Psychologist Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan Podcast #2308 (Transcript)

I said, why not? They came in.

JAMIE: I wanted some big grips. Yeah. A couple of my friends. What did Shane get? Shane got a bunch of stuff. Talked him into buying some stuff. Yeah, he got scarves and ties. He bought a bunch of ties. I think scarves, too.

JOE ROGAN: He bought a trophy.

JAMIE: A trophy and a Bill Clinton signed photo. And he spent thousands of dollars.

JOE ROGAN: What was this, some sort of O.J. Simpson auction?

JAMIE: Yeah, it was like an estate sale.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

JAMIE: Yeah. You know, he’s dead now, so you can get his stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Right. For nothing. Pennies on the dollar. Well, it’s—

JAMIE: I mean, only people like Jamie are dumb enough to buy. I was like, it’s for a goof. It’s one of those things, you’re getting it for a goof or you’re a very dark person.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, right. Yeah, right, right.

JAMIE: I wouldn’t want to own it even for a goof. If O.J. played pool, I wouldn’t want his cues.

JOE ROGAN: Was there cues?

JAMIE: No, there wasn’t. There was a weird notebook that Robert Kardashian had, handwritten stuff to him, blood splattered. I was like, whoa, that might be interesting, but it’s taking a vicious turn, Joe. Already.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah. That’s a dark story.

JOE ROGAN: It is, yeah. Yeah. And you only know the surface of it.

The O.J. Simpson Case and Planted Evidence

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, it’s dark in both ways. It’s also dark and planted evidence. You know, there was blood at the scene of the crime that had preservative in it. Allegedly. Supposedly. According to Robert Kardashian and according to, I believe, the forensic scientists, when they analyzed it, it matched O.J.’s blood.

But they had to draw blood from O.J. in order to determine whether or not it was his blood that was at the scene of the crime. And some of the blood found at the scene of the crime had that preservative in it that they use. They were sloppy in the 90s, you know, compared to now.

JOE ROGAN: Well, there was no DNA evidence back then. You know, people were—cops were there. There’s always going to be a certain percentage of cops that just want to convict somebody, regardless of the evidence. And if they’re, you know, in their mind, do they believe someone’s guilty, they’ll do whatever they can, including planting evidence, I guess. At least that’s allegedly.

I don’t—not that I don’t think he did it. I definitely think he did it, but I also think the cops planted evidence, which is probably at least partially why he got off. You know, I think the big reason why he got off was Rodney King.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right, right. Yeah. Right.

George Floyd and Complex Situations

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah. Have you gone into the whole George Floyd story at all? Have you ever looked at what they actually did to him? It’s a combination of things. What the cop did was horrible, but also he was dying. You know, most people probably, if they did that to you, you probably would have lived. You know, that guy had an allergic—he was f*ed up. But that cop did lean on his neck, which is always interesting to see people trying to minimize that. You know, I’m always like, you gotta be able to just say what it is.

JOE ROGAN: A situation can be ugly in a multitude of ways.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Right. That’s when things get—well, that’s when it’s very difficult to pick your moral pathway forward. All your choices are not good.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yes. Which is oftentimes the case when it comes to conflicts.

JOE ROGAN: Right, yes.

JORDAN PETERSON: Conflicts are very complicated, and people want it to be binary. They want there to be a good guy and a bad guy, and that’s oftentimes not really the case.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s hard to organize yourself for combat unless you are quite convinced that you’re the good guy. So there’s a default to that dichotomy. That’s a necessary part of even standing your own ground. Right. Because otherwise you get demoralized.

And so I suppose people, well, when they’re threatened, they default to a simple narrative. And because that’s—you can’t defend yourself in some ways.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right.

JOE ROGAN: It’s very hard to defend yourself, especially physically or militarily, without a pretty cut and dried narrative.

Military Mindset and Moral Clarity

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, especially military operatives, you know, you have to have a very—your life and the people that you’re with, their life depends on you not having any confusion about whether or not it’s morally correct doing what you’re doing. That’s why they like to break it down to “kill bad dudes.” You know, kill bad dudes.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

JORDAN PETERSON: Real simple, let’s go. They tell us what to do, we do it, which is what you want to stay alive. You want your teammates stay alive. That’s what you have to do.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, you never know when doubt will cause a fraction of a second difference in reaction time.

JORDAN PETERSON: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s always the thing with physical altercations with people too. You know, oftentimes people get sucked into these things where they’re not sure whether to act or not act, and that’s when they get in trouble.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

JORDAN PETERSON: You know?

JOE ROGAN: Right. That’s probably true in life. You don’t want to oversimplify things too. But once you’ve made a decision, well, that’s when it’s necessary to put doubts behind you, because otherwise you just act in half measures.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah. And oftentimes you have to have done the wrong thing before, failed to act or hesitate to act, and it cost you. And then you have to learn that lesson. It’s very difficult to know that without experiencing mistakes. You know, you have to have failed to act and then realize, oh, I should have done something there.

The Importance of Taking Action

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, that’s—I think that’s partly too—one of the things that I often faced in my clinical practice and with the students that I mentored was this confusion about acting. “I don’t know what to do. So what should I do? Well, nothing. I’ll wait around until I figure out what to do.”

It’s like, no, you should put together a bad plan and you should implement it. Because even if you fail in the implementation, you’ll gather information and then you can rectify the plan. And so staying in that malaise until you know what to do makes you get older and more miserable and you gather no information along the way.

A bad plan is a good idea best. You know, any plan is better than none. That’s a good rule of thumb. And a bad plan—a bad plan can be incrementally improved.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: With experience.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right. He who hesitates is lost.

JOE ROGAN: Yep.

Modern Distractions and Young People

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, that’s really difficult for young people. I think more so today than ever at any time in history. Because the distractions are so many and they’re so engrossing. You know, if you get out of high school, you don’t know what to do and then you start playing video games and you’re on social media, a day can slip by like that.

A day becomes a week, becomes a month, becomes a year, and before you know it you’re 30.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Right.

JORDAN PETERSON: And you haven’t done sh.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

JORDAN PETERSON: And that’s really common. That’s really common today. And I don’t think we can ignore those factors. The factors of just engrossing distractions.

Algorithms and Short-Term Hedonism

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, the algorithms optimized for short term attention. So you know, it’s a weird thing because you could imagine that you would want a machine that offers you what you want. Right. Because you want ads that are targeted to you. Because you don’t want to see a bunch of ads that aren’t relevant to you now and then, because maybe you’ll learn something and content.

Well, why not have a machine shovel the same sort of things that you are interested in at you? Yeah, that’s a kind of curation. The problem comes, and we haven’t figured this out at all technically and probably not psychologically, the problem comes in time frame. Right.

Because there’s a big difference between what you might be interested in if you were diligently striving towards a long term goal that required conscientiousness. And what’s going to attract your attention right now? This moment.

And the thing about the algorithms is that they maximize for short term attention and that’s a—so basically they’re actually optimizing for hedonism. And then you might say, well, so what? Because you’re getting what you want.

Well, the problem with short term impulsive hedonism is it doesn’t play out well over any reasonable time span. Yeah. That’s why you have to mature, which is painful and annoying, but absolutely necessary and much better than the alternative. The alternative is exactly what—that’s Peter Pan, right?

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Thirty year old, “I still haven’t grown up” and yeah, I’m a little past my shelf life now too.

Growing Up Doesn’t Mean Losing Fun

JORDAN PETERSON: I think people are afraid of losing fun. They think that when you grow up, you lose fun. But it’s silly, it’s not true. You can grow up and still have fun, you know, you just have to—you have to have discipline and prioritize your time.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s why Christ says to people that they have to become as little children, not stay—

JORDAN PETERSON: Right. You have to rediscover that, rediscover the joy of it. Yeah, but also, well, kids are good for that too, aren’t they?

Rediscovering Wonder Through Children

JOE ROGAN: Because they teach you that again, you look at the world through eyes of memory by the time you’re an adult, so the world loses its freshness. That’s part of—the world loses its freshness because you see your memories instead of the world.

And then kids come along and you think, oh, oh, yeah, that’s really actually quite interesting. And they’re so compelled by everything because their perceptions are so fresh that they share that with you. And that can help reawaken that spirit of childhood.

The Opposite of Tyranny is Play

Play, let’s say. I’ve been thinking a lot about play in the last year or so. Well, I spend a lot of time trying to take apart the causes of truly pathological degeneration. Right. On the sadistic side, on the criminal side, on the totalitarian side. Very curious about tyranny.

And it was very difficult for me to conceptualize the opposite of that as cleanly as I could characterize its presence. Like, what’s the opposite of tyranny? It’s not freedom, by the way. It’s certainly not anarchic freedom. It’s not hedonistic freedom, benevolence. I think it’s play.

JORDAN PETERSON: Play.

The Foundation of Play and Community

I think it’s play. Well, the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, one of the things he pointed out was that—let’s say play is the foundation of micro community, right? When you’re a little kid, you play a game with another kid and then if that works, well, you inhabit a little dyadic community. You’re both in it together. And then if it really works, you replicate that across time and that gives you a friend.

But play is very interesting. It’s very interesting psychologically and psychobiologically because it has to be entered in voluntarily. You can’t force someone to play. And it’s also motivationally fragile. So mammals have a play circuit and it can be disrupted by pretty much any other motivational or emotional circuit. So the circumstances have to be set up properly. Like the walled garden. You know that idea. The walled garden is a place that play can take place, like, eternally, so to speak.

And because it has to be undertaken voluntarily, it’s the opposite of tyranny. My wife and I have really started to apply this in our marriage more consciously. Once I’d figured out this relationship, because I’ve been lecturing to people for a long time about how to conduct themselves in life so they don’t become a tyrant or a handmaiden to the tyrants. Right. A silent handmaiden to the tyrants, let’s say, and aiming at play.

You know, when we walked in here today, one of the things we said was, let’s have some fun. And I’ve been thinking this morning, too, about what attitude I should take coming in to talk to you. And there isn’t a better attitude. There isn’t a better attitude than play. And so, I think it is, because it’s the antithesis. It’s the antithesis of tyranny in particular.

And then you were talking more about mature play, and that’s that good. That also makes sense that this is the issue with the idea that adulthood isn’t any fun. It’s like, well, you want to play a simple game, or do you want to play a really sophisticated game, really? Well, now that’s going to require some discipline and some training and some maturation. But the payoff is much higher. That’s a good way to conceptualize marriage.

JOE ROGAN: The highs are higher when you’re successful.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, and also the people who have the most sex now are religious married couples, really.

JOE ROGAN: I know. Isn’t that funny? Which religious, like—

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, good question, Joe. Good question. Well, I guess in the west, that would obviously be Christianity, but it’s an interesting case example of the sorts of things we’re talking about, because you can imagine at the dawn of the sexual revolution, when the birth control pill became prevalent, that the last hypothesis anyone would have possibly generated was that the cascading consequences of that over 50 years would be, well, radical increase in pornography use because sex has been made less dangerous by the pill, and that the people who were having the most sex would be really just married couples. Right.

The Sexual Revolution and Its Consequences

JOE ROGAN: But is that true? Because pornography essentially was very difficult to acquire before the birth control pill was invented.

JORDAN PETERSON: True, true.

JOE ROGAN: You used to have to go somewhere to get the pornography. Isn’t part of the excess use of pornography just because the access is so instantaneous now?

JORDAN PETERSON: Oh, definitely. But you could imagine too that you might have hypothesized that if the birth control pill took the threat out of sex, that pornography would be less necessary. That didn’t seem to work out.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

JORDAN PETERSON: So certainly the availability is—

JOE ROGAN: We would never know though, because the birth control was—when was it, 1960, something?

JORDAN PETERSON: That’s really when it started.

JOE ROGAN: Somewhere around then.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah. When it started to ramp up, let’s say.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so crazy because it completely changed the dynamic. Women could have sex for recreation with people that they didn’t even know and not have any consequences in terms of having to carry that person’s child. Whereas that was always a giant fear. If you’re a woman in the back of your head every time you have sex, you possibly could be taking care of a child for the next 18 plus years.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, yeah, well, that every time. Right, right.

JOE ROGAN: Take this thing, this is the consequential thing where with a guy, it’s like you have this biological imperative to spread your seed. But you’re not thinking about making babies.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right.

JOE ROGAN: You’re thinking about sexual activity. When a guy’s having sex, he’s not thinking, I can’t wait to make a baby. You’re just thinking, boy, sex is going to be great. I’m excited. Oh, boy, that’s fun. You’re not thinking, I’m making a kid. Because that would make you hesitant. And nature is not interested in hesitation. Nature’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let’s just make you dumb as f* for about 20 minutes and focus on one goal.

Marriage and Commitment

JORDAN PETERSON: So why did you get married?

JOE ROGAN: Well, I love my wife. She wanted to get married. We had a child. It seemed like a good thing to do. It’s like at a certain point—

JORDAN PETERSON: Making—

JOE ROGAN: A baby is more of a commitment than getting married. You made a life, you know, like the commitment of getting married seemed right. Right, of course, but it’s also—

JORDAN PETERSON: But why did you stay committed then before the marriage? Once you had a child, I just—now you said you loved your wife.

JOE ROGAN: I love her. It’s a thing to do. It’s life. And raising a child became everything. It becomes a very different thing. Right. I think I have a lot of friends who don’t have kids and I’m not the type of person that thinks everyone should have a kid, you know, I know a lot of people with kids. They do say that. I don’t think everyone should have a kid. I think you should do whatever you want. I don’t know how your brain works. I assume your brain works along similar lines with me, but there’s a thing that happens when you—

JORDAN PETERSON: Scary thought, Joe.

JOE ROGAN: Similar lines, similar. I think we all share similar lines. There’s an empathy that comes from having a child that’s so different and an understanding that we are all babies that grew up. We all start off as these bundles of potential and genetics, and then we’re influenced by so many different things. There’s so many different factors, but I used to think of people as being grown up all the time.

And then when I had kids, I was like, we’re all just babies. We’re all just babies that have just been alive for a long time. You know, everyone started out as a baby, and it just profoundly changed the way I interact with people. The amount of compassion I have for people, the amount of charity that I have for people, the charitable way in which I think about them when they do something or they say something. I give people the benefit of the doubt way more.

Dave Chappelle said this to me once at the Comedy Store, and it was very profound. He said, “Having children didn’t just change the amount of love I have, it changed my capacity for love.” And I was like, ooh, that’s it. You just nailed it. You just nailed it. You know, because there’s private moments when you talk to people about their children, about having children and what that’s like. It’s a very psychedelic experience.

The Transformative Power of Parenthood

JORDAN PETERSON: That would be another reason why the family with children is the foundation of the community, has to be the foundation of the community. It’s kind of obvious from a biological perspective, let’s say no children, no community. But there’s no reason to assume that you wouldn’t get radically better at something with necessity and practice. And if you’re practicing loving your infant and your child, well, why wouldn’t that generalize? Why would that capacity develop?

JOE ROGAN: It’s not like a practice. It’s like an overwhelming desire that comes about. The love you have for your child is like—it’s not like anything else. It’s very different. It’s very—my friend Jim Brewer said this once. He said, “When I had a child, that’s when I really understood murder.” Really understood, like, my capacity to defend my child is like—I never understood, like, how could somebody kill somebody before? He was like, oh, now I get it. Now I get it.

And, you know, that’s real, too. And that’s also tribal, right? So it’s not just your child, it’s the child of everyone around you in your tribe. And then you think that you are being invaded by an oncoming tribe. And genetics and history dictates you have to be insanely ruthless to fight off that tribe. There’s no other way for survival, which is really wild, right? Because those people have that same feeling towards their children. It’s like that Sting line, “If the Russians love their children too.”

JORDAN PETERSON: So that love that you talk about with regard to your wife, you know, I asked you a little bit about that. It’s like I’ve talked to people who have—they can’t understand how someone could be with the same woman indefinitely. Let’s say these are people who usually haven’t been able to establish that within their own life. And of course, the price you pay, assuming it’s a price for foregoing all others, is that—well, that’s exactly it. It’s a major sacrifice.

And so what do you think? What role do you think that love plays? How do you conceptualize the relationship between that love that you described and that willingness to stay in a permanent relationship and that and the willingness also to not pursue any other women? How do you understand, how does that make itself manifest in your life? I mean, I presume that you—I presume that you know, you had opportunities of all sorts.

JOE ROGAN: I presume you do as well.

JORDAN PETERSON: In principle, I suppose they don’t seem to come to me.

JOE ROGAN: Back in the day, guys like you would be banging their grad students. Not guys like you, but guys in your—

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, yeah, well, there were guys.

JOE ROGAN: Wasn’t that always the thing?

JORDAN PETERSON: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Fascinating aspect of—

JORDAN PETERSON: They seem to shut that off pretty much at the beginning.

Intellectual Rock Stars and Modern Relationships

JOE ROGAN: Well, they seem to have completely stopped that. Like if you go back to Feynman and Oppenheimer and famous, famous scientists were notoriously playboys, which is really interesting because it’s like these wild, innovative people were essentially intellectual rock stars, right? And then somehow or another that just got stopped.

Like if you were a professor in the 1960s, like the girls would be wooing the professor. They would be excited. These 22-year-old graduate students would be so excited to be talking to this incredibly famous intellectual. And they all, you know, were ladies men. Like Feynman was famous for chasing skirts. That was like part of the things. He does a lot of math and chases skirts.

You know, that is a giant distraction to people that are trying to get things done in life. And it’s also a distraction from your own personal development. I think. I think you could be with the wrong person and want to be with other people. And that makes sense. But really what that is is you should not be with that person anymore, which is unfortunately the case.

Like there’s a lot of guys who wind up with really hot women who are out of their f*ing mind. And a lot of women wind up with really hot men who are not what they thought they were going to be, you know, and if you find yourself in a situation where you’re with this pathological person and you’re trying to make it work and you realize at a certain point in time, like, I’m not going to make it work. Like this is—you have to be able to just jump ship.

That’s why people are hesitant to get married. That’s what really dangerous about marriage. It’s not like being with one person you really love being with. Like I really love being with my wife. She’s fun. Like we go, we have date nights all the time. We have a lot of fun, you know, we really do. It’s enjoyable.

Marriage and Commitment

JORDAN PETERSON: Why did you decide to set up date nights? How did you go about that? I mean, I know that’s personal, but I don’t want all the gory details.

