PBD Podcast | EP 123 | Dr. Jordan Peterson

all right awesome so we're officially live thank you for that david thank you jordan peterson for coming back for this i think this is fourth or fifth time of us having you on howard thanks strange strange but good yeah so i started my tour about 10 days ago i saw joe rogan first and that was really good and seemed to provoke a lot of outrage in the predictable places and um we need more of that though yeah well we're going to get rich we're going to get more so so i don't think we're going to have to wish for that that's just going to happen and then i've done seven tour lectures so far and with an average audience size of about 2 500 and they're going great they're unbelievably positive everybody almost everybody dresses up which i think is really cool really yeah well when i went on tour in 2018 before i went out i thought i wanted to do this like 100 right or at least as close to that as i could manage so i went out and bought some expensive suits and i spent way more money on this is one of them actually you look great thank you thank you way more money than i ever thought i'd spend on clothes and i really felt quite bad about it you know i thought maybe it was an extravagance but i thought no way man i'm gonna see if i can nail this dead on and i'm gonna be speaking to you know a hundred thousand people i'm gonna look as sharp as i possibly can and uh one of the consequences of that has been that young men in particular come to the lecture two are dressed up in suits three-piece suits they're when the couples come and they're dressed up like they're coming to a wedding or so that's really something and why do you think that is why is it because you said that they're sick acting like kids okay you know our whole culture pushes the idea that teenage life or even childhood for that matter but teenage life is some sort of pinnacle and then everybody dresses down so they look especially men they look like overgrown 10 year olds and there's something extremely demeaning about that and so to provide people with opportunity to dress up in a in a classic manner and to look like adults to present themselves in that manner there's something very attractive about that because we haven't done that in our culture that's been i would say downplayed in importance or or or for certainly since the 1960s who's to blame for that because you recall anytime you would fly on an airplane if you see old school pictures people were dressed in three piece suits to go on an airplane this is in the 60s i assume and then now you see someone like mark zuckerberg wear a t-shirt to give a speech in front of a ted talk or something like that some of it's just fashion you know i mean fashion moves around and then and it's it usually drifts from the top down and so when formality becomes the norm but that drifts down to say to the working class then the upper class thinks well we can't do that because that would you know associate us with the unfashionable people and then they dress down and so then that drifts down the hierarchy and so there's some of that some of it's just fashion but a lot of it too is this idea that this sort of reflexive rebellious attitude that anything that violates traditional norms or even anything that's associated with patriarchal oppression and adulthood is to be eliminated in favor of what's hypothetically a more free individuality but it's not because everybody looks the same i was in washington four or five years ago maybe longer than that it's probably longer than that when i first went in the summer and one of the things that really struck me all these people wandering around these great monuments is all the men looked like overgrown ten-year-olds they looked exactly like their kids except they were bigger they looked like they'd been inflated with a bicycle pump and i thought this is weird that that adults are dressing like children and not good and so some of it's fashion but some of it's also that is it exclusive in america how about in canada what have you seen all over the world with this no i don't think it's exclusive to america i think it it was more noticeable to me in washington and i think that's when it really hit me because washington is in some sense a place of pilgrimage and people from every class go there and that's that's a good thing and and they should from every economic class and so it was like a cross it was a real cross-section of the total population and that was one of the things that struck me quite quite bluntly and so anyways it's very nice to see all these people dressed up and when you hear the argument being made it's the following argument the argument is look uh you you you only have so much energy to make so many decisions throughout your day do you want to be in front of the closet in the morning picking and choosing what suit i'm going to wear to tie with what shirt and what tie you know what i'd much rather not consume my energy thinking about what outfit to put together it's a lot easier to just have a white shirt jeans regular tennis shoes and go to work and let me make the bigger decisions while i'm running the company i've never felt bad not wearing a suit every time i've had a suit on i felt better than just walking out with a t-shirt on even though the t-shirt is a lot easier to do you know it's a lot easier even when you were in the military it felt good having your greens on you know having your bdu on there was something very attractive about having a suit on not not for the audience just even for yourself you felt good having a uniform on i don't know yeah well my i talked to my father about this years ago because he always wore a suit when he was a teacher he's still alive he's a teacher and he always wore a suit and i asked him why one day and he said because it was his way of showing respect for the students and i mean i'm not saying that everyone who doesn't dress in the suit is being disrespectful but there's something about outfitting yourself for the task at hand and there's also something about attempting to put some effort into presenting your putting your best foot forward and i don't really buy that it takes more time in the morning argument it takes a bit more time but once you like before i went on this tour i went through all my clothing and i tossed out everything that didn't fit and which included a number of suits that were old and i had to organize them and that took about a day to get my closet in order and but then it from then on it only i is actually a pleasure in some sense but do you do it yourself do i do meaning like do you go through your closet you do it yourself like pat has a very unique way of like you don't pack anymore pat do you like you have someone no kind of help you out with that packing is not my strength in my life i have a lot that's one of my weaknesses no i still did that for the tour because i had to figure out what i was going to wear and but i've had people help me make clothing decisions let's say now it's often people who would like to make suits for me so so i have that as an advantage and but uh i did that pretty much on my own and anyway so the well we were talking about the tour it's going extremely well and so people come and they're dressed up and they look good everybody dresses up but everybody looks pretty good and uh i like that i like when you go into a room and people are dressed up by the way just for the audience just so you know what topics we'd like to cover with you today number one we'd like to cover what a fantastic job your your leader is doing trudeau and i know you're a big fan of his we'll cover him a little bit with the truckers on what they got going on up there in canada uh two we'll talk about what happened with whoopi goldberg i'm curious to know what your thoughts on what should happen to what the comments she made about the holocaust uh some of the stuff that's going on right now with john hopkins today report came out talking about how great of an idea was the shutdown and no one's talking about it they said it was point two percent effective love to get your thoughts on that some uh uh issues with a uh the governor who came out with what they're doing was trends uh genderism governor noam on the fairness bill i'd be curious you know what you have to say about that and a few other topics that we got going on that's more on the personal side when does divorce make sense that's a question adam's really curious about and then some other questions so today do you still live in canada today are you still full-time living in canada right now uh insofar as i live anywhere full-time it's in canada i have a house in toronto and we bought a new place about three hours north of toronto on a lake which uh we spent a lot of time in over six months very close too yeah it's that area yeah it's awesome up there yeah it is it's beautiful up there and so that's been real nice um my daughter moved to nashville partly to escape from the covid restrictions and for other reasons as well because nashville has a really burgeoning creative culture and it's a very cool place great city yeah it's a great city and real estate still is relatively inexpensive certainly by toronto standards um so yes why are you still in canada why are you still living in canada well i'm living in toronto because my son and his wife and their their their son live on the same street that we lived on we we they purchased a house four years ago i think it was four years ago and that was before i assumed that i would be in toronto for the rest of my life because i assumed i would work at the university of toronto and continue doing what i was doing until i was like 90 because i really like doing it and there was just no reason to assume and i had a clinical practice which i also really liked and so that was pretty good life and i assumed we were there permanently and my son liked toronto and so we picked up a house and and they lived there and so but that's really the reason i'm still in toronto and how that'll play out over time i don't really know so because i'm sure you're seeing everybody that's moving you know you got joe who went from california to austin you saw shapiro whose company is in nashville but he's living here in boca right you're seeing ruben who i think just moved in uh to i want to say miami right you got elon musk musk goes to austin you got your daughter who went to nashville right you got all these people that are looking at you know nashville florida texas it seems like those three states tend to make people the most comfortable and they're all red state what needs to happen for jordan peterson to say i'm kind of leaving canada to go to a different state would anything happen that would cause you to leave that place well i don't think as long as my son's there i don't think so because that's a big advantage to being there but we're doing so much traveling my wife and i that in some sense we don't live anywhere you know i mean we were we were three weeks two weeks in the uk and then a week in washington and now we've been on the road we're going to be on the road pretty much non-stop till march of 2023 because this the tour ends in the states in in at the end of april we'll hit 40 cities and then canada assuming that's possible but it looks like it probably will be and then the uk and europe we're going to be back in canada for two months in the summer and then down to new zealand and australia and southeast asia and then i'm going to cambridge i believe in january to do a seminar on exodus which is what i wanted to do at cambridge multiple years ago before they canceled me and but that's all been sorted out and so it looks like there's a very high probability that that will occur and then that's really as far out as we've looked so that'd be march of 2023 and god only knows what shape the world's going to be in at that point there's hardly any sense in planning out past that because everything is in such flux there's no predicting a future i ask a question for the following reason so you know there are certain people who do a lot of work behind closed doors but nobody knows them there's a lot of smart people that are very intellectual great teachers you know great students loyalty a ton of strong philosophies who maybe would make a great leader but we don't know them right and very few it's it's very very few 0.1 all of a sudden boom overnight the world knows who they are and they're enamored by this person you're one of them that's kind of what happened to you overnight jordan who's jordan peterson while the people who are in toronto would know who jordan peterson is professor teacher clinical i think you said you had 20 patients or 20 families that you were working on i think that was the number so it's not like it's in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands overnight the world's addicted to jordan peterson who is this guy and then you have your moment with the lady that's pushing you feminist and then that goes off and wow this man's deep and you write the book sells millions on top of millions of copies so then money's being generated money's coming in then everybody else comes in hey speaking this speaking that and that that adds up that starts getting a lot of money and then you had your moment where i remember when i interviewed you on stage that that event was a very special event because it was you and then i had also george bush i interviewed at that event as well as uh the late kobe bryant if you remember that event that was one event six thousand people and you got emotional on stage when we talked about your wife and your daughter and i walked off the stage and i said i think he's dealing with something i don't know what it is talking to my wife i said uh i think this guy is dealing with something and that was your last live event that you did and you kind of went hiatus and you know the whole thing that you were dealing with with the medication and all that stuff but then i kind of sit and i think about you know a jordan peterson okay so he makes a comeback when you go to a dark place and you come back i would assume you may sit there and say you know stuff that i thought i valued it's not really that valuable i value this though and maybe used to value that 82 percent now it's 90 you know and stuff they used to value at 48 they give energy to because other people care you're down to 22 percent i really don't give a about this i don't know why i'm even putting so much time into it right and then you come out and when you come out you're kind of like looking around saying god why did i go through this what was this all about so it's kind of strange should i see someone like you yesterday i posted something saying look this whole thing with spotify and rogan i'm sure we'll get into we'll talk about it because i'd be curious to know what you have to say about that i really want to know your thoughts i said you know in in a very strange way i would love spotify to drop rogan and we're talking i said why why would you want spotify to drop rogan i said because the first phone call rogen would get us from elon musk and elon musk would say hey don't worry about it let's go compete i'm going to start something you be the face let's get a bunch of podcasters come with us and let's go do something so i put this video out there and i got commentary people that are posting stuff one guy said that's just not rogan rogan's not trying to be a hero he's not trying to be a legend he's not trying to be that i said well if you read the journey of a hero as he fights it until eventually it's kind of like listen man i know you don't want to do this but it's kind of like you could really address a lot of things and you're the right guy for but i don't want to do it we see this in movies all the time it's the constant fight fight fight fight fight i asked a question with you in canada because you know who gets more eyeballs in canada than you i don't know and is canada in a pretty strange place right now with the way true those handled things where he used to talk about freedom and we can't ever make people do anything to their bodies that they don't want to do at all okay this guy makes sense boom no if we have to choose between delivering food and delivering this we're gonna choose this because you're like this guy sounds like a dictator okay is there any aspiration we're in a moment like this with all of these weird things taking place worldwide where maybe you've sat down behind closed doors with your family with somebody and have said you know dad jordan why don't you go in there and see if you can be the leader of a great country like canada and do something about it has that conversation ever taken place at this phase of your life yes and well i've thought about a political career at different points throughout my whole life starting literally starting when i was 14. in fact that's what i thought i would do when i was 14. i worked for a political party in canada it was a socialist party as it turns out and uh i had that option open to me when i was extremely when i was very young but i figured out when i was about 16 that i didn't really know anything and so i had ideas and i was capable of functioning in the realm of ideas and putting them forth even then i would say in a somewhat compelling manner but i i figured out partly because i had worked with a lot of small business people and also on the board of governors of this little college i went to these are all people who'd built businesses from the bottom up they're all immigrants because everybody in northern alberta was an immigrant and they didn't share my left wing presuppositions but they were very admirable people and part of what made them admirable to me wasn't their facility with ideological conceptions so it wasn't an intellectual attraction it was a practical attraction like i'd worked in restaurants in this little town i grew up in fairview and uh i liked working with the guys that that that built the restaurant and i talked to them one day about uh the socialist party in canada and alberta at that time had a pretty good small business platform probably better than the conservatives had in terms of what it would do for small businesses and i asked them one day why aren't you in favor of this small business platform because they wouldn't vote for the ndp the socialist party to save their lives they said well we don't want to be small business people we want to be big business people and so i learned then that people well the guy i worked with his name was scotty kyle and scotty was a rough guy he was about 35 i was about 15 at that time and scotty had been an alcoholic and he had like all his teeth knocked out in fights and like he was a rough guy but he was super funny and he was really smart and he said to me one day people don't vote their reality they vote their dreams i thought hey man that's a good phrase you know that stuck in my mind for the rest of my life and so so in any case when i went to college i went i was going to i went to to take political science and literature and i wanted to go into law school i wrote the lsat and i was set to go to law school i want to take corporate law and the reason that i wanted to do that was to understand my enemy that was the idea and who was your enemy well i was doing this when i was social yeah yeah the big corporations essentially big corporations but i i realized about a year