The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 510. The Greatest Hits

Episode Date: December 30, 2024

With the new year just around the corner, join Dr. Jordan B. Peterson as he revisits some of his most engaging and substantial moments from 2024. This episode was filmed on December 14th, 2024 ...

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello everybody. So as you no doubt are aware, 2024, one of the most preposterous years possible is coming to a close and it's been quite a trip, as I'm sure next year will be and what we have for you today is a compilation of highlight clips from the last year, it'll be a trip down memory lane for all of us and You know welcome to the reminiscences Starting from the beginning the College of Psychologists of Ontario, a regulatory board that was formed to monitor psychologists' relationships with their clients mainly, has
Starting point is 00:00:54 been after you for, is it three years or is it longer than that? It depends on the waves, but for this issue, it's been three or four years. Yeah. So working professionals like doctors, lawyers, massage therapists even are all overseen by regulatory boards. What regulatory boards are supposed to do is give clients who've been basically abused by working professionals a place to go to to complain to. What happened to you is a bunch of people who weren't your clients, random people online from all over the world, complained about a number of your tweets as well as comments you made on Joe Rogan. The sorry not beautiful tweet in reference to a
Starting point is 00:01:35 extremely obese swimsuit model, a tweet criticizing the government of Canada, a tweet saying that physicians were moving women's breasts for being trans was criminal, and one I thought fairly entertaining tweet saying that physicians removing women's breasts for being trans was criminal. And one, I thought, fairly entertaining tweet suggesting that this is the tweet that people online are saying you were inciting suicide, which honestly, I think you'd have to have the IQ of a beetle in order to think that. But anyway, you responded to someone who thought the world's population was too high and suggested that he should include himself in the depopulation he was already suggesting. The gist of it is, it looks like your license is getting taken away. I think probably the most comical element of this absolute charade is that the College of Psychologists and Behavior Analysts, because that's what they call themselves now in Ontario, convenient name change.
Starting point is 00:02:27 They received perhaps, I don't know for sure, 15 complaints about me from people who, as Michaela pointed out, weren't my clients, or even knew my clients or had anything to do with them, complaining about things that I said that were true and that needed to be said. So for example, with the Joe Rogan transcript, which was submitted in its totality as a complaint, I pointed out that stacking extremely unwieldy economic models, projecting out a hundred years into the future on top of climate models that are in themselves unwieldy was not anything approximating settled and genuine science, which is absolutely 100% the truth.
Starting point is 00:03:12 And you may have noticed if you were paying attention that the Democrats under Kamala Harris said nothing about climate in the last election. And so that narrative has turned. Anyways, they're still pursuing me. Hypothetically, they found someone who doesn't know what planet they live on to serve as my re-education agent, even though we're squabbling over the details of that. They don't want any of it made public, and that's not going to happen. They've received 25,000 complaints about their own behavior and they admitted that and they're actually bound by their own rules Which they never pay any attention to anyways to investigate all those complaints and to find out if they're justified
Starting point is 00:03:53 and so it's just a complete bloody nightmare and In principle, I am still scheduled to be reeducated by some Social media expert whatever the hell that is so that I conducteducated by some social media expert, whatever the hell that is, so that I conduct myself more appropriately on social media. And so, God only knows how that's going to turn out. It's annoying and blackly comical at the same time. So we'll keep you posted on that front. Okay, so how did we get from protecting vulnerable children from online sexual exploitation with a gigantic unnamed bureaucracy with indefinite rights and virtually no responsibility to whatever the hell hateful speech is.
Starting point is 00:04:45 I mean, first of all, we might ask ourselves, and Constantine, you can weigh in here too, is like the whole notion of hateful speech, that's a troublesome one for me because there's an obvious element of subjective judgment in it, like a clearly obvious one. So part of the problem is the premise. And the premise is widely accepted because we accept this premise generally now in society because this is where we're at. But the premise is that the government is responsible for keeping people safe, including the children. And that's ignoring the best mechanism we already have to keep children safe, which is their parents.
Starting point is 00:05:26 So that's all in reference to this absolutely and utterly insane bill in Canada, C63, which is grinding its way through the legislative process in Canada as we speak. As was alluded to in the clip, it purports to be a bill that does nothing but save the children from online predators, particularly let's say of the sexual type. And it's like, you know, it's pretty hard to mount an argument against that as a name, but sandwiched in between the clauses that describe attempts to accomplish that and badly I would say because there's much more effective ways of doing it is are these insane clauses that deal with speech that would be hateful towards protected groups now you have to
Starting point is 00:06:18 understand in Canada since bill c-16 in Canada since be bill c-16. In Canada, since Bill C-16, one of the protected classes, I don't even understand how this functions legally, is gender expression. And it's literally the case that gender expression is fashion. And so, I just can't believe that any of this is true. It's the case that criticizing someone's fashion choice in Canada could be construed as hate speech. Now then you might ask, well what's the punishment for that? Well this is where things get far past the worst nightmares of both Kafka and George Orwell. So in this bill there is a provision so that people who are afraid that someone they know might
Starting point is 00:07:05 commit a hate crime can take that person in front of a provincial magistrate and if the magistrate agrees that there is a possibility that this person's fear is warranted, whatever that means, I suppose that would be based on past behavior perhaps, God only knows, then that person can be fitted with an ankle bracelet and confined to their own quarters for periods of up to a year, which is completely insane, obviously, and be subject to the continual monitoring of their bodily fluids on a daily basis, I guess so that of their bodily fluids on a daily basis, I guess so that what they're not supposed to consume alcohol that would be part of it or any other illicit drug including the marijuana that the liberals themselves have made legal in a successful attempt to bribe the voters.