JOE ROGAN: Let’s say no, it’s really simple. We just enjoy hanging out together. We have a lot of laughs. And so we just said, like, it’s kind of important because I’m so f*ing busy that we schedule time. That’s just unavoidable. Like, this is what we’re doing. We’re going to do this.

JORDAN PETERSON: And then we do it with Tammy, too. Yeah, we’ve done that for, like—

JOE ROGAN: I think most married couples will tell you that that’s important. Most married couples tell you that that’s kind of the secret. And it’s the secret.

JORDAN PETERSON: It’s like, shows are the best thing as well as being the secret.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s fun. It’s fun. Like, if the person that you’re with is fun, that’s the real problem is that sometimes people just—they pick people that are hot. That’s it. You know, hot and willing and nice enough. Nice enough to be around. Then you deal with all the other crazy nonsense, and you’re setting yourself up.

I’ve had many friends ruin their f*ing lives, and then they go through divorces. And you’ve said this best, that one of the things that women are very good at is reputation destruction. I have seen that happen. So imagine you are legally entangled with someone who at one point in time, you loved intimately. And now that person is trying to destroy every aspect of your life.

And you have to pay for their lawyers. So you have to pay for the general of the army that’s trying to destroy your kingdom. And I’ve seen this happen to many of my friends. And that is why people are afraid of marriage. That’s why people are afraid of commitment. Because the disastrous implications of, like, what can happen if it goes sideways? Like, what can happen if you wind—

JORDAN PETERSON: Up hating each other?

The Cost of Divorce

JOE ROGAN: And what can happen if you just lie to yourself and you trick—like, some of the hesitation that I had for getting married is most of my friends that got married when I was young all went through horrible divorces. When I was on NewsRadio, Dave Foley, Stephen Root, and Phil Hartman were all going through it. All going through it in different levels of psychosis.

Obviously, Phil Hartman’s being the worst because his wife shot him when he was leaving her, by the way. He decided to leave her, and he tried to leave her a few times, and she shot him in his sleep, and then she shot herself. It’s a horrible, horrible story.

But Stephen Root went through it, and they—you know, they’d confide in me. I’d be like, oh, Jesus Christ. The amount of money these women were trying to get from them when they knew that they couldn’t afford this. So one of the dirty tricks that will happen with divorced lawyers, with people that are on sitcoms, is when you get on a sitcom, if you’re an actor and you get on a sitcom, it is the most stable job, the greatest job in show business for a lot of them, because you’re going to get a steady check, you’re going to do 24, maybe 26 episodes a year. You’re making more money than you’ve ever made in your whole life.

But then you get divorced. So what happens is it gets set up where your ex-wife wants a percentage of what you’re making at this very unrealistic level where you’re never going to achieve this again. And for Dave Foley, it was so bad that at one point in time, I don’t believe he was allowed to go back to Canada. I don’t know if that’s changed.

But the judge literally told him, when he told the judge, like, “I don’t have that kind of money anymore. I don’t have the potential for earning. I was on a hit sitcom, not even a hit sitcom, but I was on a sitcom and was it on NBC, paid a lot of money, and that was the only time I made that kind of money.” The judge said to him, “Your obligation to pay has no relation to your ability to pay.” That’s Canadian judges for you.

JORDAN PETERSON: Just insane. You know, those are words you never—those are words you never want to hear even once in your life.

JOE ROGAN: I love him. So I was going through this pain, not like he was, but just like, oh, my God. Oh, my God. So these three people that I was very close to, and then most of the other people that I knew, you know, I knew so many people.

Fortunately, my mother and my stepfather have a great relationship, and they have for a long time. So I had that modeled. Like, they were always very close and they didn’t fight, which is really nice. It was really nice to have that as a model, you know, like, where I realized, okay, everybody’s not at each other’s throats all the time. And some people actually do enjoy spending time together.

Modeling Healthy Relationships

JORDAN PETERSON: You know, Tammy and I on—on the tour, she started to introduce me two years ago and to talk about some of the things we’re doing in the family, some of our family business, talk about Peterson Academy, talk about essay. And so she’d go out on the—

JOE ROGAN: Stage and was that the first time she had ever gone on stage in front of you do enormous crowds?

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah. Well, so—so first of all she did that and then we replaced the business discussion because we were just doing an update about the family, you know, and so she’d do that. We replaced that with ads. And then she started to talk. She talked about the rules, say in 12 Rules for Life or some of the religious things I’ve been dealing with lately. And she’d relate that to something in her own life. And then she does the Q and A at the end of the lecture.

And part of that was just she was along with me and part of that was Mikhaila was introducing me for a while and then had to go back to her work. And so we slotted Tammy in because it seemed business decision.

But one of the things we figured out very quickly that was really a shock to us was that people really liked especially the Q and A’s when, because what people will offer their questions electronically on this platform called Slido, which is a very good platform for such things. And then Tammy would, they could upvote the questions and then Tammy would sort them and ask me questions kind of from the top down that were thematically relevant to the lecture that I had given.

But we found very quickly that people really liked that because they hadn’t seen a couple engage in civilized discussion ever. Seriously. It was really shocking, Joe. Like, you know, I was shocked when I first started touring by how demoralized people were like that. Really, that was really striking and painful to see that on such a mass scale.

And then also to see how little encouragement it took to have a really major effect. I mean, there’s a positive aspect to that too, but there’s also a tragic aspect. It’s like, you mean you just need to have some encouragement and that was enough. And you never got that like even once. That’s rough when you see that in thousands of people, right?

And it was the same thing. We found it was the same thing with regards to seeing a functional couple, at least even that model. Because, you know, Tammy asked me questions and she thinks about the questions and then sometimes she comments, but not that much, but she actually listens to the answers and she wants to hear the answer. And so, and that dynamic is being played out on stage and people found that very heartening.

And all that shows you—well, you said, you know yourself, and this is why I brought it up because you had the example from your, from your stepfather and your mom of this long term relationship that worked. How the hell do you orient yourself if you haven’t seen that anywhere, right?

JOE ROGAN: And then you consider relationships just like all the bad ones. And, like, you’re going to be burdened and locked into that. Did you ever see that video where Alec Baldwin and his wife are on the camp on red carpet, and they’re being interviewed and they’re asking them questions, and the wife starts talking, and Alec chimes in about something, and she said, “You’re not talking. I’m talking. When I’m talking, you’re not talking” on camera. And you watch this, you’re like, yo, that’s what everyone’s scared of, right? That’s right.

JORDAN PETERSON: Definitely. You want to talk about repetition, tyranny.

JOE ROGAN: The tyranny of being trapped in a relationship. Like, that is like—and sometimes one person is so overbearing that the other person just sort of submits to it.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And then you just like, I don’t even want to—I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to deal with this. I don’t want to deal with this. And so then you’re just trapped and this person’s insulting you and humiliating you publicly.

That was the case with Phil Hartman. I got to see that. We would all go—like, we went to a party once, and I remember she was talking about ex-boyfriends, that she loves pickup trucks because her ex-boyfriends had pickup trucks. And they would climb into the back of these pickup trucks. And I was like, what the f*? But she was doing it on purpose to, like, make him squirm and make him uncomfortable.

And she would say things like, talk about how he’s old. “Oh, he’s old. He doesn’t, you know, he doesn’t like to do anything.” It was just—it was just public humiliation in front of friends where you’re in this, like, arena where you—he can’t say anything. He can’t just go, “What the f* are you talking about? Like, why are you talking to me like that? Like, why are we doing this?” He can’t do that because he’s public and he’s out with us.

JORDAN PETERSON: Maybe he should do it anyways.

JOE ROGAN: Probably should do it anyways.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, probably.

JOE ROGAN: We’re all out. And, you know, Phil was all about, like, appearances.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right? Right.

JOE ROGAN: One of the things that he was afraid of with getting married was that he was just starting to break into films. And a lot of the films that he was doing were very, like, family friendly films. And it was—it helped that he was a family man, you know, if he was right.

JORDAN PETERSON: So he had—he had an act he had to sustain, too.

JOE ROGAN: He had an image.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And this was critical in Hollywood. Like, they had ideas of who you were. “Okay. You’re a family man. Okay, good, good, good.” So if you have this radical change in your life where no longer your family man, and if you want to be honest about it, and you want to say “I was in a toxic relationship and some of it was me and some of it was her, and this is what happened,” like, whoa, now you’re opening up the world to this big can of worms. Better to keep that can sealed.

Honoring Your Partner

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, well, it’s generally better not to have your—your fights in public. And it’s certainly better, you know, I mean, thinking about this commandment to honor your mother and father. And I’ve been thinking about what that means.

I read this book called Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. And Frank had a really alcoholic father, like, like an Irish alcoholic father back in the 40s. Oh, yeah. He drank every cent the family had. And they, they lived in terrible poverty. And his sister died. And like, it was rough, but he said his father was often sober in the morning and, and he established a relationship with, like, good morning, sober father, and kind of put alcoholic, drunken, nighttime father in a different bin. And he could, he could get the benefit of having a father in consequence of that.

And that honoring, that’s also something that you want to do within a marriage. Right. Because your wife is your friend and your lover, but she’s also your wife and, and you’re her husband. And that means that a part of keeping that marriage working is honor. And part of the honor is that you don’t do that sort of thing in public.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

JORDAN PETERSON: Humiliated people fight in public. Well, that’s also in some ways independent. In a way, it’s independent of who your wife or husband is. It’s like, you know, you could imagine two people fighting in public, and one of them or both of them really deserving to have that fight as people.

But then to keep the marriage intact, you have to remember, well, this is my wife. She’s not just my friend. She’s not just someone I know. She’s my wife. And we shouldn’t be doing primate dominance hierarchy maneuvering in public. We shouldn’t be competing for power, because that’s going to destroy the marriage.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

JORDAN PETERSON: So that’s—that. That’s part of that honoring, I think, is to—to remember the role and to keep it, well, sacred is sacrosanct.

The Value of Respectful Communication

JORDAN PETERSON: Here’s another one. Don’t ever insult each other. Even though you want to, people get mean to you. You want to be mean back. I don’t do that with my friends, so I don’t do that with anyone else. I don’t want to do that. That’s why I don’t do it online. I don’t get involved in these hissy pissy fits online, particularly on Twitter.

I just don’t think the prime place for such things.

JORDAN PETERSON: That’s all it is. First of all, again, as someone who looks at everyone like a child or like a baby, I’m not angry that people do that. I understand the appeal of it. If I was 15 and Twitter was around, I would be tweeting at every celebrity saying, “You’re a loser. Jump in front of a bus.” I would say things just to try to get a reaction out of them. I think a lot of kids do. I think a lot of people don’t feel like they have a voice. And one way to be heard is to be insulting, and one way to be heard is to be negative.

If you look at the majority of discourse on social media in regards to hot button issues, it’s disrespectful, it’s contentious, it’s shitty and insulting. And I’ve decided over time in my life to not do that. I don’t want to do that. Not interested. I’m not interested in that kind of conflict.

I see real conflict all the time as an MMA commentator. I see the most violent legal conflict other than war all the time. That’s conflict. That’s real conflict and resolution and purposeful, agreed upon conflict. Regular back and forth. And wouldn’t it be better to figure out what you agree and disagree on and why and talk? Why can’t we all figure out how to do that? That should be a discipline you learn at an early age.

Most of the issues that people have, if the person comes at you insulting and aggressive, either that person is ignorant or they’re playing a game. And the game is to get your emotions up, to get you reactive and to be reacting to them instead of acting. The game is like if someone’s hyper aggressive in a fight, the game is to put you on the defensive so that they don’t. The best defense is a good offense. You learn that early on in fighting. So you learn that you can be very offensive and then the person never has a chance to get their game going.

That’s the case with conversations too. There’s a gamesmanship to this kind of communication, where it’s not just communicating, it’s essentially intellectual one-upsmanship and sparring. You’re sparring, you’re scoring points, you’re trying to dunk on each other. And I get that. I’ve done that before. I’ve engaged in it. It’s never satisfying. It always feels gross. Even if you win, it’s gross.

I said this before, even publicly, things that I felt like I had to do, like the Carlos Mencia conflict that I had way back in 2007, where I accused him of stealing material. And it became this viral video. And then a bunch of other comedians jumped in and we all agreed there was a real problem. It was a real problem because he was very famous and he was being protected by these agencies who were profiting off of him being famous. They didn’t want that train to stop.

I still to this day wonder if I would ever do that again. Because the negativity that came my way from people that were fans of his was so overwhelming. If you’re paying attention to it, it’s like, what did I open up? Even though I knew it was necessary. And that is also why people are negative. Because they want to stop you from engaging in conflict that’s going to hurt them. So they try to hurt you as much as possible. So you’re hesitant to do it. I don’t want to wade into those waters. It’s dangerous, filled with sharks.

Reputation and Status

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, you could imagine, maybe. I think this is worth delving into in some depth. You could imagine that there are various ways of attaining status, renown, reputation. Status isn’t exactly the right word because reputation is better, because you can have a reputation that you deserve. And so people do work for reputation. And all things considered, that’s a good thing.

JORDAN PETERSON: Earned reputation.

JORDAN PETERSON: Earned reputation. Earned reputation.

JORDAN PETERSON: Earned valid reputation with Jordan. That guy. That’s a unique human being. And that’s a real reputation.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right? Right. Okay.

JORDAN PETERSON: That’s what people want.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right, right. And it’s also, there isn’t anything more valuable that you can have than that. Not even close. This is why, by the way, this is very cool. It’s a bit of an aside, but it’s worth bringing up. In the Gospels, Christ tells people to store up treasure in heaven where it doesn’t rust, where the thieves can’t steal it. That’s reputational treasure.

So if you conduct yourself impeccably, you’ll develop a storehouse of reputation that will withstand all catastrophe. Nothing can touch it. There’s no place you can put your wealth that’s more effective than that. It’s the least violatable place. And that’s right.

And so, but the problem is, and this is a really tricky problem, and you’re touching on it, is that the reputation game can be gamed. So when your reputation rises, your serotonin levels rise, and that makes you less sensitive to negative emotion and more sensitive to positive emotion. So that’s a really good deal. And what that also means is that there’s a high psychological benefit to status increase, reputational increase, and a real cost to reputational decrease.

So that’s partly why people don’t like losing face, for example, because their emotions dysregulate. So now the best way to play that game is to establish a genuine reputation. And the best way to do that, you’ve done this, by the way. I figured out this year in my lectures that I’m always trying to answer a question on stage. So that’s a quest and I’m bringing the audience along on a quest, and it’s a real quest because I’m actually trying to figure something out and I do that in real time.

And that’s a very different game, that’s a very different conversational game than the status battle game. Because I could come on here, I don’t know if it would work, but I could come on here and I could try to show that I was smarter than Joe Rogan. Now, I’ve watched you and that’s a very difficult thing to pull off. But hypothetically, that could be my aim and I could play gotcha questions and I could lead you into…

JORDAN PETERSON: The problem is that wouldn’t work because I’m willing to accept that you’re smarter than me. First of all, I talk to a lot of people that are smarter than me and I like it. It’s enjoyable. I don’t ever feel uncomfortable talking to people that are smarter than me. I want to know some things that they can tell me. On certain things, I want to educate myself. I want to see how their mind works. I want to be blown away. I don’t want to compete with them intellectually. There’s times in my life where I would have fallen into that trap, I think.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, I think that’s also what’s made you popular and a force for good, is that you are on a quest. And that quest, the consequence of that quest, if undertaken properly, is reputational enhancement. And people who can’t or won’t do that, they default to power games. And the part of it, and that’s the default to power. But it’s worsened with social media because if you meet someone and they’re playing a power game with you, you can just decide not to have anything to do with them anymore or you can put a stop to it if you need to.

But on social media you can’t because they’re distant from you and they’re often also anonymous. And so they can play power games to enhance their reputational status falsely with no consequences. And social media is rife with that. And it’s really a problem. I think that virtualization has enabled the psychopaths.

JORDAN PETERSON: Without a doubt.

Political Psychopathology and the Dark Tetrad

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah. Well, without a doubt that’s a terrible thing because the psychopathic types, they’re always the death of everything. I’m seeing this come up on the right now. So imagine this. I’ve been working on a new theory of political psychopathology and I like it quite a lot.

JORDAN PETERSON: Is this where the term “the woke right” comes in?

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, well, Lindsay is pointing at that, but he hasn’t got the diagnosis exactly right. So it isn’t woke. That’s not the issue. It’s not exactly one level.

JORDAN PETERSON: What he’s talking about is similar types of behavior.

JORDAN PETERSON: He is talking about that. Yeah, I know what he’s pointing at.

JORDAN PETERSON: “Woke” just lets you clarify in your head. Oh, it’s like that.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, but the problem is like Antifa. Absolutely. But the problem is that that argument is predicated on the claim that the ideas are the problem. Like the woke ideas, for example, on the right or the left. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that 4 to 5% of the population, something like that is Cluster B, that’s the DSM-5 terms: histrionic, narcissistic, antisocial, psychopathic. Or they have dark tetrad traits, they’re Machiavellian, they’re sadistic, that’s about 4%.

So the question is how do these people maneuver? And the answer is they go to where the power is and they adopt those ideas and they put themselves even on the forefront of that. But the ideas are completely irrelevant.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right?

JORDAN PETERSON: All they’re doing is they’re the Pharisees, they’re the modern version of the Pharisees. They’re the people who use God’s name in vain as they proclaim moral virtue. Doesn’t matter whether it’s right or left or Christian or Jewish or Islam. They invade the idea space and then they use those ideas as false weapons to advance their narcissistic advantage.

And so then you have the problem and the right’s going to face this more and more particularly because the left had to face it when they were in power.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yes.

JORDAN PETERSON: How do you identify the psychopathic parasites? 4% of the population who are clothed in your clothing and waving your flags, but who are only in it for narcissistic benefit?

The people who studied the dark triad, these were people who originally studied psychopaths and they moved into ordinary personality, so to speak. On the fringes showed that the non-criminal psychopaths, the fringe cases are Machiavellian, they use their language to manipulate. They’re narcissistic, they want unearned reputation. That’s what a narcissist wants. And they’re psychopathic, which makes them predators or parasites. That’s pretty bad, those three things.

