The Room Is Not the Room: Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on DarkHorse
Bret Speaks with Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on the subject of his decision to join the Rescue the Republic rally in Washington, D.C. on September 29th (https://jointheresistance.org). They discuss accepting the call to adventure, making the choice to use your words truthfully, the pursuit of happiness, and the dynamism of play. Find Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on X at https://x.com/jordanbpeterson and at Peterson Academy http://petersonacademy.com*****Sponsors:Dream Recovery: silk sleep masks and...
They are using air horns and shouting and signs everywhere, and were you to stand up and speak, you'd be completely drowned out.
And what I saw there, as I watched you calmly sitting, understanding the error that these people were obviously making right in front of you, was that Jordan Peterson is losing badly in that room, but he is winning decisively in a much larger room that you can't see.
And so I coined the phrase... To see, eh?
Yeah, the room is not the room.
That's so true.
Right.
So that's the spiritual landscape behind everything.
That's a good way of thinking about it.
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
I have the distinct honor and pleasure of sitting this afternoon with a man who truly needs no introduction unless you've been living under a rock since 2016, Jordan Peterson.
Jordan, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks, Brett.
It's really good to see you.
Is it 2016?
Is that the moment at which I remember you confronted by a crazed mob in Toronto?
Yes.
Yep.
Fall of 2016.
It's been quite a ride since then.
I imagine you would agree with me on that.
That's for sure.
Yes, it continues.
Yeah, it doesn't seem to slow down any.
That's certainly been my experience.
Heather and I say that we feel like we got picked up by a tornado in 2017, and it hasn't put us down since, and it seems to have picked almost everybody else up, too, in the intervening years.
Very strange thing, because I assumed at the beginning that it would be, you know, a storm and blow over, but no.
Wrong.
No, wrong.
It only gets more intense.
So, let's start here.
You have decided, and I am thrilled that you have decided to join us for Rescue the Republic, September 29th in Washington, D.C.
And aside from us having a great lineup and it looking like a lot of fun, can you say something about why it is you've decided to make what is a very substantial effort in order for you to be there and speak?
Well, because I'm curious fundamentally and something's going on and for some reason you happen to be a major part of it.
And so do many of the people that you are gathering together to speak there.
And so I want to go see what's going to happen and see what I can contribute.
So, like I said, a fair bit of it is curiosity, but it's curiosity of the sort that I hope will be requited in the moment, and that also being there will enable me to see what's going on and speak to that.
You know, one of the things I do when I lecture is I don't lecture from notes.
You know, I have my corpus of things to talk about and modes of exploration, but One of the advantages of not speaking from notes is that you can let the dynamic of the moment inform your speech.
This is actually one of the problems, for example, with the kind of pre-recorded lectures that we've been doing for Peterson Academy.
That won't be part of that.
I mean, there's a... That's okay.
There's a place for that as well, but Being there live, I'll be able to get a sense of the dynamism of the crowd and the other speakers and craft my words so that it's contributing to that event.
And then I'll also be able to watch and further my understanding of just exactly what is going on, which is a continual... I mean, part of what's going on, Brett, is radical acceleration of everything in terms of speed.
Right, so I think part of the reason that the archetypal contours have become more evident is because the rate at which things are changing has increased so rapidly that things that were very subtle, even to the point of invisibility, are becoming increasingly stark.
I think that's what accounts for this notion that there's something very, very deep going on, something, you know, that you could express in spiritual terms, which I think is actually appropriate.
But a lot of that's mere rate of transformation.
Well, I'm curious about being part of that.
And, you know, everything that you and I have done together is being productive.
And it's not obvious why exactly.
I mean, we shared the distinction of being cancelled by our respective institutions for reasons that were somewhat similar.
Other than that, the perspectives from which we've approached things aren't obviously of the sort that would call forth a deep alignment.
But I can see that happening.
You know, and we've been playing at that for a long time, because we've had a lot of conversations, and you famously mediated between Sam Harris and I, and so I want to continue that, too.
And then we tried the X Spaces, and I listened to Gabbard and Kennedy, and you, and I thought, yeah, that's how it looks to me, too.
Like, pretty much dead and down the line.
Those are my people!
So to speak.
That's a marvelous answer and I must tell you I feel it too and it's a little hard to put it into words but at the point that things feel very dire but you also discover that you are part of a large, dynamic, compassionate, courageous team of people.
That's an exhilarating discovery and I want to go also because existing there, you know, in flesh and blood form, along with all of these people who are aligned in a commitment to rescue the Republic, is a powerful thing one way or the other.
So I think curiosity is as good a motivation as any about what really is the dimension of this team.
And I think the answer is going to be heartening, to say the least.
Yeah, well, we're cobbling that together as we move forward.
It's not as if there were a set of a priori commitments that defined, let's say, the Dark Web, which your brother so famously named.
And he put his finger on something there too, because otherwise the name wouldn't have stuck.