into my college education for a variety of reasons that partly reading george orwell but that wasn't all of it that um i also didn't like i i went to a lot of the uh ndp party and its new democratic party it's not the ndp party new democratic party conventions provincially and nationally and i'm i had access to the leadership for a variety of reasons a lot of the leaders were reasonably admirable people or maybe even completely admirable people who had worked with labor unions and like they were really they were advocates for the working class in a real sense uh but the party level activists i never liked them from the beginning i thought i don't trust you guys you just seem to be driven by resentment not not genuine care for the working class and so that that didn't sit well with me any case i started to get interested in psychological motivations for political behavior especially as i went through my political science degree because there was increasing emphasis as we moved away from the classics which is what i studied in the first couple of years to more modern political thinking let's say it was all quasi-marxist in that the political scientists believed intrinsically that people were only motivated by economic concerns and i just never believed that i thought that's which economic concerns and why well those questions weren't asked by political scientists they took economic determinism as a starting point and that never sat well with me i thought there was a mystery there because it wasn't obvious to me what motivated people and we're not ruled by our bellies as far as i'm concerned so the idea of pure economic determinism was a non-starter and that's really when i started to get interested in psychology and i've made a choice all the way through my life the choice has always been say political sociological versus psychological or perhaps spiritual and i've always chosen the psycho psychological work at the level of the individual and i don't think i'm going to stop doing that i mean i have had discussion serious discussions with people about a political career and first of all in my current situation it isn't obvious to me at all that that wouldn't be less effective than what i'm already doing you know so that wouldn't be less effective yeah yeah it would be less effective yes it would be less effective for me what do you mean by that well i mean i know what you mean by that but what do you mean by that you mean to tell me you would you're you're having the same amount of impact now as you would as the pm no i think more yeah right now you're having more impact yeah yeah look those are hard jobs and it's very and you get boxed in very quickly and they're also brutal jobs and it isn't obvious to me that i have the stomach for it i don't really like fights in fact i don't like them at all part of the reason that i said what i said back in 2016 when i first stood up and voiced opposition to what the universities were doing and also what my government was doing was because i could see where that was going i could see that it was going to generate conflict of all sorts i knew for example that all this pronoun foolishness was going to confuse thousands particularly of young women because there's a whole there's a very large clinical history of that sort of thing happening for 350 years so that's detailed in a book called the history of the unconscious which is a great book by a man named henry ellenberger who wrote the best book on the history of psychoanalytic thinking and so i knew that um in any case part of the reason i spoke up and this was a hallmark of my clinical practice and also of the manner in which my family was organized is like we're gonna have that fight right now and we're gonna make peace because i don't wanna have this fight every day for the rest of my life and so it's gonna be a pain to fight through it because it's always a pain to fight through a conflict but if you can fight through it you can make peace and then you don't have the conflict and i really don't like conflict so i don't like it deferred because i know what happens if conflict is deferred you get weaker because you backed off and the conflict gets more intense because its tentacles grow in a sense it's like not paying your not paying a utility bill it's like for the first month it's not that big a problem but i don't know i'm trying to think to say that you think you're making a bigger impact right now than being a pm i don't have a hard time with that let me let me unpack my question and challenge me on this sure so uh so so okay so let's just say uh who is jimmy fallon he is the you know hey i'd like to be like a jimmy johnny carson hypothetically like that's the fallon carson right who is i don't know uh tucker carlson maybe he's trying to be a o'reilly or maybe whoever it is that the lineage that you're going through right okay who's this latest person trying to have a show she's trying to be the next oprah winfrey right who would you say what jordan peterson is doing in history who would you have been in the 16 or whatever you know the century would go to who was jordan peterson like if you were to give a a 100 years from now what are people going to say who jordan peterson was they're not going to say oh he was a professor oh he was a clinical psychologist oh he was an author i don't think they're going to say that what do you think people are going to correlate you to 100 years from now i i really have no idea so let's just say is it like a philosopher plato would you say you're more of a philosopher would you say you're more like an aristotle do you see yourself more as that do you see yourself as look i'm just somebody that's sharing my thoughts and my life experiences i think i'm a clinical psychologist okay so that's kind of how you see yourself yeah yeah there's a great there's a lineage of great clinical psychologists i'm not saying that i'm in that lineage but i would say that people who are the most similar to me are people like well carl rogers might be an example okay i mean he didn't have the same social media platform but of course no one did but that's how i see myself intellectually really really as a psychologist as a clinical psychologist and i think that the work i'm doing on my lecture tour is a hybrid of being a professor and being a clinical psychologist but is it fair to say that's who you were but you've evolved into something way bigger than just being a clinical psychologist i think that's what pat's yeah i know you're kind of getting out he's comparing you to an aristotle of some capacity yeah well i don't know because my focus is still on the individual even when i'm lecturing in front of large audiences and i don't exactly lecture i explore ideas in front of audiences which is what rogan does and i do that even when i'm when it's a monologue you know and you think well how can you be exploring ideas with the audience when it's a monologue and answer is well you're attending to the audience you're watching them to see if they understand and if they're nodding and what they're responding to like there's a dynamism about it and but it's all focused on the individual and there's been some unbelievably influential clinical psychologists or psychiatrists i mean freud was unbelievably influential and so was carl jung and there's a half dozen sure so so i see that i'm in that tradition now the fact that this information now can be disseminated in audio form and video form makes the playing field radically different and so i was also a very early adopter of those technologies so when i blew up let's say it happened overnight it's not not exactly like because most of these things don't happen exactly takes 20 years to overblown well yeah the first doublings are invisible right yeah but that live outside of the university yeah well that was that's that's listen everybody's like who is this guy yeah he's right he makes sense so that was a concept of well sure there was a tipping point there that was when when there was a free speech rally outside my office at the university of toronto it wasn't organized by me but i was invited to speak as was anyone who wanted to speak by the way at that event and then a bunch of radical types tried to shut it down with white noise and they were very annoying and some of them were clearly psychopathic some of the people i watched them because i have pretty good eye for that and some of the men that came out they were bad bad actors in any case i got shanghaied on the way back into my office by these these hypothetically trans activists mostly young people what do you mean shanghai well they just surrounded me you know that's that's all i mean ganged up on well kind of they were they were disrespectful which i wasn't very thrilled about because i think that it's not a good students if students are being disrespectful to to to professors something's wrong that's not that's not what happens at a university i i have no tolerance for that in my classes if you were out of line you were more than welcome to leave now and that didn't mean you couldn't challenge me intellectually that was absolutely fine if you had a smart question you were paying attention i didn't care what your opinion was but you know maybe when you're a junior high teacher or an elementary school teacher you have to put up with misbehavior as a professor i put up with there's like zero misbehavior no misbehavior we're adults we're not doing that at all did you set the tone for that day one in the first class like this is how i roll yeah i never had trouble with students in my classes well a handful of students would pretty much always leave the first lecture i gave particularly my personality class because a lot of them didn't who i was in my smaller classes people already knew who i was so that never happened but in my personality class there'd always be six or seven people in the first lecture who'd make a show of leaving and it was because of the tone i set which was don't muck about in this class at all you're here to listen or not you can leave if you don't want to listen but this is a serious endeavor any case these students surrounded me and they filmed it and then they put it online and the object was to discredit me but that didn't work and but the reason it didn't work in part and this is why this wasn't only overnight was i already had a hundred hours of lectures on youtube and i basically recorded everything i ever said to students in any professional capacity and what i said in my classes was exactly the same as what i said when i wasn't in my classes so there was no there's no show there and so people came to look to see what was going on they came to my youtube channel and it had like 35 000 50 000 subscribers at that point which wasn't none especially that early on in youtube development and they found out that what i was saying was not only completely unlike what i was accused of saying but it was exactly the opposite partly because you know i was accused of being this radical right-wing figure and i'd lectured about the evils of national socialism at harvard and at the university of toronto for like 20 years so the idea that i was somehow radically right-wing was not only a lie there's lies where you bend the truth right that's one kind of lie i think what the i think what those lectures did is a way for people to not be able to taint your name by saying i actually like what this guy has to say 35 000 subscribers not a lot of subscribers no but this is where i'm going with this so you're saying you see yourself as a clinical psychologist right okay uh great you know sometimes the challenge i have is to follow like you know i sit down why is he still in canada maybe there's bigger aspirations to stay in canada because he loves his country and he'd like to see canada become the country that he chose to live when he was a kid growing up and he's got memories mom dad family all this stuff so maybe to him because some people don't want to leave a country because they want to make a political contribution to that country some people are like listen what country is going to give me the best tax benefits and freedom i'm going to go there i'm totally cool i'm going to go to singapore i'll do my bitcoins i'll go to puerto rico pay four percent on taxes this is what i'm going to be doing right you seem like a very deep guy here's where i go with this in my life i've experienced a lot of weird things iran war divorce parents politics military you know all this weird things out of business you've seen coming up and hey we're so supportive of you we want to see when patrick and then i start kind of getting big and all of a sudden we're getting babies like oh we don't like you anymore what happened you liked me when i was small you don't like me when i'm big i'm the same person what's the problem here right here's what i've noticed those who are driven by force are more ambitious on imposing and having control than those who are driven by choice let me unpack this meaning you know sometimes people that are driven by force are more inspired to get involved in politics and create laws than those who are driven by choice choice is kind of like listen let me leave me alone let me alone let me go live my life right but i think sometimes it's kind of like you know you made this one example you know who made this example somebody was on yesterday saying look you know the way i look at foreign relations mike ritlin is if i go to a bar and if a fight's breaking into a bar and i go in there no matter what if i go in there and fight i'm going to piss off one side whether if i defend the girl or the guy someone's going to be upset with me because i chose to fight right it says america is kind of like that you're getting into a lot of these fights and you're getting involved in these there's a fight going on your country right now yours and people are still listening to this guy he's still got influence and you got you know you know these truckers that are coming out there are saying listen you can't make us do this this 500 mile america this you want us to get vaccinated you want us we don't want to do it we want this freedom don't you think you know this may be a good time for you to throw your name in the you know and say hey you know what i'm gonna go and here's why because i think 100 years from when we sit here and talk about who was the main philosopher when lincoln was president only people in that world are gonna know who that person is but everyone's gonna know who lincoln is and what lincoln did and the impact he made right do i think his life was a you know a peaceful life if you've read about lincoln and his marriage and that one friend he would travel with and when you go to smithsonian then they show the evolution of how much he aged it's a pretty it's a lot of burden of what this guy went through right but he was chosen and he was the right guy for it you don't at all feel like you know no it's again i think i can detail out some of the reasons sure i think i'm more effective doing what i'm doing well i'm working with a lot of political people in the united states both on the republican and the democrat side all the time and i couldn't do that if i was involved formally and technically in politics in canada i'm working with a bunch of people in the uk as well and so and i'm working with people in canada it's just more effective for me to do what i'm doing i don't know about that i don't know well i can give you an example with the truckers you know so and a couple of examples so a week and a half ago the former premier of newfoundland so equivalent of the governor of the state he was the premier in in the 1980s and uh he was one of the drafters of the canadian charter of rights so he actually wrote it with a bunch of other people but he was one of them and he's a mainstream solidly admired politician across the spectrum regarded as a decent guy and he mounted a constitutional challenge to the vaccine mandates announced it a week ago stating that see they put an emergency provision in the charter saying that under certain emergency conditions true emergencies that charter rights could be suspended in the case of a national emergency but he's not convinced in the least that the covid epidemic even at its height constituted such an emergency he said that was not the intent of the drafters and certainly doesn't constitute that emergency now and so he talked me through this and i thought well isn't this interesting we have a person who actually drafted the chart of rights saying that the and a former premier of a major province saying that the government is acting in an essentially unconstitutional manner i don't think that's ever happened in the history of a western democracy and i said well okay that's something he's 82 now sharp is attack why do you want to announce this on my podcast because that's preposterous and he said well our team has talked it over and we don't think there's one news source in canada that will handle this credibly i thought that's not good so we released that a week and a half ago which was timed very nicely as it turned out with the truckers protest because people are saying well are the truckers breaking the law and the question is well just exactly who's breaking law here and that's by no means obvious and so that was extremely helpful and then about a few days after that i released another video calling on the conservative types in canada to seize the moment given this popular uprising and the fact that countries all over the world are dropping the covid mandates to seize the moment and drop the mandates at a provincial level it's enough is enough and somebody's got to be the first actor and so that got million and a half views in no time flat and so i'm able to play a useful role as a well on the media front weirdly enough but also as a someone who's standing apart from the from the details of the political fray i mean i get that but you know it's like saying if reagan would have stayed being the b actor or a ge going getting paid a million dollars a year to go around the world and talking about his political philosophies and how great he is or president of sag would he have been able to tell gorbachev to take that wall down i don't think so would he have influenced the country like russia to become a little bit more free where people are staying they're not leaving they're a little bit more comfortable staying there because now there's a capitalistic opportunity it's no longer communism karl marx and engel and those guys don't have the influence that they had before because stalin and lenin and what travesty they did to people does that credit go to gorbachev does it go to who it goes to reagan right so if you think about churchill and chamberlain it was to solzhenitsyn too i i told again he was a writer obviously a writer and so it's look i mean it's not like i know what i'm saying there isn't it's not like the the political domain doesn't have its purpose and its function and but there's a lot i would have to stop doing if i did that and it isn't obvious to me that that's the right thing for me to do partly again because i started doing what i'm doing back in say probably 1985 because i realized that one of the pathways to totalitarian catastrophe was deceit at the individual level which is something that soldier hits and made very much of orwell as well huxley as well these great thinkers concluded in