Starting point is 00:08:01 Oh, that's one little section of this Bill C-63 c63 now it's a long ways through the legislative process in Canada already and there's some real possibility that the head narcissist of Canada and that's Justin Trudeau and his band of Minion supporters that would be Jagmeet Singh who who is the worst possible leader for the working class that you could imagine with his bespoke suits and his Rolexes. Now I have bespoke suits and a Rolex too, and you might think well, that's pretty damn hypocritical It's like yeah, I'm not a socialist who's claiming to be a champion of the working class. So that's very different Cup of tea you might say. In any case it's highly probable that Trudeau, before he disappears into the perdition that he so richly deserves, as his liberal party will be eliminated
Starting point is 00:08:53 as a political entity in Canada in the next election because of the absolute catastrophe of his nine years of rule, during which Canada went from a country whose average, whose per capita gross domestic product approximated that of the United States, so a country as rich as the United States, to a country now whose, the inhabitants of whose richest province, per capita that would be Ontario, are poorer than the inhabitants of the United States poorest state, that would be Mississippi. That's Justin Trudeau for us. And so I was discussing Bill C-63 with Bruce Party, who's a remarkable and courageous professor of law. There's actually one of those that exists, a remarkable and courageous Canadian
Starting point is 00:09:41 professor of law. That's Bruce Party andee and Constantine Kissen. And we were discussing that in the broader context of these ridiculously authoritarian laws that are popping up not only in Canada, because maybe it wouldn't be of all that interesting if it was only Canada, but particularly in the UK under the new Labour government and also in Australia, which is a country that's gone just completely out of its mind. And so we discussed all that in the UK under the new Labour government and also in Australia which is a country that's gone just completely out of its mind and so we discussed all that in the context of broader threat to free speech that's emerging pretty much everywhere except the United States. So we'll see how that goes. C63 could easily be law in Canada. Now I recently moved to the United States. Part of the reason for
Starting point is 00:10:23 that was Bill C-63, because the other thing it does is it enables informants of the same type, for example, who had a great thrill of turning me into the College of Psychologists, to go over all the public utterances you've ever made on any social media platform, to find anything that might be regarded as indicative of hate defined in the broadest possible manner so that they can turn you over to these new governmental agencies that can investigate you and the punishments are extremely draconian and you know in the United in the UK where similar legislation has already been implemented there are thousands of people who are being prosecuted for you know Twitter crimes or Facebook crimes.
Starting point is 00:11:09 The police are hell-bent on what they call them non-crime hate incidents in the UK and they're not precisely criminal although they would be much more criminal in Canada if this legislation passed. Dreadful, dreadful. And so and Trudeau is going to be the Prime Minister of Canada in all likelihood till October of 2025. So he's got a whole year to wreak havoc on the country that's turned its back on him in the miserable fashion that, what would you say, wounded narcissists are particularly expert at carrying out. So, you know, he believes that he's God's gift to Canada, that's for sure. And now that Canadians have turned their back on him, and justly so, he's going to have
Starting point is 00:11:55 precisely the attitude of the wounded narcissist who presumes that, well, everyone in the country didn't deserve anyone as remarkable as him. And that's a great platform upon which you would develop vengeful legislative moves. So we're going to see a lot of that in Canada in the next nine months before the liberals disappear into the pit that they've dug for themselves. And so what you're talking about there is being able to live a life of dignity. So we, our values, our small c conservative values that we talk about with the children all the time, the idea of being able to take responsibility, not being a victim, somebody
Starting point is 00:12:41 who has a sense of duty towards others. I don't disrupt my class, not just because I don't want to get a detention, somebody who has a sense of duty towards others. I don't disrupt my class, not just because I don't want to get a detention, but because I wouldn't want to disrupt the learning for my classmates. Being somebody who is able to sacrifice. So that position on prayer, for instance, you know, the Muslim children, well, they put up with not having a prayer room. They make that sacrifice for the betterment of the whole. The Jehovah witness children, there's Macbeth that we teach as a set GCSE text. It has witches in it.
Starting point is 00:13:07 They don't like the magic. We also teach a Christmas carol, Christmas in there. They don't like it because of Christmas, but they put up with it because they think about the self-sacrifice for the betterment of the whole. The Hindu children who think, well, we want our separate plates at lunch because the eggs have touched the plates, so we don't like that. They, too, self-sacrifice for the betterment of the whole. Because the problem with multiculturalism is that if each group is vying for their rights and it's always, I want this, I want that, and you're a racist or you're an Islamophobe
Starting point is 00:13:39 unless I get it, then we'll never be happy. We'll never be successful. And schools struggle with this because they are multicultural communities. And unfortunately, our whole culture encourages them to divide children according to race and religion and sexuality and so on. So you have your LGBT group over there, you have your Hindu group over there, the Muslim group over here, and so on. Any of you billionaires out there listening who have spare money is like you should Any of you billionaires out there listening who have spare money is like you should give Catherine Berbelsing a call because we could use about a hundred of her. So that was Catherine Berbelsing that you just heard. She runs a school in the UK called the Michaela School, which it was reported just recently
Starting point is 00:14:20 once again topped the charts in the UK for the educational achievement of her students. Now, you remember in the UK there are a multitude of very high quality private, very expensive private schools. Now Catherine runs a state school and she doesn't select her incoming students. So her school is in what you would describe as inner city working class London. It's a rough place, the neighborhood, and she has to take all comers. And she places more of her students by percentage in top universities in the UK when they graduate – she has a very high graduation rate, by the way – than any other school.