And that particular nomenclature is having its moment, I would say, but What it signifies, well, has accelerated, if anything.
I mean, Rogan was part of that from the beginning, and I mean, he's the most powerful journalist in the world now, by a good margin.
I suppose Carlson gives him a bit of a run for his money, but not from, you know, there's still a massive distinction.
And all the players in that movement, virtually all of them, have, if anything, only increased their impact across the intervening years, and so this is the next iteration of that, whatever it happens to be.
So, I've heard you speak many times about Hero's Journey, and the particular thing that resonates most strongly for me is the concept you refer to about having to accept the call to adventure.
If I'm putting words in your mouth, you correct them.
Your thoughts are so good.
But there is something, you know, let's just be frank about this.
In putting together this event, there are no shortage of fears and concerns, and When I think about them, I often think about what you say about that you have to accept the call to the adventure of your life and that this is a very concentrated example of that.
That yes, none of us can be certain of what this is, but the importance of the gathering is, in my opinion, so significant that it really just puts the question in front of you.
You know, if not for this, then for what?
Well, the adventure call.
Well, I think you cast your lot when you decided to make your stand at Evergreen.
And so, in principle, and insofar as you were able, you stood by what you presumed was the truth.
And you made the decision that you were going to follow that, regardless of consequences.
And the biblical promise, I would say, This is a variation, let's say, of the eternal hero myth, is that there is no better call than the truthful call to adventure, that those things are actually the same.
And I think the reason for that is that people remain silent or lie because they want to gain an advantage they didn't earn, or they want to avoid a consequence they deserve.
And so you can play your words You can use your words as chess pieces in whatever game you happen to be playing.
Towards a certain end, let's say.
That's what Machiavellians do with their speech.
Or you can say what you believe to be the case, and you can think, OK, I'm going to say what I think is the case, and I'm going to watch what happens.
Now that is very daunting, often, especially in the short term, and it can even be fatal.
It's no joke.
But it's unbelievably interesting, because you don't know what's going to happen.
You literally don't know.
And one of the propositions of faith, which I think is an accurate one, because the alternative is too incomprehensible and dire to contemplate, is that There is nothing better that can happen than what happens if you use your words truthfully.
Now, that may mean you pay a price in the short term, and maybe you even pay the ultimate price, which, you know, starts to border on the paradoxical.
But the alternative hypothesis is that the order that is good can be brought into being by deception.
Well, no one believes that.
People might do it, but no one believes that.
No one believes that.
No matter how psychopathic you are, you might think, well, I can gain an advantage by lying, but nobody thinks that makes the world a better place.
They just don't give a damn.
But how could it be otherwise than what is true moves things forward best?
I mean, it's virtually a matter of definition.
And so once you discover that, then, hey, man, the die is thrown.
I mean the consequences for me, my life was already pretty interesting because I love my job and I was effective as a lecturer and as a clinician and as a researcher, so that was pretty good.
But the field of opportunity that's emerged in front of me is preposterous and it's very difficult to know and you're in the same boat.
It's very difficult what to make of that, to know what to make of that, but Hey man, I'm along for the ride.
So we'll see what happens.
And this is another, this seemed to me to be an appropriate step.
You know, so I evaluated it three ways.
I mean, I started thinking about going when you first asked me.
But I'm doing a lot, a lot of traveling.
And then, well, the X-Spaces came up, and that worked.
And then I agreed with, I listened to Kennedy, and I'd interviewed him.
But I really thought that what he said about the Ukraine war was pretty much exactly what I think is the case.
It was very forthright about it.
And I also think, as he does, that The public health crisis, which is immense.
It might actually be the worst problem we have, although it's hard to rank order them.
He's the only one that's drawn any attention to that politically.
And so, and then of course, Musk is on board with them.
And I like Tulsi Gabbard.
I think she's everything Kamala Harris wants to be in the deepest recesses of her heart.
So, and Vivek, you know, he's a smart character and he's young and no doubt he has things to
become more wise about but man he's smart and he's already accomplished a lot and so you know what there's another thing too is that I spent a lot of time in Washington and I've met with a lot of Democrats and I've met with a lot of Republicans and I found the Republicans a lot easier to communicate with partly because I can just I can disagree with them and it's okay whereas with the Democrats I'm walking on eggshells all the time as are they because they'll talk to me privately but not publicly But the Republicans will talk to me.
And they listen.
You know, there's some back and forth.
And it's not that they're not necessarily the crowd that I would have assumed I, a priori, I would have found common ground with.
But hey, man, like I'm, that's what happened.
So All right, well, you raise some interesting points here.
One, we can come back to it later, but I think the Republican Party is in the process of a transition like none we have seen before, certainly in our lifetimes, but maybe ever.
The big tent is really an incredibly powerful phenomenon, and that speaks to, I think, the crisis of the moment.
