these sacrifices and you reward him. And I make
a sacrifice and I don't get anywhere. And that's
the complaint of everyone, bitter. I made all
these sacrifices and God rejected them. It's
like, yeah, that sucks. Well, so God says to
Cain, I had to look at a bunch of different translations
to kind of get this right. God says something
like, sin crouches at your door like a predatory,
sexually aroused animal. It wants to have its
way with you. And you invited it in and let it
have its way with you. And it's this great metaphor
because that kind of evil is that that's creative.
That's creative. It's like inviting a vampire
in. It's like, invite that in. Say, inhabit me.
Then you toy with it and toy with it, and you
let the fantasies of revenge build in your head
until it inflates you into something that's indistinguishable
from demonic. Read the writings of the Columbine
kids. If you want to find out about this, I mean,
it's crystal clear. They're the judges of the
human race. They want to eradicate being itself.
They are out for revenge against God. Like, this
stuff is biblical. They're also on psychotropic
medication. Yeah, yeah, well, there's all sorts
of... Yeah. There's all sorts of problems. I'm
talking specifically about this. But lots of
people on psychotropic medications don't shoot
up high schools. Right, but under the right conditions,
people that are on, I mean, I don't know what
kind of psychotropic medications they were on,
but some of them act as, there's a way where
you take them where it makes everything okay.
It alleviates consequence. It alleviates the
feeling of... whatever you're doing being wrong.
Yeah, well, that didn't happen in the Columbine
case. They knew it was wrong. No, no. No, no.
What are you saying? No, no, they were doing
it because it was wrong. Right. They didn't just
know, but that's different, right? But wrong
is the wrong word then. No, no, it isn't. It's
exactly right. They were out to do the maximal
amount of harm in the minimal amount of time.
But they felt it was the thing to do, and they
didn't think that there was something that they
shouldn't do. No, no. No, no. No, no, no. It's
like the Joker. Right, but they did it. He burns
the money. They thought it was something they
should do. No. But they did it. Yes. So they
thought it was something they should do. No.
What are you saying? I'm saying they decided.
But they wanted to do it. Yes. And they did it.
Yes. So it was something they should do. No.
No, they did it because it was the worst thing
they could think of. Right, which is what they
should do, because they wanted to do the worst
thing they could do. Yes, they wanted to do,
we can agree on that. That's what I'm saying.
But I'm saying being under the influence of psychotropic
drugs, it's like the question of causality, right?
It wasn't because their conscience was alleviated
by the drugs. They knew that what they were doing,
they'd already planned to die. Right. Well, so
then here, ask yourself this. If you plan to
die, Why not just save everybody the trouble
and die first? Because you're angry. Because
you want revenge. Yeah, you want revenge. But
you want revenge against the innocent. Do these
drugs that change your state allow you to do
things that are impossible to do without them?
No. Some horrific acts that you don't think so.
No, I don't think that was... So there's a question.
This comes up. This is why I'm asking you this.
And you're a good person to answer. The question
of whether or not it causes something or the
fact that they're on these drugs because they've
been so tortured by life that they needed these
drugs. These drugs are not causing these actions.
Right. Yes. That's what you think? Yes. In all
cases? No. Because something's almost never all.
And people... will react idiosyncratically to
all sorts of medications in somewhat unpredictable
ways. But there's no straightforward pathway
from the use of such drugs to that level of atrocity.
But you know that there's a direct correlation
that almost all school shooters are on psychotropic
drugs. Yeah, but they're all depressed, so that's
not surprising. And they're not exactly depressed.
They're nihilistic. They're nihilistic in a way
that manifests itself as a kind of depression
that would elicit psychotropic medication. But
it's not depression precisely. I had a friend
who was on, I think it was on Zoloft, and their
take on it was that they lost a whole year of
their life where they just didn't give a fuck
about anything. And they just felt like nothing
mattered. Everything was fine. Nothing mattered.
There are people who report emotional blunting
of that sort on antidepressants. If you are...
tortured and angry and furious, and then you're
put on something where it doesn't matter. Nothing
matters. I don't give a fuck. You think it'll
alleviate conscience? Yes. No. No way? Like I
said, zero of anything is pushing too hard, so
I wouldn't rule out the possibility of idiosyncratic
responses, but these drugs are extraordinarily
widely used, antidepressants, and the proportion
of people who... commit atrocious acts on them
is infinitesimally small. Right. But the proportion
of people who commit atrocious acts while they're
on those medications is extraordinarily high.