But they had to expand the nomenclature after a while because they found that they were also sadistic, which implied that if you’re Machiavellian and narcissistic and psychopathic, you develop a sufficiently bad view of your fellow man that their undeserved pain is a source of pleasure to you. And that’s what’s being enabled online.

See, because we’ve evolved real specific mechanisms to keep such things under control in face-to-face interaction. Lack of anonymity, for example, within a community. Psychopaths in the real world, they wander. They have to move from place to place because people figure out who they are and they’re held responsible. They’re particularly held responsible by men.

But online they escape from that protective system of constraints and they have free reign and they can find other people like them very rapidly and they can gang together. And so I can really see this starting to happen on the right. I’ve been tracking psychopathic behavior on the right for probably four years, something like that. Especially on the anti-Semitic side because that’s really where it reared its head first.

JORDAN PETERSON: And why is that?

JORDAN PETERSON: There’s nothing more annoying than a successful minority right now. That’s part of it. I’m going to get myself in trouble right away too.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, for sure. Well, this is a real subject.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, it’s a real terrible subject. It’s interesting.

JORDAN PETERSON: If you don’t criticize it enough, you’re compromised. If you criticize, it’s like when it comes to anti-Semitism, it’s one of those things where you can’t separate. It’s a religion and it’s also a race and it’s also a government. That’s where things get weird.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right, right.

JORDAN PETERSON: And then there’s also the concept of intelligence agencies and compromise that also gets attached to it. The manipulation of world markets and money. And there’s a lot to unpack. And then there’s regular Jewish people who have nothing to do with that.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, the Jews too are very successful. And so what you would expect from a purely statistical point of view is you’d expect them to be over-represented at the extreme.

JORDAN PETERSON: They’re also a walled garden, right?

JORDAN PETERSON: Meaning…

JORDAN PETERSON: Meaning it’s very difficult to join. They don’t proselytize, they don’t try to get you to join. And they’re all very tightly knit. They call themselves the Klan. They’re all locked in, you know, Jewish Klan, not KKK. The problem with that term, it’s been compromised by the Ku Klux Klan. But I mean it in terms of tribe.

JOE ROGAN: Community.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, community. They’re very tight knit in that regard. They stick together. And if you understand the history obviously of Nazi Germany and of persecution in Eastern Europe. Yeah, you have to. Yeah, of course.

Navigating Complex Conversations

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, all these complex things are multi-dimensional. I watched your whole conversation with Douglas and I thought you guys did a very credible job, all three of you, of navigating unbelievably choppy waters. So that’s the first thing I’d like to say because one of the things I was trying to figure out when I was watching that is do I think I could have done a better job than any of you? And I certainly didn’t walk away from it with that idea in mind.

But then underneath all that, I thought there’s really an unbelievably tricky problem here. And I think that’s why it poked up into—well, you also set that conversation up, but it poked up and made itself manifest in that conversation. And the issue is how do you identify the psychopathic pretenders? And it’s even worse now and then make a barrier.

Right now the right was calling for the left to do that for decades and they didn’t and they couldn’t. And the left is not good at drawing barriers. Partly temperamentally, the right is somewhat better, but there’s no shortage of monstrosity there. And so then the question is, how do you draw the line? And that’s kind of what I was—because I’ve been watching these right wing—they’re not right wings—these psychopathic types manipulate the edge of the conservative movement for their own gain. And a lot of that’s cloaked in anti-Semitic guys. There’s plenty of anti-Semitism on the left too, by the way. So it’s not unique to the right.

JORDAN PETERSON: Particularly now.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, yes, particularly now. And so, you know, you’ve let your curiosity guide you. Your curiosity and your desire for knowledge. This quest, you’ve let that guide you as a podcaster. And I’m, by the way, I’m trying to work through exactly the same sort of thing.

How do you know, given your radical increase in stature over the last 10 years, how do you know when your curiosity and even your skepticism about the fact that things aren’t the way that people say they are? Because that’s certainly been demonstrated in the last 10 years. How do you—how should anyone decide what guardrails to put up? Like, what do you look for? Do you have a conceptual system worked out for that?

JORDAN PETERSON: Like, what do you mean? In what way? Well, how do I look for—in terms of people to talk to?

The Challenge of Platform Responsibility

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you have this insanely immense platform and you’re inviting people onto it. And, you know, you said to Douglas, and I know this to be true, that you’re not really thinking about the outcome. Exactly. You’re thinking about, this is an interesting person to talk to and I’d like to go on that quest.

But then you have the additional conundrum. We’re trying to work this out in the Daily Wire side of things, too. Not to say that that’s exactly the same situation. It’s like once you gain in reach and authority, then how do you know that? How do you take great care that the people you’re talking to aren’t—what would you say—eliciting or feeding a subculture. Yeah, that’s right. That hasn’t got the proper aims.

Like, I guess the legacy media probably worked that out by having people, mediators. Right. And guests. And that was also back when we could rely on structures of authority in some sense to filter. And now we’re in this helter skelter world where everything is the Legacy.

JORDAN PETERSON: The worst at that now.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I know.

JORDAN PETERSON: They’re the worst.

JOE ROGAN: I know.

JORDAN PETERSON: Which is fascinating. You know, it really is. It’s really fascinating when you lose faith in a New York Times piece. You know, it’s like you go like, well, this is bullsht. Yeah, I know this. I know what they’re doing. I know they’re just, this is editorial bullsht. And that didn’t used to be the case, I don’t think.

JOE ROGAN: No, it didn’t.

Watergate and Intelligence Operations

JORDAN PETERSON: But then I go back to like what I learned about the Woodward, Bernstein, Nixon thing at Watergate. That was all essentially an intelligence operation. Have you ever looked into that? Yeah, I had Bill Murray on the podcast and Bill Murray said one of the wildest things. He read the first five pages of Bob Woodward’s biography on John Belushi, “Wired.” He read the first five pages like he goes, oh my God, they framed Nixon.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, really? Wow.

JORDAN PETERSON: Isn’t that crazy?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. No.

JORDAN PETERSON: What they wrote about my friend was so not true. It was so wildly off. He said John Belushi was a lightweight. John Belushi’d have a couple of drinks and he’d be f*ed up. He wasn’t like a big partier that time he did that speedball, probably the only time he ever did it in his life. But Woodward had him painted as this maniacal, off the rails, just drug addled monster. And he knew that to not be true. He was very close to Belushi for a long time.

And so he was like, oh my God, they framed Nixon. Then when I told him the whole story, you know what Tucker Carlson had told me about Woodward being an intelligence asset. And then that was his first job ever as a journalist was Watergate, and that there’s FBI guys that were involved in it and the break in and the whole thing was tried. They tried to get Nixon out of there. The most popular president in the history of the country in terms of the vote. And they were successful. They got him out of there.

And it’s probably because, or likely because Nixon was very concerned with who killed Kennedy and he wanted to find out and he wanted to get that information out. And apparently he had been talking about it. I know who did it. And he was, you know, he didn’t want it happening to him, obviously, and he knew it could. If you’re a president, you know, a couple of guys ago, you know, just most—one of the most popular presidents, at least posthumously popular presidents. I know he’s very polarizing while he was in office, but was shot in the head in the middle of Dallas and you think that the government might have had something to do with it. Like that could—that could f* with your head, obviously, you know.

COVID Revelations

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, there—and there’s many things like that. I mean, you saw the government website that came up two days ago about COVID? Yes. Okay.

JORDAN PETERSON: Wild.

JOE ROGAN: Wild to see, that’s for sure. What are you supposed to do with that?

JORDAN PETERSON: All the things that would have gotten you fired if you were a professor and you said them four years ago, you would have 100% got fired for espousing any of these ideas that turned out to be true. You would have gotten kicked off of YouTube. You would have gotten—you know, there was a lot. There was a lot going on there, you know, which is—I feel so fortunate that right at the height of COVID was also when I had gone over to Spotify.

Spotify is a Swedish company. It’s different. They’re different. They don’t—they’re much more rational, and they’re not overwhelmed by this identity politics sh*t. And they aren’t overwhelmed by our weird political binary system of good guy, bad guy, depending on which side you’re on. And they were like, what are you talking about? Like, this is crap. We don’t—we don’t censor all the weeds also didn’t lock down.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, they didn’t lock down.

JORDAN PETERSON: They were also like, we don’t censor our rappers. Like, we don’t tell the—like, the rap lyrics. Some of my favorite rap lyrics are horrendous, but it’s just like my diet. My favorite movies are Tarantino movies. The dialogue is horrendous. It doesn’t mean that these are horrendous people that are putting together this. Tarantino’s a wonderful guy. He’s fun to be around. He’s great. I’ve had dinner with him, brought him to the comedy club.

JOE ROGAN: He’s great.

JORDAN PETERSON: He’s not a bad person. But he is an artist, and he’s creating this thing, and this thing is going to show you aspects of humanity that you know to be true but are horrific. That’s the same with rap lyrics. It’s the same with a lot of things. And Spotify’s position was, we’re not censoring. That’s not what we’re in the business of, like, promoting art. Like, we sell art and we’re not interested in censoring art, essentially.

And turns out, luckily, we were all right. We were all correct, you know, and now the government shows it on their f*ing website, which is crazy. Have you seen it? Jamie, pull it up because it’s bananas and—

JOE ROGAN: Well.

JORDAN PETERSON: And look at this lab.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, right. By the way.

Trump and the Vaccine Narrative

JORDAN PETERSON: You know, I know that he would bring up the vaccines when he was on his rallies, and people would boo. When he was on the campaign trail, people would boo. And I think he was, like, confused by that. I think he’s a little—I don’t want to say he’s out of touch, but there’s too many things for him to be thinking about, for him to be paying attention to what people really think about the vaccines and vaccine injuries and mandates and just the psychological warfare that was played on the American people.

You remember that very famous White House post that they made for the vaccinated, “You’ve done your job,” but for the unvaccinated, “You’re looking forward to a winter of severe illness and death. And the hospitals that you will overwhelm.” Like, that was the White House telling you something when it was in Omicron. By that point, which was like a cold, like it was crazy, the deaths had dropped off radically, but they were so in bed with the pharmaceutical companies that they were like, you gotta do it. You gotta get vaccinated.

And if you don’t, you’re looking forward to death and severe illness. Like, imagine this is—you’re not basing this on real statistics. You’re not basing this on science. You’re just basing this on this control, this fear element that you’re trying to impose upon people.

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship

JOE ROGAN: Okay, so that’s—that’s an interesting point there, too, that issue of control and fear. You know, I started this—I was part of a group that started this organization in the UK called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. We had our second convention in November, which went very nicely, by the way.

JORDAN PETERSON: So you’re doing, like, a positive counter to the World Economic—

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, we have some rules, and one rule is you don’t use force or fear. Right. Use invitation. So can I tell you a story about that? Please do.

JORDAN PETERSON: Please do.

The Moses Story and Leadership Through Invitation

JORDAN PETERSON: Okay, so I’ve been touring about this new book of mine, right? We Who Wrestle with God. I’ve been lecturing about lots of the things I know, but I’ve been using biblical stories mostly to provide an analytical frame, because that’s what stories do. They provide a frame.

And there’s a great story in the continuing Exodus story, the story of Moses and the Israelites, where Moses has led his people away from the tyrant and away from their own slavery. Because there’s a dynamic in that story between those two things. No tyrants without slaves, or you might say, no tyrants without willing slaves.

And so the Israelites have to get away from the tyrant. But then it’s across the Red Sea of chaos and blood and into the desert for 40 years. You don’t escape from the tyrant if you’re a slave without paying a price. And maybe for three generations. It’s rough.

So Moses is trying to get these people to stop being slaves and to take responsibility so they don’t need a tyrant. And so he’s kind of got there and they’re on the edge of the promised land, right? And so they’re almost at the end of their voyage and they run out of water. They’re still in the desert. They run out of water.

And they get all whiny and bitchy about the fact that they had to go across the desert and it was way better under the tyrant and that Moses is nothing but a corrupt patriarch and he’s only power mad. And they foment some rebellion. And anyways, it’s a pretty ugly situation.

And the Israelites go to Moses and they say, look, we’re really starving. We’re thirsting for water. We’re going to die. Do you think you can have a chat with God, see if he’ll do something about this?

And God tells Moses to go to some rocks in the desert and to ask them to bring water forth. And so he goes with his people to these rocks, and instead of asking, he takes this staff of his. The staff is a really important thing. It’s your staff if you have an organization, same derivation, but it’s also the magic wand of Gandalf. It’s the flag you plant in new territory. It’s the Tree of Life. It’s the living tradition that has a spirit inside it.

And that’s a serpent, and that’s the serpent that eats all the serpents of the Egyptian tyrants’ magicians. That’s the staff. It’s his rod of his authority. And he, instead of asking the rocks, he hits them twice with the staff. So he forces them.

And God tells him that in consequence of that, number one, he’s going to die, and number two, he’s not going to get to the promised land. So there’s this insistence. It’s really interesting. Well, it’s crucial insistence. And it’s very important in this time, I think, to understand what this means.

So Moses is a leader. He’s the archetypal leader. And he realizes his responsibility in the encounter with the burning bush, which is something that attracts his attention that he takes with great seriousness and that transforms him. And so then he becomes the leader who stands up against the tyrant and frees the slaves and takes them through chaos into the desert.

And his temptation as leader is to use force. So when he’s a young man, for example, he kills an Egyptian aristocrat who was tormenting a Hebrew slave, and that’s why he has to leave Egypt. He’s tempted by power because he’s a leader.

And then at the end, even though he’s done all these things, he’s been an upstanding man and gone beyond his call of duty. And he’s right at the point where he attains victory, right, to enter the promised land. And he uses force once when God tells him to use invitation, to use his words, the Logos, to use words, to use invitation.

And that’s enough so that he’s dead, so is his brother Aaron. That’s his political arm. And he doesn’t enter the promised land. And then in the Gospels, of course, Christ forgoes power altogether. The temptation in the desert, one of the three temptations, is the temptation for use of power.

So one of the things that maybe we could conclude from all this, given the context of what you said, is that you can tell the tyrants, they use fear and compulsion and they don’t use invitation. So one of the rules we put together for ARK was invitation only play. We’re going to do this playfully.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

JORDAN PETERSON: And we’re not going to use force or fear ever. You have to use invitation. And so I don’t know what you think about that. Is a distinguish. Imagine it’s a distinguishing. It’s the distinguishing characteristic between the wannabe tyrants and the true leaders. The true leaders say, here’s an offer. Would you accept this of your own free will? And the tyrants say, the apocalypse is coming and everything. And we are allowed to do everything to forestall it.

JOE ROGAN: Right, right.

JORDAN PETERSON: Including control you and everything that you do.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the problem.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s how they get people to fall in line. They fall in line through fear.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah. Yeah. Well, fear and force, it’s also, you know, you have to do this because the apocalypse is looming, which is always, in a way true.

JOE ROGAN: Always.

JORDAN PETERSON: There’s always. Well, there’s always an apocalypse of one form or another looming. The question is, what do you do about it?

JOE ROGAN: And terrifying anywhere in the world right now.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right.

JOE ROGAN: You might be experiencing the apocalypse right now. If you live in Gaza. Yeah, you might be experiencing the apocalypse right now, if you’re in Yemen, if you’re a Houthi.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right. The end of the world is always coming. Right. And for you, for me, for everybody. Yeah. Right. So you can always look into the future and conjure up an apocalyptic scenario. And maybe even that in itself isn’t a sin, although I think it is. There’s another. But if you yet then turn to fear and compulsion as your means of governance, then you’re a tyrant. I don’t care what your excuse is. It has to be invitational.

Fear and Compulsion as Tools of Tyranny

JOE ROGAN: That’s when it gets scary, when you see governments telling people that they have to fall in line, or these are horrible consequences for you not agreeing to what we’re saying.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then if you don’t do this, you’re a part of the problem.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right, exactly. Well, and if the apocalypse that’s generated in that way is of sufficient magnitude, there’s no limit to the amount of power that can be exerted. Right. Because obviously the rationale is there.

JOE ROGAN: They have to do it.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right.

JOE ROGAN: This is the rationale to stop Trump.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right.

JOE ROGAN: You’re trying to stop Hitler.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right? Right.

JOE ROGAN: Well, no matter what social white. Use the law. Use lawfare.

JORDAN PETERSON: Use whatever. Yeah, use whatever. This is one of the things that worries me about Canada at the moment. No, I know when we talked a couple of weeks ago, I expressed my concern about what was happening in Canada.

JOE ROGAN: Doesn’t look good.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, I read Carney’s book Values. I read it twice, and I understood it. And Carney says in that book. Well, he says he’s an advocate of centralized planning, ESG. He was a huge ESG advocate. He organized many large corporations to go down this central planning governance route because the market wasn’t pricing everything properly. And so central planners had to step in.

And BlackRock and Vanguard and places like that were big parts of that. Don’t know if they were directly affected by Carney, but it’s the same thing, and they’ve stepped away from that. And he’s a big DEI advocate, and he’s also a net zero advocate.

And Carney says in his book, this is a good example of this, and I think also a good example of this kind of narcissism that we talked about earlier. Every single financial decision that every individual or organization makes has to prioritize decarbonization above all else, or else. And there will be many. He doesn’t say casualties, but he implies that there’ll be many. There’ll be many who pay a price along the way. But it’s necessary, you know, because you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

And then he says 75% of the world’s fossil fuels have to stay in the ground. And this is who Canadians are seriously thinking about electing. Right.

JOE ROGAN: Why does he say the fossil fuels have to stay in the ground?

JORDAN PETERSON: Too much carbon, you know.

The Problem with Top-Down Narratives

JOE ROGAN: You know, the real problem with that is the same problem with the COVID narrative is that they don’t allow any dissent, they don’t allow any data that conflicts with the narrative. And they don’t want to look at any possible. Both of them are complicated. They’re not similar in a lot, but there are because they’re top down tyrannical.

JORDAN PETERSON: Tools using fear and compulsion.

JOE ROGAN: So they did during the COVID times. Nobody wanted to look at any alternative treatments. They didn’t want to look at health, metabolic health. They didn’t want to look at any factors other than vaccination and compliance with carbon. No one wants to look at. I’m sure you saw that Washington Post study of the last. Was it 50 million years? The graph that shows the temperature of Earth. Have you seen it? We’re in a cooling period.