The thing I want to most focus on is You mentioned that I already made my choice when Evergreen happened, but I oddly don't really think that's right.
Oh, okay.
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When evergreen melted down, and this story is going to come back to you and me here in a way that I'd love to To hear your response to.
But I didn't really feel that I did have a choice whenever green melted down.
There was no conceivable way I'd be able to live with myself if I didn't say what needed to be said in that situation.
I felt I was better positioned than just about anybody to stare down the accusations that would come back and that I just there was I literally physically did not feel that there was a choice.
I did what needed to be done because it needed to be done.
That's different than where I find myself now, where... I think you underestimate the degree to which people who stay silent when they're called upon to speak violate their soul.
You know, you said that, you know, it was stark for you.
It's like, I think it's stark for other people, too.
I mean, God, when you're called upon to remain silent or to lie in the service of the career you've devoted yourself to, you have to warp your language and bend your inquiry in accordance with some idiot ideological dictate.
You do yourself immense harm, and I believe that people feel that in the moment, and they decide, no, I'm, I'm, what is it?
lack of apprehension about the damage they're doing to themselves but that's unwillingness to look fundamentally it's willful blindness so i cannot like i understand why you phrase the argument that way i mean i felt the same way but but i would still regard it as a choice because I could have shut up.
I didn't have to post the videos I posted, for example.
I mean, I'm terribly curious, and that's something that distinguishes me to some degree from my colleagues.
They were curious, but they weren't terribly curious.
But still, It's a choice, and people's lives are made up of an infinite number of micro choices, you know, and sometimes they're not so micro.
It might also mean, Brett, that, you know, the pattern of your life up to that point had already tilted you in that direction.
You're actually a scientist, so most scientists are actually seekers of the truth, because otherwise you don't get anywhere.
You just do your damn papers and you burnish your reputation and you spout your platitudes and so dull.
But it's exciting to discover the truth.
And you can do that in science.
Well, that's interesting.
There's no doubt that my feeling that I didn't have a choice was the result of the previous rodeos that I'd been to and having, you know, looked at my own character and more or less consciously decided who I was and who I didn't want to be.
But I don't know if you and I have talked about this.
I suspect we did somewhere.
But one of the things that affected the way I confronted that situation at Evergreen was that I had become aware of you.
And I had watched those videos very carefully and learned from them things that I did not know.
Now I think I would have done the same thing if I had not seen them, but I would have done it differently and less well.
So, did I, have I told you that before?
No, I don't think so.
I don't think so.
So let me tell you the, the, there were a lot of insights, but there's one of them that is so explicit that I can even just phrase it.
I watched, there are two videos, I guess there are three.
There's one where you're testifying about C-16.
That's what I told them they were going to cause a psychological epidemic among young women.
No, you're exaggerating the danger.
It's like, no, what they didn't understand was I wasn't, I could see it.
Yep.
I knew this was going to happen.
I knew the literature on psychogenic epidemics.
I could see exactly what they were doing.
I knew they were going to confuse further the most confused people.
I knew those would be young women.
It's like, it wasn't a guess.
It's like, no, you shouldn't do this.
This is what's going to happen.
Yeah, they treated me so disrespectfully.
They did.
And if I recall it correctly, I hope I'm not conflating two events, but if I recall it correctly, you also talked about The reason that you had stood up was the danger of being, of invoking the law to compel you to speak in a particular way.
No, you don't get to run my tongue.
Yep.
I'll take the risk of that.
Thank you very much.
This is something else.
See, I knew at that point, Brett, see, I knew already at that point that A totalitarian state emerges when Satan has everyone's tongue, so to speak, is that everyone in the totalitarian state lies by omission and commission about everything all the time.
And that's the totalitarian state.
It's not some tyrant at the top, although there is one.
It's the allegiance of every single person to the lie.
Like, I knew that.
I really knew it.
And I thought, well, and I had already sworn when I was investigating the roots of totalitarian evil, that if I discovered the cause, I wouldn't participate in it.
And so then I figured out, you know, by reading great people that that was the cause.
I thought, oh, I see.
You just don't lie.
Just, just don't lie.
Ever.
No matter what.
Right?
And you know, I'm not perfect.
And I deviate from that path.
You know, sometimes consciously and sometimes by accident.
But I do my best to put my money where my mouth is, so to speak.
And when the university started telling me what to speak and think, I thought, well, first of all, I'm not going to be any use.
The only reason my students like me is because I say what I think.
And I'm good at it.
I was good at that.
I was a popular professor.
And I thought, you'll just I'm not going to work dreading the day to hell with that.
No!
And so that was a way more threatening proposition, the idea that the government could compel me to speak, or the bureaucrats at the university.
It's like, I'm not letting those pikers tell me what to say.
Jesus, why would I do that?
To keep my job?
It's like, I don't think so.
Why would you want the job at that point?
Right.
Exactly.
That's the last job I would want.
Right.