the aftermath of these totalitarian catastrophes that there was an integral link between pathology at the individual level which was fundamentally the willingness to use deceit in an instrumental manner i'll lie to you to get what i want and authoritarian catastrophe and that it was a direct causal link and actually by that argument i think that's literally true and so partly what i'm doing i hope is helping people walk through thinking about why telling the truth is a good idea not not only for them not not as a top down shake your finger moral injunction don't lie you shouldn't lie but in an in a detailed manner to explain the relationship between the instrumental use of deceit and the collapse of civilizations and that connection is way closer than people think you know so one person is influenced as a thousand people for sure in their lifetime and sometimes a lot more than that and a thousand you know the next rung out from that a thousand times a thousand is a million and the next rung out from that is a billion and so you're always at the center of a concentric circle that two rungs out contains a billion people well it turns out that what you do matters and basically what i'm doing as i hope is touring and talking to people face to face in these lectures for example and making the case that it's a terrifying case everyone says well we want meaning in our life it's do you now do you now because you might ask yourself what's the more threatening possibility that nothing you do matters which means you can pretty much do whatever you want that's the upside of that nihilistic claim no responsibility right and why why not pursue narrow focused hedonism since nothing matters anyways so that's the shadow of nihilism or everything you do matters and it's a lot more terrifying to contemplate that is that you will be held accountable for everything you do and i believe that firmly partly as a consequence of my clinical experience i never saw any one of my clinical clients ever get away with anything even once and you think well people get away with things all the time it's like no they don't they might gain a narrow advantage in one dimension in the short term but you know let's say that you you're you use deceit in your business practices first of all that doesn't work very well because people will figure you out so as a long-term as a long-term strategy it's terrible it just doesn't work no one is going to play with you if you're a cheat but let's say that someone asked me someone asked me the other day well what about these dictators that that uh you know ruled their whole life and and they were at the top of the hierarchy let's say and they had all the power stalin's a perfectly good example it's like didn't he win well everyone stellan ever talked to lied to him because they were absolutely bloody terrified of him his country was a nightmare it was a hell or as close as we've been able to produce with the possible exception of the nazis and the maoists but it was up there in terms of hell and did he rule yes but he ruled hell and if you think that's a victory well go ahead and try it see how much of a victory it is you know milton satan said i'd rather rule in hell than serve in heaven it's like fair enough go ahead use deceit use instrumentality rule in hell you'll be the ruler see how much good it does you see where that takes you it takes you somewhere terrible and so i'm much more interested in talking those things through with people and i do do political work but but i it's not the right thing for me i got the last question for you on this and then we can move on to the next topic so uh churchill you know his writing what he did kind of started like you at a very young age he's not he's a guy that if you follow his writing the guy has done a lot of stuff right and then eventually last minute hey we can't figure this guy out from germany we need your help chamberlain stepped away he goes and recruits the guy that he hates the most and we know how uh history ends up we speak in english today big part of it because of churchill but this the last question you know uh how you said at this phase of my life this is what i'm doing do you think um do you think the right thing to do is what what's always what we want to do or sometimes we have to do things that maybe uh uh uh the world or family or somebody else is relying on us to make a decision that's more impactful to the world than what would be more fruitful to us i think that happens a lot you know i have a i don't know a fantasy i suppose and i don't know how well thought through it is but one of the things i've been thinking about doing is i'm i'm writing another book at the moment which i plan to publish in the next year and a half or something like that it's called we who wrestle with god and um and perhaps there'll be a tour associated with that and i want to do a public lecture series on exodus but i've been pursuing more artistic endeavors recently again uh in detail i did some of that in when i first went to graduate school i made a variety of paintings and and so forth that i really liked doing that i really like doing this i've been working on a musical project with a friend of mine and with my family which is really it's really fun i really like it a lot and i wrote a screenplay that's a musical which i really enjoyed doing i have seem to have somewhat of a gift for writing verse weirdly enough um especially amusing verse i i think it's amusing and some other people have thought so and it's really playful and fun and i think i could do that i could do a lot of that and it would be in many ways less demanding than what i'm doing now and i've talked to my family about that but they seem to think that you know when my wife and i planned this tour i was unbelievably ill still and it just seemed like a pipe dream that this was ever going to occur but if we were going to try it we had to do it months in advance and so but you know i outlined the tour for her with my agents and she said i asked her when we got off the phone i said do you want to do this and she said yes and i was quite surprised that actually i mean tammy had been unbelievably ill for months and months and months like at death's doorstep every day for like eight months it was awful and yet she was on board and you know it's it's got this great adventurous element to it and it seems to your point that the time is right for it whatever it is and so away we go and that's what we're doing and it would be possible in principle for me to be in my cabin up north and record music and engage in artistic activities and be with her and my family in a more private way now i don't know if i'm suited for that you know so that's why i'm saying well maybe it's a pipe dream because i really like being as busy as i can possibly be all the time you know and i've kind of trained myself for that i started training myself for that really when i went to graduate school because i wanted to find out how much i could do and i like running at top speed all the time and so maybe i wouldn't be suited for that you know and although the days we've spent the weeks we spent engaged in it i have an art book coming out a strange art project is going to cause all sorts of trouble coming out probably in september or october and a bunch of music that will accompany that which is also going to cause a lot of trouble i believe i really enjoyed doing it it's it's really engrossing and fun and playful and and i liked working on this screenplay we've got a bunch of music being recorded for it and that's called the water of life the screenplay it's a great old fairy tale so but to your point sorry you have a responsibility beyond the narrow confines let's say of a particular interest even if it's an artistic interest interest sure and you play the role that is set in front of you that constitutes the best path forward and there's obviously a market for what i'm discussing a market let's say an interested audience and so and i love doing that too that's the other thing i love doing it pat yeah can i ask you a question because i think the line of questioning that you're asking dr peterson is overall you're talking about being the reluctant hero that was the sort of the initial analogy that you gave you gave with joe rogan where like the guy said you know that's not what joe is joe is not trying to be a hero and you're like sometimes you know it's not who you want to be it's who people need you to be i mean it's like the joe isn't trying to be here no he's just being here no no okay yeah but but you know it's almost like neo from the matrix he's like it's like we need you you're the chosen one what are you talking about so pat essentially what he's asking you was like lincoln you know churchill uh trump even these are people whether they were reluctant heroes or not these are people that had chan have changed the world and you're more saying like look sigmund freud gandhi uh you know more the philosophical line but ultimately what i think pat is getting at is like who changes the world more dignitaries presidents prime ministers or thinkers thinkers and you say it's thinkers so that's all for sure it's thing okay so that is ultimately and that's even why yeah yeah so that's ultimately what your line of questions are all i'm saying is listen all i'm saying is the following i'm sitting there looking at a lot of guys that should there should throw their name into and go out there and compete and they're not yeah and that's a problem yeah okay so well look a lot of the people i know who would make excuse me who would make extraordinarily competent political leaders so these are people who've built exceptionally complicated enterprises from the bottom up in an extremely creative and diligent way and who mastered that they won't throw their hat in the political ring partly because they have other things they're doing that are they regard as more significant and often they are and this is a big problem because what it means is that perhaps is that the pool of qualified political candidates is much narrower than it might otherwise be so and that's something you're obviously wrestling with ethically you know when are you when you called upon to throw your hat in the ring in some sense despite your own personal interests i don't have any contempt for the political arena you know i think it's a big mistake for people people go from naive to cynical and then they think cynicism is wisdom and it is compared to naivety but it's not compared to what comes after cynicism which is something like courageous trust and that's the right attitude towards that to have towards the political sphere and often people don't want to take the risk of courageous trust and so they justify that avoidance with their cynicism i'm not like that i know the political realm is valuable and necessary and and i don't have contempt for it and i don't think anyone should it's it's a mistake because it's your system man and you're a sovereign you're a sovereign individual it's your system if it's corrupt that's on you i can have in a definite sense and people say well there isn't anything i can do is one person it's like joe rogan's one person and he didn't he his success is really remarkable first of all you can't just push it aside as chance because rogan was a good fighter and that's hard and then he was a good comedian and that's really hard maybe no harder than being a fighter but hard and then he had a pretty good tv career and that's hard too i forgot he was on news radio which was yeah yeah i mean rogan's rogan's establishment yes exactly he's established his credibility in three different domains and then it's also extremely difficult to be a good interviewer you actually have to listen yeah and he listens and so and so rogan's rogan's a very good example of someone who as an individual stayed closely allied with the truth and has had well his we have no idea what his impact is going to be because rogan has 11 million listeners per episode now i see absolutely no reason why he won't have 20 million listeners per episode in a year especially if people keep trying to take him out and it's so funny especially watching cnn go after him you know they're all treating the mainstream media they keep treating joe like he's the fringe i think are you people well i know your these legacy news media sources are dying all their really competent people have already gone off to do other things because they could and and they're they're they're living in like 1975 which is a very weird place to live at the moment and they look at rogan and they think but the cn cnn guy who was criticizing the other day said we have all these departments devoted to news analysis i believe yeah yeah rogan is just winging it's like you try winging it buddy in front of 11 million people and see how successful you would think that's easy dancing on a tightrope where any word you say that's false is going to result in well complete and utter pillaring of you from multiple news media sources all over the world every day which is what's happened to joe nonstop in the last month despite the fact that he hasn't said anything stupid so wing it you think that's so easy it's not so easy and look what he's done it's like it's amazing and all he's done all what do you think is going to happen with him with spotify oh spotify won't won't remove rogan you don't think so would it be out of their mind what are the odds they just dropped from 60 billion valuation to 36 that's 24 billion you think the board is sitting there they're diehard joe rogan fans or do you think they're profit margin top line revenue fans oh i hope that i would rather that they were the latter the profit margin types because that's what a corporation should do and i'd trust them more if they were doing that but i also think that if they have any sense and i know how this is going to turn out it's it's turned out in my life like 50 times this way the heat goes on the pressure's on you're in the desert it's unpleasant you wait it out you waited out you waited out if you haven't done anything wrong you wait it out you don't apologize you don't back down you wait and things viciously turn in your favor now waiting it out while you're roasting that's not pleasant and if the spotify types have any sense they think yeah well that's a drop but you know it's part of the death throes of the legacy media and once all the dust settles cnn will have half the viewers they have now and joe rogan will have twice the viewers and we'll be doing just fine and rogan as long as he keeps doing what he's doing he came out on instagram this is so funny he came out on instagram to talk about all this a few days ago and i thought you nailed it joe he came out and he said it's a paraphrase and i'm going to do it a bit comedically he basically said well everyone knows i'm kind of a lunk head and i have lots to learn and i probably haven't managed this like perfectly because i do my own scheduling and i just talked to people i'm interested in and so possibly i could have presented a more balanced view some of the time and i'll try to do better in the future and so all the legacy media said joe rogan apologizes which is not really the case and then he talked about how much he liked neil young and none of this was for show and none of this was was is that he is absolutely and what told the story when he was at a new young concert i mean that's great man and so as long as rogan keeps doing that and i he's been doing it for five years and he's it's not like he hasn't faced pressure before it's clear to me that he's i just can't see any scenario short of his assassination that ends up in rogan not having 20 million viewers an episode in a year and so as long as he's careful like he is i don't think rogan can be cancelled so even if spotify dumps them it's like who's dumping who here rogan he's on spotify it's not necessarily spotify might be on rogan it's not so clear and so what what's going to happen they kick him off well he'll just have another platform like tomorrow immediately yeah and he'll have all the money spotify gave him which was actually quite a lot of money exactly did you hear did you see what pat had to say about this topic yesterday i don't know i think rogan is a billion dollar guy i think elon needs to sign a 20-year 50 million a year contract with rogan and start a company like a social media company choose which route you want to go direct competitor to youtube to google to it's not like elon hasn't done it he didn't create a company that was revolutionary he went against cars cars have been around for a while yeah but what i'm saying is cars and rockets have been around so it's not like you wouldn't invented the rocket or invented a car you don't need to invent something just go direct against youtube go directly in spotify go and elon and rogan could pull it off with the help of peter thiel it'll work itself out and they'll recruit the right people they'll make a few phone calls and the world's going to come saying hey if you like to have a platform for free thinkers and where you're not going to be censored give us a call or you know do this and it would take off but going back to the question with you you know i watch you when you get interviewed and i say this to myself i'm like okay here's a clinical psychologist okay what does he do for a living uh you you are in the you you listen to every you know prop you know whatever problems you hear people tell you right if you really don't want to entertain an idea and you want to push it away you'll do it in your own creative way you're you're you're you're a uh you're a heavyweight chain you know heavyweight type of guy that's gone up against everybody and you know how to handle a topic that you don't want to uh you don't want to talk about or give the answer to you're a pro you've been around the block for a while i just think for you you know to to think about like right now when we're talking about i think as an individual we can make more impact than being a pm or being a president or somebody like that uh canada is in shambles right now because of trudeau's policies canada is shut down right now because of true those people it's not just trudeau you know there's lots of conservative premiers in canada well they've done exactly the same thing let's flip it if trudeau's philosophies were different the other guys wouldn't be able to do what they're doing if trudeau had the influence at the top it would have been open can you pull up the mark the john hopkins article i just wanted to get get uh jordan's that article yeah so so here's cnn msnbc new york times wapo washington post completely avoid john hopkins study finding uh coveted lockdown's ineffective fyi would you say john hopkins is a conservative organization like hoover institute no or heritage johns hopkins is one of the most reliable medical scientific research enterprises universities in the world bar none that's very important it's extremely reliable so it's not like it's a cnn no no this is like this is harvard oxford cambridge level johns hopkins especially in the medical domain so watches abc cbs nbc also ignored the down study so go up let me read this so here we go there has been a full-on media blockout in the study online the ineffectiveness of lockdowns to prevent coveted debts according to john hopkins university men and analysis of several studies lockdowns during first