Right. But I don't believe that that's involved
in the causal pathway. Is that because you have
personal experience with these drugs? That would
be part of it, but that's not the primary. I
say that's a tiny fraction of it. Because I wouldn't
generalize from that. Do you still have personal
experience with these drugs? No. Are you on any
kind of medication anymore? Yes, a small amount
of one medication. What is it? I'm not going
to discuss that. Okay. No, I don't believe that
that's... Because these crimes, these particular
crimes we're talking about... They're a very
specific kind of crime. No, I'm not saying that
the drugs cause those crimes. You're saying that
maybe they dampen the voice of conscience. Yes.
Or also alleviate the anxiety of committing them.
Yeah. Alleviate the anxiety of following through
with something. No, it's not obvious that that's
the case. If you look at the effect of these
drugs on motivation and emotion has been pretty
well delineated. And they do dampen negative
emotion. But for most depressed people, that's
really good because they are suffering from a
pathological excess of negative emotion. And
some of that does manifest itself in the form
of harsh, superego -like conscience analogs.
So here's how a depressed person would think.
Maybe they have an argument with their wife about
who's supposed to take out the garbage. Trivial.
in some sense it's like oh man I didn't take
out the garbage again I never do anything around
the house properly that's just an indication
that I never do anything at all properly people
who do nothing at all properly they're not very
good people I've never really been good at that
sort of thing in the past in the present I'm
probably going to keep fucking up like this into
the future I'm a terrible person I should die
That's too much negative emotion, right? It just
blows every level out. And they go right from
the trivial mistake to the suicidal thought.
And one of the things that antidepressants do
is bolster their resistance to that propagation
of catastrophe. Because that's hallmarks of depression.
And you're talking specifically about SSRIs?
Yes. Yes. So, no, I don't believe that they...
There's no evidence, for example, that they make
psychopaths worse or that they tilt people into
kind of psychopathic behavior because they decrease
negative emotion. I know no literature that indicates
that. And people are very interested in such
things. It would be studied. Yeah, people are
interested in that correlation. Yes, but that
doesn't mean that there's no single person to
whom that ever happened. Right, got it. But that's
not a behavioral consequence of SSRIs. Or even
of serotonin itself. Because then you'd also
have to say that raising someone's serotonin
level, which does make them more calm, by the
way, like less prone to negative emotion, because
as you move up a hierarchy, you produce more
serotonin. And the consequence of that is that
threatening things become less threatening. Well,
they should, because the higher you are in a
hierarchy, the less dangerous it is. Right. Right.
And so... And so partly you can destabilize people
by threatening their position in the hierarchy
because you dysregulate the structure. You dysregulate
their claim to valid occupation of that position.
And then you destabilize their nervous systems.
That's partly, say when, let's say, you see this
in academia. A new, a young faculty member comes
in for a job talk and lays out his theory. You
might say, well, the professor on stage gets
taken aback and is destabilized because his theory
has been challenged and he uses the theory to
protect himself against anxiety. It's kind of
a terror management idea. That isn't what happens.
Not exactly. It's close, man. It's real close.
What happens is the young faculty member comes
in using his claim to valid knowledge as an indicator.
of his suitability for that position. So I'd
say, I know a bunch of things that are useful,
that I can use in trade, and because of that,
I'm justified in occupying this position. And
so, then the student stands up and says, you're
a fraud. You don't deserve that position. And
it's the specter of the loss of the position,
the hierarchical position, that's destabilizing,
not the threat to the integrity of the belief
system. Now, there can be some of both, right?
Right. But the reason that people don't like
to lose faith is because it undermines their
moral claim to their position. And people hate
that. And no wonder, because that's a severe
threat. You're a fraud to have that revealed.
means that the system could validly take away
your position. Well, the terror management theorists
regard your theory as a defense against death
anxiety. But your position is actually a defense
against death, not just death anxiety. It's like
that's your space in the culture. That's why
people don't stone you. That's why you're a valid
member of society. That's how you make your living.
That's not an illusion. That is actually the
structure that defends you against catastrophe.
And part of what the mob does is come up to people
continually, especially from the left, but the
right can do it too. And they certainly have
done it, if you look back at any reasonable stretch
of history. But the left comes up and says, you're
a white supremacist, racist oppressor, part of
this patriarchal system. You have no moral claim
whatsoever to the position you occupy. Well,
that just strips people, you know. Especially
if they're good people. They think, oh, I need
a moral claim to this position. Well, it's also
often disingenuous because all they're trying
to do is silence you. All they're trying to do
is defuse you. No, no. They're also trying to
hurt and destroy you. Destroy you. But they're
also trying to stop you from being a valid member
of the conversation. Oh, definitely. And they're
trying to undermine the idea of merit itself
because maybe they're not living particularly
meritorious lives. And so the light shines. on
them in their darkness. Yes, most likely. Yeah,
yeah. We are four hours in here. So I think we
should probably wrap this bad boy up and bring
it home. Tell everybody where they can, your
website is jordanpeterson .com. jordanbpeterson
.com. jordanbpeterson .com. Yeah, and you can
look up the essay app at essay .app or on my
website. If you go to my website, you can find
my list of recommended books. There's 100 there.