Starting point is 00:15:03 And the left, the radical leftist utopians who love children hate her they hate her because she's what does she describe herself as? The UK's strictest headmistress, which is kind of a joke. You know what I mean It's she's it's a bit of self parody Tammy. My wife and I went to the Michaela school and watched her my wife and I went to the Michaela school and watched her operation and it was just, it'd bring a tear to your eye, man. It was so, it was something to see all these kids, they're in their uniforms, they're disciplined. There's no talking in the hallways, for example. They're making a beeline to the next class and then when you walk into the class with your little group, none of the students even look at you when you walk in. They're so focused on the teacher that their attention isn't broken for a minute. Now that's completely unprecedented. And the teachers too, they're just, and they're teaching those kids so fast
Starting point is 00:15:54 that it's like it's higher intensity teaching and receiving than I saw in the best graduate seminars that I've ever seen. It was something to something to see and the kids we talked to a lot of The kids they love it there because a lot of them came from really rough schools where they were Especially if they had any pretensions to academic achievement They're being pounded flat on a regular basis, you know And it's a terrible thing when you're a kid to go to a school that's dominated by bullies of the ideological type Which would be the teachers andies of the ideological type, which would be the teachers, and then of the physical type, which would be the bullies that the ideological teachers are too damn
Starting point is 00:16:29 cowardly to regulate. And so those kids, they came from rough schools and they're so happy to be in this school where they were literally safe and being educated and where all the teachers, who are great by the way, and I'm not saying that lightly were really devoted to making to offering the opportunity to these children to become everything they could be and Birbal Singh students ace the standardized tests despite the fact that most of them are from you know oppressed minority backgrounds to use the horrible progressive parlance and you know we need like a hundred
Starting point is 00:17:06 of her. A hundred Catherine Birbal Singhs and the whole education system would be revolutionized. She is a force of nature and tough as a boot and the cancel mob has come for her like dozens of times and coming for Catherine Birbal Singh that's a very bad idea. So she'll like chew you up and spit you out in no time flat. And it was a privilege to go to her school and more power to her. And again, she pulled off the same thing this year. So and and got almost no credit for it from the idiot Labour Party in the UK, despite the fact that she's actually doing what they promised to do. That's why they're so annoyed with her, because she's actually showed that it's possible and she can do it efficiently
Starting point is 00:17:49 and inexpensively and in a manner that would scale and of course that's not happening because people would especially the radical progressive types they'd far rather moralize about a problem immensely than actually solve it. So yeah, Catherine Birbal saying two thumbs up for her. That's for sure. Check her out, the Michaela school in the UK. Man, if every school was like that, every kid would be a killer. So, and not in the, you know, terrible sense that street killer emerges. So out of the typical school.
Starting point is 00:18:30 I've said if you worry about consequence, you will never ever bring about change. You won't bring about change. I wouldn't walk out my front door if I were. I wouldn't come to Canada if I was worrying about consequence, getting sort of torn down by a communist government. But if you worry about consequence, you won't bring about change. An incompetent communist government.
Starting point is 00:18:44 A competent communist government. Better be precise. Yeah, yeah. You bring about change. An incompetent communist government. Communist government. Better be precise. Yeah, yeah. You should probably throw a bit of malevolence, wounded narcissism, malevolence in there too, just for the icing. But when I come out of court that day with the injunction, I was scared, in all honesty. I've been in prison multiple times to do my work. I spent a year, I've done a year of solitary confinement,
Starting point is 00:19:08 which damaged me, which was totally damaged me. I went into prison one person and come out another. And I am, so at that time, and it also damaged my family. So at that time, I didn't play the film. Right. So this is interesting, I think. I should have played the film. These are adult problems that haven't been dealt with because people aren't allowed to
Starting point is 00:19:32 speak and now children are at the brunt of it. My wife Tammy interviewed Tommy with me. Tommy is the most reviled man in the UK, I would say. That's an honest assessment. He was a whistleblower with regard to the gangs in the UK, and if you want to investigate an ugly story, wander down that rabbit hole for a week or two. There were thousands of young women who were in the United Kingdom by organized gangs and the authorities were to still work to cover it up and many working-class towns
Starting point is 00:20:13 many and well Tommy Robinson's cousin was one of the girls who who got tangled up in that catastrophic mess and Tommy has been reviled as a right-wing provocateur, you know, next door to a Nazi, and he's paid a major league price for that. He's in prison right now in the UK for contempt of court. He had left the UK after our interviews and went to, I believe he was in Spain but he came back to face the music and they they put him in prison and in a rough prison too even though it was a civil charge and even people I regard as sensible in the UK are ambivalent with regards to Tommy because he really is he's from the streets he's
Starting point is 00:21:00 a working-class guy he's tough as a a boot and he's not, he's got the background you'd expect from someone like that, but he's super smart and he's super dedicated and he's amazingly intelligent and he's unstoppable. Hopefully this next prison bout isn't going to do him in or he isn't killed in prison because that's a real possibility. In the UK is going to have to, the leadership of the conservatives and the reform party are going to have to reconcile themselves with the people that Tommy represents, the genuine working class in Britain, because they deserve a voice and need one and certainly Tommy is one of the few people who've provided that and Tommy isn't of the right class, you know, and that's a problem in the UK and
Starting point is 00:21:52 But he's extremely brave and the gang Story in the UK is the only thing the only story I know That's indicative of the state of disrepair of the West, let's say, that's approximately horrific as horrific as the gang story is the surgery and mutilation story and You know, we should be ashamed of ourselves deeply for like five decades for both of those things and yet Tommy has been persecuted intensely and continually and now for being brave enough to point to the fact of these of the existence of
Starting point is 00:22:35 these gangs and for his role in identifying the true not only the true perpetrators but also the cowards and liars and enablers who've covered this all up for literally for decades. It's an ugly business. Now you know, this was the most contentious podcast, riskiest podcast maybe that I ever did and I did it in part at the insistence of my wife who'd been following Tommy as I have been for many many years and He conducted himself
Starting point is 00:23:09 Extremely well. We got very little blowback for the podcast We did two of them, which is really remarkable because Tommy Robinson is a red hot He's a he's a he's a red hot piece of iron that you grasp at your peril, but he comported himself extremely Well, he was really really nervous in the studio, you know, because he knew, well, he knew what was at stake. And I certainly believe that the consequence of this was that he came out with his reputation much enhanced. He's someone I admire. Tommy's a tough guy and you can't stop him. And he's paid a major price for it, him and his family. Like a price higher than I would say anyone else I know. Even maybe including I.N. Hersey Ali, who's another person the left detests, who's so brave and so upright, it's so
Starting point is 00:24:01 honorable that it's painful to meet them. You know, they're the sort of people you kind of feel shame in their presence because they have the kind of courage you could have if you weren't such a bloody coward. So I hope Tommy manages to keep his head together given what's facing him at the moment. I think they put him in prison for nine months for showing a movie about another scandal in the UK for showing a movie after the court had told him that he wasn't allowed to show it. He regarded that as an extension of his activity as a journalist.
