Joe Rogan Experience #1933 — Jordan Peterson Transcript

Transcript

0:00 The Joe Rogan Experience. Company made this for me, LGFG. Come on. So that's pretty funny. that's no you're good it's a it's double breasted double breasted yeah fancy yeah got one suit with Yeah. Me too. Me too. Yeah. I still have hope for Sam Harris. Yeah, me too. Most creative ideas are wrong, some Twitter files today on, well, or on Twitter obviously, and they're going through the code.

2:57 And so apparently Musk is doing what he can Yeah. But it's just like, why would anybody not think that that was going to come around to get them? they don't understand what, where this leads to. Yeah. Well, we're seeing a little bit of that So how do you control something you can't define? beyond belief and so once you get to the point where the government has to step in and regulate

5:51 and that's just as likely on the right as it is on the left. you know, because new clouds of ideas emerge and they kind of have an animating spirit these different schools of thought Plus, as I said, the world and that heuristic is that you can understand and if your eyes are open a little bit, or if you're, let's call it, if you've moved from The postmodernists figured out, and they were right about this, that we see the world through

9:09 scientist, you're not exactly objective because there's a narrative driving your work that you to play power games with her, she's going to fight back with everything she's got. And then I mean, fundamental sense, you look how successful they are. those who used exploitation to dominate, And the answer is, well, productive, generous people roost and he pounds everybody flat and he gets access to the females. And there's a little bit

12:52 be the smallest male of the troop. but they're really 100% seriously wrong about the idea that it's power relation advancement. That's a good definition for a good marriage. Okay, but now you have a community of people like that together. 4% of people are close enough to clinically diagnosable psychopaths. And that's probably who are fairly aggressive keep the psychopaths under control and so part of the reason that

15:56 but he's not tamed into a reciprocal relationship. It's also the basis of the most fundamental female but he's capable of being tamed into an intimate relationship. pretty negative relationships. And so women like that are very leery of any expression of male Because the psychopaths mimic competence where we are. That's where we are. What a strange place to be, isn't it?

19:43 I want to know how it's my fault. I will. I'll tell you. I'll tell you. A lot of things are your fault, as it And the college didn't throw out their complaints despite that, beautiful. And I guess that was something like fat shaming. I don't remember exactly what the and apparently everything you say too, is bringing the profession of psychology into disgrace. And I think they're most upset in that

22:15 Actually, it's a pseudo, it's a partial pseudo religion. That's a way of thinking about it. draws on underlying religious archetypes. And so to characterize the world properly, with regard to the rapacious tyranny, let's say, well, you know, any industrial system or any human that there is this oppressive element of culture and so but then, you know, you should also wake up

25:44 And that's completely absent in the environmental view. You only get half that story. Now, if you have no comprehensive underlying cultural narrative, But he was a real genius, Jean Piaget. But young people need to be offered something like a, well, a vision It's so funny, you know, because I thought 10 years ago, I thought, we live in the delusion of a disturbed 13-year-old girl.

28:52 her neurotic fear, essentially. been on us it's always the case that the future has the possibility of being dreadful but you know It's always been up and down. Randall Carlson was saying there's been times in our like distant past where the CO2 levels Right. It's a factor. growth on, because it turns out if you get people above about $5,000 a year in average GDP, they start taking a long-term view of the future instead of scrabbling around in the dirt trying to get lunch, you know.

32:10 So wouldn't that be great? Because we could make our goal the eradication of absolute poverty, as the tyrannical father raping and pillaging or a billion, you know, in relative poverty, or two billion barely scraping by, because otherwise they're going to be wrecking everything, and, you know, controlled by some top-down authority that makes bloody well sure that no one's consuming too much.

34:06 billion people but if the underlying narrative is the one i just described you know virginal planet cranking energy prices up through the roof, and that means that people die. Lomburg has estimated You know, and if the Europeans would have had a cold winter, They have almost all the money. they go from barely hanging on to not hanging on and their kids go from having some ghost of a

36:55 produced an improvement in those things you wanted to improve. So for example, energy is more And if your cure for the planet is, well is well you know we got to put 350 million It's like you want to save the planet or do you want the power? No, I don't hear it at all. What are the consequences? i'm a good person well how do i know that well i'm concerned about the planet well, I'm a good person. Well, how do I know that? Well, I'm concerned about the planet.

40:02 Well, what's that? And we need to rank order the problems And number two, well, now where are you going to get Yeah, yeah, definitely. dark tetrad traits. So we could walk through that a little bit. So the standard personality models that produce the big five, extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, okay so but that meant that the pathological personality wasn't encapsulated or well defined

43:07 So that's how a Machiavellian operates. theft a classic marxist trope why would you say that well if I And the sadist takes positive delight in causing pain to others. And bloody well, social media just facilitates like that. and people who've been influenced by him, have laid out this four-dimensional structure of And that usually has to do with something like the threat of physical intervention.