coveted wave in spring of 2020 only reduce covet mortality by 0.2 that is not a lot in u.s and in europe while the meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted the researcher wrote in consequence lockdown's policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument if you can go a little higher i want to read the next two and i'll get jordan thoughts however the johns hopkins study received no mention on any of the five liberal networks this week according to uh grabian transcripts cnn msnbc abc cbs nbc all ignored the anti-lockdown's findings after having spent much of the pandemic shaming red states with minimal restrictions and events deemed by critics as super spreaders it wasn't just the networks avoiding the study the new york times the washington post the associated press reuters usa today axios politico amongst other outlets also tuned a black a blind eye to the findings according to search results jordan how important is this research like how important is is this analysis that we're reading here right now what is this i should tell you what a meta-analysis is to begin with well imagine there's a group of studies done on a particular topic and you write a review and you try to interpret the findings that was called a narrative review you use your opinion in some sense to wade through the data and try to understand what the compilation of studies reveals well there were techniques developed 25 years ago that are statistical where you can aggregate the statistical results from studies statistically so you do a statistical analysis of all the statistical analysis and that's a meta-analysis and hypothetically it's more objective and there's some truth to that claim you still have to select which studies to include but i i don't believe that that was a detriment in this particular case and so solid methodology and it's basically something approximating a cost benefit analysis and that has it's that's tough too because it's not that easy to assign costs and benefits in a quantitative manner having said all that it's well it's an amazing study not only because of what it reveals which is a point two percent decline in overall mortality but also in that the the researchers felt so strongly about their findings that they came right out and said that this was ineffective policy and that isn't that common um for researchers who generally hold off on drawing that sorts of conclusions they they kind of lay out the facts out of black and white they're typically not going to come out as black and white as what you're saying yes yes exactly exactly and so so that's that's really something we rushed to imitate a totalitarian state in panic and the consequence of that according to this study was there's zero there's nothing positive about it now i've talked with some democrats about this study because they were paying attention to it and their response is something like well it did help control hospital overrun and time will tell whether or not that's true i think the data suggesting that covid vaccines decreased the seriousness of illness when people contracted covid who were vaccinated i think that data is credible i could be wrong about that because things are being done in a rush and it's very difficult to draw appropriate scientific conclusions in a rush but i think the bulk of the information suggests that but i also think that is not how they were marketed and that was not the initial intent to merely reduce severity of the illness it was to reduce transmission and and so forth and and then of course this is a cost-benefit analysis which says yeah there was some gain on that front conceivably maybe although all-cause mortality doesn't seem to have gone down much at all but the economic the secondary consequences were devastating and well we don't even know what the secondary consequences are yet you know the collu here's one secondary consequence which is revealed in what you just read the collusion of the press and the government like how do you know that's not worse than the epidemic it could easily be worse than the epidemic or the idea that now we've been uh coerced into having to share our medical information with people all through the bureaucratic hierarchy all the way down to servers and restaurants so we've trained people that that's okay to ask and also to offer is that worse than the pandemic well these are arguably all of this involves violation of our fundamental rights where's the evidence that that's not worse well we're going to see it play out well the collusion between the press and the government that's so intense in canada as already said when the premier of ex-premier of newfoundland wanted to launch his constitutional challenge he couldn't use a mainstream news source that's a bloody catastrophe much as i dislike cbc which is a lot by the way i think that it's an absolute catastrophe that it's come to that and that's just one of you know two consequences of the lockdown there's the supply chain problem that's a big one you know my publisher penguin told me a week and a half ago we're talking about putting out a two-volume set of my last two books which i would really like to do they're going to do that in great britain i i think that people would turn to it as a gift for graduations and so on that would be a nice set for that they told me they can't get paper this is penguin random house right and it's paper paper isn't that complex given how complex everything is the fact that there are paper shortages that's a big deal i was in a mazda dealership in canada a couple of be a couple of months ago now they had one car one isn't very many cars you know and and so we have no idea what the supply line crunch is going to produce in terms of economic capacity and then the next issue is well how about all the money we've been printing you know we've already seen that produce a massive bubble expansion in housing prices that's being driven by other factors how do we know that's not worse than the pandemic you know it could easily be i'm not saying that it is because i don't know but that's the issue i don't know and this is partly why this mad rush to impose top-down solutions to complex problems this is in some sense what makes me a conservative insofar as i am it's part of the caution i learned as a social scientist social scientists i'll give you an example this is a good example i worked with this woman named joan mccord and she was one of america's great criminologists and uh a woman who was involved as a faculty member when very few women were she participated in a study in in in boston in summerville which is a working-class community back in the 30s they did the first large-scale intervention to deflect children from a criminal pathway so they're looking at deprived inner-city kids thinking they have a higher probability than average to become criminal and and to suffer all sorts of other negative consequences as well or to inflict them and perhaps you could intervene at an early age and and stop that or slow it down at least and so they put together a very comprehensive set of interventions parental lessons for the parents lessons for the kids health and nutrition interventions a whole broad spectrum of all the things you think this was in the united states in somerville massachusetts famous study somerville study um one of the first large-scale psychological public health interventions i would say and targeting a problem that was troublesome for left-wing people and right-wing people alike the right-wingers would think well fewer criminals that's good and the left-wingers would think well let's do some remediation at the root of the cause so everyone was hoping this worked and everyone was happy about it the kids thought it was good the parents thought it was good the researchers thought it was good they also put kids they took the kids out of the inner city in the summer and put them out in camp because of nature and all of that and wouldn't that be a nice break for them and then they did the analysis and the kids in the intervention group did worse on virtually every measure worse like substantially worse and so they were all shocked and seriously shocked in a major way in fact joan mccord was so shocked she spent the rest of her life going around talking about what had happened turns out that it's a really bad idea to group anti-social prone kids together in camps in the summer because they learn to compete with each other in terms of the manifestation of anti-social behavior and they get better at it it's like criminal camp and so that single consequence of one part of the intervention was so negative that it overwhelmed the entire study and produced negative results so mccord she was part of a group of very very able social scientists that i worked with when i was in montreal a broad group and it was an international group and they beat the drum all the time never never never never do a large-scale intervention without building in an evaluation 25 of your intervention budget should be evaluation because you do not know that your stupid intervention which you think will do what it you think it will do that's just a guess it's a guess and it could go wildly wrong in 10 ways you don't predict if you've ever run studies in lab trying to predict how people are going to behave you figure this out real soon because they don't behave the way what was the old idea put a lab rat in a cage under controlled conditions and the route will do exactly what it damn well chooses to do and that's true for rats it's even more true for people and so these large-scale interventions which the pandemic lockdown was certainly one of those is like and this is the conservative objection the law iron law of unintended consequences do something large scale to systems you don't understand at all not a bit you know we have just in time supply now right and you think about how efficient a economy has to be to rely on just in time supply so it used to be that if you ran an industry and uh maybe you're making uh you're you're a car manufacturer you have a warehouse full of parts but the parts are just sitting there and so that's like money invested that's not accruing any interest it's a cost and you have to store it that's cost and so that's an expense and so maybe you want to just have your part supplier supply the parts exactly when you need them and then maybe the parts supplier has to get the metal just exactly when they need it and so on all the way down to the miners and maybe that's in china then you think there's 30 steps there and every bloody thing has to work absolutely perfectly on time for that to work at all and then you throw a lockdown into that it's like well you've never run a business you have no idea how thing how complicated things are you think electricity comes out of plug-ins in the wall you know that's not a complicated problem you just put the plug in and there's the electricity and you muck things up in 50 different directions and that's what we've done and god only knows what we've done and then this issue that the you know the mainstream press won't cover this you think the reason they're not is just purely embarrassed the fact that this is gonna lose lose even more credibility with the audience that what we've been saying this entire time we've been wrong we haven't done real true investment no i don't think that's it i think no i don't think that's it if if that was the reason i could understand that reason i think it's part of this implicit and explicit collusion it's like this isn't the story and so we're not going to report it and i think that economically even that's a foolish decision because newsweek i've been reading newsweek recently newsweek has some journalists they actually have some real information again which is quite interesting still a leftover it's still a liberal magazine yeah but my experience has been in the last couple of months i thought oh my god there's some actual news in newsweek and so that was that was really cool but i see all this not only as collusion which is absolutely appalling so that's the death of journalism because journalists are colluding with politicians it's like well they're not journalists anymore and they're also not politicians because if they were politicians and journalists they wouldn't be colluding whatever they are as a consequence of this collusion is not politicians and journalists it's some completely new thing now i'm less worried about it than i might be because i also see it as part of the inevitable death spiral of the legacy media they're dead and why well they don't have a monopoly over the dissemination of information at all youtube for all of its flaws which are manifold is an unbelievably powerful and accessible technology where the cost of entry is zero it's like no tv station can compete with that period they're done and then these print media sources especially when they're great people barry weiss might be example leave because they can't say what they want to they don't have to lose much of their talent before all they've got left is hacks and then everyone can publish to an international audience instantly online so part of what we're seeing in the mainstream media is a technologically fueled death spiral and i know how large corporations die so there's this principle pareto principle which is that the square root of the number of people in a given creative enterprise do half the work and so if you're a news organization with a thousand people 30 of them do half the work and you think no and you can take that all you want but you're just wrong because this is one of the most well established findings in social science period so you got a thousand people and 970 of them are putting in time and 30 of them are doing half the work and then something shifts those people can't say what they want to say let's say the 30 the 30. what do they do well they leave why because they can right these are people they're un these are competent people they're really smart they're on the edge they're tough they have immense networks of connections as soon as the ship rocks they think ciao you think i need you it's like you got you got your priorities wrong you need me they go off like barry weiss did and start their own thing and so then you're left with the 970 that was only doing half the work and then the next 30 competent people leave and soon all you've got is people who run the legacy media and they just and they say things like well joe rogan people shouldn't listen to him because he just wings it it's like how clueless can you possibly be or or you have people like at cnn who treat rogan like he's an outsider despite the fact that he's pulling in numbers that are at least five five to eight times their average viewership joe is fringe it's like really we'll see who's fringe here and so and part of this is purely technological it's like there's no way these legacy apparatuses can compete how can they printing is for printing with universal distribution is free video with universal distribution is free how can a network possibly compete it can't so spiral death and as they die they lose their editors they lose their fat fact checkers they lose their good journalists they lose everybody with courage and then they put out pablum and they and they're tempted by click bait because that's what you have to do while you're dying it's like christ we have to attract attention somehow so you say well joe rogan apologized and everybody clicks on it and they read it and they think that's a lie and so you've lost another five percent of your viewership cnn is probably sitting in their board meetings saying god please we need trump to be president again because when he was president we were making money we need somebody like that to be president they're begging this guy to come back can you imagine if cnn ends up like putting him on left and right to and then you know to berate him but at the same time they're getting more eyeballs but going back to it okay so jordan let's just say you are the pm of canada let's just play this let's just say game okay um and you watch the decisions justin made he's your pm you live in that country how he handled truckers how he handled vaccine how he handled lockdowns how he handled everything how would you have handled some of those things if you were the pm of canada well i i'd have to say that i don't know because those decisions are extremely complicated you know and it's it's very hard to speculate i do have something to say about that though that i think is relevant when i watch mr trudeau through through the lenses that i've developed over the years i see someone who never ever says a true word and so i've met lots of people like that they're all persona and everything they do is crafted in a sense to obtain what they think is appropriate in the situation whatever that might be it's all instrumentality and so when mr trudeau comes out and addresses his audiences it's all a it's all a game it's all an act all of it and so what i would hope i would have done differently if i was in that position is i would have said what i thought and hope that that i always think that's the way that carries the day it doesn't mean you're right because what the hell do you know but at least it means you're engaging in the process that might make you right if you opened up your eyes and your ears and listened right and so what to do isn't in a complex situation in some sense isn't as important as how you do it right what approach do you take when when when the chips are down and and things are tense the good politicians that i've met and this is relevant to this they listen you know they go out among their people actually go out and they listen to them and that way they learn what to do and that's not opinion polls opinion polls are and our my country and yours to a large degree is ruled by opinion polls to a degree you can can't possibly imagine because the politicians won't take responsibility for saying what they think and so then they default to their handlers and their handlers rely on opinion polls and opinion polls provide a bad short-term sample of people's careless thoughts and you think well you're following the public it's no you're not the entire parliamentary system is set up to follow the public in an intelligent way it's not easy to figure out what people think or what they want it isn't even easy for individuals to figure out what they themselves think or want it's really hard and these traditions that we've set up of representative democracy are ways of listening to the people that are measured and thoughtful and long-term and they're being supplanted by idiot opinion polls that are run by people who have instrumental desires they want to win the next election i know you have to win the damn next election you know but pandering to a mob who's frightened because you scared them that doesn't constitute leadership it's certainly not democracy there's a reason we don't have direct democracy there's a reason for that it's like rule by impulse it's not a good structure it's not a good strategy we figured that out a long time ago our organizations are way too large and complex for anything like direct democracy to work we're going to want to have a we're going to have a vote on every issue like obviously not people just don't have the expertise for that and it's not like they shouldn't be consulted they absolutely should be the voice of