Starting point is 00:24:39 And I believe Elon Musk shared the movie, even if Elon didn't, because I might be wrong about that, although I know Elon has shared some of Tommy's material. It was extremely widely disseminated on X. When I was, I don't know, about 11 or 12 years old, I had somewhat of an existential crisis because it, I, there's just doesn't seem to be any meaning in the world, like I had no meaning to life. And so I actually read, try to read all the religious texts. At that age? Yes.
Starting point is 00:25:26 So I was a voracious reader as a kid. So I obviously read the Bible. I read the Koran, the Torah, the various, but on the Hindu side, just trying to understand all these things. And obviously as a 12 year old, you're not really going to understand these things super well, but I just want to find some. Well, you understood it well enough
Starting point is 00:25:55 to have an existential crisis when you were 11 or 12. Yeah, I'm just trying to figure out, does anyone have an answer that makes sense? And then I started getting into the philosophy books and I read quite a bit of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and which is quite depressing to read as a kid. Yeah, you might say that. That's depressing as an adult.
Starting point is 00:26:22 And none of them really seem to have, to me, answers that resonated, at least to me. But then I read Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is really a book on philosophy disguised as humor. And what Douglas Adams, the point that Adams tries to make there is that we don't actually know all the answers, obviously. In fact, we don't even know what the right questions are to ask.
Starting point is 00:26:50 Yeah, so there was a couple of cardinal moments in that Elon Musk interview. I mean, the whole thing was a real privilege. We went out to his Cybertruck factory, which is just an absolutely amazing building. It's immense. It's like five airports big. And he built it in no time flat. And then he's making these preposterous, powerful electric vehicles that actually function despite government opposition, despite the fact that the government is pushing electric vehicles. So, you know, that's a small part of Elon Musk's story. Two things really happened in this interview that were worthy of note, I would say,
Starting point is 00:27:33 especially given what's transpired in relationship to Elon and the new Trump administration. The first one was this clip here, because see, Elon pointed to something very important in that discussion. He said that he had a profound existential crisis questioning the meaning of life, you know, when he was well when he was a very young teenager and it's not that rare for really hyper-intelligent teenagers. And he said that the way he resolved that essentially was to start to envision his life as a quest, right, that he found deep meaning in pushing the limits.
Starting point is 00:28:13 Well, you can see that, for example, in his ambitions to go to Mars, in the ambitions that drive all of his companies, to push the limits and to explore and to ask questions and to investigate and that in that process of investigation and exploration and production, meaning itself is to be found. And that's, well, that was a sufficiently profound realization for Elon that it did solve his, it did quell the storms of his existential crisis and put him on the pathway that he's been walking ever since in this radically successful manner. And so that was very interesting to hear and to work through from a psychological perspective. But the other thing
Starting point is 00:28:59 that happened in that interview was that Musk talked a little bit about his experiences as a father whose child fell prey to the ideological machinations of the butchers and their lying enablers, which at the moment includes virtually all psychologists and a large proportion of the medical establishment, absolutely unforgivable in my estimation. And in his, it's clear to me that part of Elon's determination to be the most formidable of enemies in relationship to the woke mob was in no little consequence of the fact that he had been brutally lied to when he was in serious trouble with one of his children, who did in fact transition and who is alienated from him.
Starting point is 00:29:48 You know, the typical physician, the typical psychologist, I say this to my own great shame being a member of the profession of psychologists, is to tell parents whose children are manifesting the kind of gender dysphoria, bodily dysmorphia, let's say, that's actually quite common in early adolescence, especially among women, to tell them that that has to be rectified with puberty blockers and the most barbaric of experimental surgery. It's so awful that surgery that you can't read it without... It's like it's silence of the lambs bad. It's inexcusable what's being done and part of the way that parents are talked into that is that the lying therapists tell them that if they don't participate in
Starting point is 00:30:40 this stunningly brutal medical process that their children will commit suicide. That is the biggest lie that I've ever heard members of my profession utter. There's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that that's true. There never has been any evidence of that sort and anyone reasonably well-trained as a psychologist knows it. And silence on this front is inexcusable and Well Musk you might say what could you say about Elon? He's decided not to be silent
Starting point is 00:31:15 Right and so he's not I He's not the person that you would choose to go to war against if you had a choice but that choice has already been made and he's not the least bit happy that he lost one of his kids and he revealed that in some real detail on the podcast. Really it's awful and I know other families who've been affected in the same way. It's all of us should be deeply ashamed of the fact that we're complicit by our silence in this insane, devastating, deceitful, ideologically ridden, fetishistic, sexually hedonistic catastrophe. Thankfully, many places are waking up, even the Labour Party in the UK,
Starting point is 00:32:12 Thankfully many places are waking up, even the Labour Party in the UK, a party of whom virtually nothing good can or should be said, had enough sense to extend the ban on puberty blockers to minors throughout the UK. So the Europeans are waking up, Americans not yet, although many states, many states, at the state level, there has been increasing pushback. Thank God for that. Canada, of course, is still completely captured by the butchering woke ideologues and their Pied Piper leader, Trudeau. So yeah, the Musk interview was really something. I probably talked too much during it, and that's too bad. But it was a real privilege to talk to him and, you know, to see his mind in action. He's a remarkable person. You're going to go back to the UK, you said, if I got this right, near the end of October
Starting point is 00:33:02 to face the music. That's the plan. And in the meantime, I presume your strategy so far has been certainly not to involve yourself in the demonstrations and so forth that have been occurring in the UK over the last few weeks, except you also said that you were correcting certain misapprehensions about what's been said about you and also the information that's been spread around. So your plan is to let the events unfold as they will, but that you're going to go back to the UK and face the music.