46:40 Dialogue among men civilized is the possibility that it won't be civilized if it goes too sideways. And the social media companies will monetize it and so and who's doing everything they possibly can at every second quite like he used to you know he gets sucked in by someone pretending to be his friend and And really, it's a non-random sample. because they're not fun but they're extremely rare but online it's like well 50 of the people

50:00 Yeah, well, Twitter's better, but it's still quite the snake pit. factor of people that don't want to get in trouble at work. Yeah, I know. I know. Well, that's kind of the whistleblower problem. Because I don't think that you can, I don't think that we can set up a playable game online You want to say something But maybe you have a responsibility if you have something to say, to say it in your own voice and to put yourself behind it, you know, and maybe you're taking the easy way out by not doing that.

52:33 certainly true you you find the adventure in your life by standing behind your words It depends on the amount of resources you have. Now, if these women stepped up or these men who are nurses stepped up and said something employment opportunities and they had families. And so you can't tell people, Maybe you send out some job applications would cause a psychological epidemic i told told the Senate that back in 2017.

55:52 streams of income. I had my university salary, I had a clinical practice, and I had a business. so that now you've, you're grounded firmly, But, you know, what sort of devil do you let into your head if you abide by falsehood? haven't sorted through all this you know very well in our society but i think it's morally incumbent And so I think if you're anonymous,

58:32 as i can tell you're mostly trying to figure out what the hell's going on and so that's honest That's all a consequence of actually truthfully admitting your own ignorance and saying what you had to say. And I know you were set up you do that's all a consequence of actually truthfully admitting your own ignorance You're making sense, but it's a very, very complex situation

1:00:09 nurse whose name unfortunately i forget who's being hauled over the coals by her college for grounds. But even that's not enough for me to engage in the battle. The reason I'm engaging how do you know that if you have that I haven't been hauled in front of their disciplinary board yet, which they've already done in my case. the whole transcript of our last conversation i don't imagine they'll be that happy with this one

1:03:15 is because they're interfering with my freedom of conscience and speech. conduct of the professionals. Now, in a functional time, all that happens then is that generally the the college didn't have to pursue those complaints they can invent they have to investigate them media and that all of them not only only were they fourth-hand claims of harm, I said something about Jacinda Ardern

1:06:22 that would be the first answer and the second is to take on the college and the problem with that is that I don't know anybody in Canada who's a physician that's more well-situated than him or braver. very well-established clinical finding. and the reason for that likely is that puberty. It's very well documented. This is why women have three to five times the rates of anxiety and depression worldwide.

1:09:15 It's the same thing. And then she was dreaming that she'd turn out like Kim Kardashian, So just tap her cool. man. They're bound by law. it's because you're of the opposite gender. pushed into the law under the guise of the elimination of conversion therapy. And so, someone comes to you, adds a bit to that, but nobody really knows. Probably adds some, but the fundamental issue is one of depression and anxiety. So now you're

1:13:51 And now you can be elevated and you can be treated specially. exceptional in that matter. But more likely, you're just a loser who couldn't fit in. And that sucks. I told you. satanic daycare ritual abuse accusations that came out in the 1980s, that was a psychological the people who who are the first who display the first symptoms of multiple personality disorder

1:17:14 that's all part of trade openness you combine that with high neuroticism negative emotion no friends everyone's contemptuous of you you know and maybe that's partly because you have some Government closed it down. Well, we're still where the UK was three or four years ago. This is part of the reason that I've also part of the reason that I felt like I've been at war for like six months.

1:19:54 you know, pristine and pure. It's like, no, you're not. You're getting a sexual kick from would be feminine boy or a masculine girl or feminine boys And he was one of the world's leading authorities in terms of publication. nothing sexual about that yeah right bloody absolute liars now then you have the kids who And here, let's add something equally ugly to it.

1:22:45 She said, well, I have two children, five and seven. how to calculate those odds, but whatever that is, is rarer than trans, because no one ever even was one of the major impediments to proper human development. You have an evil stepmother. You need a house. political psychopathology. You know, and there's male political psychopathology, a lot of the reason for that is that women who don't have anything better to do are turning

1:26:24 And so I set up an international consortium based in London. Okay, so how do we get energy and resources at the lowest possible cost We're going to try to alleviate absolute poverty. you know, in harmony with nature to the degree that's possible, high end, it's like a Tower of Babel, is Which all that'll mean is they're going to burn wood and coal, obviously.