And that was always what I mean. During the 1970s, Leonard Nimoy when he had that In Search Of show, one of the things that they covered was that we are at the verge of an ice age and how terrifying an ice age is.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah. Well, the conclusion you draw about climate and carbon dioxide is entirely dependent on where you put the origin point of your graph. So if you go back 150 years ago, carbon dioxide has increased. If you go back 500 million years ago, which is quite a lot longer, we’re in a drought, like a serious carbon dioxide drought.

JOE ROGAN: Right. And also carbon dioxide is the fuel of plants.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yes. It turns out that they like it. Well, you know, the global greening data. Well, when.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, say it well, so people know it well.

The Global Greening Phenomenon

JORDAN PETERSON: You know, one of the things I learned as a scientist was that there’s usually an explanation or two that accounts for a phenomenon so completely that almost everything else is noise. Like the MAHA movement. Make America Healthy Again. The fundamental issue is insulin resistance. That’s the fundamental plague of, say, North America. And everything else is noise. It’s not unimportant noise, but insulin resistance is the major contributor.

On the climate side, when I look at the data, the thing that leaps out for me is greening. The planet is 20% greener than it was 30 years ago. Okay, 20%. This is NASA data. I’m not inventing this. Okay, and then the next you think, oh, 20%, if 20% of the plants had vanished, you’d be sure we’d heard about that. Yes.

Okay, so. And agricultural outputs got up 13%. Now, whether all that additional carbon dioxide is a function of human activity, that’s still debatable. Doesn’t matter. There is an association between the carbon dioxide rise and the plant propagation. Okay.

It’s even more particular than that because a lot of the greening has occurred in semi-arid areas, so areas around deserts. And the reason for that is that if there’s more carbon dioxide, the plants can close their breathing pores more and they don’t lose water.

And so not only is there 20% more vegetation, which is a lot, I think it’s twice the area of the United States that’s green. That’s a lot of green. And where our agricultural production is more effective. And the places that have greened were the very places that the deserts were supposed to expand into. And so, right, because they’ve greened, they’ve shrunk, not grown.

Now, you know, you could say, well, that rate of change has its problems and you know, rates of change have their problems, but I don’t see another data point that’s anywhere near as stunning as that.

JOE ROGAN: I think it’s a really important point. What you said that if we lost 20% of the plan, people would be freaking out.

JORDAN PETERSON: Oh, my God. Rightly so.

JOE ROGAN: Rightly so, but yet it’s not even discussed because again, it’s one of those things that invades the narrative.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right?

JOE ROGAN: It’s one of those pesky facts, those pesky truths that gets in the way of the thing that you’re saying, well, the apocalypse is coming.

The Climate Apocalypse Narrative and Power

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, well, that’s the thing about the narrative. Okay, so now we talked about the psychopaths who manipulate belief systems for their own advantage, right? The people who use God’s name in vain, the Pharisees who want to dress in religious clothing and obtain status in consequence. They’re Christ’s number one enemies in the Gospels, by the way. Those people, they’re the ones who conspire to crucify him. Right? The religious pretenders. So this has been going on for a very long period of time.

So the climate apocalypse narrative is perfectly situated to serve the purposes of the narcissists, the Machiavellians, the psychopaths and the sadists. Because it’s an infinitely expanding existential threat that can be used as an excuse for anything. And it also provides a perfect cloak for any amount of power maneuvering.

It’s like I want to make your shower heads put out a needle spray so that you’re cold all the time while you have a shower, while you’re doing something you do every day that could otherwise be highly enjoyable. Why do I get to invade your life to that degree? Well, because the planet’s at stake, Joe. And who are you to privilege your shower comfort, something that trivial, over the fate of the entire planet? Well, you can use that argument at every single level.

You know, Trump came out with this executive statement just a few days ago about shower heads, and everybody kind of laughed about that. And I thought, no, he has an eye for petty tyranny. For petty tyranny. And there’s very little that’s more petty than, well, I think the showerhead example is a perfect one. And then you also think, look, if they’re willing to control your life at that level of detail, what are they not willing to control? It’s like you’re concerned about my shower heads? We’re out of water, which we’re not at all. So what won’t you control?

So you think all the psychopaths are edge cases? They’ll move wherever the power is. They find a narrative that can be used to strike fear in the hearts of people and to justify compulsion. They ally themselves with that belief claim, and then they ratchet themselves up status hierarchies without any true reputational validity, riding on that edge of fear and power.

I wrote an article. It hasn’t been published yet in the Telegraph because I got a lot of hell after one of our podcasts. You may know this, but the climate change stuff. That’s right. The whole transcript was sent to the college as an indication that I was out of my wheelhouse. And maybe I stepped a bit out of my wheelhouse when we had that discussion, because I’m not a climate scientist, whatever the hell that is, by the way. Because you have to know a lot to be a climate scientist and an economist on top of that.

So today I’m talking about something that’s a lot more psychological. The climate apocalypse narrative is a social contagion that’s driven by power-mad psychopaths who are hell-bent on using fear and compulsion to make sure everyone steps in line so that they can continue with their acquisition of undeserved power.

JOE ROGAN: It’s also effective enough that the people that are underneath the power comply and do the job of the man for the man.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, well that’s the advantage of using fear and compulsion, right? It’s like, well, I have to go along with this because my leaders who had built up a certain degree of credibility are telling me that the apocalypse is nigh and who am I to, well, first of all, question, because, God, there’s a hard thing to figure out. What’s the global effect of human activity on the climate for the next hundred years? Well, good luck figuring that out.

But this is why making it more psychological this time. It’s like the climate fluctuates and for complex reasons. But that doesn’t mean that you get to look a hundred years into the future and you get to conjure up an apocalyptic narrative and you get to say we’re the only people that can save you. And you get to say you have to change every single thing you do in your life and prioritize our concern above all else, including even the well-being of your own children or the economic future of the Africans, for example, who don’t get to use fossil fuels. You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to do that using fear and compulsion.

JOE ROGAN: Not only that, it’s being done by people who have been wrong about everything every step of the way. Every step of the way.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah. Well then they just play a sleight of hand game there though. Okay? We got the time frame wrong, Joe. It’s not 20 years, but it’s not even just four years.

JOE ROGAN: It’s not even just climate change. It’s basically everything. Public health, agriculture, you name it.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, everything.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, that’s the thing, the water supply.

The Problem of Reliable Expertise

JORDAN PETERSON: That sets us back into this conundrum that you and Douglas and Dave were addressing. It’s like, okay, two conundrums, three. How do you pursue your interest in a landscape that’s been shorn of reliable expert input? Who do you rely on? If you don’t know who to rely on, how do you keep the psychopaths at bay? And the conspiracy theorist mongers and the people who aren’t trying to discover the truth, but who are using the conspiratorial edge, let’s say. Yeah, the gripers for that matter, right?

These are people who are clearly playing power games for their own benefit and they’re spinning up these conspiratorial narratives and riding on them and occupying them in this parasitical manner. There’s going to be a huge, this is a huge problem already on the right wing side. I don’t even know what the hell that is anymore because I don’t know what the left is and I don’t know what the right is.

JOE ROGAN: But we need to claim the center.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, well, that’s also what we’re trying to do with Ark. What is the center?

JOE ROGAN: The center is kind of where we can all meet up. Well, and I think that’s doable.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, let’s specify it even more.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

The Center as Voluntary Play

JORDAN PETERSON: The center is a place you’d go if you were invited. Well, and that also ties back into this idea of play. You know, Piaget figured this out when he was watching little kids. So if a little boy wants to play house with a little girl, which is generally a good idea, if you want to play house with a woman at some point in your life, you better get that right. It’s a very serious game.

What’s the first rule? She has to want to play. What’s the second rule? You have to play with her in a manner that makes her want to play with you again. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in terms of what constitutes objective standards of morality. You know how Sam Harris was obsessed with malevolence and he wanted to ground morality in objective science because he thought that would give us a firm standing place. But he went down the wrong scientific rabbit hole, I think.

I think if you understand this relationship with play and iteration, then you have the core of morality. And Piaget, by the way, this is part of, this is the philosophical edge of his theory. This is actually what he’s trying to accomplish. How do you decide if an arrangement is good versus bad or good versus evil? Well, Piaget went to children to find that out.

It’s like, okay, you want to set up a game. Why? A game is the first social, it’s the foundation of social interaction. Play a game with one other person. And then maybe you can play a game with a bunch of people. And then you can play a game with one person or a bunch of people across a long period of time. And then you could do it in a way that improves.

Okay, so now, so what are the rules? If you’re a little boy, she has to want to play, and then you have to play with her in a way so that she wants to play with you again. If you do that, then you have a friend and that iterates now. So you can imagine that there’s a structure of voluntary play that’s really quite stringent.

But this is what you do on your podcast, seriously. And that’s why it’s so attractive to people. You know, that’s the core of what you might call objective morality. It’s like there’s a very limited number of ways to play, to offer a game that someone else wants to play, and then there’s a very limited number of ways to play that game so that they want to keep playing with you. And then if you add that additional constraint of improvement across the games, you’ve got the straight, narrow path.

Then it’s marked by, we’re really trying to do this at Ark. We want to offer a vision that people want to accept, or even thrilled to accept, because that’s even better. A game that you’d be thrilled to play.

Energy Abundance and Poverty

So one of the things we’re doing on the energy side, I’m going to an event with Alex Epstein here in two days. Talk to energy executives about this. You know, well, what kind of world do you want to see? Well, how about a world where there’s so much energy that poor people can afford it? How’d that be for a vision? Have you got a problem with that?

Well, poor people can’t have energy because that’ll destroy the planet. It’s like, no, poor people can’t have that energy because you’d have to let go of the game that you’re playing as a narcissistic psychopath that’s elevating your status inappropriately, and you’re perfectly willing to sacrifice the world’s poor to continue your grip on power. How about that for a psychological interpretation?

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

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think people on the left are getting that message. I don’t think they’re hearing that this is exactly what third world countries need is a reliable source of energy and industry to elevate themselves out of poverty.

JORDAN PETERSON: They’re not, they’re not getting that.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s not the problem of the people that are on the left, the general followers.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, it might be that. It might be a problem that’s facilitated by the psychopathic fringe types.

JOE ROGAN: I think it’s not offered to them is my point.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, the question is why not? And the reason is, this is part of the, you talk to Lomborg, right? To Bjorn, and Bjorn’s pretty good on this, or very good on this, I should say. Yes, you know, to give him credit. And he would like to see a world where, and he’s part of Ark, he’d like to see a world where we make energy abundance a top priority.

JOE ROGAN: It’s probably the only way you’re going to pull third world countries out of dire poverty.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, it’s also, as far as I can tell, the only way that you pull them out of environmental catastrophe. Because if you want to produce an environmental catastrophe, a true environmental catastrophe, how about a three or four year famine so that everyone there kills all the animals, for example, or dies?

So we also know that if you get people above $5,000 a year GDP, then they start paying attention to long-term environmental sustainability because they don’t have to scrabble around in the dirt for their next meal. So then we could say, well, how about we have a future of sufficient abundance so that no one is deprived of energy or opportunity for their children?

Well, that sounds like an invitation. Now if you hate people and you think the industrial enterprise is a stain on the planet and that we’re viruses or cancer on the planet, then you’re going to have a problem with that. But my sense too is that if we had enough energy, we could make all the deserts bloom.

The Symbol of Failed Leadership

JOE ROGAN: I was watching a video on pollution in India, about the amount of garbage that gets thrown in rivers in India. And it was staggering, just staggering to watch that somehow or another through, because the population is so large and there’s so many poor people and there’s a lack of hope, whatever it is, they’re just throwing their garbage in the rivers and their rivers are just overwhelmed with garbage. If there’s ever a symbol of people that have been led the wrong way, bad leadership, bad planning, bad…

JORDAN PETERSON: Underlying story, everything, that’s it.

When you look in your river and it’s all you see is water bottles, all you see is floating plastic that’s the whole river. And you know that if you get in that water, you’re going to get sick. And yet no one looks at it as number one priority. Like, what do you always say? Clean your room, make your bed. Like, right, yeah.

JORDAN PETERSON: What.

JORDAN PETERSON: What’s going on?

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, and you want to incentivize people to pay attention to their local environment, and you do that in part by ensuring that they’re not living so close to the edge of catastrophe that they can only think about today. Right. And if you start from the mindset that… Can I tell you another story?

JORDAN PETERSON: Sure.

The Story of Abraham and the Call to Adventure

JORDAN PETERSON: All right. This is a really cool story. This is how to set the world right, this story. So I’ve been traveling around lecturing about my book, and I wrote a chapter on Abraham in that book. And Abraham is the father of, in principle, Islam, Christianity and Judaism. He’s the father of nations. That’s how the story goes.

So when God comes to Abraham in a very particular way, it’s one of the ways God is characterized in the Old Testament. So this is like a definition of God, right? It’s not a testament to God. It’s a definition of what God is.

Abraham doesn’t hear anything about God till he’s like 70, and he’s already living in privileged paradise because his father and his mother are rich, and so he doesn’t have to lift a finger. If life is about having your needs met, Abraham’s got it covered. And so he lives like a satiated infant till he’s 70.

And then a voice comes to him and it says, “You are required by the God of your ancestors to leave your zone of comfort, to leave the wealth of your father, to leave your nation, to leave your language, to go out into the world and have your terrible adventure.”

And if you do that, so now imagine that’s the call to adventure. If you do that, these things will happen. This is the covenant that God makes to the Abrahamic people. It’s so cool. I just talked to Bret Weinstein about this from an evolutionary biological perspective on the road because I wanted him to evaluate the story I’m going to tell you from an evolutionary perspective.

So God is the voice that says to Abraham, “If you follow the call of adventure, you’ll be a blessing to yourself.” So that’s the meaning of life, right? To have the adventure.

JORDAN PETERSON: You’ll do this in a way. Yeah, yeah. Because adventure is compelling. Responsible, romantic adventure is the most compelling pathway. Right. And if it’s intense enough, it justifies the suffering, right? It’s a reason to get up in the morning, even if you’re in pain.

Then he says, there’s another thing that’ll happen too, which is that your name will become known among your people for valid reasons. So that’s that genuine reputation that we talked about. So if you follow the pattern of adventure properly, you’ll be a blessing to yourself, and your name will become known among your people for valid reasons. So that’s a good deal.

You’ll do this in a way that will maximize the probability that you’ll establish something of permanence or even eternal permanence. So Abraham is offered… He accepts the call and makes the proper sacrifices along the way. God says your descendants will outnumber the stars. So he establishes the pattern of fatherhood that best propagates down the generations, which is the same as following the pathway of adventure.

Then he says you’ll do this in a way that will make sure no one can stand before you. So that if you adhere to that adventurous spirit and you propagate it, all the enemies will either be converted into friends or flee before you. And then you’ll do it in a way that brings abundance to everyone.

The Concordance Between Personal Development and Social Good

So now, this is the question I’d asked Brett. So imagine this. Imagine that we have an instinct in us, or divine voice, I don’t care which of those you use, an instinct within us that calls us to develop, right? That puts us on the edge. And that’s not the same as looking for infantile satiation or the gratification of our needs. It’s genuinely this call to expand yourself and to be on the edge and to develop that.

If you did that, to follow that instinct, then you’d be a blessing to yourself. Your name would become known among your people. You’d establish something of permanent significance. No one could stand before you, and it would bring abundance to everyone, right?

And then in the Abrahamic story, what happens is that as Abraham accepts, that goes out in the world, and then he has a series of adventures, each of which requires a more complete sacrifice. Because as you develop under the influence of this call, what you’re required to do is to live more carefully in accordance with your expanding domain of opportunity. And that’s the pathway forward.

So I asked Brett about that, because this is different than the selfish gene idea, right? It’s like there’s an instinct within us that calls us to develop that pulls us out into the world. And if we follow it religiously and we make the proper sacrifices along the way, then those five things will happen around us.

And that speaks of a concordance which has to be there. It has to be there between the spirit that develops us and the pathway that brings maximal benefit to the natural and the social world. And I can’t see how that can be the case if we’re adapted to the world. That has to be the case, right?

It has to be that if we followed the instinct that would best put us together psychologically, this quest, this adventure, that would also be the spirit that set the world in order, right? And that spirit, that whole thing, that’s what’s defined as God in that particular story.

JORDAN PETERSON: That resonates.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, I can’t see… The alternative is preposterous, right? The alternative is that we don’t have an instinct to develop. And you know that’s wrong. You just have to watch children and you know that’s wrong. You just have to watch yourself and the curiosity that you have and the desire for novelty and for learning, you know that’s there. That’s what you followed to make this show.

JORDAN PETERSON: Definitely.

JORDAN PETERSON: And so the alternative is that instinct doesn’t exist. That’s a stupid theory. Or what brings you into the world is done at the expense of other people in a way that won’t enhance your reputation in a way that has nothing to do with anything permanent. Right? Then it would be sort of you against the world. That would be like a power orientation.

You can get your way in the world, but you have to manipulate, you have to lie, you have to use compulsion, you have to use fear. You can’t just rely on the quest, say, or your adventure. And I think you can, I think you can. I think you better. Or else there’s that too.

Power, Manipulation, and the Will to Adventure

JORDAN PETERSON: It’s interesting because you’re talking about tyrants, right? And you’re talking about people of extreme power and how that corrupts. And in that case, there’s a large percentage of those people that are violating all those things that you said, because they do manipulate and they do rely on fear.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, you know, Nietzsche was an advocate of the will to power, right? So you can imagine that there’s a variety of potential motivating forces. And one would be hedonic pleasure. That’s the golden calf worshipers, by the way. So that’s just short term hedonism. And that doesn’t work.

And by work I mean it doesn’t iterate socially. It’s like if it’s all about you and what you want now, first of all, that’s not going to serve you well tomorrow. And I don’t want to be anywhere near you. You’re literally an overgrown two year old.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right.

JORDAN PETERSON: And that gets pretty ugly by the time you’re 40. So the whole golden calf thing, no, that’s just off the table.

JORDAN PETERSON: But isn’t it kind of celebrated among certain high achievers, particularly in the business world, like the hedonistic, sociopathic drive to constantly get more numbers on the ledger?

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, well, I don’t know if that’s exactly…

JORDAN PETERSON: Greed is good. That’s Walt. Yeah, yeah, that’s Michael Douglas, right?

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah.

JORDAN PETERSON: Greed is good.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah. Well, okay, let’s delve into that for a minute.