Starting point is 00:33:36 That's the plan? My plan is my documentary is currently on 44 million views. By the time they get me in jail, it'll be on 100 million. So by all means send me to jail. You'll put more rides in that film than I can ever dream of. People need to realise the weaponisation of the court system against the people. It's not right. It's not right.
Starting point is 00:33:54 And people need to know what they're doing and how they're silencing dissident voices across the West. They need to understand it. If we're going to stop it, people need to understand it. If Donald Trump gets elected, he needs to break this. Okay. The weaponization of the courts, the unfair judiciary. Joe, I will watch what I say when I get into court before the judge. Have you watched the film, Your Honor? If you have watched the film and I'm still sat here facing prosecution, you're corrupt as well. Because that film categorically proves all I've done was report the truth.
Starting point is 00:34:19 In what same freedom loving world are we standing in where someone faces two years for reporting the truth? Do we believe in the journalism or not? Do we standing in where someone faces two years for reporting the truth? Do we believe in the journalism or not? Do we believe in freedom of the press or not? The problem is so many journalists don't believe in it. They believe in activism. They're activists, not journalists. They're total activists. So my intention is on the 28th and 29th of October to put the British judiciary on trial in the world's eyes. The film that Tommy Robinson is talking about is called Silenced in case you want to watch it and Tommy did do exactly what he said he was going to do. He went back to face the judiciary in the UK and he didn't have to and he thought they'd
Starting point is 00:35:04 put him in prison for two years and the last time he was in prison he was in solitary for a fair bit of that now you have to understand that he's going to be he was imprisoned after this interview for a civil matter and they they put him in a prison for very very very serious offenders despite the fact that that isn't how they treat civil offenders. And he did, he was in prison for showing this film when the court told him that he couldn't. And so I hope he emerges well alive and also intact.
Starting point is 00:35:42 We'll see what happens. You might want to keep your eye on that story, especially because the UK right now is a very unstable place. You know, Keir Starmer, the UK labour leader, he came out like three weeks ago and said, I couldn't believe this. I thought it was like an AI fake. He basically said that the immigration policy that has characterized the UK, let's say for the last 10 years, something like that, was planned. It was an open border plan,
Starting point is 00:36:13 experiment to see what would happen if the UK opened its borders, just like the right-wing conspiracy theorists had suggested, and that when people pointed that out they were gaslighted, they were told they were conspiracy theorists and liars, and that that was all a dreadful mistake for which Stammer is now apologizing. And I couldn't believe that when when he said it. I mean that was a Prime Minister of Britain said, the Prime Minister of Great Britain said that and then the new leader of the Conservative Party, a lot of these policies came into play under the Conservatives not the Labour Party and so the Conservatives so to speak and the new leader of the Conservative Party, Kimmy Badnock, basically said the same thing the next day and so I
Starting point is 00:37:02 don't know even what to say about the situation in the UK. It's dreadful. You know, they have electricity prices now, by the way, like Germany, that are five times higher than the, this is prices for the electricity that runs all of the industrial infrastructure of say, the UK and Germany. It's five times as expensive in the UK as it is in the United States. How's that gonna work? It's obvious what the consequences that will be. There's no difference between cheap energy and a prospering economy. Those are the same thing because energy is work and when you make work expensive, well you don't have to be a genius to figure out what that means. So the UK has a massive immigration problem and no one
Starting point is 00:37:49 has any idea what to do anything, what to do about it. Stop the immigration process would be the first thing and their industrial infrastructure is collapsing and the country is extremely divided. We'll see, we'll keep our eye on that very carefully. You know, Tommy Robinson, when he emerges from prison, assuming that he does, which is not a foregone conclusion, it'd be very convenient for the authorities if something happened to happen to Tommy in prison. And he got beat up really badly the last time he was in prison, because they put him in prison with people who were in prison in the same prison for conspiring to kill
Starting point is 00:38:28 him. That's the prison they put him in. So and then he got beat up really really badly when he was in prison, lost a few teeth and so he could easily not come out. Anyways we'll be following that and we'll keep you informed and that's part of what's coming up in the next year. You recently taught a course for Peterson Academy. And so thank you very much for that. I thought I could update you a little bit about what's going on just so you know and so everybody else knows. We have about 30,000 students now. Wow. And so yeah, it took off like mad. So we've been, we did a pre-enrollment for three weeks and so that was the enrollment so far. So we're thrilled about that. Now people seem very happy with the course offerings. So, and you know, we've set up the social media platform on Peterson Academy to have a goal, right? The goal is for people to be able to
Starting point is 00:39:33 exchange information related to their self-improvement on the educational side. And so far, it's functioning that way. And the fact that people have to pay essentially $500 a year to join also keeps the trolls and the bots and the bad corporate actors pretty much down to zero. So we launched Peterson Academy this year a couple of months ago, and we now have about 40,000 students. So and that's continuing to climb. We have, I'm really happy with the way it's gone and so are the people who are on the Academy. So it's already a very large educational institution and there's no reason at all to assume that that's not just gonna continue. By January of 2025, we'll be releasing four new eight-hour courses a month.
Starting point is 00:40:19 We have all the professors lined up. Michaela, my daughter, who's been spearheading this along with her husband, Jordan Fuller, they have a full curriculum sketched out for the next four years and we have the capital and the professors in place to, and the studio, everything is in place to make that a reality. So that's definitely going to happen. We're in active negotiations about accreditation so I think we'll crack that problem. And it looks like we can bring the best professors in the world, because we have them, to the
Starting point is 00:40:51 widest possible audience that's available in multiple languages for a cost that all the people who have been participating regard as probably too low Fundamentally when if we're gonna make a mistake, that's that's a good side to err on and so I've taught Four or five courses for Peterson Academy They're not all released but many of them are one on the Gospels one on personality one on Nietzsche one on Piaget One on personal planning and self, that'll all be coming out. All the professors who are participating are thrilled. We've had offers from many of them to quit their jobs and work for us. And so, and that's going to happen with some of them, because we want to have some professors who are engaged in direct student-to-student contact.