No, it's torture.
If you couldn't speak the truth, having to speak at all in that case is just going to be painful.
Painful and boring.
Yeah.
Yeah, like some kind of recurring nightmare.
Yeah, that's for sure.
Okay.
So the second video.
You're outside the lecture hall, surrounded by a crowd, having a contentious interaction.
And the third video is the one from which I derived the lesson that I can name.
That's the one where you're inside the lecture hall.
You're there to give some kind of a talk.
They are using air horns and shouting and signs everywhere, and were you to stand up and speak, you'd be completely drowned out.
And what I saw there, as I watched you calmly sitting, understanding the error that these people were obviously making right in front of you, was that Jordan Peterson is losing badly in that room, but he is winning decisively in a much larger room that you can't see.
And so I coined the phrase... The CEA?
Yeah, the room is not the room.
That's the spiritual landscape behind everything.
That's a good way of thinking about it.
Actually, I've never thought about it that way, but you're absolutely right.
I just saw it.
Don't be thinking you understand this game.
You don't know what's being played out in eternity, let's say.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
And, you know, I could say the same thing about, you know, your biological success, right?
We evolutionists tell a very dumb and, in my opinion, incorrect story about what evolutionary fitness is, and we synonymize it with reproductive success, which is correlated to it often, but it's not the same thing.
You know, so the idea that you very well understand the game you're playing?
No, you really don't.
And it's much bigger than the one you can see.
And anyway, watching you stare down what must have felt in some way like a loss in the moment, but winning so decisively on such a much larger scale at the same time affected The moment, you know, I did not see the moment that made me, I don't want to say famous, but put me in the public eye.
I didn't know that was coming.
I would have dressed better.
But when it came, I was keenly aware that the room was not the room.
And anyway, it was a... That's a hell of a thing to realize, man.
I mean, this is... See, I think that our innate sense of meaning in relationship to the transcendent signifies the broader game.
It's so cool, because what that means is that, well, think about it biologically, is the deepest instinct that impels you towards the full realization of your potential.
sees the ramifications of your actions in eternity and it calls to you using the instinct of meaning.
Deep meaning.
The kind of meaning that enables you to sustain yourself through tragedy.
So it's not happiness.
It's not that.
It's way deep.
It's what you would happily trade happiness for if you had any sense.
Ah, that's beautiful.
That's beautiful.
Many years ago, it sort of dawned on me that happiness was some kind of evolutionary, it's a parameter that is inherently not durable, because if you became durably happy, you'd be terribly ineffective.
So selection plays this trick on you that I now know is called the hedonic treadmill.
But the fact that you can attain happiness, but you can't make it stick.
Right?
So you're a fool to try to do that because it's just impossible.
Not in the nature of the beast.
Right.
But I love the idea that there are many things for which a wise person would trade happiness, which I think is absolutely right.
You can see this pretty straightforwardly.
I mean, Imagine that you're in a very intense game.
And I mean literally a game.
You're on a football field and the stakes are high and you're exhausted.
It's like, are you happy?
Right.
No.
Are you challenged optimally?
Probably.
That's better, man.
That's why the heroes aren't laughing around like idiot comedians constantly in a hero story.
Like they're trudging towards the eye of Sauron or some goddamn thing.
It's like, It's better than happiness.
Dostoevsky knew this, eh?
He put his finger on the central critique of the, you could say, the globalist socialist utopians, you could say that.
But the people who thought that paradise would be delivered in the form of something like gratification, like satiation-oriented gratification and hedonic happiness.
Dostoevsky said in Notes from the Underground, if you offered people that option, so that they had nothing to do but eat cakes and sit in pools of warm bubbling water and busy themselves with the continuation of the species, which I always thought of as a good description of California, that they would just go mad purposefully to break that up so that something crazy and interesting would happen so they'd have something to do.
And there's even echoes of that in the idea of the fall.
It's like people are built for trouble.
They're built for trouble.
And if so, you make life easy for people, they just look for idiot ways to cause trouble.
And that's a perverse What would you say?
It's a perverse manifestation of the instinct to develop.
That's what Nietzsche was struggling to when he talked about will to power, but he didn't.
Well, you know, I'm not going to criticize Nietzsche.
Will to power is one way of thinking about it, but power is conflated with compulsion and force, and so the terminology isn't good.
Maybe that's a translation issue, but it's something like this impulse to expand and develop, and that's definitely part of the hero myth.
There's absolutely no doubt about that.
Integrate, expand, develop psychologically, but also socially, because you're bringing more people into the fold.
Soul.
Yeah.
And I love your formulation that people are built for trouble.
I will say I resonate with that especially well.
My competence to the extent it exists, leans way over into the realm of keeping a cool head in an emergency.
And often, in mundane circumstances, I'm less competent than average.
So I don't know why that is.
You should be operating on the edge, right?
Ragged edge of disaster for Brett.