JORDAN PETERSON: I’m not advocating.

JORDAN PETERSON: I know you’re not. I know you’re not. You can turn to hedonism, you can fall into nihilism, you can turn to hedonism, or you can turn to power. This Abrahamic covenant, it’s different than power. It’s adventure. That’s… it’s romantic adventure, actually. That’s not the only definition of God in the Old Testament, by the way. There’s something deeper than that that it refers to.

So those are the options. Now, you said the achievers, you know, who are stacking up numbers, it’s like they found a way forward to attain status, but they’ve fixated on an element that shouldn’t be fundamental. They’re not trying to store up the treasure in heaven, they’re trying to store up the treasure on earth. And that’s better than not doing it.

See, this is another thing we need to understand because I’ve spent a lot of time, for example, trying to figure out why people are attracted to Andrew Tate. And I know why they’re attracted to Andrew Tate. They’d rather be Andrew Tate than an incel. And they’re right. Right. It’s best to give the devil his due.

If you had to choose between being kind of flabby and unhealthy and resentful and in your basement looking at pornography, hating women, because all of them reject you all the time and you deserve it and you’re ineffectual and the future looks pretty damn gloomy. And then you see Andrew Tate, who’s tough and hyper masculine in a manner that’s almost a parody, and wealthy and famous and apparently has women at his disposal, with a fair bit of stress on the idea of disposal. You’d think, well, I’d much rather be him than me. That’s the incorporation of the shadow from the Jungian perspective. It’s right.

Rejection, Pain, and the Shadow

JORDAN PETERSON: And you think about the number of men, they’re incels. The thing about men, also, if they get rejected a lot, they associate women with pain.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah.

JORDAN PETERSON: And then they get angry at those women because those women cause them pain. It’s just very simple equation. Of course, that’s how you get man haters, or excuse me, that’s how you get a woman hater. And the same could be said for… that’s how you get a man hater. Right. You associate men with rejection and cruelty.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, and then young men in particular are more likely to be rejected. Young women may have difficulty finding the ideal man, but they don’t face the same degree of universal rejection. So it’s hard on young men.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, they’re not the pursuers. Right. As much. The young women are.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right, Right. Well, and women are the gatekeepers fundamentally, of sex. So that’s their essential power. That’s also the power of chastity.

JORDAN PETERSON: And that’s the scary thing about acquiring wealth, is that wealth allows you to bypass the genetic social hierarchy.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, Well, I talked to Russell Brand about this a lot. You know, women threw themselves at him. How’d that work out for him? Not great. You know, it threw him into great spiritual confusion. It was empty and hollow. And that’s worth knowing to see because you might say to the people who are interested in the shadow figures, and Tate plays that role, the master of women, let’s say. Why not do that?

Because you need an answer to that. It’s certainly better than being lonely, isolated, bitter and ineffectual. That’s for sure. Well, it’s because you don’t confuse a stepping stone with the pinnacle. That’s why there’s way more beyond that.

I mean, you’re a tough guy. You went through your disciplinary processes on the physical side, in particular, the intellectual side too, I might add. You know, you’ve got what Tate has to offer, but you’re… what? You’re respectable. Why? Why?

JORDAN PETERSON: Completely different background than him, first of all. And also my feeling in life is whenever you can be nice, that’s a general guideline.

JORDAN PETERSON: You can be nice or good.

JORDAN PETERSON: I mean, both.

JORDAN PETERSON: Okay.

JORDAN PETERSON: Nice as well. I get the posturing. I get how it would be attractive to young men. I get it. If I was a young man, I would certainly be drawn to him. And I was to many fighters. And I accepted a lot of personality flaws in people that I admired as fighters because they were very successful at doing this one insanely difficult thing.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right, right.

The Path to Championship Excellence

And oftentimes that requires a certain amount of narcissism, requires a certain amount of internal focus, ironically enough, not at the championship level. Ironically enough, it gets you close, but it doesn’t get you to be the king. The kings are almost precisely universally disciplined, focused and generally kind. They’re some of the nicest people. The best at the most difficult thing athletically to do and the most difficult you’re conquering.

JORDAN PETERSON: Why do you think that is?

JORDAN PETERSON: I think you have to be.

JORDAN PETERSON: Why?

JORDAN PETERSON: Miyamoto Musashi wrote about this in the Book of Five Rings. You must have balance in everything in life. If you have imbalance, you can get pretty far because you’re so specialized, right? You’re so driven. But you will fall prey to the balanced man.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, well, that’s exactly my point.

JORDAN PETERSON: You will also recognize characteristics in him that you envy and that you wish you had yourself. Like if you’re a narcissist and a sociopath, you know you are. And you can’t really be proud of yourself. You can’t.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right?

JORDAN PETERSON: You don’t have the benefit of the positive feedback that you get from true kindness to others. You don’t have.

JORDAN PETERSON: You also know that your reputation is founded on sand. And one of the way to rationalize that is, well, everyone does that, right? Everyone’s like that. Yeah. But then you don’t trust or like anyone, right?

JORDAN PETERSON: Then you’re really alone.

JORDAN PETERSON: That, that’s for sure.

JORDAN PETERSON: Really?

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah.

JORDAN PETERSON: And then if you do achieve success, it’s hollow because you realize like, so.

The Jungian Path of Individuation

JORDAN PETERSON: You know, you just outlined there the progression that Carl Jung identified as characteristic of individuation. Right? With the second thing that you said. So imagine that you start. You start an incel. Right? You’re ineffectual and you’re rejected as a young man. Now, there are exceptions, but let’s just play that out as the unhappy majority. Okay?

Now you look for a shadow figure to sharpen you up, to toughen you up, and to make you strive at least along one dimension, right? And so then you do that. Well, then the next thing that happens in the Jungian stage progression is for a man, it’s integration of the anima, which is the feminine part. And it’s integration. It’s not replacement, it’s like, oh, well, then you discover the utility of empathy and compassion and kindness and mercy and care, while still being able to deal out justice, let’s say.

And so then you bridge that gap. And then that integration, you just said, even among fighters, that’s what puts them in the highest place. Right? That’s right. That’s right. So, but it’s hard for the people. It’s hard for those who are completely disaffected and also quite angry about it.

You know, the people who are interested in the pathway that Tate offers, they’re not so unhappy that he’s hard on women, because they’re pretty mad at women. And so, you know, if it’s the b or me, then I’ll pick me, you know. Right, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And so, and it is very crucial to get this progression correct, because monster is better than wimp.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right?

JORDAN PETERSON: Right. But the question is, what’s better than monster? And so it’s very interesting that you made those comments on the fighting side, because you wouldn’t necessarily think that it would be true in that world as well.

George St. Pierre: The Balanced Warrior

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, one of the best examples is your countryman, George St. Pierre, one of the greatest of all time, one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. And if you didn’t know that he was one of the greatest fighters of all time, you would never guess it. You’d never guess it talking to him.

He’s curious, he’s interesting, he’s intelligent, he’s very well read. He’s always interested in different things. He’s constantly searching for new information. And as a martial artist, he is still on a quest of improvement, even though he’s retired from competing, always trains, he’s constantly training.

Moses and the Burning Bush: The Making of a Leader

JORDAN PETERSON: A quest for new information. Okay, so let me tell you a story about that, please. All right, so this is the story that comes up at the beginning of Moses when he turns into a leader. So it’s about how you turn into a leader.

Okay, so he’s already killed a man, and he’s left Egypt because of it. So now he’s in this land called Midian, and he goes there and he chases some ruffians away from a well for these two girls who are drawing water. And they go and tell their father, and he says to them, bring this young man home to have dinner. So he does, and then he gets married to them, and then he becomes a shepherd.

And this is crucial because the shepherds, an image that runs through the biblical corpus. Right. Well, shepherds at that time lived by themselves in the wilderness on their wits, and they kept the wolves and the lions at bay with primitive weapons. So these were tough guys, and they cared for the most vulnerable.

So a shepherd is an image of optimized, ordinary masculinity. Take care of yourself, keep the monsters at bay, and you attend to the most vulnerable. So Moses has got that. He’s a shepherd. He’s a successful shepherd.

So now he’s out there one day, wandering around Mount Sinai. And Mount Sinai, or Mount Horeb, that’s the place where heaven and earth touch. So that’s where the messengers of the divine descend to earth. And so he’s out there, and something attracts his attention, makes him curious. That’s the burning bush.

It’s not a forest fire. It’s not something you can’t ignore. It’s something alive because that’s a bush. A tree is a symbol of life, and it’s burning because things that are alive burn, right? That’s metabolism and an intensification of that, like a psychedelic intensification of that. That’s what the burning bush is, and that’s what glimmers to Moses.

And he steps off the beaten track, right, to investigate what drives his curiosity. And so then he goes off the beaten track, and he starts to delve deeply into the mysteries of the burning bush. And at some point, he realizes he’s on sacred ground. He takes off his shoes. That’s a symbol of willingness to transform identity, because shoes signify identity, right? They’re part of your costume, your working man’s costume.

And so then he continues to commune with the burning bush. He gets deeper and deeper into something. He makes himself a specialist by following what compels him and delving deeply into it. And when he gets deep enough into it, to the bottom, the voice of eternity speaks to him and says, “You’re now no longer who you were. You’re now a leader. You have to go back to your people. You have to stand up against the tyrant. You have to tell the slaves that they need to leave their tyranny and their slavery and serve me in the wilderness. And you have to do that now.”

And Moses says, “I can’t, because I can’t speak. I’m slow of tongue.” And God says, basically, “That’s your problem. And with me on your side, we can sort that out. And don’t you have a brother, Aaron? And can’t he speak? It’s like, bring him along for the ride.”

And so that’s when Moses becomes a leader, right? And so that’s the pattern. It’s like ordinary masculinity. Those are the dwarves that Snow White serves before she meets the prince, by the way. The ordinary masculine. Right, so, but, and that, and those dwarves protect her from the evil queen that wants to suppress her by feeding her a poisoned apple.

So Snow White has to learn to serve the ordinary man before she can find a prince. Yeah, something Disney missed completely in the last story.

The Pattern of Leadership

So what’s the pattern? Well, you discipline yourself, so you become a shepherd, and then you follow what compels you off the path. Then you take it seriously and get to the bottom of it, and then that transforms you. And thus transformed, you can face the tyrant, you can specify the promised land properly, and you can lead the slaves across chaos and blood. That’s the Red Sea and then through the desert. Right.

And so you said, you know, you said two things. You said that the good fighters have learned to integrate their civilized side, otherwise they don’t get to be great. And that they continue the pathway of self improvement. Right. They continue to pursue what’s calling to them.

That’s another definition of God in the Old Testament, by the way. What calls to you? That’s the burning bush. The spirit of the burning bush is what entices you, what grabs your interest, what attracts your curiosity, and that’s identical. The biblical claim is that’s the same thing as the spirit of adventure.

It’s the same thing that speaks to Noah. Noah’s a good man and a voice comes to him and says, “All hell’s about to break loose.” And he believes his intuition because he’s a good man and can rely on himself. So he makes the ark, right. And he brings his family aboard and culture and nature and re establishes humanity. That’s the pathway of the leader too.

JORDAN PETERSON: What is your take on, there’s a university in Jerusalem that had this theory that the burning bush was the acacia bush, and the acacia bush is rich in DMT.

The Symbolism of Hallucinogens and the Burning Bush

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, I think that hallucinogens strip memory from perception, so you see the world in all its blazing glory. Huxley figured that out with the doors of perception. That’s really what that is. Apparently what psychedelics do psychopharmacologically, they mimic a high stress condition and they strip memory from perception so that you can return to the source and revitalize your perceptions.

Right. So the probability that there’s some overlap between that and the burning bush is high. It’s high, so to speak.

I’ll tell you one more story. If that’s all right with you. So, something else I figured out that I tried on Brett. Imagine you could take the hedonistic path, you could take the power path, you could take the nihilistic path. And then you might say, well, that’s the only three options. That’s kind of what the postmodernists believe. That’s kind of what the nihilists and the post modernists, the Nietzscheans believe. Power, hedonism, nihilism. Those are your options. There’s no uniting narrative above that.

The Story of Cain and Abel

So in the story of Cain and Abel, two patterns are laid out that are different than that. One is Cain’s pattern, one’s Abel’s pattern. These are the first two people that live in the world. Because Adam and Eve are made by God. They’re in paradise, or were. Cain and Abel are the first two people.

So Abel brings his best to the table. He takes the best animal in his flock, and he takes the best cut and the best part of the cut, and he offers that to God. So he literally brings his best to the table. That’s what he sacrifices and Cain doesn’t. So Cain’s sacrifices are rejected by God. And God tells him, if you brought your best to the table, you’d be accepted.

And Cain gets bitter and resentful and invites temptation in to possess him. So that spirit of resentment possesses him. And then he becomes murderous. He kills his brother, and his descendants become genocidal. And then you have the flood.

And so that pattern of sacrifice is established right at the beginning of the biblical texts, Abel versus Cain. Abel brings the best to the table, and that satisfies God. So one question, God actually asks Cain this, when Cain complains, says, wouldn’t you be accepted if you were doing your best? So that’s a question of conscience.

If you’re in extreme misery and your life is hollow and empty and you’re bitter and resentful, are you bringing your best to the table? Because the covenant proclaims that if you did, you’d be accepted. So clearly, now the question is, what constitutes sacrifice? Sacrifice becomes the foundation of the state. Not power, not hedonism, sacrifice.

Christ as the Exemplar of Voluntary Self-Sacrifice

And then that motif is played out through the whole Bible. And that’s what culminates in the New Testament. Total sacrifice as the foundation of the community. I don’t know what sense to make out of the metaphysics of the religious realm, because that’s beyond me and everyone. The world’s a strange place and we could leave it at that.

But the idea that Christ is the exemplar of voluntary self-sacrifice, won’t turn to power, won’t deviate from his course, faces the worst of all possible deaths, descends to hell itself. That’s the pattern of life lived with no reserve. And that’s the foundation of the free state.

I tried that on Brett. He told me when we first met on the tour that he felt that the biblical narratives were anachronistic, that they were written in a time that was no longer relevant to us. But he decided by the end of our three days together that if you got to the core of the message, it’s alive. That’s the living spirit inside the bush, you might say.

And here’s even the weirder thing. It’s pretty obvious that Christ is a symbol of voluntary self-sacrifice. I don’t think it really comes as a shock to anyone. But the weird thing is, we put that symbol at the center of our churches and at the centers of our towns for 2,000 years, not really knowing why.

And the reason is, is that voluntary self-sacrifice is the foundation of the integrated psyche and the stable, productive and abundant community. It’s been exciting to have the opportunity over the last nine months to go talk to people about that because I’ve talked to about 150,000 people, I guess, public lectures.

JOE ROGAN: That to me is one of the most fascinating aspects of Christianity. Regardless of whether or not you think logically these things took place, logically, these stories are a completely accurate depiction of exactly how, if you follow the principles, it’s incredibly beneficial to your spiritual life as a person.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, that’s a kind of interesting proof, isn’t it?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It means that there’s truth in it.

The Spirit of Truth and Timeless Stories

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, there’s certainly the spirit of truth that makes life more abundant. That’s exactly right. And these are weird stories because the way they’re true is very sophisticated. They’re true always. That’s different than a story about the past. The truest story is always happening.

The story of Moses is exactly like that. The pattern of leadership development that’s embedded in the Exodus story. That is how leaders develop. If they’re real leaders and the temptation is power. But that’s not their motivation. That’s their temptation. That’s a very important distinction. And that’s always the case with leaders. And if they fall prey to the temptation of power, no matter what their accomplishment, they’re not going to complete the task.

And so there’s a cool element at the end of that story, too. Just before Moses dies, he picks a scout from each tribe, 12 tribes, and he sends them to Canaan, which is the future. That’s a good way of thinking about it. It’s the potential place we could reside, where everything was worked out. The land of milk and honey.

He sends 12 scouts there, and 10 of them come back and say they tell a fear story. Say it’s insurmountable. The challenges that lie ahead of us, there’s no way we can master this. We should have never crossed the desert. We should have stayed under the thumbs of the tyrants. We should have never tried to be anything more than slaves, because now we’re doomed.

And two of them say no. If we maintain our upward orientation and our covenant, nothing can stand in our way. We can make the deserts bloom. Moses dies, those two scouts, and so do all the Israelites who are convinced by the unfaithful scouts. And the scouts die.

And the two people who go on to the promised land are Caleb and Joshua. And they lead the Israelites, the faithful Israelites, into the promised land. Those are the people who have the courage to confront the future in a faithful and hopeful and courageous manner. They’re the inheritors of the future. Caleb, Joshua. Joshua’s name is the same as Christ’s name. It’s the same name. That’s not a fluke. That’s one of those echoes or precursors to the story.

There’s an ethos that leads you into the promised land. And what’s the ethos? The spirit of voluntary self-sacrifice. You know, you give up something for a social relationship, of course, you give up being primary. You do the same thing at the social level. And when you do that, it integrates you and it sets the world straight. And that’s built into the biblical story. It’s right at its core.

JOE ROGAN: So pause that thought.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I’m going to use the restroom. We’ll come back.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yep, we’re back. So it’s great fun to explain these things to people on the tour because it sorts them out well.

JOE ROGAN: It’s very fascinating.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, that’s for sure.

JOE ROGAN: And the fact that these stories have existed for so long, so interesting. That’s where it gets really weird.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah. Well, they’ve adapted to the contours of our memory and our imagination.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

Peterson Academy Update

JORDAN PETERSON: So you find them compelling and they stick to your memory. So I’m going to tell you what else I’m up to.

JOE ROGAN: What are you up to?

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, the first thing I want to do is thank you. So we launched Peterson Academy in September and we talked about it and it’s been a stunning success. We have 40,000 students.

JOE ROGAN: That’s amazing.

JORDAN PETERSON: We think we’re the most rapidly capitalized. We’re one of the most rapidly capitalized companies ever, especially with our degree of investment, because we run a lean show. We have great professors, we have a great social media site. We had to kick 10 people off it. We have 15,000 active users. 10 people were dragging it sideways.

JOE ROGAN: What were they doing?

JORDAN PETERSON: They were causing trouble, Joe. Causing trouble. Well, or immature or out for, or didn’t know how to conduct themselves. That’s all it took. And now everyone is sharing ideas and Mick, my daughter and her husband, they keep a close eye on this.