Starting point is 00:41:41 And so that's PetersonAcademy.com and it's thriving. I made mention of the social media element of it. We took the best elements of the most popular social media platforms and integrated them into the into the app and the participants use it continually and it's extremely positive. Troll-free, bot-free, very, very positive and productive. So, yeah, it's firing on all cylinders. And so, you know, if you want to educate yourself, there's no reason not to join the academy.
Starting point is 00:42:19 Because one of the things you've done that I think is unprecedented and that's become perhaps more part of the public discussion since you've teamed up with Trump is to make public health a political issue. And so you talked about the public health crisis and maybe you could lay out the dimensions of that crisis. I mean, I know there's an obesity epidemic, there's a diabetes epidemic. These are very, very serious problems. And so, but you've concentrated on that in a way
Starting point is 00:42:50 that just isn't characteristic of anybody on the political landscape at all. Now it's become an issue that's front and center. And so I'd like to hear more about your thoughts. Why you think that's such a fundamental priority, you know, compared to say free speech and war and peace, why health and what you see lay out the landscape of the problem and also the landscape of potential solution. Yeah, so we are now the sickest country in the world.
Starting point is 00:43:20 We have the highest chronic disease burden in the world. When my uncle was president, I was a 10-year-old boy. About 6% of Americans had chronic illness, and today 60%. When my uncle was president, we spent zero in this country on chronic disease, zero. And today, and for many chronic diseases, first of all, there weren't even diagnoses and there weren't drugs available.
Starting point is 00:43:52 Today we spend $4.3 trillion, so about 95% of our health budget. It's the biggest, and it's five times our military cost. It's the biggest item in our budget, and it is the fastest growing. And not only that, so it's destroying our country economically, absolutely debilitating it. All of our other issues are small towards it.
Starting point is 00:44:20 If you just measure its economic impact it has other impacts 77% of American children are no longer eligible for the military. Yeah well so one of the things that's really worth contemplating in retrospect is just how revolutionary this year has been and it's it's really been something to watch personally because so many of the people that I've interacted with on this podcast and personally now have key roles in the new American administration. And so, you know, I watched that with some trepidation because there are many difficult jobs that need to be done to set things right. It's so remarkable watching Kennedy make public health a political issue, really single-handedly. That's something that he accomplished.
Starting point is 00:45:08 That's quite an accomplishment. Now he's in a position, along with Mamet Oz, to do something about it. So now, you know, ha ha, there's the opportunity to put your money where your mouth is, so to speak. And they have an unparalleled opportunity with Trump and the public goodwill that surrounds the new administration to make some real changes. It was interesting too to see what's transpired with regards to the Democrats. You know, when I first interviewed RFK in the interview that YouTube took down,
Starting point is 00:45:40 which I thought was utterly reprehensible, interference with a presidential campaign. I asked him when the left went too far, because I always ask Democrats that question and they never answer it, ever, and he didn't answer it. He said, I'm not running that kind of divisive campaign. In this interview, I asked him the same question and I think it's fair to say that In this interview, I asked him the same question and I think it's fair to say that in the aftermath of Kennedy's truncated run for presidency, he's never stopped talking about when the left goes too far. Right, and the Democrats are really going to have to contend with that because they made a large number of extremely large errors and I'm hoping they have enough residual expertise in leadership, somewhere in the ranks of the party, to reconstitute themselves.
Starting point is 00:46:33 Because happy as I am that this remarkable band of Avengers has assembled themselves around Trump, we know perfectly well from our long history in democratic countries that the good guys need an opposition too, because if they don't have an opposition they quickly turn into the bad guys and it's highly probable that happens to everyone because power is a extraordinarily tempting elixir you might say. And so I'm hoping that the Democrats transform themselves back into a party that could serve as intelligent opposition to the Trump crowd. You know the Democrats have been whining madly and publicly about the fact that the sneaky conservatives captured the new
Starting point is 00:47:22 media you know and which I think is absolutely hilarious because there was no capture. There were just people like Rogan and the other podcasters who sort of assembled in his wake, myself included, who just started enterprises on a shoestring and said what we believed to be the truth and interviewed people without any tricks. And the Democrats could have had a part of that because a bunch of us, and I do believe that included Rogan at the time, but it certainly included many of the other major podcast figures. We invited all the Democrats to come and talk to us multiple times. We got to them all through channels that they were communicating with, because I knew people
Starting point is 00:48:14 who were integrally situated within the Democrat hierarchy, and we repeatedly offered to talk to them. And the offers are genuine and in some ways risk-free like if you come on my podcast and You don't like the outcome you can just scrap the podcast like no one's ever done that but that is a genuine offer I make to my guests and if they say something they regret I also tell them well, we're not here to play some gotcha game If you say something the day later you think it was stupid tell us and you know
Starting point is 00:48:44 If you want us to remove 40 things, it's like, that's not going to happen. We'll just scrap the podcast. But if it's one or two things that you, you know, misspoke about, well then we'll take them out. Now, I believe only one person has taken us up on that offer about one thing they said, but it's a genuine offer. The Democrats would talk to me behind the scenes, the senators and the congressmen whom I've met and that's many Of them, but they'd never talked to me publicly and so, you know what I heard someone on CNN say
Starting point is 00:49:12 Well with the Democrats they said we need our own Rogan and I thought you guys had Rogan you dimwits Like Joe Rogan is not your father's Republican He interviewed Bernie Sanders like four years ago because he voted for Bernie. That's not a Republican thing to do in case he hadn't noticed. And both Roganen and Sanders himself got nothing but pilloried by the woke council mob for doing that. And so the Democrat failure on the new social media front is 100% their fault. Not only their, but their fault in the face of repeated offers and repeated warnings. And even now, you know, I have people scouring behind the scenes to find democratic leadership
Starting point is 00:49:58 hopefuls who will come and talk. And it's even now they're loath to do it. They're loath to do it. It's like hey have it your way. You know your legacy media allies have radically done themselves in as you noticed and you have nowhere to turn except to your own media infrastructure which doesn't exist or to the media infrastructure which doesn't exist or to the podcast mob but their invitation is open and you refuse it so don't be whining about the fact that the new media is captured by the conservatives Jesus you handed it to them on a silver platter so and you still haven't learned burned. Look at it this way.