the people is the sovereign master of the political enterprise but what a leader does is aggregate that voice i'll give you an example this is a good example what a leader does is aggravate aggregate people aggregate that voice yes yes yes collects it collects it so i interviewed jimmy carr the british comedian he's very very smart car and i asked him how he did what he did and i kind of knew this from other comedians i've talked to he said the comedy stand-up comedy is the most dialogical of all the artistic enterprises i thought what do you mean by that because he actually you have a monologue what do you mean it's dialogical he said well before i go out on a tour and he's had a couple of successful world tours so that's pretty good when you're that funny that's amazing he said he'd go out and do 100 shows rogan does the same thing all the comedians do the same thing louis ck does this they all do it they go to small clubs and they try out their material so they're sitting at home trying to be funny and sometimes they are and sometimes they're not and then they go to an audience and they lay out some jokes and sometimes people laugh a lot and sometimes they don't and so the comedians who do this repeatedly listen and then they collect all the things that people think are funny and so isn't it so cool is that you don't even have to be that funny in some sense to be a comedian you have to be a little bit funny and then you really have to listen and so if you go out to your audience and you tell them jokes and they tell you what's funny then you can collect all the things that everyone thinks is funny and then you can go on a world tour and just say things that everyone thinks are funny exactly it's so cool it's that that's the pathway tense aggregate exactly exactly so so when the comedians are doing what what a political leader who who who is functioning properly does they're doing exactly the same thing um i i talk in at length to a canadian politician preston manning he's on the right of the of the political spectrum um and he built a political party from scratch in canada and became the leader of the opposition which is no trivial thing to do in the span of a single lifetime or even in the fraction of a career which is what he did and he told me um that what he really liked was going out to make a speech but that wasn't party really like he really liked the question period because people would just tell him what they were concerned about and then he derived the policies for his party as a consequence of addressing those concerns so it was really a bottom-up enterprise and so i would hope that had i been in that position i would do what i'm doing when i'm on my tour which is watching people and listening to them and then responding and this happens first of all when i lecture which isn't exactly the right word when i explore ideas in front of people i'm watching them like a hawk blinded as i am by the lights you know but i'm watching to see if people are following and and modifying what i'm saying to make sure that everybody's staying on the track and then i have thousands of people i have had thousands of people meet me in meet and greets after the talks and then on the street and i always listen to them and so then i can address that those concerns and then that keeps the situation dynamic right and so in in in the uk in the house of parliament there's this great dome at the center of the building and it's the lobby and that's where the word lobbyist comes from by the way and the citizens of the uk have the right to enter the lobby and petition their their member of parliament at any time essentially and so the lobby is where the voice of the people meets the voice of their representatives and it's the center of the british house of parliament and it's it's built that way architecturally which is so brilliant it's stunningly brilliant the way that that's laid out and that's exactly right because the people are somewhat inarticulate like the truckers like they're not making an argument in some sense they're bringing their trucks to ottawa right now yes exactly and and and and people who aren't primarily intellectual let's say they have to act out their moral presuppositions in a more concrete manner but that doesn't mean they're wrong at all it doesn't mean that at all and so then the job of a leader is to note that inarticulate expression and to give it voice publicly in in speeches let's say but also to have that voice manifest itself in the body of laws that governs all of us that's how the system works and so and the alternative is to dismiss that and that's not a good alternative or to demonize it which is i want to read this to you because it goes kind of based on what you're saying here's a yahoo news story trudeau flees as trucker convoys enters ottawa as thousands of protesters enter auto canadian prime minister justin trudeau and his family were moved from their home to an undisclosed location somewhere in the city on saturday afternoon due to security concerns a freedom convoy of some 2 700 truckers enter the canadian capital of auto saturday to protest through those through those securities security concerns this is the pm so kobe 19 policies uh according to the independent around 100 big rigs blockade blockaded a main street running past the canadian parliament building so that's going on he just tested positive for kovid now it's coming into us they froze the gofundme account which raised over 10 million dollars and nearly 130 140 000 people that donated and now american truckers are kind of getting involved and saying listen we're going to facebook you can't kick them off yeah facebook kicked 137 000 subscribers to that group they kicked them off yeah you wait till you see your election this year you're going to see plenty of that that's for sure how bad do you think the consequences are going to be like you you really think you know some people i talk to some people like who are professionals in my community like what are you talking about truckers i haven't seen anything on the news i'm like you haven't seen anything i haven't seen anything on the news you don't know what's going on with truckers no i read wall street journal in new york times i know nothing about what's going on in canadian truckers so they don't watch obviously fox and maybe they don't watch podcasts right but it's not the same thing with the john hopkins yeah the same exact exactly it's like how did you not like yours how would i yeah so he said he says you really think these truckers are gonna have any kind of an influence on anything it's truckers you think they're gonna have any information the way he said it he said looking down on them because they can't express it with intellectuals the leader of the socialist party in canada so hypothetically on the side of the working class the the people who are most opposed to the truckers in canada are the people who vote ndp the socialists about 20 of the population stably in canada and now and then we have a socialist provincial government and they've done some good you know i don't want to get into that but like i said there are people in on that side of the equation who for example were fostered in the labor movement and they had they had things to say the working class needs to have their say but the vast majority of people who vote ndp in canada are opposed to the truckers it's like i thought you guys were on the side of the working class it's like what's happened well not them it's like hey man welcome to the working class those truckers well they're all white supremacists and racists like really in canada are they now white supremacists really or nazis in canada there aren't any of them there was some dimwit was waving a confederate flag at the rally and the truckers he was massed the truckers stripped him of his mask and chased him away but all the mainstream press reported confederate flags at the trucker rally as if that matters it's like it's not like there are a lot of canadians by the way flying the confederate flag first of all that's not our country and second most canadians i would say don't really know in any deep sense what the confederate flag stands for i mean right you know people aren't that informed and i'm i'm not being condescending they have other things to concern this is it's comments like what you just said that validates some people how much of a role people like george soros plays to get protesters out there that are actors and they're not real and they're trying to instigate to say dear dude this is how people are feeling because you know the biggest mover and shaker emotion is what anger anger is the way you get people to say you know what these guys are white supremacists these guys are this and so this validates how some people have that argument it also validates how facebook does their algorithms they want people arguing in the comment section because anger basically begets more comments and more yeah and basically more eyeballs and more support like how many canadians even know what the hell the confederate flag even means right and there's one like there's 50 000 people who we don't even know how many people are in ottawa i've seen wildly different numbers the idea that there was a hundred trucks that's just completely insane there's like 10 times that number minimum and so that's another thing that's so appalling is you can't actually get accurate information and then yeah well this trudeau flees issue that's i don't i don't like that it's not like i view that with any sense of satisfaction or or or delight like i'm not a fan of trudeau because i don't think he's capable of saying an honest word and i truly mean that and i've watched his speeches over and over watching to see what's going on with him and all i see is acting and but i'm why despite that why would i be happy that the leader of my country ran away from a protest citing security concerns which is a very bad move to begin with it's like well i have to leave because you people are so dangerous it shows weakness well no it's it's it's worse than that it's it's an instigation it's an instigation it because he said that the reason he had to leave was because of security concerns which means you people are dangerous and not to be trusted and i don't think the truckers so far are dangerous and not to be trusted and i've been watching them handle this they're they're playing this it's been very peaceful for for the number of people who are involved in the demonstration and that's despite the potential effect of instigator types and that's a real threat so even with that it's been peaceful and they're they've set up food camps to feed the homeless and they're shoveling the snow in front of the war monument and now they have a guard around the terry fox statue terry fox was a man one-legged canadian who ran across the country raising money for cancer and he's a canadian hero and his statue was desecrated in the in the in the language of the mainstream press they put a fl upside down canadian flag on it and put some clothing on him which was desecration which okay have it your way in any case the truckers set up a guard around the statue so that's not going to happen again and they seem to be not taking the bait and so i hope that that continues and that this proclivity to instigate which would be extraordinarily convenient for mr trudeau and which is an easy out for him i'm praying that that doesn't happen is there a reason why you wouldn't show up to something like this like to support the truckers or at least lend your voice no the reason i'm not there is because i have other commitments right i'm on this tour and and people have bought tickets and there's thousands of them and that's what i'm doing and you know i put out videos in support of them and which i think in some senses yeah well the video i put out last week which was a message to the conservative premiers essentially and the conservative leader who lost his position last week because there was a revolt at the federal level and so our main opposition party transformed leadership last week in no small part as a consequence of the trucker convoy i put out this video calling on these conservative premiers to drop the damn mandates and so it's i said i mentioned earlier it's got about a million and a half views it's called seize the day and that's as if that's as effective or more effective than me being there so as far as i can tell and besides it's the best i can do under the current circumstances given everything yeah so um you know you know it's crazy while this is happening uh i was listening to charlemagne god you know charlemagne god i don't know if you know who he is he breakfast club he's he's a big-time radio hip-hop guy big yeah in a hip-hop world very very well known he's been at this point you know i think he's necessary it's not about a fan i think he's necessary anybody that's pushing the envelope and you're fair and you push your own side salute hats off to you live respect that guy he said something the other day on the podcast which pissed a lot of people off he says you know what at this point i miss trump he said let's get that you know back here because at least you knew he would say some and he meant it and you're like you could say i disagree with this guy he's crazy and he's not a fan of trump no he's not a zero fantastic interview yeah and and is not a fan of he asked the question said who's running this country is the president uh joe manchin or the president joe biden who was really but anyways he said yeah to kamala he sent them you know kamala acted like she got pissed off but so trump hey maybe we need this guy back right maybe we need somebody like that to come and you saw shaq the other day can you pull up shaq what he said i don't know if i want to play the video to be honest with you if you can find what he says and maybe do this maybe do this press unmute on the video you see that button on the audio bring it all the way down but they're going to pick up the algorithm so go and say shaq vaccine force just google shack vaccine force i don't know if you saw this or not jordan did you see this this was just yesterday did you see this or no adam did you read that i have not okay i know he did say something so so watch this go shaq rips covered vaccine mandates you shouldn't be forced to make something you don't take something now go all the way down because i want to read to exactly how he said it because if they have the whole back and forth go a little lower go a little lower go little or i wish i could show it to you so so the ladies like well no they're not really forcing us to take anything he says no no they are no they're not no one's forced me says what are you talking about if you don't take it do you have a job she says no you don't have a job but they're not forcing me to take you so that's forcing you that's forcing you so what is starting to happen is some people charlemagne is like listen maybe this guy that we hated on as much as we hated on maybe he took positions maybe he came out there and talked to us maybe at least we had you know uh uh something to say took a position on what we had to do rather than hey uh what are we doing today hey you know how do we handle the situation here do you think there's certain people right now uh because we're in florida so in florida it's desantis and trump and it's a very competitive there's a lot of people that want the santas and there are a lot of people that don't want desantis to run for office because they like him as a governor they're worried who would replace him but they're still you know let's go brandon flags outside of uh you know all these boats that you see everyone's got some kind of a let's go brandon flag which i'd like to get your feedback on how you feel about brandon if you like this brand the guy or not but uh trump your thoughts next election coming in u.s with everything that's going on well i watched what happened in the united states with trump and clinton i thought people liked they liked the unscripted impulsive lies of trump better than the scripted instrumental lies of clinton what do you mean by that well trump trump gave a different speech generally when he went from audience to audience he kind of shoots from the hip kind of a lot and it isn't obvious to me that shooting from the hip is really the right way to lead a country but calculating everything beforehand for maximum impact on your political future that is not also not a way to run a country and that's how you get pulled into politics by handler by pr by by opinion poll by image we have you know you see politicians we have to protect our image it's like really do you you have to protect your image do you what what's your image exactly well it's what we want people to think we are well how about you be that instead of being the image of that and this you see this dialogue taking place people don't even notice it it's like we have to protect our image it's like rogan doesn't protect his image he doesn't have an image he's actually there which is why people are listening to him or or come up with some other excuse he's a gateway to the alt-right it's like really this left-leaning person with a high degree of sympathy for socialist views on the working-class site whose odd psychedelic experiment or hippie cr counter cultural person is a gateway to the alt-right really that's your story yeah of all the stupid stories it's so it's so ridiculous you the only way you could possibly believe that is if you knew nothing about it because that's just not who he is at all it's preposterous but the only other explanation is that people are listening to him because they trust him because he's trustworthy well god could that possibly be and all the media forces of their raid against them aren't trustworthy it's like well a lot of that as we already talked about that's a consequence of rapid technological transformation much of that is based on the conversations he has regarding the facts because prior to covet or even vaccine mandates nobody thought that he was center-right nobody oh yeah he was getting that right because he was he was yeah yeah he was hypothetically you know a founding father of the intellectual dark web and that was going back five years ago and everybody review re you know viewed everybody who had a mainstream view let's say viewed all the people who are in the intellectual dark web for lack of a better term as gateway to the alt-right you know brett weinstein and his and his wife heather you know those terrible right-wingers it's so preposterous and and and and uh sam harris as well another you know hyper conservative person well it's just not that at all not are these people actually tuning in and listening are they just making assumptions oh no they don't listen no people who criticize well what happens often and this is why rogan keeps growing and popular and it happened with me to some degree is that people come because they're curious and then they do listen and then they think oh this is nothing like what i've been told it's in fact the and it and i think this was particularly true in my case in relationship to accusations of say far-right sympathies it's like well what about all the lectures i gave on nazism for like 30 years two of the biggest educational institutions in the world what about those and then what about this what about the fact that i had i now have like 300 hours