1:29:45 encouragement and the maintenance of long-term monogamous couples who are child-centered and to and the establishment of an environment that's beneficial to children. It was a very hard thing for them to arrange, obviously. to the problem of relationship and reproduction that's duplicatable across large numbers of people. well we know there's a literature on fatherlessness you know it's a bloody catastrophe fatherlessness for obvious reasons you know human children are complicated

1:32:32 And one story is power rules everything. got to be invitational and so we're trying to work out what the story has to be and on that front two weeks ago. And that was an absolute blast. I had really stellar people participating. Man, yeah, you don't have that option. Some spirit guides you. Might be your stomach. Might be, some spirit is going to guide you.

1:35:13 And that's the representation of God in Exodus. So that's what God is in the Exodus story. Now, so that they may worship me in the desert. of the tyranny into the desert not to the promised land desert first and where it's what's the desert just enveloped in chaos okay so, so what happens in the Exodus but for a long time, years and years, You know, and for judgment to work,

1:38:36 that you'll both accept. So if you take all the responsibility onto yourself, you become a tyrant and the Israelites stay slaves. with you, first we go to our elder, and then if the elder can't figure it out, he gets the elders So Jonathan Paggio did a lovely job of explaining that in this. So take responsibility for yourself to the false claim that it's only power that rules. Because it's not.

1:42:03 possible good. as broad as possible. It's like, imagine you could have the world you wanted. transcendent axis, and they're oriented towards their fellow man. So you serve what's highest and you also abide by the principle of or something exceeding that and instead of you know starving to death by the billions which is responsibility and you offload responsibility to the local where possible. I think that's

1:45:40 Yeah, we're trying to invite everybody to the table. Yeah, yeah, well, you have to, okay, we could talk about that technically. to look at in the world. and perceptual resources to my face and to what I'm saying right now there's a saying makes sense. And we also recognize that there's a real flaw in the way our society is Okay. Okay. It just got people, you know, like hundreds of millions of people and produced billions

1:49:18 A description of the pattern we're acting out, that is a story. narrative and you and the fundamental question of life is what is the proper orienting narrative? what the proper orienting pathway is. And that's embedded in tradition. You know, the stories that productive peace. And it's not by fluke, for example, do it extremely well if you don't mind the insult of a compliment and i think the reason for that is

1:52:10 We're trying to jointly make each other wiser. You know, what are they trying to do? in every direction at the same time. And one of it's because there's a mode of perception and action that unites you But metonymy is a technique where you take one story that seems to have one moral, Now, you could argue that it descends from the top down too, but I'm not going to get into that

1:56:04 They want a little fenced off plot. in when you have to and trying to go along for a free ride and that's what happens with Cain he as someone wise in his generations, right? Because those are your options. And what happens is no one can talk to each other anymore. You know, he's 83, lives in his father's tent, eats peeled grapes. conspire to steal his wife and you know it's brutal life but it's life it's adventure and so

1:59:57 which is an amazing twist it's an amazing twist because the conclusion is that the spirit of Yawa, portrayed in all these looking at it psychologically try to strip it to the degree that it's the logic of the world. in Western culture is you have this Greek idea that there's an intrinsic order in the universe, bottom-up sort of, and then the Christians come along and say, well, there's also an intrinsic order in the psychological realm, and then Western culture is the juxtaposition of those two, the claim that those are the same claim as if you honestly and truthfully confront the tragic limitations

2:03:08 Yeah. And I was fortunate because it was just 1989, not that long ago. Like, what about America? But one thing about you Americans is you're actually capable of admiring success and you're capable of trying to replicate it for yourselves and your children. And you actually celebrate that. And that's the American dream. And that's a hard contest to win. Like, there are

2:05:39 states, you know, and mob and but then i went to like 14 countries and everyone said the same thing and i thought well of people in the reasonable middle, but they don't seem to... they've abdicated their you know, this is a preposterous idea. And what should happen is that people, the conservative types, they're pretty good at implementing. They're pretty good incremental

2:08:45 time flat. So then how to implement it? Well, we got together a group of people in London twice, to get a dialogue going, but then also to have this conference October 31st, November 1st, rapidly this came together and how motivated people were to participate we had We have to run around like frightened tyrants to clamp everything down. as something that's the highest,

2:12:21 and try to establish a relationship. Yeah, I really enjoyed talking to him. Yeah. I got a couple other projects underway. november that teaches people how to write while they use it. He just developed Dark Mode for that. but it teaches you how to write and to think So that's fun that's Well, one of the features, for example, is, so imagine that you want to write about something,

2:15:21 It has to be something that grips you. Just get it down. When you get a better sentence, hit click and it'll snap into the essay. Over-produce, then edit. this. And by the third draft of the essays they wrote, there was the best essays they ever wrote And so we've got 30 professors on board so far. they lecture four, they accreditation with through a variety of different avenues so we hope to be able to what we'll do is