Starting point is 00:50:48 So for example, in this conversation, you know this to be the case, like there's various ways that this conversation could go sideways, right? Seriously. Like, we could, either of us could try to win. Either of us could try to demonstrate our intellectual superiority, right? Each of us could misrepresent the other. Or we could both try, and I do think we are in fact trying that, and I think Alex is helping along with that just fine, we could try to follow the thread of the exploratory truth and see if we could get somewhere. Now, I don't think
Starting point is 00:51:21 there is any difference between that, by the way, and what's expressed in the biblical text as the spirit of the Logos. That's why we have dialogue. I'm very interested in the possibility that truths emerge through evolving manuscripts. Now, that's a very interesting idea, and it's totally different from divine inspiration. And I want to pursue it because I don't believe in divine inspiration but I would be prepared to believe in evolving manuscripts. Yeah, so yeah, there was a lot of cardinal conversations this year and certainly the one with Dawkins was one of them.
Starting point is 00:51:56 I talked, there were four main players in the so-called Four Horsemen, the Four Horsemen of the Atheist Movement, right? There was Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, and I've talked to three of them publicly, Sam Harris, a number of times. I had a very good conversation with Daniel Dennett. And then, you know, I had a conversation a while back with Dawkins that was made public audio only, and I was very much looking forward to this conversation, which I felt was very productive. By the end of the conversation, Dr. Dawkins was excited about the idea that genetic transformation could occur at the human level in consequence of the cultural transformation that the spread
Starting point is 00:52:48 of memes might produce, and I would say those would include religious ideas. And so we actually got somewhere scientifically on the hypothesis front. The conversation was, it had its stuttering moments. I think part of the problem you see is that there's a whole literature on the emergence of religious ideation That dr. Dawkins and the atheist types They just don't know and that's a big problem because it's a deep and profound literature the foremost exponent of that school was either Carl Jung or Merchea Eliade who was the world's greatest historian
Starting point is 00:53:25 of religions and a true genius with ideas that are rich with biological implications and that was part of what I wanted to discuss with Dawkins. Now I think one of the things that's interesting in the broader cultural context is that the the atheist movement that those four gentlemen spearheaded has really, the air has really gone out of it. And I think it's partly because it doesn't offer anything positive on the existential front, it's merely critical. And look, terrible things need to be criticized, but something has to arise to replace them. Now, even Dawkins can see that part of what's risen to replace these dreadful
Starting point is 00:54:06 superstitions once they collapsed is superstitions like say on the woke ideological side that are far worse than anything dreamt of by the mere Christians. And that's had a devastating effect on not only the universities, but on the scientific enterprise. And there's no doubt that Dr Dawkins is keenly aware of that. So that's a major problem for the atheist crowd. And it's also the case that there are elements of religious thinking that are much more sophisticated than the superstition that's parodied by the by the atheist thought leaders. I mean even
Starting point is 00:54:48 Harris, I mean, Harris has moved out of the public realm into the realm of the meditative. He's basically become a Buddhist and that's a pretty strange landing point for someone who was, you know, a standard bearer for kind of militant atheism. Now Harris might debate about whether or not he believes in God, so to speak, but the God of the Old Testament is ineffable like the Buddhist, like the divine that's represented in Buddhism. And so that's a semantic issue rather than a substantive issue. The truth of the matter still is that Sam found his home in the contemplative world.
Starting point is 00:55:35 And as I said, the steam has gone out of the atheist movement. And many of the people who were associated with that movement, I wouldn't say peripherally, quite directly, I. Anne Herseysey, E. Lee, Neil Ferguson, Douglas Murray, they've come to radically rethink their stance. So, and that's going to continue. That's absolutely going to continue. That's something we'll keep an eye on in this podcast. The revitalization of the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of the West. Dawkins at some point said something like, I don't care about these stories. I care about the kind of science and the kind of prediction that can help us land a spaceship
Starting point is 00:56:15 on the moon. Yeah, I know I missed an opportunity there. I care more about why the hell would we want to land a spaceship on the moon? Why would humans do that? That's more interesting to me or more important than the fact that we want to land a spaceship on the moon? Why would humans do that? That's more interesting to me or more important than the fact that we're capable of doing it. Well, it's also, there's two things there that are interesting.
Starting point is 00:56:32 The first is, well, we landed on the moon, and for Dawkins, the fact that that's remarkable is self-evident. It's like for a psychologist, it's like, that's not self-evident, buddy. There's lots of things we could have done and had been doing for a very long period of time before we landed on the moon.
Starting point is 00:56:46 So it's something like Star Trek, right? To boldly go where no one has gone before. Right, well that's- It's the Mariner's journey. It's the Mariner's story. You know, you have all these stories. Ancient stories, the story of Ulysses or the story of Saint Brendan,
Starting point is 00:57:00 who goes out into the ocean and goes in a land that nobody has been before, these are the stories that we care about, the idea of going out into. Oh, and they plant a flag. Well, that's what we did on the moon, and the flag, that's the staff of Moses. That signifies the new center, right? The center of identity.
Starting point is 00:57:18 It's the joining of something with identity. That's why we plant flags or crosses when explorers would encounter new lands, they would plant a vertical pole to say, this is an identity. This is the new centre of the world. Yeah, so that was Jonathan Paggio. Everything Jonathan Paggio says is worth listening to, and that's something you can't say of most people, and deeply worth listening to. So Paggio has done many projects with me now.