of things i've said online and you haven't been able to find one phrase even taken out of context that was enough to damn me in any serious sense not one so now you can take some of the things i've said maybe about gender differences in personality and clip them and then put them in a the most like abysmal interpretive context possible and warp that seriously and kind of make an argument that i'm a misogynist but even that's incredibly ineffective first of all because i'm not the fact that i think there are differences between men and women and that i actually appreciate the differences makes me the opposite of a misogynist because if you're a misogynist and you don't like femininity then you deny that it exists and it does exist and so and all the data support that men and women are broadly more similar than they are different in terms of their personality structure there's no doubt about that but the differences aren't trivial they have major influence on occupational choice for example and the data on that's absolutely clear from from from and it's all been generated by left-leaning psychologists because the entire psychological research community the academic community in general is left leaning so all this data is showing that there are differences between men and women at a personality level has been generated by people who are antithetical to that idea politically so yeah yeah well did you used to get in arguments with your colleagues meaning i think 90 plus percent of professors are left-leaning is that the number pat i want to say 90 it's 13-1 according to washington so more than 90 so meaning if you're in a room and there's 13 professors and you're more to the right conservative and you're you know you're in the break room having a coffee having a having a cake or whatever are you arguing with your colleagues how did that work i didn't argue with my colleagues much now they want to argue with you okay faculty well people were irritated at me from time to time because i worked with the business school and you know how reprehensible they are and so that was annoying because i my attitude to that was you think all the sins on the side of the business school it's like what the hell's wrong with you that's your viewpoint you think you're sophisticated and so but i didn't argue about that because it just was pointless i didn't i argued very seldomly with my colleagues and i spent most of my i had lots of colleagues who were friends of mine although at the university of toronto they tended to be people who eventually went elsewhere and that was more a matter of happenstance than anything else but i had colleagues who were close friends of mine at harvard and we got along just fine and they weren't i wouldn't say they were also that they were particularly left-leaning but i would also say i'm not particularly right-leaning you know the fact that i was branded conservative or right-wing for that matter really came as quite a shock to me because temperamentally i'm kind of halfway between a liberal and conservative because i'm very conscientious but i'm also very high in this trait openness which is a creativity dimension and so the openness tilts me more in the liberal direction and the conscientiousness tilts me more in a conservative direction so i kind of so i suppose in some ways the easiest political slot for me is something like libertarian so far as i would put myself in the political slot but i ever thought myself as a conservative so apparently well i'm conservative in some ways now um partly from being a social scientist as i said i'm a firm believer in the law of unintended consequences i also believe the conservative dictate that the best level of government is the level most proximal to the problem and that's a really good principle even for for running an organization right is you want to devolve power distribute it as much as possible facilitate local autonomy and you want the decision makers to be as close to the people that the decisions are affecting as possible that's actually why i thought brexit was a good idea you know it was like two tower of babel the european union it's like no the representatives got too far away from the people very very dangerous and so i think the uk made a good choice it's like no we're not especially the uk it's like center of free speech in the world all things considered historically considered you know americans and canadians differ on this to some degree but in canada we kind of view the american revolution as englishmen standing up for their rights as englishmen standing up for themselves yeah well the uk had a very well-developed tradition of belief in intrinsic human rights long before the american revolution i'm not saying the american revolution was trivial because it wasn't trivial but it's uh extension and elaboration of a set of principles that were there long before the american revolution occurred and so as a canadian uh do you think america is the greatest country in the world it's it's probably yeah probably i mean i was every time i go to the uk i'm or europe in general for that matter i'm stunningly impressed the uk is an amazing place and its institutions are so remarkable oxford and cambridge they're so i mean i was at harvard for a long time the depth of history there the the weight of that tradition the commitment of people to free speech the uk is an amazing country the united states has the advantages of the uk and then it's much bigger you have a huge population it's incredibly diverse your political institutions also allow for a diverse range of experiments at the state level that really seems to be working out well much better than in canada for example the united states has this amazing theatricality that's such a potent force it's so obvious when you come here from canada because everything in the united states is like a movie set i was at this uh gala week ago desantis spoke out at the common sense society um that was a european organization set up to foster free speech and uh they had an ex-military guy black guy sing the national anthem before the formal dinner started and he just belted it out you know with this kind of gospel undertone and this whole culture your whole culture is saturated by this unbelievably powerful pop culture that just has its tentacles out everywhere in the world and so he belted out the national anthem a cappella in a way you'd never hear a canadian belt out canada and then they had another guy who's also black as it turned out get up and do the prayer before dinner and you could just see him channeling that kind of gospel evangelism that's a big part of the southern us culture and so that was amazingly theatrical and do you want to attempt to reenact that no no no no i couldn't do it justice and then you know they showed this video about freedom that was all theatrical and and it the americans you americans are unbelieve you're unbelievably good at that it's it's it and it it shows a culture that has this immense belief in its dream and that manifests itself in especially in pop culture it just manifests itself everywhere in pop culture and and american pop culture clearly dominates the world and so and part of it is that that dream of a better future that's accessible to all that that is given voice through all of that pop culture i mean including the automobile for that matter because that's an expression of pop culture and it's certainly not obvious to me at all that it wasn't the automobile that doomed the communists because nothing says freedom and individual sovereignty like a 16 year old with a 400 horsepower mustang you know and i know perfectly well if the automobile was invented today the no ordinary person would be able to have one because they'd be too dangerous you have to take a 10 year course and then you know get them pay a million dollars a month for insurance and and be encased in styrofoam and the car that's a bloody miracle it's like well why don't we let people go wherever they want in these unbelievably dangerous contraptions what is the point there's almost nothing more dangerous than driving right and you let kids do it it's like 16 yeah you can drive why not it's like well because you run people you can't drink you can't have a beer but you well but but it's so wonderful and and you have all this autonomy in a vehicle it it just yells out individual liberty so then you export those to communist countries it's like you think you're exporting cars you don't think there's a political message embedded in the existence of an automobile so you haven't thought about it it was crazy you're saying that because yesterday we had a guest here mike who said he asked about a car that i own he says hey you know is it true about this car and i said if you want to go drive it and allegedly yesterday he drove it allegedly keyboards of cops are listening to this allegedly he went 170 yes today what's the freeway it's an sf-90 it's the fastest street car ferrari it's got a thousand horsepower he was shocked when you're like yeah here you go here's the keys he's like what i could have matched it against the tesla well zero to sixty tesla will destroy yeah but to like 210 miles an hour you're just it's just gonna destroy dude ferrari's gonna jordan would you like to drive the car after the show no i mean by the way you know for one first time he came to dallas i think i took you you did i drove you to your hotel and you were to meet your wife right because you guys would always travel together very good conversation what did you have what car was that that was uh what did i do i drove you in a bentley oh that was a blue rolls-royce convertible yes it was we're at a red light guy into the car next to us he's like that's charlotte he went crazy what kind of car do you drive right now mercedes sl550 yeah you guys you can have any car you want why do you pick that one that's a pretty legit car by the way no no it's a nice car well i bought it five years ago um my brother-in-law had one which i used to drive in california i really liked it i really liked the way it felt it's got great acceleration it's cool too and so i i bought one secondhand one it's like eight years old this thing or nine years old but it's in great shape and uh i like it it's two-seater zoom around with my wife in it and it has a really good sound system and so we put in whatever we're listening to yeah what are you bumping when you're driving what's your music cms i like classic rock okay um i have about an eight-hour playlist of old jazz and blues standards uh crooners uh that's more for the on the romance side of things i have a really good playlist of old country and blues music that's about seven hours long which i really love or why my wife and i listened to that a lot the car cranked right up do you have a particular family i really like i think okay i was going to ask you is there a particular names that you listen to more than anyone neil young does neil young neil young yeah yeah yeah but but and so he's in my classic rock collection or he was because it's on spotify so i don't know if he's going to be there much longer i don't like what john my son did a real good cover of harvest moon that's on spotify and so you know we were neil young fans i liked his music and i still like his music and and and artists if they had any sense would stay out of that political debate because they're artists and that's way better creative barbara streisand came out and said that yesterday that she's going off of a spotify school but jon stewart said it best john stewart's like first of all we need to keep rogan on there and i think john was on rogan about a year ago a year and a half ago when he was on but he said here was the biggest surprise when i heard look i listened to neil young i think his music's great i've listened to my entire life but what i didn't think spotify was going to lose four billion dollars because of neil young he was kind of shocked by it but let me ask a couple stories one do you follow anything with china are you somebody that's okay so so soros which we know the name soros here's what soros said recently and i'm curious to get your take on uh this soros is a guy that's worth i don't know 20 billion guy he's a guy that is hated by the right and a lot of people on the right think he is manipulative deceptive and he wants to inject his philosophies politically to this country but here's what he said he says this is a bloomberg article soros says china's real estate crisis omicron threatens xi rule billionaire philanthropist george soros and china's xi jinping may fail to extend his rule of the country later this year contrast to what most observers expect sorority enemies within the party real estate crisis ineffective accidents and a failing birth rate as factors working against him internal divisions in china are so sharp that it has found expression in various party publications soros said she is under attack from those who are inspired by deng xiaoping's ideas and want to see a greater role for private enterprise what do you think is going to happen with g and china well my sense of it and i'm definitely no expert is that it's not easy for the chinese to maintain internal unity and so they tend to focus on that and perhaps that's partly why china hasn't been as expansionist to power as it might have been maybe that's changed to some degree in recent years but it's it's a very large country it has an incredibly diverse population and so they have their own problems their own internal problems which are significant and and preoccupying and so i hope that they stay focused on their internal problems and that they stay focused on solving them i mean china has been forward-looking enough thank god to allow the free-market enterprise to flourish despite the proclivity for implementing top-down radical left state solutions and the consequence of that has been first of all now china is a player in the international scene for better or worse i think mostly for better i know that a lot of that was accomplished on the backs of the american working class and that's catastrophic in many ways but the fact that there aren't tens of millions of chinese people starving that's really good thing for international security and stability and that's of no trivial benefit to the american working class as well and the fact is that china makes a lot of cheap stuff that works mostly and that people who are more stressed economically have also benefited to that to a tremendous degree so it seems that all of that has been good the twist towards a more totalitarian mode of governance in the last 10 years that's obviously extremely worrisome the fact that china is a totalitarian state has had a very negative consequence on us in the west especially in the immediate uh what would you call it in the immediate emergence of the of the pandemic because what we did was we rushed to imitate a totalitarian state we thought chinese lockdown we better do it it's like really really we better do what the ccp did well that's what we did and we'll see we don't know what the consequence of that is yet we'll see not good not good in my estimation and certainly the johns hopkins studies study seems to it's only a partial study in some sense they've done the cost benefit analysis costs so far we have no idea what the costs are of having kids in masks for two years we have no idea what the consequences are what that's done especially to introverted kids who are high in negative emotion because they're going to be looking for a reason to hide anyways and who knows what that's done to their psychological development both as children and as adolescents we'll find out over time but we haven't paid the price for the pandemic lockdowns even a little bit yet did we destroy our economy like these things take a long time you know they say if you're piling an oil tanker and you detect an iceberg in your path you can see it you've already hit it because it takes so long for you to turn that it's too late well in some sense these huge systems that we're a part of are like that is that you can't tell when they're broken because they take a long time to fall over and i don't know if our system is broken but we're going to find out and i don't know if the pandemic lockdowns broke it and maybe they didn't and hopefully they didn't i mean i was in new york city in manhattan a month ago and it was the first time i'd really gone out anywhere other than toronto and i've been to new york a few years before and it's a bouncing place manhattan i love new york it's such an amazing city you know the fact that manhattan can even exist is just an ongoing absolute miracle seven million people compressed onto that island and it's it's pretty damn clean and it's pretty safe and it's really cool and there's something to do all the time and you can walk around free and like that bloody place is a miracle that's for sure and it looked pretty good i thought isn't this something these people have been locked down for like 18 months and this place isn't on fire it actually it's pretty clean and most of the businesses are still open and isn't that a bloody miracle and which it most definitely is and so let's pray and not be too resentful about all the foolishness let's pray that we wake up and we treat the pandemic like the flu and we get back to something resembling the normality of florida and we put this behind us and we don't get too upset about january 6th and we don't get too vengeful about the democrats and the radical left and we licked someone half sensible to run the republicans and we carefully weave our way through to a peaceful future we let's pray for that because the alternative is pretty damn dismal and i don't think we have to have the alternative you know one of it we talked about trump earlier here's my dilemma with trump one of many he's beating the election with stolen drum pretty damn hard and i look at that as an outsider again because i'm canadian and i think well you americans you've been split 50 50 for like five decades like right down the middle and there's always election trouble because no system is a hundred percent perfect maybe there's like a one percent two percent margin of crookedness something like that and you're probably really not going to get rid of that maybe you can maneuver carefully to keep it so that it's never any more than one or two percent but to get rid of that last bit of malfeasance and deception and corruption would take such a heavy hand that that would become worse than the problem and that's a real problem when you split 50 50 because small election irregularities can throw the whole election okay so it isn't obvious precisely what can be done about that but the election was stolen narrative i think it's weak for a variety of reasons the first is it's pretty whiny like why didn't you win with five percent margin then so how do you know this isn't your fault and you think the republicans aren't gerrymandering congressional districts because they are and so it's not obvious that even if it is the case that there is substantive election fraud that it's all from one side and so there's that and then you're sure that's the message you want to be sending people that they shouldn't have faith in their most fundamental institution you might be right but but it's in your interest for that to be true and so that's a moral hazard and then well what happens when you retake the house because