JOE ROGAN: That’s great.

JORDAN PETERSON: We have secured funding to the point where we are dropping the price from $599 to $399 a year as of today. So that should make it accessible to a lot more people. And we’re even more convinced than we were that this has to be the future of higher education.

So when we were doing our due diligence for the fundraising, we discovered that 40% of courses at university are now online. And we’ve investigated some of those courses. Many of them are PowerPoint presentations. And that’s all. And so that’s the university experience for full tuition. And we literally have the best professors in the world and unmatched production quality.

And we’re filling in the social element too, because we want people to be able to meet. The social media platform does that. It’s very positive platform. We’ve already had our first couple announce themselves, which was quite fun. And we’re going to do in person events. Our first plan, we’re going to do a cruise.

Navigating Fame and Misrepresentation

JOE ROGAN: Can I ask you this? What has your journey been like? To go from relative obscurity as a professor in Toronto to becoming this person who you are now, sort of a worldwide educator outside of the standard system of academia, but also subject to intense international scrutiny, character distortions.

JORDAN PETERSON: Complete.

JOE ROGAN: Complete voluntary. What they’ve done to change your position. Something like, you are probably the most intentionally misrepresented person I know, intentionally misrepresented. You see it with a lot of other people, too, but with you, it’s malicious. I’ve seen it. But yet you have this desire inside of you to spread information and to educate and learn.

JORDAN PETERSON: I’m learning on the stage.

JOE ROGAN: What has it been like? How old were you when I first met you? It was like 2015, right? Somewhere around 10 years ago?

JORDAN PETERSON: 53. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You were just encountering notoriety, just encountering attention and all the trappings that come with that. What has that been like? Navigating that. It’s very unusual. The first person becomes world famous, at 50, for ideas.

The Impact of Public Speaking and Teaching

Yeah. That’s for sure. Well, first, I mean, it was exhilarating and painful to begin with. It was exhilarating because I knew the ideas that I was teaching at Harvard and at U of T were revolutionary. I could never believe. I never could get over the fact that they allowed me to teach. It was just a. But the students loved my courses, and I was very diligent, you know. So I stayed in my traces, so to speak.

And I wasn’t a revolutionary for the sake of revolutionary argumentation. And I was teaching about totalitarianism and great evil. And so it was hard to make a moral case against me. And no one was really inclined to. They were happy with my teaching, and as were the students. And I had a clinical practice which was quite extensive.

But then when I first started to lecture much more broadly, we rented a theater, and I did a series on Genesis. That was the first foray out into the public space, and it sold out. Well, that was when I started to encounter pain, I would say, at a crowd level. And that was rough, Joe, because I’m pretty good at getting people to open up to me right away. I mean, I learned that as a clinician, and have thousands of people do that. That’s pretty rough now.

It was good. It was a good thing, like all things considered, because people would tell me how miserable they were, how discouraged and how sidelined and often how bitter, how addicted, how imprisoned. Rough stories and then tell me how much they had improved. But that was also. There was a tragic element to that, because it didn’t take that much to tap them into the right orientation.

And so there was sadness in that. To see all these people who are demoralized, thousands of them, and then to see how that could be rectified and yet hadn’t been. That was rough. I’d really. I’m sure that was what. There’s many things that made me sick. I had a pre-existing condition that was autoimmune. But seeing all that, that was pretty rough.

But knowing that it was possible to rectify it, well, that’s. There’s nothing better than that. Wherever I go now, it’s so interesting. Wherever I go now, I’m among friends. It’s very strange. And I have security people and they keep an eye on me. And all the interactions I have with people are positive.

And I always take time for people, because, well, if they’ve been positively impacted by something that I’ve read or said and they’re trying to get their lives together, it’s like, how about we encourage that? Right? Because more of that would be real good. And if we had enough of that, then more of that would be real good and real necessary.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

JORDAN PETERSON: And so good for everyone too. That’s that abundance. It’s like you got your act together. Great. That’ll be real good for you. Be great for your girlfriend, be great for your kids, be great for your community. Absolutely.

And it’s. Well, the Christian ethos, the emphasis is redemption. One soul at a time. Well, I’m a psychologist. That’s what I think. One person at a time. Because everyone’s connected way more intensely than we think. And so there’s no such thing as a trivial person and there’s no such thing as a trivial sin or a trivial accomplishment, for that matter.

And so. And I know that, I know that I studied totalitarianism for a long time. I know how it comes about. It comes about when everyone lies about everything all the time. And the way you stop that is by not lying. And that’s how it stops.

So what’s it like? Painful and insanely exhilarating at the same time. And the balances shift over the years to the exhilaration. Once I got on top of it, once I got my health under control, which required pretty stringent discipline. Like I eat steak. And when I deviate from that, things start to fall apart around me pretty quick.

The Carnivore Diet Controversy

JOE ROGAN: Isn’t it crazy? The that alone is polarizing. You’re eating all the steak, you’re contributing to the downfall of civilization, you’re destroying the environment. Don’t you know that cows are the number one producer of.

JORDAN PETERSON: I know, I know. They got to stop eating meat.

JOE ROGAN: We eat too much meat. That’s why the world’s meanwhile, China’s opening up coal plants every week. It’s hilarious.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that’s just another. Okay, so it’s also surreal. And that’s one element, the diet thing. Just alone, not just alone is surreal. I mean, my daughter was so sick and now she’s great. Isn’t it crazy? It’s crazy. Well, my wife is on this carnivore diet too. And it’s been unbelievably good for her.

JOE ROGAN: It’s unbelievably good for almost everybody. That’s what’s really nuts.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, it’s crazy for the mind. That’s. Oh yeah, your brain likes to run on ketones, as it turns out. Yeah, it really does.

JOE ROGAN: I felt when I’ve done it back and forth, but when I’m on it strictly, when I go back to it, one of the things that I notice immediately is I have like an extra gear intellectually. My brain works.

JORDAN PETERSON: More stamina.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, more stamina.

JORDAN PETERSON: We’re going to run a study and IQ test people.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, because my system we don’t know, but yeah. There’s two studies planned. One on one group will be people with immunological disorders. Try carnivore keto and ordinary diet. Random assignation. But we’re also going to give them personality and IQ tests.

JOE ROGAN: You should do it with junk food. I’d be fascinated to see people pre, like go the right way first and then try junk food.

JORDAN PETERSON: It’d be good to do an ABAB design.

JOE ROGAN: Remember that is. What was that? Super Size Me. Yeah, yeah, that documentary. Yeah, where the guy just garbage.

JORDAN PETERSON: It’s absolutely crystal clear that we eat too many carbohydrates. Like the food pyramid is upside down.

Make America Healthy Again

JOE ROGAN: Yes, clearly. And then on top of that, environmental pollutants and all the other issues have with additives. And this to me is one of the more exciting things about this current administration is the Make America Healthy Again movement. And eliminate fluoride from the water, eliminate all these. I think there’s a new list of ingredients that most of them are banned in Europe and a lot of other places and are legal in America.

It’s insanity and it doesn’t make any sense. And oftentimes the arguments don’t even make sense as to why they continue to produce it. Because they produce the same products for Canada, for instance, where Canada has better laws when it comes to additives. So they produce the ones in Canada where they don’t have the negative dangerous additives. And yet they still make this argument that to force them to stop doing that in America will cause great economic harm.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, it’s clearly, clearly the case that we have an obesity, diabetes, mental health epidemic, and the probability that all of those are associated with insulin resistance and.

JOE ROGAN: Immunological reactions, to me, to be certain, herbicides and pesticides.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, well, well, there’s. There’s a cascading. There’s a cascade of differential effects. Undoubtedly some people are more sensitive to those things as well.

JOE ROGAN: I was watching a documentary that I sent to Jamie about China and one of the, China innovates at such a level, like, such a fascinating level that, because they’re integrated with the government, which I’m not saying is a good thing, but because of that sort of unlimited growth, because the growth is designed for the state, like everyone’s all involved in it.

One of the things they’re doing is integrating rice farms with crayfish farms. So they figured out a way to stop using herbicides and pesticides and instead farm these two things together. So they have the rice and then they have the crayfish. The crayfish feed off the excess material from the rice, but also keep the water, nitrogen and carbon rich. And so the rice is more nutrient rich, and so soil is more nutrient rich.

And then they’re bringing in fish and crabs as well. So they’re harvesting all of these different things that people eat along with the rice all in together. And they’ve created, sort of like what they’ve done with regenerative agriculture, like White Oaks Pastures and Polyface Farms and different regenerative agriculture establishments in America. But they’re doing it with rice to avoid using herbicides and pesticides.

JORDAN PETERSON: And hopefully the new administration under Kennedy will be able to figure out how to prioritize these things. So some of them happen. My concern, I suppose it’s not my concern. A concern is that they’ll try to do too many things at once. And that’s why I focused when we talked earlier today about insulin resistance.

JOE ROGAN: Right. But there’s so much to try to change.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, that’s it. And you can’t change at all. Like, that’s. There’s going to be resistance on all.

JOE ROGAN: Fronts, but one person at a time, as you’re saying, like when you. When you have this message and you talk to people about things that you’ve done that have made you healthier, that message resonates. And then one person, time tries that, their friends join in, and the next thing you know, you’ve got a large percentage of healthy people that are listening to you, which is.

The Power of Personal Transformation

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

JOE ROGAN: Yes, that’s.

JORDAN PETERSON: That’s a good deal.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a great.

JORDAN PETERSON: That’s a good deal.

JOE ROGAN: Those are my favorite stories that I hear from people that listen to the podcast. They’re like, I’ve listened to podcasts. I lost 60 pounds. I started working out every day. I’m much healthier. I’m drinking a lot of water. I’m taking electrolytes and vitamins and. And just my mental health has improved because of the daily exercise. I’m a different person. Yeah, I’m on the right path.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah. Well, it’s so, so that’s very interesting too. That the fact that that’s actually. You said those are the best stories that you can hear. Well, it shows you something about non-hedonistic motivation. It’s like, imagine what you could have if you could have anything you wanted. Well, maybe your imagination would drift first to the hedonistic side or maybe the power side for that matter.

It’s like, no, how about you can wander around anywhere in the world, some isolated field with a castle on it in Serbia, and people that you’ve never seen will come up to you and say, “I was having a pretty damn dismal time of it, all things considered. And I listened to what you wrote and said, and in consequence, I put my life together” and their wife is standing beside them going, “Yeah, he’s really in a lot better shape. Thank you a lot.”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, no, those, those are great.

JORDAN PETERSON: That’s a good deal.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a great deal.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah. So when you ask what it’s like. Well, it’s like a lot of that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

JORDAN PETERSON: And do you feel a burden?

Responsibility and Opportunity

JOE ROGAN: Do you feel like a sense of responsibility that is at times overwhelming because of this responsibility that you have?

JORDAN PETERSON: I think I felt more for a good while. The pain of it. It wasn’t the responsibility.

JOE ROGAN: Well, well, the intense connection you have to these people that are.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, the responsibility. Responsibility makes you careful. You know how careful are you? Pretty careful? Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

JORDAN PETERSON: Why?

JOE ROGAN: Because you have a responsibility.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, but that’s okay. Yeah. Well, that’s part of that additional sacrifice.

JOE ROGAN: Like, seems natural to me.

JORDAN PETERSON: Okay. What do you mean?

JOE ROGAN: That with, the concept, with great power comes great responsibility. It just seems right.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, it has to be the case.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

JORDAN PETERSON: I mean, as your field of opportunity expands.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

JORDAN PETERSON: If your field of responsibility doesn’t expand, you’ll collapse and you pay a higher price for stupidity at larger scales of opportunity. Yes, obviously. And so get your act together and. Is that a burden? Voluntarily undertaken responsibility isn’t a burden. It’s an opportunity. Right. That doesn’t mean it’s not easy. But easy like, I don’t know what easy is.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

JORDAN PETERSON: What’s easy? Pointless misery. That’s not easy.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

JORDAN PETERSON: Like you have.

JOE ROGAN: Life with no meaning is one of the hardest things.

JORDAN PETERSON: Absolutely.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

JORDAN PETERSON: So I guess the reason you pick up your cross and walk uphill is because that’s the best thing you can do, all things considered. I mean, that’s why Christ says that his burden is light, that his yoke is light. It’s like, huh, you’re supposed to take up your cross and walk uphill towards death and hell, let’s say. But that’s light. Okay. Why?

Because there’s no better pathway than voluntarily undertaken responsibility. Well, definitely. That’s psychologically impeccable statement. Like there’s no difference, statistically speaking, between thinking about yourself and being miserable. Self consciousness, they’re the same thing. Right.

JOE ROGAN: Which is a giant problem with social media. Right.

JORDAN PETERSON: Terrible problem.

JOE ROGAN: Accelerant to misery.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah. It’s sure. As soon as you’re focused on you, the narrow you, now, you’re self conscious, you stumble on stage, you can’t play your musical instrument, you can’t ride a bike, you can’t box. Right. You’re not in the flow. Why? Because you’re not serving the right thing.

Like when I go on stage, I remember, first of all, I have music at the beginning of my shows. I get a great musician. Well, I don’t play it. I have a musician from Cambridge. Yeah. My son sometimes plays for us, which is really fun.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s not songs, it’s just music.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, Julian plays. He plays country music on a guitar and a couple of his own compositions. So it’s been fun to have him along because he’s quite good at it and so that’s really great.

But the music, the guy who plays for me, he starts out, plays classical gas. He’s kind of like a one man band. He plays classical guitar, but he’s got electronic instruments around him and he can fill up the theater or the stadium. He likes playing in stadiums. And he ends with Inception on electric guitar, which is pretty hardcore rock, all things considered. And it gets everybody focused, you know.

And then when I’m lecturing, I have a question and I know that’s a quest and it’s real because I pick something important that I would like the answer to and then I explore that with the audience. And I’m not self conscious. And the reason for that is it’s not about me. It’s about trying to answer the question and even more importantly, trying to get the damn question right to begin with. Right. Because you got to get the question right, man. That’s the crucial issue.

Then the words come to you that what did I figure out. The spirit of your aim is what answers your prayers. There’s a brutal idea for you.

JOE ROGAN: Right, right, right, right.

JORDAN PETERSON: So if you want to defeat your wife, the spirit of power will tell you what to say. Yeah, right is right, man. Right. There’s a terrifying thing to know. So if you aim upward high enough, then the spirit of upward aim reveals itself to you in words. That’s right. In words and intent. And that’s exactly right. So it’s great. Like, it’s a lot, you know, you know that it’s a lot.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I had a different journey, though. My journey was like a slow drip of fame, which I think is very healthy. It’s a good way to do it so you could adjust.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah. Well, you also mostly escaped from reputation savaging. Right. I mean, you’ve had, I’m not saying completely because people have gone after you, but I got a real flurry of early hate around Bill C-16, which I was 100% right about, by the way.

JOE ROGAN: But it was. You were a lightning rod. You were the patriarchy. You were the one to point to that was going to reinforce these established norms that are not supportive of the minimalized and marginalized communities.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right.

JOE ROGAN: You were cruelty.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right.

JOE ROGAN: You were the cruel white man. What did that guy call you? Mean white man.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Which is, by the way, you’ve already lost. You’re throwing pejoratives out there like that in a debate. Like, that’s the thing that I was talking about, like when someone tries to establish insults and get you on your back, it’s offense. It’s offense to put you in a defensive position so that you cannot do your best.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah. Well, it’s also to pull the rug out from underneath you so you collapse your reputation permanently. And that redounds to the person’s credit.

The Problem With Debate Tactics

JOE ROGAN: Also, it’s establish a narrative to the audience that’s listening to you. Now, you have to look at this person under this light because I’ve done so eloquently described him as this thing. And then he will be defensive about that because he does. And then you look even more like that thing.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, yeah. It’s a very underhanded way of progressing.

JOE ROGAN: Which is, luckily, I don’t like that. Not only do I not like that, I don’t think that’s necessary. I don’t think it’s necessary as the person doing it. I certainly don’t think it’s necessary to respond to that. I don’t think it does anyone any good. I don’t think it’s good for society as a whole. And it’s definitely not good for exploring ideas.

JORDAN PETERSON: I wonder what you do with the psychopaths.

JOE ROGAN: It’s also, you’re trying to win versus trying to find truth, trying to express your perspective with as much clarity and as much thought as possible. You’re trying to do your very best to examine these things from a selfless perspective, from a truly objective perspective.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, it’s a truly quest perspective, I think. Right. So it’s not exactly objective. It’s more like, because you don’t have access to that. But what you can say is, I’m genuinely puzzled about this.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

JORDAN PETERSON: And I would genuinely like to search for the answer.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Wouldn’t it be ideal if you were having a debate where someone said something that you agreed with and you’re like, wow, he’s got a really good point. And you, instead of refuting that person, exploring that with them. Which is one of the reasons I don’t like debates.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I personally, I like conversations because in conversations, if you don’t have a predetermined narrative that you want to enforce, instead you have your thoughts, you have your ideas, and you’re not married to them. And these are just thoughts. And you put them out there, and then you can encounter a very unique human being who has a way of describing and thinking about things that will open your mind to new possibilities, which is what we all should strive for.

We should all strive to be, to be illuminated, to learn from new things, but yet we close those off, because that is a point that your enemy is trying to score well and you will not give them.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, it’s also because people aren’t really very well versed in how to do this. You know, it’s like, so one of the huge advantages of your podcast and of the podcast world in general, I would say, is that you model how to do that. You know, it’s like, and there’s an intense religious ethos under that.

So, okay, so what does it mean? You start without pride in humility. It’s like, what the hell do I know? Right. Or maybe more precisely, there’s probably some things I could still learn that would be beneficial. Okay. You note your interest in a topic and your desire to know more. So that’s the quest elements, like you’re after something. Right. You don’t know what it is.

JOE ROGAN: But.

JORDAN PETERSON: But it’s more development, it’s more wisdom, it’s more information. Right. You’re not sure where it’s going to be. Right. Okay, so now you’re the sort of person who could learn and that has something to learn, and now you have a quest in mind. Okay. So now that’s the frame for your actions.

Well, if you’re talking to someone who’s also doing that, well, then those are the words that come. Yeah, right. And they come in a compelling way to you and to the participant, and in a way that’s compelling enough so that they compel other people. That’s the Holy Spirit, by the way. That phenomenon from a religious perspective. That’s exactly what it is. Right. Because, like, you sit before the talk and rehearse what words you’re going to say, they just.