Don't tweet it, Jordan, because he's not going
to read it, right? Yeah, I hope not. Yeah, I
hope not. And your podcast is still available
on YouTube. Yeah, and Spotify. And Spotify. Yeah.
Okay. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's lots of good
discussions on YouTube. If you like long -form
discussions, I find people that I want to talk
to, and they'll say yes, and then we have as
interesting a conversation as I can manage, and
maybe I share that with Joe, and that's our intent.
Yes. And it is our intent, and it's a pleasure
and a privilege to do it, and we try to live
up to that responsibility. And thank you, man.
Thank you. It's so good to see you. Always. Always
good to see you. Looking forward to dinner, too.
And also. Congratulations on your success. Thank
you. I've had senior political figures in Canada
now tell me this is so awful that they cannot
say what they have to say in our current political
situation because they cannot find a single media
source in the entire country that they regard
as trustworthy and reliable. And these aren't
fringe political figures. These are people who've
had stellar political careers. And that's what
they tell me, point blank. And the same thing
is happening in the United States. And you're
an antidote to that. All by yourself. I know
you have help. I know you have help. And you
have people around you. But it's a testament
to your integrity, man. And good for you. It's
something. So keep it up. I will. It's something.
It's an odd place, man. I know. It's all by accident.
That's the oddest part about it. Yeah, well,
sort of. I know. It's not by design, but it's
not by accident. Well, being where I am is by
accident. Yeah, that is by accident. It is not
by design. It is by accident. I could not have
imagined a world where just talking to people
about whatever subject matter is their area of
expertise and asking questions and being curious
could be that popular. It's very strange. Yeah,
but wouldn't it be something if that was the
way it is? Yeah. Well, it wouldn't be so unique
then. Or maybe there'd be just more unique everywhere.
That would be nice. Yeah, yeah. Everybody else,
pick up the slack. Yeah, well, I've had visions
of that sort of thing, you know, is that we're
each called to a unique destiny, and it's not
unique. It's like, well, the world's inexhaustible,
and so we could each have a unique destiny. Well,
one thing that does happen, that I hope does
happen, and I didn't mean to set out to create
a kind of a format or to pioneer a kind of a
format, but what I do hope is that the people
who enjoy it, and I know this is the case, they're
starting to do their own thing that's similar.
You bet. I've met some unbelievably impressive
young men who are doing this, and one of the
things that just stuns me about interacting with
them is that they're very articulate. They don't
say like, they don't say you know, they don't
say um. They weigh their words. They're witty.
They listen intently, and they're aiming up.
And they're just lights. It's like, oh, man,
you're going places. You're going places. Well,
intellectual curiosity is now, because I think
of long -form podcasts, it's attractive where
it was thought of as something akin to daydreaming
or mental masturbation. Impractical. You bet.
Effect intellectualism. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.
It's the opposite of that, man. It is in many
ways the opposite of that, and it's also a viable
opportunity for a career. Yeah. And all you have
to do. is be interesting. Yeah. It's the only
opportunity for a career in any real sense because
even if I tried to teach a friend of mine this
and he eventually committed suicide for a variety
of reasons and he managed it now and then but
finally was overcome by his own, by the demons
that possessed him, let's say. You know, he was
a very smart man but he hadn't made much of his
education and so he was in positions he felt
were beneath him. And I tried to tell him that
the idea that those positions were beneath him
was his own blindness. Because there was an infinite
amount of possibility everywhere. So like I worked
in restaurants and I had lots of working class
jobs, like 30 of them, like lots. And I really
liked working in restaurants. I was a dishwasher.
I loved it once I got good at it. And the reason
I loved it is I was a kid, 14. I got treated
as an adult because I worked hard, you know,
and I loved that, man. That was so great to be
treated as an adult, a legitimate contributor.
You bet, you bet. And then because I worked hard
and was interested, the cook in the first restaurant
who was a German chef, he taught me to cook.