that's what's going to happen i think the democrats going to get stomped in the in the upcoming election are those elections somehow valid but yours wasn't and so why magically when the republicans get elected that's honest but when they don't it's not and so doesn't that take the wind out of your story it's like well it was stolen well you have the house and the senate how do you account for that so that to me that that's going to weaken that narrative trump is capitalizing on anger he's using the election issue as a means to an end and he may believe it but it doesn't matter because it's a weak story especially when the democrats lose the house it's a weak story so it's not gonna it doesn't have any momentum but then it it's worse than that because i also think and i've talked to lots of republicans about this is that the best story you've got you've got tradition on your side you've got the truth as an adventurer on your side you've got belief in truth on your side that's been abandoned by the radical left you've got belief in science on your side you've got responsibility on your side you've got the fundamental purpose of higher education on your side you can't conjure up a better story for americans than the election was stolen when with all that on your side that's just not very impressive and i have sympathy for politicians in general in the united states congress people have very hard jobs it's not a job i would like i don't think it's a pleasant job they spend a lot of their time fundraising 25 hours a week on the phone out of their congressional offices because otherwise they're not supported by their party leadership 40 percent of them sleep in their offices when they go to washington they don't even have apartments those that do usually have little bitty apartments their families aren't there because it's hard to get families to move to washington now with dual career families they don't have much of a social group they have to run for their job every two years this is not a plus they're under attack all the time and they're micromanaged and micro scheduled so i'm curious what point are you trying to make are you trying to make a point with trump saying the fact that you know election was stolen because that's exactly what hillary clinton's position was for four years that elections were stolen from her no better no better when she does it oh no i'm not even what i'm trying to say is i looked at it as a weak position this is a weak position it is a weak position she was taken i think okay but that's the worst of it it's like really where are you going with this are you going with the better story tell a better story if you want to get is reelected no no no no no no the way to re-election is through a better story but that's not the reason to tell it the reason to tell it is because you believe it and the for the first time in my life really i believe this to be the case conservatives really have something to sell to young people and they have the they can sell the meaning of responsibility because young people are bereft of meaning and most people find meaning in responsibility and and when the right talks about responsibility they kind of do it in that finger wagging way that makes conservatives unpopular among young people you should be responsible it's like yeah you should why well because your life is chaotic and meaningless and you're stuck in this juvenile surreality and it's really painful for you and you're anxious and aimless and goalless and then you look at people who have a life because maybe you could have a life and you think well what does that life consist of it's like well you have a committed intimate relationship there's one you have friends that you're honest with and and playful with so you have a group of friends you have a job or a career you know you you you learn how to use your life your time outside of work in a productive engaging way you regulate your susceptibility to the multitude of hedonistic temptations that are in front of you um you pay some attention to your mental and physical health you make a goal some goals for the future that are concrete well there's seven things you can do they're all responsible things why because then your life will have some meaning now you might say well what's the ultimate meaning it's like get those things straight first they're not nothing and maybe you won't be so damn miserable and bitter and resentful and angry and aimless and anxious and frustrated and disappointed and then ashamed if you had five of those seven things going well and the conservatives can make that case no bloody left isn't making that case it's like for them responsibility is pretty much equivalent to totalitarian patriarchal oppression the conservatives could just take that say no no our institutions they're pretty solid maybe if you don't like what's happening on the political front you join a group a church the elks the rotary some civic organization get in there and do your part why not because you should even though you should but because well why not meet some people who are like-minded and have a social group you think biden can can have the kind of impact to push people away from the political party to the opposing side similar to how goldwater and what they did back in the days on how civil rights was handled when barry goldwater did what he did and next you know african americans went from uh only 60 percent of them voting uh democrat to 92 percent four years later they went from 60 to 92 percent four years later in the next election and republicans haven't had a chance on the african-american vote since 1964. do you think the current climate is that big of a climate where the conversion from one side to the other side to say listen i don't agree with you guys on censoring if the guys want to talk leave them alone the way you handle kovit by shutting everybody down i don't agree with that constantly printing money i don't agree with that do you think it could be something where it could flip that that big i don't know because 20 the next presidential election in this climate is a long way away because you know who can predict the future even a year out especially given the rate of technological change that we face now i mean you don't even know what's happening today there's so many technological transformations just today many of which have world shaping consequences god only knows where we're going to be by the time of the next presidential election but it certainly does seem to be the case that the democrats are going to lose big in the fall and so you know that's that's what we'll focus on for the time being we'll see what happened there we'll see what happened couple other topics before we wrap up here so remote work it's a conversation everybody's having i'm going to read the vox story uh uh on remote work and then we'll talk a couple other stories here and we'll wrap up so vox comes out with this article remote work isn't the problem work is okay executives are nearly three times more likely than non-executives to say they want to return to office full-time according to slack survey the report found that while nearly 80 percent of knowledge workers want flexibility in where they work their employer thinks that the arrangement will lead to a variety of ills diminishing the company's collaboration creativity and culture as people have quit their jobs or stepped out of workforce in what's called the great resignation you've heard that before or the great reshuffling those left behind have had to pick up the slack two-thirds of workers said their workload has increased significantly since they started working remotely as if increased work-related work weren't enough pandemic related obstructions the lack of child care smaller social support system has caused many people to have work outside of paid work so this whole concept of the great resignation and what's happening you know some people are seniors listen you guys got to come back to work i'm in the financial industry i can't tell you how many people are having a hard time getting their people back like the biggest thing ceos will tell me is pat we we screwed up we screwed up taking a position of it's okay you can work from home because now they are only looking for jobs that allow them to work from home and other companies are willing to take that position even though it doesn't work so we're in a we're cornered right now and we don't think long term this is an effective way of running a company what are your thoughts with the great resignation well one of the things i learned when i was in washington we were trying to understand i went there with a in collaboration with a group that runs the amer the presidential prayer breakfast and so they're christians um self-admittedly let's say who have been operating in washington since the eisenhower administration and most of what they do is bring people together congressmen and senators within parties to have some social time a meal some chance to talk or across party lines and they're trying to provide the kind of hospitality that produces social relationship and we talked a lot about this because one of the things that's happening in washington that is fostering polarization is the breakdown of the social community so it's hard to get people to move to washington often because their spouses have jobs and so they're localized in their community hard to move the kids and so as i said 40 percent of congressmen i believe it is sleep in their offices and then you can do a lot of remote meetings and and then you can fly in and fly out and you think so what oh and then there's cameras recording your speeches in the house that means you're always acting instead of saying what you think and so there's this confluence of technological transformation that's devastating the under culture of washington because what used to happen more was that well people would go to each other's soccer games with their kids you know their kids soccer games or baseball games and they get to know each other a bit and if i disagree with you then it's easy for me to think you're bad because i think that what i think is right because i wouldn't take it if i didn't think it was right if i'm a good faith player and you might not be bad you might just be different but i need to get to know you well what does that mean it means i need to step out with you in the actual world and do something in the actual world that shows how much we actually have in common and a lot of that social like i i had it lunch i set up five years ago four years ago we invited i think eight republican congressmen and eight democrats and they were all juniors and they didn't know most of the people within their own party organization much less people across the aisle and they're not exactly rewarded for talking across the aisle either especially when the leadership has a top down vision of what constitutes leadership and so instead of having them talk about anything political we just had them talk about why are you in washington you know most of these people these snake pit dwellers you know in in the cynical parlance they had perfectly functional lives before they went into congress they gave up a lot to seek political office you think while they're power hungry it's like they were doing all right so it isn't obvious that this was a step up for them and so all of them i said take three minutes and just say why you were here and it was it was the same speech every single one of them gave the same speech and it wasn't nonsense it was deeply cinematic in that american sense you know they talked about their love for their country and their patriotism and the fact that they felt that they had to give back and every single person now they personalized that they talked a little bit about their own story and how they came to that realization but there's no way you could tell the democrats from the republicans not on the basis of that and i tell you if you were there you would have walked out thinking that's a pretty decent group of people and they're really trying hard that that i swear that's certainly i was there with people one person in particular who's much more tilted to the democrat side and that was his take on the whole room and so how old were these people oh anywhere 35 to 45 basically and and so my point is the problem with the with the distance work is that it's predicated on the idea that everything we do that's important is done in the abstract right in the domain of information exchange explicit information exchange and that's just not true so that's a danger because we don't know what that will do to cooperative organizations now it might be a good thing it might be a bad thing i often meet with my son on zoom when we're doing business related when we have a business related matter because it's actually easier to share our computer screens and do what we're doing than it is to meet in person but that doesn't mean i don't want to meet him in person i want to meet him in person for sure so there's that then that's uh beware of what your technology is doing because it's doing all sorts of things that you do not understand at all like it could be that the decimation of the underlying social community in washington is enough to drive polarization to the point where the whole system will rock and crumble we we have no idea because we don't know why it worked it it worked you know i've been thinking about online universities well that's easy lectures and tests that's what universities do it's like no that might be maybe that's five percent of what universities do five percent yeah i would say so here well here's a bunch of things universities do they confer an identity upon you who are you i'm a student okay respectable so for a hundred and twenty thousand dollars let's say it's more than that sometimes and less than that you now have an identity for four years that your culture respects and that means you have a container within which you can have intellectual freedom while you're deciding what you want to do with the rest of your life instead of torturing yourself about how useless you are because you don't have a productive job yet so that's a big deal god only knows what that's worth but not nothing well how about finding a mate so there's evidence now coming out i don't know how reliable it is you know that it's about two women for every man in many academic institutions now and that proclivity towards female dominance seems to be increasing however it appears that once the men drop to one third of the population the women stop going well you think why is that well why the hell do you think it is you go out of your little town you know you want to find a new peer group and you're young it's one of the things you want to do is find a mate so part of the reason you go to a good university is because the sorting has already taken place it's like well you know this person's got a high school diploma and they're they're clued in enough to pursue a college filtering system yeah so that's a huge deal and then universities also act as a filtering system for businesses because they use the sat as a entrance requirement so if you hire someone as a graduate from a high-end university you knew that they had a high iq because the s.a.t is an iq test and god only knows what that's worth and then you shed your peer group your old peer group and you establish a new one maybe when you're a bit wiser and that's a i mean one of the major elements of my college education was the transformation of my peer group that was huge and then there's personal relationships between you and the professors if you're lucky enough to establish them that's a big deal because then you get to interact with someone who's an embodiment of the academic tradition and see how they act that's different than listening to what they say in a lecture and then there's the social surround the joint meals this is they make a big deal of this at cambridge and oxford because the students eat together in their colleges and god only knows how important that is and then there's the part of being an embodied actor in that academic tradition and learning to speak and write and so that's just a handful of things universities do and that's not lectures and tests online and to reduce it to that might destroy it completely could easily be and it's the same with our political institutions they depend on these real world substructures that like like engagement in civic society we have no idea how important that is and the fact that that's starting to deteriorate in washington could be fatal you know you know what i would be curious about you know how in america the the one school university that was popping 20 years ago and everybody said i can get my mba on online it was what phoenix university phoenix university right and i recruited a few of their sales guys and they're legit sales guys because they they're selling is what they're selling um i saw their sales training was great but one of the things i'd be curious about is how much do they get from boosters like kids graduate from phoenix university and they got the degree online like i wonder oh my gosh i'm so loyal to the school i got to give these guys 10 grand you know i want to contribute because this university changed my life did it though like is there you know and so what i'm saying like because we're saying there's no culture i don't think again how do you do that like you know you want me to go to church on sundays on a zoom yeah okay great fine yeah i'll do it i'll listen to service i mean they all every church does it nowadays and they'll say our service today was viewed by 73 countries because youtube said 73 oh we're 73 countries right but am i sold you know am i really emotionally i don't know i i i don't your point about the five percent lecture and you know well you also don't know what people were doing when they went to church and people were cynical about that the people who fell out of the church they say well you know they're one hour a week christians it's like well better an hour of contemplation of higher order moral virtue than zero so zero's not much and you think well the church didn't do that good a job it's like okay do do better see if you can do better yeah and so but but then also well what are you doing when you go to church well you're singing that's not nothing with other people that's not nothing you're trying to orient yourself ethically with your community you're sacrificing a part of your weekend to indicate your willingness to do so like you're you're in a drama right you're acting out something it's not it's not merely fictional it's like we get up in the morning and you saw this in the simpsons all the time with marge simpson trying to get her family to go to church which they did it's like get up put on a suit dress up go out there with members of your community and show your allegiance to something higher and the atheists are cynical about that sort of thing you know because they reduce god to a set of propositions but they don't have any real appreciation for the embodiment it's like i was in these beautiful chapels in in cambridge and oxford my god they're so beautiful it's just beyond comprehension they're so stunningly magnificent and the boys choirs were singing when they they have excellent boys choirs they're like world-class and then they read these ancient words and those things ring true and there