JOE ROGAN: No, I never do.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think I should.

JORDAN PETERSON: No.

JOE ROGAN: Well, sometimes it’s a problem because you breach subjects that you weren’t really prepared to talk about, and you might not have a fully formed idea about it.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, you’re not exact. Oh, if I thought about that, what would I have said differently? You know?

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, but you kind of have to find that out along the way. Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

JORDAN PETERSON: You know, and that way you’re, you know, you have a right to stumble over your own ignorance for sure. How the hell do you know it’s there before you reveal it?

Authenticity and the Quest for Understanding

JOE ROGAN: Well, not only that, I don’t think the audience truly trust you unless they feel authenticity in that quest, as it were. That desire to try to understand, like, what is it that you believe? And why do you believe what you believe? And where did you come to these conclusions?

JORDAN PETERSON: How.

JOE ROGAN: What journey did you go on? What ideas did you dismiss? What ideas were holding you back? What ideas did you realize were just a personal weakness, that you were protecting yourself from reality, protecting yourself from the reality of bad choices and past mistakes. What are you doing to stop that from entering into your current state of mind?

And that kind of thinking, people can mirror and they can listen to you talk about these things and say, I do that. Okay, I got to stop doing that. Okay, this is what. But this is how I can clarify the way I view things. And this is why I’m tripping myself up, because I keep trying to win conversations. I keep trying to be right all the time, which is impossible, especially as human.

JORDAN PETERSON: It’s elevating your status in the conversation as a consequence of abstract victory instead of increasing your wisdom and enhancing your reputation as a sojourner towards the truth.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. And this is especially difficult for young people because you don’t have enough life experience to have made these mistakes and corrected them and learned and grown and have the humility to recognize that process.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Instead, you see other people that are successful or whatever it is. And you want that right now.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yes. Yeah. And that’s wrong, too, because you don’t want that right now. You want to learn how to have that so that when you want to win the lottery.

JOE ROGAN: But you don’t.

JORDAN PETERSON: No, definitely not.

JOE ROGAN: You don’t. Right. Because everybody wants to win the lottery. It’s one of the worst things that can happen to you.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, and what do young people have? They can listen and they can ask questions. Right. And you know, they say, when the student is ready, the teacher will come. Well, how does that play out in the world?

Well, if you admit to your ignorance and you ask genuine stupid questions, you will rapidly encounter people who are more than happy to share their wisdom with you. Like, people love having mentees. Right. They like to be able to share their wisdom and their experience, unfortunately, even.

JOE ROGAN: If they don’t have it.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That’s where it becomes a problem. Yeah. The false prophet.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, well, that’s right. Yeah, that’s a problem.

JOE ROGAN: The false guru.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah. Right.

JOE ROGAN: The people that don’t have the answers to their own lives, so they try to give other people answers to their lives.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah. Well, that’s also the psychopath problem.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

JORDAN PETERSON: You know, what about the people who are feigning competence?

JOE ROGAN: Right.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah. Right. Well, that’s a real problem. Yeah, it’s a real problem. That’s, it’s a deadly problem and it’s massively elevated on social media.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, well, it used to be a gigantic problem in martial arts. The fake martial artists. There was a lot of them, sure.

The Eternal Parasite Problem

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, any. That’s the eternal parasite problem. Yes. So organisms build up a storehouse of value, a carcass, let’s say, like a whale carcass, for example. And inevitably the parasites move in to invade it. Inevitably. And that’s so consistent a pattern that sex evolved to stop it.

JOE ROGAN: How so?

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, parasites can reproduce faster than their hosts because they’re simpler and so they can swarm the host quite rapidly, especially if the host clones itself, because the host then stays identical physiologically across the generations. So the parasites can optimize to colonize the host and that’s the end of it.

If you reproduce sexually, you mix your genes up 50%, you pay a price, you lose 50% of your genetic, specific genetic heritage. But the advantage is you stay ahead of the parasites. So sex evolved to outwit the parasites.

And a huge part of what we’re seeing around us, and this is probably a consequence at the lowest level, base level. We’ve had a phenomenal boom in wealth since World War II. Phenomenal. We stored wealth everywhere, like in Harvard at a $53 billion endowment. Well, the parasites found the wealth everywhere and they’ve invaded like mad.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a great example. Parasites in academia are a great example.

JORDAN PETERSON: What, you’re talking about media, unearned legacy media. Yes. Science has been invaded that way. The political, this is a major problem. You know, and so how do you protect yourself against the parasitical exploiters?

JOE ROGAN: Well, you could recognize parasitical behavior. When everything gets chalked off to racism and white supremacy, when they start using these pejoratives, they start throwing those around for everything, that’s one of the ways you recognize. Oh, that’s right. You’re a parasite. You’re not really doing science, you’re not really doing academics.

Parasitizing Empathy

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, one of the hallmarks of identification from the clinical literature for the cluster B types. And so there they have a parasitical element, histrionic, narcissistic, psychopathic criminal. That’s cluster B. They use false claims of victimization to manipulate.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

JORDAN PETERSON: And so this is a particularly pernicious pathway because they parasitize empathy. And the left is unbelievably susceptible to that. Because the left is full of empathic people. And so those who parasitize empathy have a field day on the left.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Because the left is generally thought to be more educated, more compassionate, kinder, looking out for marginalized people. That’s part of the ethics of the left.

JORDAN PETERSON: The ethic is pretty straightforward. “Anything that cries is a baby.” It’s like, no, some things that cry are monsters. Well, let’s take the case of Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish Prime Minister. The previous Scottish Prime Minister. “Any man who wants to can be a woman.” It’s like, okay, any man. You mean any man. Do you? Yeah. Have you encountered the nightmare men? Oh, they don’t exist. They’re all victims. Yeah. You just bloody well wait till you encounter one. You’ll change your story very rapidly.

And for the naive and sheltered empaths of the radical left, they’re either psychopaths, so they’re wolves in cheap clothing, or they’re people that are so naive that Red Riding Hood’s grandmother can definitely have his way with.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. That’s literally something that I use as an example in my Netflix special. I said, I think there are people that feel like they’re trapped in a woman’s body. And then there’s also people that are out of their f*ing mind. They’re crazy.

JORDAN PETERSON: And that. Oh, they’re not.

JOE ROGAN: Throughout history. But what I pointed to all throughout history, when you wanted to make a killer in a movie scarier, you put them in a dress like Norman Bates and Psycho, Silence of the Lambs. And I used the big bad wolf. I’m like, it’s literally a wolf dressed up like a woman. Like, that’s literally what it is.

And they’ve somehow or another completely abandoned this one aspect of masculinity that’s one of the more terrifying is the predatory pervert. And they’ve given the predatory pervert a privileged position.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right. And that’s crazy that he’s one of the sin. By the way, one of the craziest.

JOE ROGAN: Things about it is because they’ve completely abandoned the idea of the pedophile and then the monster and the sexual pervert and the attacker, the assaulter, the person who, when you give a guy, you say, all you have to do is say, “You’re a woman now. You have access to where women’s spaces, all the women’s spaces. You could victimize them, you could fight them, you could beat them in sports, you could dominate them in all games.” Bizarre. Bizarre that no one’s caught on to that. And that’s the weirder. That’s the more cult like, and even, you could say, religious aspect of leftist thinking.

JORDAN PETERSON: It’s an original sin. Eve clutches the serpent to her breast. It’s like, that’s a serpent. It’s poison. You don’t get to love it. It’s a monster.

JOE ROGAN: Guy wearing a dress with an erection.

JORDAN PETERSON: In the women’s room. Yeah, or worse.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, or worse.

JORDAN PETERSON: Or worse. Well, right. And there are no shortage of naive people who’ve never really encountered a monster and have no imagination for it.

JOE ROGAN: But there’s also people that are willing to justify the monster’s behavior because the monster is a part of a protected class now.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, well, that’s part of that, which is crazy. The cluster B types use proclamation of victimization to parasitize. That’s part of their clinical pathology. And they’re “poor me, I get to do anything.”

Academia’s Vulnerability to Parasites

JOE ROGAN: And they’re so common. That’s what’s really crazy. And why is it that academia is overwhelmed by people like this? Is it because it’s vulnerable to parasites?

JORDAN PETERSON: Sure, why not? It was a storehouse of unguarded value.

JOE ROGAN: You know, without any religious principles.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, yeah, there’s that too. And with no real gatekeeper. The parasite problems are very deep problem. So I can even give you an example of that. This is a hard one, but I’ll try.

In the Pinocchio movie, this also happens in Jonah, the story of Jonah. Remember, Geppetto ends up in a whale. It’s like, what the hell? There’s no explanation for that in the story. It’s like he’s out looking for Pinocchio now he’s in a whale. Well, a whale is a giant carcass. And so when something dies, its spirit, what would you say its spirit is then embedded in a carcass? That’s a good way of thinking about it.

That’s why Pinocchio has to go into the belly of the whale to free Geppetto and finish his transformation. Is that when things deteriorate, you have these carcasses lying around with their dead spirits. The spirit of what gave rise to them is still inside there. And the job is to go into the carcass and to revitalize the spirit that produced it and not to parasitize it.

JOE ROGAN: Boy, I don’t know how you got that out of Pinocchio and the Whale. Well, I tried to follow you on this one.

JORDAN PETERSON: I’m like, wow, Geppetto ends up languishing in the whale. So imagine that there’s a spirit in the universities that gave rise to these great, great storehouses of value. And that spirit has disintegrated and now it’s inside the storehouse. That’s a good way of thinking about. It’s inside the storehouse. Your job, as someone who wants to become real, is to go into the storehouses of value that have been bequeathed to us by the past and to discover and revitalize the spirit that gave rise to them, not to parasitize them.

JOE ROGAN: And when they parasitize, they strip them.

JORDAN PETERSON: To their bones and there’s nothing left.

JOE ROGAN: And they do it, obviously.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right.

JOE ROGAN: There’s plagiarism. There’s all these different.

JORDAN PETERSON: And all that false scientific papers.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. And all that stuff gets gamed. All that gets swept under the rug because the people that are doing it are part of the protected class.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So they protect the parasites. Like, this is my lamprey.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like, don’t.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is my baby.

JOE ROGAN: Like the woman from Harvard, they fired her, but they gave her an equal paying job.

JORDAN PETERSON: It could also be Joe and might as well get in trouble for this, too.

JOE ROGAN: Let’s go.

The Naivety Problem

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, because women are more agreeable, they’re more prone to manipulation by psychopaths because their primary ethos is nurturing for a naive woman. Every victim is a baby. It’s like, fine, 90% of them are victims. You could even say that about criminals. You go to a run of the mill prison and there’s going to be people in there, and you heard their lives. You think, oh, my God, no wonder.

And then there’s another core group that’s like, oh, I see. I see who you are. You’re, if I saw one, if I saw inside your skull for five seconds, I’d have post traumatic stress disorder. I never recover. Those people don’t exist. It’s like, ho, ho. Oh, yes, they exist.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they exist.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah. And they’re very good at crying like infants. And then the mothers, the naive mothers come flooding out. The women dominated the universities from the 1960s onward. It’s like in come the parasites and they’re enabled. And what are they enabled by?

JOE ROGAN: Fascinating things to me is when parasites are confronted and they laugh. Like, one of the things about academic parasites, when you challenge their beliefs, that’s contempt. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I saw this with the anti Semitism on campus thing when these women were confronted by these statements like “death to the Jews” on campus and whether or not this is hate speech.

And I saw it with, I believe it was Josh Hawley. The woman was, he was saying, some women can give birth and some men can give birth as well. Like some men have, period. Like this kind of like, “I guess this line of questioning is very transphobic and opens people up to violence” with a laugh. With a laugh and a smile. A diminishing of your position by mockery, contempt.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: What they’re saying doesn’t make any f*ing sense to anybody rational. But they’re so embedded in this system that they really believe that they have the kind of control over Congress that they have over their classmates. This is like standard behavior for them, mocking and dismissing other ideas that are counter to theirs.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right. Well, and there’s plenty of reward for that disseminated in the universities.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

Can the Academy Be Fixed?

JORDAN PETERSON: And so that’s part of their how do you fix that or can you Academy? No, I’m dead serious. It’s not like I’m thrilled about the fact that Harvard is having a war with Donald Trump, and I’m less thrilled with the fact that I hope Donald Trump wins. I worked at Harvard. It was a great place. I’m not happy at all that these institutions have become what they’ve become. And if I could see a way forward to revitalizing them, then. But what are you going to do?

Like, the administration took over the universities and parasitized the tuition fees and the tax dollars. Then the woke mob parasitized the administration, and here we are now, what are you going to do about that? All these tenured professors who are progressive, and they’re way less progressive than the administrators. You’re going to fix that. How? How? Even in principle, I don’t see it. How.

What. So what we decided to do, we’ve been working on this for 10 years. It’s like, well, what do universities do? Well, they educate, they offer lectures, they allow. They have a place where people can congregate. They help people mature. They explain the world. They encourage people to aim up. They teach people to write. My son runs this essay app. We’re trying to teach kids to write. We’re integrating that with Peterson Academy so they can learn to think. That’s our solution.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

JORDAN PETERSON: Will it work? The world’s pretty dynamic place. It’s working real well at the moment.

JOE ROGAN: You know, and well, people need some sort of an alternative to that system. If you recognize what that system is, especially if you’re participating in it and you’re opposed to all of it and you’re trapped in it and it’s vital to your success that you accept some of it. How else can you get through? How can you get this degree and maintain some level of sovereignty over your mind and your ideas? It’s a horrible trap. And I’ve met a lot of people that I think are very rational, reasonable people that get at least some of that stuck in their head.

The Psychology of Political Correctness and Authoritarianism

JORDAN PETERSON: Oh yeah. Well, when we did some research trying to see what predicted politically correct authoritarianism, it was the last piece of research I did before my research lab ceased to be a viable entity. What predicted politically correct authoritarianism was that hyper-compassionate leftism, but conjoined with willingness to use force to put the doctrines forward. Force and fear. So it’s tyrannical compassion. That’s exactly that.

What are the predictors? Low verbal intelligence. That’s the first one. Second one was being female. The third one was having a feminine temperament. The fourth one was ever having taken even one politically correct course. Wow. Yeah. Right. And so I’ve thought that through for a long time. It’s like, well, what’s the female relationship? Because that’s a crucial one. The female-dominated disciplines are the most woke by far.

JOE ROGAN: Why?

JORDAN PETERSON: So I think it’s because of that basic ethos of compassion. All who cry are babies. Well, look, that’s the right default for women.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

Discriminating Empathy and the Fall of Man

JORDAN PETERSON: You know, like wise women. My wife is one of these women. She was a very good mother. She never thought adult men were babies. Like, one of the things that’s quite striking about my wife is that if you’re a useless man, she doesn’t feel sorry for you. You’re not a baby. Now she’s really good at taking care of babies. And so she got to be. She’s discriminating in her empathy.

And we’re in a situation now where people think that indiscriminate empathy is a virtue. That’s Eve’s sin. See, Eve, literally Eve wants to put the feminine ethos at the top of the hierarchy. Value that replaces God. Right. And that causes the fall. And then Adam, he’s such a cuck that that’s exactly it, is that he goes along with her. He doesn’t stand up and tell her that maybe she shouldn’t be listening to poisonous serpents.

He doesn’t. He consumes with her what she delivers so that she’ll be his friend because you know how useful men like that are. And then when the fall happens, he complains to God that he made, that God made Eve and cursed him with her. That’s the story. So it’s not just women. It’s, and we got to get this straight, women with their drive towards indiscriminate compassion so that even the serpents are their children. It’s men, too, who won’t say. They always say, “Yes, dear, whatever. Whatever you want.”

JOE ROGAN: Weak men.

The Role of Men in Setting Boundaries

JORDAN PETERSON: Weak men. Weak men who enable the, who don’t help the women set boundaries. Now you got to do that as a man. You know, like when you have a, when you and your wife have a baby, for the first nine months, every time the baby cries, it’s right. Right. You respond to a baby’s cries as if it’s right 100% of the time. Because human infants are so dependent and utterly unable to fend for themselves. So that sets up a very powerful feminine dynamic. It’s like, if it cries, take care of it.

Okay, so what are the men for? It’s like, if it cries, take care of it. Except that that’s a false cry. And you see that with kids, they’ll start playing with that by the time they’re nine or ten months old. Right? Yes, of course. And so you differentiate. It’s like, oh, no, that’s not a baby, that’s a snake. Well, are you sure it’s not a baby? It’s like, nope, nope. Snake for sure. Snake. Poisonous snake, in fact. Right.

Well, I’m feeling pretty sorry for it. It’s like, save your compassion for the truly needy and leave the snakes to me. Right. And Adam doesn’t do that.

JOE ROGAN: Is it a function of a society that’s almost, I want to say, too successful and empathetic and there’s too much abundance that you have more of this crying?

Parasitical Behavior in High-Trust Societies

JORDAN PETERSON: No, but you have more parasitical behavior. Why? Well, everyone’s got pretty comfortable. Because we’ve been in a high-trust society for a long time. It’s like, oh, everybody’s trustworthy. It’s like, no. A few people in a few countries are trustworthy most of the time, and that’s really hard. Right. And there’s stringent preconditions. Right.

So everyone’s trustworthy. And now there’s all these piles of wealth lying around everywhere. It’s like parasite dream. Especially when it’s unguarded and so it’s enabled by the women and unguarded by the men. And both are at fault. Right. And that, you see that in the Genesis account too. It’s like Eve clutches the serpent to her breast, but Adam fails to help her distinguish.

JOE ROGAN: Plenty of these parasitic men as well.

JORDAN PETERSON: Oh, yeah. Well, they’re the worst. There’s the worst. Men cry victim and look for sympathy from women. That was, there was a famous mass murder, no, a serial killer who did that. The lawyer. Very. Bundy. Ted Bundy. You know what his trick was? He had a VW, if I remember correctly. He had a cast that he could take on and off. So he put his hood up. Maybe it wasn’t a VW. Put his hood up because his car didn’t work. And he did it around places where he knew there were young women.