Starting point is 00:57:45 He has his own podcast, The Symbolic World, and he's a very accomplished artist. He's worked with me on the documentary series on Western civilization that's on the daily wire. We journeyed through Jerusalem and went to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and walked the Via Dolorosa, right? The 12-stop road of Christ's journey to the crucifixion. And so that was absolutely remarkable. And then Pagio was also, I would say in many ways, the lead participant in the Exodus seminar that the Daily Wire produced, which was about a 30-hour walk through the great story of Moses and the Israelites leaving the land of tyranny
Starting point is 00:58:31 for the promised land across the desert of despair. And, you know, Pajos' commentary on those stories was unbelievably illuminating. I would say it's really the case, I was just talking to Greg Hurwitz, a friend of mine, who was also a participant in the Exodus Seminar and in the Gospel Seminar, which we just released on Daily Wire beginning in December. All the episodes of that aren't even out yet. Greg participated like Jonathan in both the Exodus Seminar and the Gospel Seminar, and I asked him the other day, you know, what the consequence of that participation was and he said very straightforwardly that it really transformed his life. You know, and Greg was already a very knowledgeable person, right, and who had many accomplishments
Starting point is 00:59:16 under his belt and had thought many things through deeply and I think that that was the effect of those seminars on all the participants and they were all very accomplished men and so and then we had the great privilege of being able to bring them to a wide audience and with the full support of daily wire which was really quite remarkable because it was a unlikely enterprise right to gather nine academics reputable academics around a table and have them do nothing but talk to one another as they walk through these these fun foundational stories. I think it was 34 hours for the Exodus seminar and something like 25 for the Gospels. And well, we're going to continue with that endeavor
Starting point is 01:00:02 as we move forward into the future. We're planning a series on the Book of Revelation, which will be quite the trip, so to speak. And The Daily Wire has been an unbelievably good partner in these endeavors, these unlikely endeavors. And Jonathan, I learned so much from talking to him about these old stories. You know, it's like you have, there are parts of you that are fragmented, they don't exactly have their place, and they're pieces of stories that have been broken. And if you encounter a great storyteller and interpreter like Pageot, then he brings all those things together and everything that you see transforms in consequence. And
Starting point is 01:00:43 he's a magician in that regard and well it was a privilege to talk to him about the Dawkins interview because the formulations that Jonathan is generating along with John Vervecky for example both of whom lecture for Peterson Academy by the way are they're the future as far as I can see. They are the structure of interpretation that's going to replace, I would say in some ways, the standard approach to these stories that has been promoted by, would I say, traditional Christianity?
Starting point is 01:01:19 It depends on the tradition, because there deep traditions in in Christian interpretation. Populist Christianity replace the interpretations of popular Christianity and supplant both the postmodern theoretical stance and the atheist materialist deterministic stance and that's happening and it's going to continue to unfold as the West comes to a more conscious understanding of its foundations. And hopefully this podcast will play a role in that and the work I'm doing with Daily
Starting point is 01:01:53 Wire, the work that's being undertaken by Peterson Academy, the work of ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, this hybrid political philosophical organization that's being organized in London. We have our next conference in February. It's become the go-to place for classic liberals and conservatives from all across the West. And so all of those enterprises are moving in the same direction. And what we're hoping for is a revitalized understanding of the meaning of the foundational stories of the West, and an understanding that's deep enough to be practically applicable in the daily lives of the people who have developed that understanding.
Starting point is 01:02:34 And I can see that unfolding, and it's a lovely thing to watch. It's the thing we're pursuing with the tour. Like I'm on a pretty continual tour with my wife Tammy. We're touring all through the United States from January through April. You can find out about that at JordanBPeterson.com and then through Europe in May and June. And it's the same enterprise, right? The telling of these old stories. My new book, We Who Wrestle With God is part of that enterprise. And so we'll have the opportunity over the next year to watch
Starting point is 01:03:05 as that continues to unfold. So in Peugeot he's going to play a key role in that. Do it for the lulls. Don't talk about it, don't talk about it, don't talk about it. No. Sorry. No. Mom I don't want to wear that.
Starting point is 01:03:22 So what does that mean exactly? Woo! Babies look like they're always on psilocybin mushrooms because they're like this. I don't really believe in lesbians, by the way. Exploding miniature penises. Zero is a very low number. Okay? Alright, I'm out of here. You know, when I watch something like that, the first thing that really strikes me as
Starting point is 01:03:42 a miracle is that I still have a wife. So, because I don't know how anybody can actually put up with me that actually has to live with me. So you know I watched a bit of that compilation earlier and it made me turn red and it's done exactly the same thing again. You know I don't know I don't believe in lesbians I think that's a really funny that's a really funny line. It's also it's also mostly true by the way. So I I apologize for all of those things that I said I apologize and for many of the other things that I said that are equally I don't know what unforgivable I probably apologize for
Starting point is 01:04:21 them too, so but if you want more of it, you know which podcast to go to and thank you all for your support over the last year. The YouTube channel continues to grow. We're gathering about a hundred thousand people a month. So that's, you know, major progress and we're on a kind of wave on the alternative social media side because even the legacy media has admitted that they've been supplanted which is you know a remarkable thing to to be part of and the Instagram channel grows and the Facebook channel grows and the TikTok channel grows at zero subscribers on TikTok two years ago and there's two and a half million now.
Starting point is 01:05:07 And I've got a new book deal by the looks of things for the next two books and one of them will be a continuation of this line of argumentation that I started with We Who Wrestle With God that'll focus on the story of Job and the Gospels, like the Gospel seminar at Daily Wire. I also did a course on like the gospel seminar at Daily Wire. I also did a course on the Sermon on the Mount for Peterson Academy. So no doubt I'll continue to say like absurd and provocative things as we move forward into the future and thanks again for putting up with it. It's as remarkable as all this has been I suspect that there's greater things, more remarkable things, more
Starting point is 01:05:46 adventurous things yet to come. And I would also like to say in closing, like thank you to my crew, to my producer Joy, who's been unbelievably helpful, to the Daily Wire enterprise altogether, to all the people around me, my logistics people and security people, to my wife and my family. It's a team endeavor, that's for sure, and I have a great team, and that makes all this possible. And thank you to all who've been watching and listening. Time and attention is much appreciated.

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