was a bunch of ideological nonsense at one of the chapels i went to and that was off-putting but you have to be there and doing that for that to work right it's it's not replaceable in any real sense by a virtual experience because it's not just information content or it's not abstract information content it's the acting out of something that's what happens when you join a civic club you know it's it's a mark of it's a mark of willingness to participate it's a mark of faith in the system and you think well i'm cynical about the damn system it's like good for you you're not naive you know thumbs up for you but sin you're gonna top out in your wisdom at cynicism that's pretty dismal man you can do better than that like cynicism that's that's beginner's place how often do you go to church that's a good question um i don't attend church um and so you might think that makes me a hypocrite and possibly it does um i would say i participate avidly in civic enterprises however you know and for me this the lectures that's a church for me you know i'm trying to make things better and i think i'm participating with people my audience members my viewers and listeners they're committed to making things better and they're committed to i hope at least in some sense they're committed to the truth and so it's always been awkward for me to go to church because for a variety of reasons and some of that might just be the unwillingness to do it but i find myself uncomfortable in them often because i always got the impression that the people who were reading the words didn't believe them the trudeau factor yes yeah and so that's not necessarily any reason to be cynical but then again i'm not cynical about religious matters so quite the contrary so i had a guy i had a guy marvin delvaye you know who marvin of course so you're his hero okay you he brought you up at the event in front of 6 000 people okay he says patrick i'm begging you if you can ask this question he's a catholic and he's a very very well-read catholic okay and he when i he's from honduras he's done well for himself in business and when i read this question for you you're gonna realize how technical of a question he's asking you okay uh and and i'm curious to know what take you know what your take's gonna be on this it has to do with a comment you made about the catholic church right let me read this to you see if i have it here we go okay it's long-winded so just brace for impact so okay in his video who dares to say he believes in god he criticized the catholic church very harshly is not uh the first that he had done and he basically compared the catholic church to the protestant approach to salvation number one number two he then had the opportunity to interview bishop baron as part of his podcast name christianity and the modern world and most of us expect him to ask some really tough questions about the issue he criticized but he never had never happened he almost looked overwhelmed by the moment in the conversation he almost looked like a man that wanted to confess okay first question he's got three of them here for you number one why did he avoid the tough questions bishop baron was the best person the most qualified person to clear what i believe is a mistaken perspective about the catholic church number two he was also just coming back from a difficult health situation he experienced in 2019 did that influence his approach to the conversation you called me the day of my birthday september 20th i called him let me know that he was really not doing well you when you you know you we knew kind of what you were going through i was very emotional and was praying for him ever since you have to realize this guy's a true believer of you number three my final question is about the catholic church to which catholic church is he referring to the latin american catholic church that was heavenly influenced by liberty liberation theology for the last 60 plus years by the way very poor catholic church b the very wealthy north american catholic church see the european catholic church that almost like and uh and angelican church feels like a social club the the grown missionary african catholic church also very poor and persecuted church the russian catholic church suffering persecution by the russian orthodox church the asian catholic church persecuted by the chinese government or the persecuted almost decimated catholic church at the ease his he talking is he talking about the pre-vatican the second or the post-vatican the second church is he familiar with the current conflict that emerged from the vatican the second he made a blanket uh statement about the catholic church which church is he talking about does he know the difference between them between the missed opportunity with bishop barron and not being specific enough about his position with the catholic church he left a lot of unanswered questions where do you stand with that well one of the things i learned from reading carl jung i mean this isn't a statement he made explicitly but but it's it emerges as a consequence of reviewing a fair bit of his thought his proposition in some sense was that catholicism was as sane as human beings could get and it's a very interesting rejoinder to the atheist types because they think we could be rationalist materialists but i don't think we can be because that isn't what we're like we're we're all going to become rational in in this scientific sense it there aren't that many scientists and even among scientists there aren't that many scientists it's actually really hard to be a scientist you it takes a lot of training it's a very specific way of thinking and it isn't how obvious how broadly accessible that's ever going to be and i say that as an admirer of the scientific enterprise catholicism is a great drama it's a inclusive encompassing ritual and drama as well as a system of beliefs and you know more power to it as far as i'm concerned on that regard i don't remember what my fundamental criticism was unfortunately i there's many podcasts that i've done because i was so ill and sometimes well doing them that i don't i don't remember them at all i meet people that i interviewed for two hours and i don't remember meeting them it's very distressing but that's life um i would say and i think the idea that a critique should be differentiated that's that's a very good idea and and fair enough and i certainly don't feel like engaging in a blanket condemnation of the catholic church i've i've been grappling and trying to do this with bishop baron too part of the reason baron wanted to talk to me is because the rel people who are actively engaged in the religious enterprise professionally and this is orthodox jews muslims orthodox christians roman catholics protestants protestants less so but some they're they're interested in the popularity of my lecture series on genesis because i did that lecture series in 2017 it was really the first public lecture series i gave we rented a theater in toronto privately and booked it for 15 weeks and i offered these lectures and all the tickets sold out and most of the people who came were young men and that's weird because you imagined going to a bank with this business plan so i'm going to run to theater i want you to loan me some money i'm going to run a theater i'm a professor i'm going to rent a theater and i'm going to lecture the first lecture i'm going to give will be two hours on the first sentence of genesis and my target market is young men it's like they're not going to lend me any money that's that's a no starter but the lectures sold out and they've been watched i don't know 40 million times or something on youtube and so the the civil apparatus of many religious organizations are interested in this because i obviously tapped into something that they're not tapping into and my criticism if i remember was a criticism aimed at addressing the fact that that's not being tapped into one of the things i talked to bishop baron about and i may not be addressing your friend's concern because i don't know what specific criticism he was he was uh he was concerned about i suggested to baron that the reason the churches the church the catholic church is not doing as well as it might there's many reasons is that they actually in the attempt to popularize the faith especially in the 60s they ended up not asking enough of people so we shouldn't ask so much like no wrong decision meaning expect make it more accessible got it like got it yeah okay one thing i learned from reading kierkegaard you know kierkegaard said at one point in real comical piece of writing that once everything has become too easy that there'll be a massive outcry for voluntary difficulty and i thought that's smart well he was smart he was kierkegaard after all and the church can offer that that is what it has to offer like that's the straight narrow path this is very very very very very difficult but it's alternative to hell so there is that and i think that's there's true and there's meta true and that's meta true that's that's powerful because you know churches sit behind closed doors and the board will say whoever the board may be at a nondenominational church hey pastor this last time you talked about you know pick whatever it is transgenderism a little bit too much we we're losing our you know attendees you talked about this don't spend too much time talking about gay marriage out of the bible because we have to be a little bit more diplomatic you know don't let's not raise the standard too much where people are doing too many bible studies or too many you know whatever you know events at the house you're saying no double down and raise the standards and keep them high expect more from people that's what you're saying yeah absolutely and and it isn't and not in a finger wagging sense it's more i've been thinking i've been talking to a lot of islamic thinkers and i have a lot of people who a lot of muslim people have watched my biblical lectures like a lot and so i have a following strangely enough among the muslim community and among orthodox jews and broadly among religious communities and you know the christians are often on me to come out and just profess my faith in jesus christ as our universal savior um whenever i'm let's say questioned in that matter it's always a trap it's like join my club it's like yeah you just stay in your own club and i've got lots of people to talk to you know but a huge part of you know the the muslims say it's pretty funny peterson doesn't realize but he's actually a muslim and and i had an orthodox jewish fellow in new york make a comment about his friends watching my videos and seeing them in accordance with the deepest elements of their teachings and it's a lovely thing to see it's very surprising to me it's quite staggering but you know what i'm doing is predicated on the idea that there's way more to people than they let out and a lot of that's to be found in their darkness and i'm making that case i suppose the people who've been most attracted by that case have been young men and i think that that's because they're so actively discouraged in the expression of their possibility by our culture actively discouraged because they're regarded as you know oppressive patriarchs in training or some bloody thing like that and so caustic and so horrible i guess the question the question i was more asking is you know the idea is if we lower the standards attendance will go up we've been losing attendance because standards have been very high let's lower it a little bit let's be more welcoming you know and more political and more relevant it's like religion isn't politics religion is that is the structure that contains politics it's far deeper it's like politics literature religion that's sort of the structure so politics literature yeah politics is embedded well you know americans i said you're all theatrical here well it's because your whole polity is is encapsulated in narrative everyone knows that that's the american dream it's like what's the american dream well it's hard to put your finger on it and you guys are exploring that all the time not least in your popular culture it's constant exploration of what constitutes the american dream that's the container for the political structure and it's the dream that unites you the political structure does as well but it can't unite you if the dream doesn't unite you and underneath so the dream is that's in the domain of literature essentially in storytelling and dream and underneath that the deepest strata of the literary endeavor is the religious endeavor the bible is a story is it true well it depends what you mean by true and people say well that's weasely it's like no it's not if you ask a profound question like that is the bible true you can't assume true and then cram the bible into that you have to make both sides of the equation open to question what do you mean by true well you're not answering the question no i'm just not answering it the way you want me to i'm not this is why people like richard dawkins always kick the hell out of religious people when they're debating them it's because dawkins comes armed with a conception of the truth and it's not trivial it's like the scientific conception of the truth this is a big club and before he even begins this the whole structure of the debate is predicated on the fundamental acceptance that that definition of true is valid and complete and so the religious people just lose because they're up against the might of science it's like how are they not going to lose that so what do you mean by god is not great is that yeah i've read it and by the way he he he is very very influential how he influenced the world by the way i want to keep you on time i had a conversation with him at oxford we're going to release that in a couple of weeks how long ago was that a month ago oh it's very cool yeah but yeah i would have liked to talk to him for like 35 hours i bet i can only imagine that especially so how much more time do we no i got to wrap up because it's uh anyways let me show you this neighbor of mine asked me this question he's canadian he says can you ask jordan peterson this go to the picture with uh uh uh trudeau what what can you say about this this is your world i don't know if this is this even talked about over there with the whole story of justin trudeau's you know related to castro because years ago like is this is this a show the other picture where this other guy posted it so apparently this is uh uh go to the picture of a fidel the wife and the father so this is a picture of them three that's his mother that's him that's the father but then you put justin right next to castro can you go back to the other picture on twitter yeah that one right there it looks really similar yeah is there any is this even a conversation in canada has anybody been telling because this is written about many many different places to the point where they tweeted about it and said no castro is not justin trudeau's father it's a it's a nasty it's a nasty bit of innuendo and i think it's it's it's it's resentment fueled fundamentally like in some sense it's a satirical joke you know and fair enough but it's it's not helpful look one of the things that happens if you're a political leader is you you're exposed to criticism of all sorts and and part of that's to stop your power from degenerating to something approximating a tyranny so you kind of have to put up with it this i would say is i wouldn't propagate the idea okay um first of all just it's speculation clearly it's mean-spirited speculation on the part in relationship to the behavior of trudeau's mother even if it was true then well what's your point he's born a communist that's your point that's a stupid point you know or what he knows that castro is his father and so now he's tilting hard towards the left to please him well that's that's not helpful and clueless now the trudeaus in some sense set themselves up for something like this because trudeau played the senior played ftse with castro in a way that was rather unique in the western world and i think that was ill that was not a good decision he was less stringent in drawing a line between the left and the radical communist left that he might have been and so those chickens have come home to roost in some sense in terms of this assault on his son and justin himself doesn't do a very good job of drawing a distinction between his views and the views of the radical left and so all of that's mangled around in this satirical attack but i don't think it's the most effective it's it's got an element of real gossipy innuendo and mean-spiritedness about it that i think overwhelms whatever humorous satire it might also contain so i mean they did this with obama's uh you know when trump came out and said five million dollars prove to me your birth certificate you're born these types of stories tend to do well and they tend to go viral but you know this is just when you look at this it it's it's uh it looks a little too uh too real to you know that's why people are given the credibility anyways we are at the end of the podcast jordan i appreciate you coming out couple things gank if you are in florida he's performing he's speaking tonight if you can't even get the tickets at miami florida fillmore today the third no it was yesterday i'm sorry seven oh i'm sorry seventh you're going to be in houston is where you'll be at the uh bayou music center eight you'll be in midland texas ninth urine irving 10th in san antonio 15th in new york 16th in new york 17 in providence 21st norfolk virginia then dc on the 22nd philadelphia 23rd boston 24 we're going to put the link below if you haven't had a chance to go spend some time with this man i highly recommend you take your family wife kids and have them hear from him because he's going gonna get everybody thinking and at least a great conversation and uh i have a feeling this will not be the last time we'll have you on again jordan thank you so much for coming on see you guys again yes and what we're doing is every time we get a guess somebody signs one of these lock boxes you pick one sign it up there so we know jordan peterson was in the house folks uh this has been a week of us doing podcasts four times i think we got some lineup next week's only give me one time because i'm all over the country but it's been great uh having jordan on today hope you enjoyed it as much as we did give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel tyler you look like you're taylor you look like you want to say something let's say we got rolo tommaso uh tomasi tuesday yeah and then maybe a few other things in the world but we do have a lot of surprises coming up we just can't reveal it right now but anyways thank you everybody bye bye bye bye you

Channel: PBD Podcast

Views: 2,720,852

Keywords: Patrick Bet-David, Valeutainment, The BetDavid Podcast, The BetDavid Show, Betdavid, PBD, BetDavid show, Betdavid podcast, podcast betdavid, podcast patrick, patrick bet david podcast, Valuetainment podcast, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneur Motivation, Entrepreneur Advice, Startup Entrepreneurs, valuetainment, patrick bet david, PBD podcast, Betdavid show, Betdavid Podcast, Podcast Betdavid, Show Betdavid, PBDPodcast, Jordan Peterson, Jordan B. Peterson

Id: UvLU2Dq3HN8

Length: 157min 49sec (9469 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 04 2022