And then he’d entice them to stop because, well, poor Ted, because he’s crippled and his car doesn’t work. And then, ha ha. And then, well, and then the woman learned very painfully the difference between a monster and a baby. Right. Brutal. He was a bad guy. There are some bad people and a fair number of them like to dress in women’s clothing, let’s say.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, that’s really uncomfortable. Uncomfortable for people if they have this idea that’s embedded in their consciousness about what’s going on to accept that.

Naivety and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

JORDAN PETERSON: Of course. Of course. It’s in fact accepting that when that reality is thrust upon you unawares, you develop post-traumatic stress disorder. Right. Because it’s naive people who encounter malevolence develop PTSD. That’s the pathway. So if you want to make your children susceptible to PTSD, like all these kids that are triggered by everything, right, make them extremely naive and then let them encounter malevolence. Right.

Because you’re supposed to teach them to handle serpents. Right. To identify them and handle them. And that means they have to learn about the nature of the world and the girls to differentiate between snakes and babies. Right, right. And babies and men. And the man who worms his way into your dreams because he’s a dependent infant, he’s a snake. And your sympathy is wasted on him.

Yes, there certainly are. Man, I tell you, those riots that used to gather around me, you know, when that was mostly 2017, before I stopped speaking at universities, mostly the women were pretty bad. Harpy city man and this self-righteous, feminine, toxic compassion just screeching at the top of its lungs. But the men that were with them, oh my God. I didn’t even, I didn’t want to be within three feet of them. You know, it’s like, “I’ll be your friend.” Yeah.

You know, you see those people on the net talking to children. “I’ll be your friend. When your family abandons you, I’m here for you.” You know, “They don’t understand. Not like me. We could be closer than anybody has been with you.” Oh, that just barely scrapes the surface of awful. Like awful is a long, long ways down. Yeah.

The Decline of Universities

So part of what’s happened in the universities and you know, it’s a terrible thing to say. Well, they, there’s a lot of things. Storehouse of wealth, radical increase in the number of students served, radical feminization of the institutions and weakness on the part of the men who should have been guardian of the gates. All of that. And is it repairable? I don’t think so.

JOE ROGAN: Jesus.

JORDAN PETERSON: I think once the parasites, once the parasites have the corpse, what are you going to do? How are you going to rebuild? You’re going to bring Lazarus back from the dead? You know, I don’t think so. I think it’s time for something new.

JOE ROGAN: You need academic dewormer.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that’s what critical thinking was supposed to be, Joe.

JOE ROGAN: So you think it needs to, so something needs to emerge like your academy as an alternative.

Peterson Academy: A New Educational Model

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, the thing is, it already is emerging. Right, because the universities, of course they’re going to do this. As they spiral downward, they’re going to turn to cost cutting. Well, they’re not going to cut the administration obviously, because they make the decisions about who’s going to be cut. So they’re going to turn to low-cost alternatives to having courses. And so they’re already doing that. Let’s put our courses online. Well, fair enough, except they’re terrible. They’re terrible. We got the best professors and the best production quality.

JOE ROGAN: And so you’ve designed it for online versus just having a PowerPoint.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right. We have a plan mapped out. No, we’ll have a full, the full equivalent of a four-year distribution of courses. We’ll have that within, we think, two years, something like that. Four new courses a month. At the moment we’re putting out 32 hours of original content a month. It’s very well, people can go look, it looks great and that’s because it’s great.

Mikayla and her husband, they’re unbelievably picky about the professors and about everything. They watch the social media, they watch the look, they watch the images, they watch the ads. You know, we’re trying to make, do everything 100%, and then we’re trying to make it as inexpensive as possible. Soon we’re raising money because we want to translate it into multiple languages, because wouldn’t it be lovely to offer that to the developing world with free market economics instead of Marxist economics, so that people could learn to be entrepreneurs?

That’d be great for Africa, especially if we could get energy prices down. Then maybe everybody could be rich and not just materially rich. Right. Because that’s not enough. If you’re materially rich and you’re spiritually poor, your money just serves to destroy you and fast. So that’s not wealth.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

Money and Ethical Framework

JORDAN PETERSON: And yeah. Right. You know that you met people that that’s happened to. Oh, yeah. Money is not the cure for poverty. No, you’re naive if you think that.

JOE ROGAN: No, it’s not the giver of happiness for being discontent either. But it does offer you freedom if you use it correctly, and opportunity. So give you some relief from stress, which can give you some kind of happiness. But it’s not the goal.

JORDAN PETERSON: No, no. Well, it has to be put in, it has to be put in an ethical framework or it’ll just, look, money’s opportunity. That’s a way of thinking about it. And if you’re going to the devil and you have money, you just go to the devil faster. I saw that lots of times in my clinical practice. And you know, maybe if you’re aim, if you’re aiming upward, then money can be a force multiplier and it can be, you know, you can make a good, you can establish a solid institution that provides mentorship and opportunity for people. And actually that’s more, that’s the most fun to do that. It’s by far the most fun to do that, to make something of genuine value.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

JORDAN PETERSON: Why wouldn’t you do that? Right. Only if you were cynical and unable. Why not make something that works? That’s much more entertaining, all things considered. And so, and we’re trying to do this with Ark, and it’s going real well, you know, and you were very helpful there too. You know, that podcast that we did, there were lots of reasons that the climate apocalypse narrative has been falling radically apart, but that podcast that you and I did was definitely one of them. You know, and I’ve interviewed a lot of good scientists who, they’re not climate skeptics. You know, that’s a stupid term, and Lomborg’s a good example of that.

The Climate Debate and Manipulative Language

JOE ROGAN: It is like climate denier is right up there with vaccine.

JORDAN PETERSON: That’s such a manipulative. Yeah, it’s like, oh, you’re like the Nazis who object to Jews being baked. That’s your argument. Is it really? That’s your argument, you scum rat. You’re going to use that as a moral lever. That’s your level of ethos. That’s your argumentation. You’re going to take the worst slur you can possibly imagine and you’re going to use it to devastate someone’s reputation publicly because you don’t have a leg to stand on because you’re the kind of tyrant who uses fear to monger power. That’s you.

There’s a psychological interpretation of the climate apocalypse scandal. And it’s, if it, and it’s killing, it’s destroying Germany. It’s destroying the UK.

JOE ROGAN: Didn’t Germany, like, didn’t they shut down a bunch of their nuclear plants?

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, yeah. And they replaced them with lignite coal. Right. The dirtiest burning coal. So they’re in a situation where they pollute more for more unstable energy that’s delivered by tyrants. Well, outsourcing their industry to China. It’s a very bad idea. Right. Who’s building coal plants at a rate that is so fast that everything the west does to ameliorate carbon is utterly irrelevant. Utterly irrelevant.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And that’s an uncomfortable truth that these climate cultists just don’t, they don’t address. They won’t even entertain any information contrary to the narrative. They won’t even let it in.

JORDAN PETERSON: Of course not, because it upsets the game.

JOE ROGAN: Not only that, most of the people that are involved in the game don’t even understand the game. They don’t even understand what’s really not just at stake, but the actual facts that they’re arguing for.

The Carney Factor in Canadian Politics

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, Carney’s a good example of this in Canada, to return to that. You know, is he going to win? It seems like he’s supposed to. Certainly indicators indicate that. And maybe with a majority government.

And I can see why Canadians were accustomed to having everything go pretty well and we could be morally superior to you Americans because that was also fun. And we’ll never forgo that opportunity. And Trump has provided it in spades in the last month.

So we look at Carney and we don’t pay any attention to politics and we certainly don’t read his book. And so we see someone who looks like a banker from the 1990s when everything was just fine in Canada. And Canadians were just as rich as Americans, and the whole country was stable and peaceful.

And we think, well, you know, we kind of made a mistake on Justin. Turned out he was a little incompetent, a little narcissistic, and maybe we shouldn’t have voted for him just because he legalized marijuana, because that’s actually what brought him into power the first time.

And so we kind of made a mistake. But now look, we’ve learned, and we’re not going to be fooled by narcissistic pretenders. And Mark Carney used to be governor, Bank of England, you know, and that’s pretty good. That’s a pretty good resume, and it certainly looks like that.

And yet he believes that 75% of the fossil fuels in the world should be left in the ground and that there’s nothing that should guide your purchasing decision by force other than decarbonization.

JOE ROGAN: But it seemed to me, at least from an observer from afar, that Pierre was gaining steam. It looked like he was going to win.

JORDAN PETERSON: Oh, and they seem to have taken. Well, two things happened. Trudeau resigned. The Liberals were headed for extinction. It was going to be the worst defeat of a governing party in Canada ever. They might have lost their official party status. So they were done.

Well, they pivoted, brought in Carney, who’d been advising Trudeau. He’s put himself up as an outsider, a competent outsider. A lot of private experience in the private domain, you know, a steady hand at the helm. It’s like you were Trudeau’s economic advisor for 10 years. Ten years, and there’s going to be more of the same under you.

And now you’re pretending to be an industrialist even though you’re one of the leaders, the world’s leading authorities on DEI, ESG and Net Zero. That’s Mark Carney. All you have to do is read his book, which people don’t, of course, because it’s a book. You know, first three chapters will do the trick.

Well, now either he’s decided that every single thing he ever believed was wrong right to the core, and hasn’t apologized or let anyone know that. And now he’s actually Mr. Industry, which is how he’s presenting himself to Canadians. Or he believes what he’s always believed.

JOE ROGAN: Or he’s a wolf wearing grandma’s dress.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, he’s a benevolent wolf. Well, that’s why the wolf wears grandma’s dress. It’s like there’s no one nicer than me.

Canada’s Path Forward

JOE ROGAN: So how does Canada correct course?

JORDAN PETERSON: Dumb people either correct course by waking up or by experiencing severe pain. And it looks to me like we’ve chosen the severe pain route. You know, we already make 60 cents. We already produce 60 cents to every dollar you Americans produce, even though we were at parity 10 years ago.

And so after four more years of Carney, we could easily have that down to 50 cents. Spiraling housing prices. A lot of social instability in Canada, especially since after October 7th. Do you think that that’s all? My Jewish friends in Toronto are terrified. That’s not fun. I don’t like seeing that. No, that’s awful. It’s awful.

And all those psychopaths who’ve been parading around their moral virtues since October 7th, they’re plenty emboldened. Plenty. I know. I’ll give you a little example of Canada. So we had the English leadership debate a week ago. And the powers that be who organized the debate, the legacy media types with CBC radically involved, couldn’t figure out how to exclude Rebel Media.

You know that right wing news kind of tabloidy news group from Canada, Ezra Levant, who’s been buzzing about for 10 years causing trouble like a right wing tabloid journalist, which is what he is. Well, they didn’t want him in the press scrum for the leaders after the debate, so they cancelled it.

They cancelled the journalists’ interviews of the four leading contenders for prime minister in Canada because some right wing tabloid journalist, they’ve had a newspaper or media empire for 10 years. I don’t care what you think of it. It’s not the point. The point is they cancelled the journalist scrum after the English language debate.

JOE ROGAN: That’s so—

JORDAN PETERSON: And no one complained.

JOE ROGAN: But that doesn’t even make sense. If you’re a presidential candidate and you’re in, or prime minister candidate and you’re encountering someone that has an opposing perspective, you should have really good answers.

The CBC Problem

JORDAN PETERSON: Look, if your guy’s leading, why ask questions? That’s the legacy media and candidates, the CBC. It’s state funded, right to the core. $1.4 billion. Think about this, Joe. This is our state media. It’s so funny. $1.4 billion in direct government subsidy and $600 million in federal advertising per year. $2 billion.

Go to the CBC website on YouTube. You look at their last 20 videos. I’ll guarantee that not a single one of them has more than 200 views. Right. Which means the people who made the video clips didn’t watch them. Right. That’s what you get for $2 billion.

Now, everyone in Canada who’s older than 55 watches legacy media, and Poilievre has said he’d defund the CBC. So you can imagine they’re not exactly covering him in a positive way.

JOE ROGAN: I watched the debate where he kept getting talked over.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, yeah. Jagmeet Singh.

JOE ROGAN: Fascinating.

JORDAN PETERSON: He’s such fun with his pink turban. He’s such a fashion icon. Luckily, he’s going to lose his own seat and his party’s going to be devastated. That’s the Socialists. They’re going to be devastated so badly that they won’t have official party status.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s incredible to watch that in Canada, where I’ve always thought at least your discourse is much more polite.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah. Was.

JOE ROGAN: Was.

Constitutional Crisis and Separatism

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, yeah. We’ve got a lot of mopping up to do in Canada. Well, and the country. And, you know, the man who started the Reform Party in Canada. So that was the populist end of the conservative movement 20 years ago, maybe a little longer. Eventually reunited with the Conservatives.

Ernest Manning, or Preston Manning, son of an Alberta premier. He was premier of Alberta for 40 years. He wrote an article in the Globe and Mail, which was the Canadian liberal establishment newspaper. And I mean liberal by the classic, you know, old school, small-l, liberal, centrist sort of newspaper, saying that Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan should have an immediate constitutional convention immediately on Carney’s ascension to the throne.

Quebec doesn’t want pipelines traversing its territory. And Quebec, one of the—I don’t know if you noticed this, but one of the participants in the debate was a Canadian separatist. We literally have a Canadian federal party. Federal. Localized in Quebec, whose stated intent is to break up the country.

JOE ROGAN: Hasn’t that always been the case with Quebec, though?

JORDAN PETERSON: For a good while it was provincial. Right. I mean, they had a provincial party, like a state party. Right. Okay, fair enough. Have your state separatist party. It’s for your state. Oh, no, we want to have a national party. We want to be represented in the House of Commons as separatists.

Yeah. So the country’s in—it’s very sad. And I was hoping they could be the 51st state. Well, then. Well, that’s what happened. So two things. Back to that.

JOE ROGAN: That was the big one.

The Trump Effect

JORDAN PETERSON: Carney showed up just in the nick of time to save the burning damsel from the train tracks or whatever the hell it is. And the rhetoric and then Trump, he just timed it so badly and he didn’t know. He didn’t know what it would do. He didn’t know. But that’s also—

JOE ROGAN: How do you not know that people have national pride?

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, he knew that, but he didn’t know what the electoral consequences would be. He didn’t know that that would shift them to the liberals so radically. And he’s going to pay for that. Because once Carney is elected, if that happens, Trump will not have a more seasoned enemy in the West.

JOE ROGAN: Boy.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right. Carney’s very well connected. Very. Especially in Europe and the UK. Very well so.

JOE ROGAN: And Europe and the UK is a mess.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, you might say that. Oh, that’s for sure.

The UK’s Authoritarian Turn

JOE ROGAN: We’ve highlighted all the arrests in the UK over social media posts and most people have no idea. Constantine Kisin is great with explaining all that to people. It’s so funny when he compares it to Russia.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: He says, how many people got arrested in Russia? How many people you think got arrested in the UK and most people. Oh, none.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right. No.

JOE ROGAN: 4,000.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: What? Yeah.

JORDAN PETERSON: Oh, yeah. It’s unbelievable. There’s all over the Internet, you just see this everywhere. So they’ve implemented these 20 mile an hour speed limits everywhere and so—

JOE ROGAN: 20 miles an hour?

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, yeah. Because, Joe, that’s a bike. You don’t really need a car. What are you doing that’s so important that you need a car? If I have to go to a climate meeting, well, I get a car. But the peasants, they don’t really need cars. They don’t need heat either. Not that much heat. Maybe they can stop grandma from freezing.

JOE ROGAN: One of the fascinating things about Bernie Sanders’ anti-oligarch tour is they’re doing it on private jets.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So we were in the UK not long ago for this ARC conference and we rented a truck and whenever it went over 20 miles an hour, it beeped at you. Just like seat belt things.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, God.

JORDAN PETERSON: And then if you go more than two miles an hour over the speed limit and you get caught, then that knocks one third of your license off. If you do that three times, you don’t have a license for a year. Beep, beep, beep, beep. Climate. Climate knocking. Climate knocking.

Yep. You can tell tyrants, Joe. They use fear and compulsion and they hate comedians and cars. Right. There’s tyrant checklist. Hates cars. Check. No sense of humor. Check. Uses fear. Check. Uses force. Check. Psychopath. Right.

JOE ROGAN: I hate to end this on a bleak note.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, let’s end it on a positive note.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

The Return to Core Traditions

JORDAN PETERSON: Okay, so what’s positive? Young people are flocking back to churches across the west and more to the conservative churches. And the only thing we have to buttress us into the future against the Islamists and the Marxists and the nihilists and the hedonists is our return to our core traditions. Without that, we’re done. And so that’s happening and in big numbers. And so that’s really quite something.

The back has been broken of the climate apocalypse narrative. There’s plenty of mopping up to do, but half the people know that there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark and that that particular apocalypse is probably not worth giving up all your freedoms for.

We’ve seen a lot of progress on the ark front, a lot of the things that we’ve been putting forward. The better story. That’s a return to the foundations of Western civilization that made our society the sort of place that dispossessed people will go to voluntarily. Right. There’s lots of people who are starting to understand that that’s seriously worth preserving.

Energy executives are waking up, as far as I can see, to the fact that they could help the world’s poor in a serious way. And if they want to moralize, that would be that. If they want to act morally, that would be a good place to start.

There’s lots of people who are working to produce abundance. Your country, the U.S., you guys are unbelievably good at that. Way better than any other country in the world. And you generally deliver in times of crisis, and you might just do that again.

The Power of Aiming Up

JORDAN PETERSON: And then I would say underneath all that, you said you’re pretty happy to encourage people. You’re very happy when you hear that your show has been helpful to people, and there’s lots of people who are consciously trying to aim up and more and more of them all the time. And if enough people do that, we won’t need to learn through pain.

And we can bring abundance everywhere in the world, and we can make the next 50 years an unparalleled success. And we need the faith and courage of Joshua and Caleb to do that. Of course, the future is full of giants and disasters, but if we aim up and we speak the words of truth that make good order out of chaos, then anything’s possible. All right.

JOE ROGAN: Beautiful. Always enjoy this. Always enjoy our conversations. I appreciate you very much, appreciate our friendship. It’s been great knowing you all these years and watching this crazy journey that you’ve been on. I’m glad you’re doing great.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, Joe, same thing for you, man. Thanks a lot. And thanks for your help with Peterson Academy, too.

JOE ROGAN: My pleasure.

JORDAN PETERSON: Very helpful. All right. Much appreciated.

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