2:18:29 we'd like to offer you the opportunity to pair yourself with a student in the developing world and how we could partner with them to also offer people amalgamate it with this essay program so that all our graduates will be able to write, from Cambridge and Oxford and Stanford and MIT, scenes i do a 30 minute interview after my my youtube interviews and put that behind the paywall

2:21:19 She opens the show. open my shows for the last 30 lectures, and he plays classical guitar. Yeah. Well, it's hard to be completely there. You know, I don't talk about political things much at the lectures. I'll make a joke now and then. That's so it's so crazy it's so positive you know i don't talk about political every night for, for about 70 minutes and then doing a Q and A and that was wearing me out

2:24:05 people like to see her and I interacting pleased to see us interacting and we realized that there's a lot of people out there who And now there's way more women who come. And, you know, now I have this girlfriend and we're getting married or we're just having that's partly why we keep doing it. That's an overwhelming responsibility too, I mean, you became very famous as a professor who was, you know, fairly anonymous.

2:27:18 And so, and that's a pretty radical claim. And, you know, I had 20 years of that, because I am a clinician, playing with YouTube and turned out that could scale, you know. And then there's this hunger It's discipline. That's the sort of thing Jocko thing joco pushes you know and you too to a large degree because young men they're clamoring for disciplined

2:29:40 dangerous yes right yeah yeah yeah the alternative, insecure, bitter men are not harmless. They don't like it. in public people are friendly how often mostly 99 more more than 99 but i'm friendly yeah i know i Well, that's the same with me. So it's so interesting, you know, because there are people who are motivated, at least in part and sometimes almost completely, by envy.

2:32:08 Oh, most, yeah. there who's fully possessed by those ideas. It's the ideas have a relationship that's that's reflective of that, that the cosmos is a battle between as soon as you concretize it, you fall prey to the same pathology. You'll end up Right. there's different people at different stages of their lives that will adopt these ideas because You have to have conversations.

2:35:53 happens is you can kill off those ideas before they possess you to the point where you act them have to do that to sustain your life because to sustain your life biologically parts of you are That's one of the dangers of podcasts. usually what happens is i go a bunch of different places and then i can snap it together at the end To get to the gist and to tie it together.

2:38:21 Jokes do that all the time. Yeah. So that's the goal. I think the closest thing to what I do on stage is probably what stand-up comedians do. Have you noticed in your podcast that if you're really paying attention to the So, and that's cool that that narrative emerges just as a consequence of focused attention, but it's definitely the case. why they disagree on it and solidify that position in their mind as well.

2:40:34 matter are let's say but they also learn how to conduct an exploratory dialogue and both of those Well, oftentimes I am too, because I might know what the answer is, but I have to ask it anyway because I want other people to know it. Yes, yes. about the problem and about what they might view as a hypothetical solution and then they develop the intermediary steps

2:42:24 Yeah. games with that or any more than you you know than you can avoid yeah yeah it's uh for me this It made itself in some way, It's not an oak tree that's 300 feet tall. That's what that story means. So something catches your interest and glimmers, Oh, yeah. culture was embedded in what looks like a collective psychedelic experience and So imagine you're extremely stressed, like your life's in danger.

2:46:12 That's why, you know, when you look at a word, the perception it's all memory what a psychedelic does in part is remove the possible path through this sort of quest for spiritual enlightenment. answers. It's very dangerous. cults and how many of them, you know, it winds up being sexual. Well, Jung was asked once to comment Yeah, and then you've got it.

2:49:17 Yes. Yeah. It's so scary for people. with PTSD where they're doing MDMA therapy and also other people that have had violent You know, the implication is somehow that's a chemical transformation. Yeah. So love is the partial lifting of that veil of ignorance. It's the basis of life itself. even people that are lost apply. No. I mean, it's such a satisfying narrative too,

2:53:48 know you do get attacked by people who are clearly bad actors it'd still be better if you could have Yes. I don't know if it's people like Trudeau or people that go there. That's what I wanted to bring up. And it's a tricky problem because there has to be some degree of international communication Well, and then you get looped right back into that problem as you're surrounded by the extraordinary people to be a part of this. Well, and then you get looped right back into that problem

2:57:01 Your job is to call it out. those with incredible character. Yeah, that's for sure. Like Yeonmi Park. Yeah, she's a good example. And, you know, he was devastated when he emerged. Again, you would never wish that on anyone. Yeah, well, that's part of that victim narrative. We're lost. towards meaning, that's the deepest connection you have to what is most real. You know, because

3:00:50 so you know that's not the same claim as you know the object's real right right it's a different to them it's like you know i had lots of clients in my practice who were pretty Yeah, well, and how much people could still strive But they didn't turn out to be serial sexual slayers. Our prisons are filled with people like that, right? Yep. Right. But they didn't turn out to be serial sexual slayers.

3:02:59 The moment that that was happening, All right. Appreciate you.