There you go.
Because otherwise, you've got to ask yourself, to some degree, why bother?
You need... What would you say?
You need the ever-present threat of complete calamity to wake you up completely.
You know, I thought for a while, Brent, I thought, you know, trying to figure out how you define what's real.
I think I know how you define what's real.
Death defines what's real.
Nothing's real without death.
Death makes everything real.
And you think, well, so what is that?
I mean, you can understand that because you're going to take it seriously.
And when you play games where you can die virtually, you know that's not real.
Well, why isn't it real?
Well, because you don't actually die.
There's that finality.
So interesting that that mortality, that fragility of mortality is simultaneously what defines the real.
So then you think, well, you can't have the real without mortality.
And then you think, well, okay, that puts a conundrum forward because mortality is such a major price to pay for what's real that you might think that the whole damn enterprise should just fold up and go away.
Then you think, okay, well, how do you cope with that?
Path of maximal adventure.
That's what Musk told me, you know, when he said he had a terrible existential crisis when he was about 13, which is pretty much right on schedule for genius types, and he said he basically reconciled that by pursuing the path of maximal adventure.
For him it was exploration, but you can see he's pushing himself to the limits in multiple dimensions simultaneously, and very effectively, and that's enough to keep him to make him feel that it's worth it.
It's like, what makes this worthwhile?
Well, death is the price.
Well, you need a hell of an adventure to justify that.
So I've noticed this pattern.
I've never known what to make of it.
But there's something to me very frightening about the transhumanist impulse to fend off death forever.
Yeah?
And it's not that I don't get it, from my perspective.
Both.
There are two reasons that I'm troubled.
There are only two reasons, really, that I'm troubled by the prospect of my own death.
One of them is selfish and one of them is not.
I do not want to leave those I love in the lurch.
Yeah, right.
That's a big one.
As you get older, that gets more and more important.
It does.
The other one, the selfish one, is I want to know what happens, goddammit.
I do not want to participate in some story that I can tell is important and just not at least get to find out how it ended, right?
Yeah, well, that's part of that terrible curiosity that makes people adventurous.
What's going to happen next?
What's going to happen next?
Right.
But the transhumanists who, I don't, because of the work I did as a graduate student on senescence and cancer, I don't believe the transhumanists are going to succeed at meaningfully fending off death.
I don't even think they can, you know, they can postpone their own death, but they can't increase the maximum longevity of humans.
But it doesn't matter because even living under the misapprehension that they are going to defeat that problem I believe creates the exact philosophical problem you're pointing to.
That it basically in their psychological minds eliminates death in some way or mutes it.
And that that has a catastrophic consequence for one's values, I suspect.
Well, it also begs another question.
Like, I kind of figured this out when I had little kids, because you're always on edge with little kids because, you know, they're going to get run over in the parking lot if they don't behave.
So you're always hyper-vigilant.
And you think, oh, they're so terribly vulnerable.
And then you might think, well, maybe we could eradicate that vulnerability.
Now, you do that to some degree by promoting growth, right?
But you say, well, He's three feet, my son, he's three feet high.
Well, he couldn't be 10 feet high.
He could be made out of titanium.
And the titanium could be self-repairing.
I mean, we're going off into science fiction stratosphere.
It's like, I could just replace all the parts of him that were vulnerable.
But then, like, where's the three-year-old?
You know, so he's gone.
And so, oh, so then you think, oh, that's weird.
So does that mean that I'm, by loving my child, am I celebrating his vulnerability?
Really?
Yeah, looks like it.
See, but there's a solution to that.
There's a solution to that that emerges in the Old Testament.
If I can diverge just briefly, there's a scene in there where the Israelites are.
They're near the Promised Land, but they're still fractious, horrible, whiny, lost people, just like us today.
And God gets sick and tired of them, and so he sends poisonous snakes in.
They're already miserable and lost, but he sends a bunch of poisonous snakes in to bite them, which is the sort of thing that God does that makes Richard Dawkins not But it points to something.
It means that no matter how bad your situation is, if you're whiny and immature and longing for the tyrants, then you'll make it worse.
You can keep digging down forever.
And so now the snakes are around.
They're biting the hell out of the Israelites.
And so they go to Moses and they say, well, we're sorry for being so useless and we're getting bit here pretty badly.
And so maybe you could have a chat with God and get him to call off the damn snakes.
And Moses says, okay, even though he's not very happy with the Israelites, and he has a chat with God, and God says, yeah, I don't think I'll call off the snakes, but I'll make you a deal.
You make a big bronze snake, and put it on a staff, big one, get all the bronze from all the Israelites, cast it together, make this serpent on a stake into a statue, and then put it out where everybody can see it, and get them to go look at it, the transforming serpent on the stake of tradition.
And if they look at it voluntarily, then the snake poison won't poison them anymore.
And I thought, oh my god, that's exposure.
That's psychotherapeutic exposure.