It's like, then I was a short order cook and
I was like 15. And so that was really fun because
it was fun to work in the kitchen and the place
was full of jokes and tricks all the time. And
I learned how to cook and I learned how to, handle
the domestic environment and clean and put things
in order but also to work with people and I had
really good friendships with those people and
that fostered all sorts of opportunities for
me there was an infinite amount of possibility
in that dishwashing job because I wasn't just
I wasn't in a bloody box with people pushing
dishes in through a slot I was in this dynamic
environment where people were trying to Be hospitable,
which is really, really hard, you know, on a
mass scale under a lot of pressure, because restaurants
can be high -pressure jobs because of the rushes
that go with it. There was everything in the
world was in that restaurant. If you had eyes
to see it, like dozens of my friends, I think
it was literally dozens, came to that restaurant
to get a job as a dishwasher, and every single
one of them quit. So it's like they were in the
same restaurant. Yeah. I had a very similar experience
when I was young. I worked at a place called
Newport Creamery. I was a short order cook. Yeah.
Did you like it? Yeah. I enjoyed it. I made friends
with the people that worked there and hung out
with them. We had fun times together. And it
was also like it taught you that. You know, like
you had a long shift. Yeah. It taught you the
value of hard work. There was something to it.
Yeah. Scrubbing the grill and, you know, all
the shit that you had to do and clean up before
you could leave for the night. Yeah, because
I was little, man. I was little. The bartender
from next door, I was really mouthy, and he'd
come over now and then. He'd say something and
I'd mouth off in some like spectacularly horrible
way. And he used to stuff me in the ice machine
and I could fit. It was so annoying because I
could hardly get out, you know. But they also
used to drop me behind the big grill and to clean
out the grease behind it. Like that's one filthy
job, man. That's a filthy job. And I was the
only one who could fit. And so I was off. Yeah,
yeah. So, but it needed to be cleaned. There's
value in shitty jobs. There really is. There's
value in struggle. You learn. You learn and then
it sucks at the time. Well, and you know, those
working class jobs, they were fun in a way. Now,
I had fun with my colleagues at Harvard. They
were fun. They'd joke. We had fun in our faculty
meetings. That was back when you were allowed
to joke? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I liked those
meetings because the faculty at Harvard at that
time, at the 90s, they had a good attitude towards
meetings. That was pre -internet. That's why.
It was like... We're here to get this done as
fast as we possibly can. And if you have something
intelligent, say it. And if you're funny, that's
okay too. But otherwise, shut up. And if you
object, we'll put you on a committee and you
can do the work outside the meeting. I bet it's
a lot different now. It certainly might be. I
bet there's a lot of self -indulgent nonsense
going on. Ellen Langer was there at the time.
She was a famous social psychologist, and she
had a vicious wit. And Ellen's role was the meeting
would progress, and then she'd say something
completely outrageous, and everyone would laugh,
and then we'd have the meeting some more, and
then she'd say something else completely outrageous.
And there was a real sense of humor. And among
my colleagues, Jill Hooley and Richard McNally
and Brendan Marr, who knew Timothy Leary, we
had meetings of the Personality and Psychopathology
Subdivision. It was really fun. It was fun. And
I didn't experience that much in the intellectual
realm once I was a faculty member, but I did
there. But in those working class jobs, like
that humor and camaraderie. Gets people through.
Yeah, well, and it's so core to it. And it elevates
the entire experience beyond the relative basicness
of the job. Yes, for sure. And when I look back
on my adolescent life. There wasn't a lot to
do in this small town when it was 40 below for
like three months of the year. And a lot of what
we did was pretty dissolute. A lot of those teenage
parties were pretty goddamn dim places, you know,
in the dark, the music so loud no one could talk,
everybody too drunk, kind of nihilistic to the
core, a lot of drugs, not so fun. But going to
work, that was fun. It gave you purpose. And
it gave me a community of productivity, you know?
So that was good. And that's there in front of
you. You have a lowly job. It's like this. Hey,
man, people are boring. Everyone I talk to is
so boring. It's like... Maybe it's you. No, no.
For sure it's you. If you listen to people, I
learned this in my clinical practice. If you
listen to people, they are so goddamn interesting.
You can hardly even stand it. And so if you're
surrounded by people who are dull, try listening
more. They start telling you their story? People
are so weird. Even so -called simple people,
it's like, think people are simple, you try building
one. They're not so simple. Even people that,
you know, wouldn't register in some sense on
any normal social barometer, you sit one of those
people down and you have them tell you their
life story? Oh, my God. It's so interesting that
it's like it's traumatically interesting. I got
to wrap this up. All right, man. I'm very sorry.
Oh, you gave me four hours, Joe. It was a lot
of fun. More. Four and 15 minutes now. All right.
Thank you, Jordan. I appreciate you very much.
Hey. Thank you. Your feelings be true. All right.
Bye, everybody. See you.