The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 510. The Greatest Hits
Episode Date: December 30, 2024With 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 ...
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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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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,
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.
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
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.
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
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
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,
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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,
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.