It's the pharmacon.
It's a bit of the hair of the dog that bit you.
It's the idea that a little of what poisons you can fortify you.
And that's the universal pathway to redemption and salvation.
I thought, wow!
But then there's a real twist, Brett, because in the Gospels, Christ says that he has to be lifted up like the The bronze serpent in the desert, which is a very weird thing to say.
But it makes perfect sense, because Christ's life is the welcoming of the worst possible fate in the most comprehensive way.
And obviously that's the path of maximal redemption, because the alternative is that, well, either that you sort of face something some of the time, but you shy away from the huge catastrophes of life, mortality and death and malevolence.
And then what?
You're better off if you hide?
Well, that's not God's proclamation to the Israelites.
He says, look, you're stuck with the poisonous snakes, but maybe you could become wise and tough enough to handle them.
And you do that by embracing God.
That's embracing, so awful in a way, it's by embracing the full catastrophe of life, including its malevolence, right?
It's not just death.
Yeah, it's worse than death.
And you think, well there's no fate, where's the death?
It's like you know nothing.
Right.
You know nothing.
There are lots of things worse than death.
So many.
Which actually brings me back to your point about kids and vulnerability.
So maybe I know a more terrifying fact, but I think the most terrifying fact that I know is there is no way to raise your children properly that does not involve risking that they will die.
That's, Brett, that's why.
So in St.
Peter's there's a statue of Mary, right, the paella, and it's significant that it's in St.
Peter's.
Like, it occupies a space that's approximately similar to the crucifixion, let's say.
Well, what Mary, Mary's the mother who offers her child to be broken by the world.
Voluntarily.
Well, that's what a mother does.
The antinatalist types, the fact that no one's having children anymore, it's like, who would bring a child into a world like this?
It's like, fair enough, you know, but the answer to that is either someone who does it accidentally, let's say, or someone who looks at the world and thinks, there's a pathway through this.
That's the heroic pathway.
I can fortify my children.
They can have the great adventure of their life.
You know, the thing, the problem with the antinatalist position, like you can make a case that the amount of suffering in the world makes it questionable whether consciousness should exist, but that also assumes that you should use hedonistic evaluation as the criteria by which you judge the utility of existence, and I don't think that's true.
But even if that is the case, well, it's just simply not the case.
Here's the problem.
If you adopt the antinatalist position and you assume that consciousness is the enemy because of suffering, then you have to work to eliminate consciousness.
That's what Mephistopheles does in Faust.
That's his ethos.
And all that does is make suffering worse.
As soon as that antinatalist position is put into practice, you have like All hell breaks loose, because now you're the enemy of life!
Jesus!
Right, I agree.
Suffering can be ended, but only by ending all things that suffer.
And there's going to be a fair bit of suffering involved in that.
Right.
But, all right, so, let's see, we were talking about Sorry, just to wrap it back to the transhumanists.
The problem with the transhuman enterprise is that by dispensing with mortality, you might end up dispensing with humans.
In all likelihood, whatever we would be as these new beings wouldn't be human.
And so even in that, that's no immortality.
Who knows?
That could be an eternal hell.
That's for sure.
That really could be.
It's like, I'll upload my consciousness into a computer.
It's like, well, Okay, but whatever you are then you might as well be dead because whatever you are then is so radically different than what you were that it's not you Yeah, I think we can actually Let's take apart these two arguments.
One, the antinatalist argument that says, how could you possibly bring a child into a world like this?
I think it's actually a lie.
And I won't say in every single person's case.
It's possible that there are careful enough thinkers who arrive at that position in some way I can't see.
But in general, it runs into an immediate paradox, which is, Well, you live in a world this troubled, and yet you decide to continue that process.
It's one.
They probably also love people.
When you love someone, you decide that their existence justifies their mortality.
That's your decision.
That's what the love is.
It's that decision.
Right.
And in the decision to continue to take breaths, You are violating the logic of your claim that you shouldn't bring somebody into a world this troubled because you live in that world and you're electing to continue.
So in fact, what this really is, I think, is a selfish Conclusion dressed up as a selfless one.
I'm not bringing children to the world to protect them.
Yeah, I agree.
Oh, yeah, that's oh, yeah.
Oh, that's the you always want to look for that.
I mean what they call that the psychoanalyst that's psychoanalytic secondary gain.
Oh, it's like yeah, what what's the payoff here, buddy?
Well, there isn't one it's like That's a bad answer.
If you've actually thought this through, you should have five reasons why you might be malevolent for holding your opinion.
You should know what those reasons are and you should have counter arguments.
I have no skin in this game that's self-promoting.
That's a really bad answer.
Yep.
Alright, two other points.
One, going way back where we were talking about the vulnerability of children and its relationship, well at least I see a relationship with this question of happiness.
I think it may have been the same one you're drawing, but there's a part of me that at the point I lost touch with happiness and decided it wasn't a thing to pursue because it was kind of an evolutionary trick at best, I can also say That the fact of having children whom you love kind of makes it impossible anyway, because... There's literature on this, Brett.
Like, it's reasonably well documented, you know, and you can quibble about the methodology, that childless couples are happier than couples with children.
And then you think, well, then I shouldn't have children.
It's like, no, you should rethink the idea of happiness.
Yep.
Responsibility.
The thing is, responsibility gives your life meaning.
That doesn't mean you're happy.
But it also means we conceptualize happiness very stupidly, because we think of momentary hedonic gratification, and there's a way Right, that's exactly the thing.
engagement with the world than that.
And those are the ones that mature people do.
Like you wouldn't trade your children for happiness.
Right.
That's that's exactly the thing.
If you ask me if I'm happy, some part of me is aware that I'm not sure at this moment where my children are and they could be in terrible peril.
And it is inconsistent that that could be true and I can be happy.
But am I fulfilled?
Yeah.
I have kids who I trust to navigate the world and I appreciate their successes.
And so that's way better than happiness.
Well, there's or or Or it's the deepest possible form of happiness.
I mean, this is why God's decision in the Old Testament story is correct, because his decision is, no, we won't make things safer, we'll just make people stronger.
And then what you have the opportunity to do with your kids, this is one of the greatest things about having kids, is you can You can push them, encourage them.
You can push them to their limits.
You can see what they are.
You can encourage them to develop.
You can make them capable.
And then you can see them take on impossible burdens and prevail.
And you think, yes, yes.
You know, I mean, Michaela, my daughter, she was in pain for like 20 years.
20 years!
And man, she's just tromping forward like a mad dog.
It's so impressive.
And I can just sit back and let her go and think, yeah, good work, man.
How remarkable.
And it's, that's way better than...
You know, when my kids left home, Tammy and I used to joke that we were then teenagers with money, because we get along pretty good, and we have a good time together.
And there was hedonic gratification in that.
And it wasn't nothing.
But nothing I've done in my whole life compares to having kids.
Like, I've done lots of things, and they've been great.
But when push comes to shove, man, I know where my Tammy had a vision of her two kids as a cathedral that stretched over her, you know, and that's in keeping with that idea you had earlier that the real game isn't being played in the room.
Yeah, the room is not the room.
And I agree, you know, I don't know what to even call it, but yes, my kids transcend anything else that I might or have accomplished.
Inherently, really.
But there's also, there's a question about, I mean, that is the natural order of things.
And I worry that something, one of the things that contributes to this anti-natalism is actually a failure of natalism.
That I see a tremendous number of parents Who, A, I think just have a wrong idea about what the relationship of parents to children is.
They've bought some story that's overly reliant on genes and they sort of see themselves as babysitters as the true nature of their children emerges in front of them, which is preposterous.
And so I see a lot of people who I think love their children, but It's a very passive relationship that they have with having produced children and raised them.
And what that means is that the rewards that you and I are talking about, where we think about our children and we have this profound reward structure built around them that actually defies normal language, right?
Happiness doesn't cut it.
That if you lack that reward structure, if some antagonist has prevented it from developing, or some process has drowned it out with noise, then they become models of, well, why would I have children?
And then you see a bunch of families in which parents and children are disconnected phenomena, and the children are more raised by, you know, their devices and their peers than they are raised by their parents.
And it's not a very good advertisement.
It's partly a consequence of failure to understand what's truly engaging, you know.
This new book I wrote is called, We Who Wrestle With God.
And that's wrestling with fate.
And so everyone does that.
You wrestle with your children.
And I mean, literally, we know even among rats, rats have to wrestle to develop.
Yep.
You have to wrestle with your kids.
You have to play with them.
You push and you prod and it's a very active dance, engaging dance.
And And people are afraid to do that because they're afraid that this is part of the pathology of accusations of the tyrannical patriarchy.
You know, and I've seen many women do this to their husbands.
I've watched this over and over and over.
Kid will misbehave.
Husband will intervene.
Mother will stop Father Cole.
She'll do that 150 times and he just tunes out.
It's like, Now, you could argue, and perhaps you should, that he should have, you know, a little bit more of a spine and refuse to be dominated in that manner.
But, you know, the fact that masculinity itself has been under a full frontal assault for like four, six decades, it's playing a role in that.
You know, and you have to get in there with your kids.
And part of the role of the father, like the role of God in the Old Testament, is like, I'm not chasing away the snakes, but, you know, get out there and hit them with the hockey stick.
You can do it.
And the mother's rightful role is to say, well, maybe, you know, that's a bit too dangerous.
It's like, fair enough.
You know, there needs to be that push and pull.
You know, the maternal instinct should be Don't push any harder than the kid can tolerate.
And the paternal instinct is, yeah, but we're going to push until we can see how far, how, you know, what, what the level of tolerance is.
That has to be a dynamic.
Can you have that?
That's also part of what's engaging in a marriage.
If you're both parenting, you know, and maybe I was fortunate in my choice of wife because my wife is arguably more adventurous than the typical woman, but that's also something that can be fostered in a relationship.
But it's the tussling and the interaction that's the pleasure and not that kind of tranquil happiness that has 50 rotten things going on under the surface.
Yeah, and it's in fact, that dynamism is, I hesitate to say that it is a requirement for all functional systems.
I would want to put some bounds on what systems we're talking about, but this is true for governance as well.
It's the dynamism of a plan.
Yeah, it's well, it's the dynamism of something that's pushing and something that's constrained.
And the point is, it's a natural balance between those things that makes the system work.
And, you know, I guess any static rule is going to be gamed.
Any static agreement in the relationship is going to make it stale quickly.
You need a relationship that is dynamic and can modify itself based on the circumstance and which of these instincts is the one that should predominate given the current conditions.
So anyway, and those are all things that as your children Watch you and your spouse navigate that.
They actually learn... Consciousness is forebred, I think.
Because otherwise we could just run on the algorithmic rules.
We could just be the zombies that Chalmers talks about.
It's like... Consciousness is there to note when application of the appropriate rules fails.
That is almost exactly what Heather and I say in our book, that consciousness evolved to address novelty.
That you don't need it if your situation isn't novel.
And we are actually desperately unhealthy, we moderns, because we live in a world that forces us to be conscious about a large fraction of decision-making that should be trivial and instinctual.
And that part of the utility, see how that's exactly right.
That's actually look, after I recovered from being so I was very ill for a good while.
Oh, I remember you were you were missed more than you could possibly know.
Yeah, well, it was no picnic, I can tell you that.
But one of the things I did learn, and this was partly also from talking to Jonathan Pageau is that I, I, I reanimated my appreciation for predictable ritual and could see it much more as a reasonable part of the religious practice.
You know, I was always antsy when I was a kid in church, Protestant churches, for example.
I couldn't sit still, partly because I had enough of that in school.
I didn't want an extra hour on Sunday, let's say.
But the blessed relief of predictability was something I rediscovered after being in pain for so long that I could just sit and know exactly what was going to happen and none of that was terrible.
We need You do this with kids too, like part of the reason you provide a routine for kids is so that many things that you shouldn't have to be conscious of become part of the landscape.
And then you can focus your consciousness on just what's most valuable, which is the best thing to do with it, right?
And so the radicals, the progressive types, they want to throw everything up in the air.
It's like, well, everything?
Really?
Like, you really think you could tolerate that?
You can only become, you can only be conscious of a few things at any given moment.
So, no, a lot of it has to be recognized and automatized according to tradition.
So that's peace.
That's peace in many ways.
Yep.
And I think it is the question of our era, is how do we rein in the instinct to change things, which we now have tremendous power to do, such that we can live?
Because what we're doing is Well, you know, the funny thing is, I still, well, you may know I call myself a reluctant radical, because I know that change is dangerous, and I know that you'd have to be foolish to be enthusiastic about change for its own sake.
But I also believe We can't stay here and we can't, there's nowhere to go back to.
We have become modern in a way that requires us to figure out what the new way of existing is and so radical change is a given and we damn well better be careful about it because we can't conserve our way out of it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well that's why this team say that Trump's put around him is so interesting because they're not your ordinary sort of radicals.
Yeah, it is a very healthy mixture of an instinct towards responsible change and an instinct towards conserving that which works and is essential.
And it's really very helpful.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.
Well, and I guess we're going to see a flowering of that, we hope, on the 29th.
Yes, we are.
We think it'll come.
You know, it's funny.
The Park Service keeps asking us that.
And it's, how would you even know?
But let me, I will... Lay out the geographical area precisely.
So it got moved.
It is now on the, it's basically in front of the Smithsonian in the shadow of the Washington Monument.
Okay, well, that's a good place for it.
Yeah, it's the perfect place for it.
Let us just close with this.
It's hard to articulate the reason that people should motivate to see something in person that yes, frankly, they can probably watch on a screen if they want.
The reason to do it are several.
One, the experience of being present is going to be radically different than the experience of watching it on a screen.
We're talking about really the first meeting of a tremendously powerful movement that is going to make people feel The people are going to be thrilled to discover the number of like-minded people and how different they are across the entire political spectrum, across all ideologies.
You will have people gathering there who agree on what's important and are committed to rescuing the Republic.
The second point I would make is in the American electoral system, there is an element that is almost always forgotten.
We talk about the voters and what we expect a race to do.
What we don't talk about are the people who are disgusted with the system and have walked away from it.
Right?
The disaffected people.
They're the affidavits of the political realm.
Well, whoever they are, there are enough of them to swing any election anytime they want.
They can demonstrate their power.
This is a great way to demonstrate their disgust at what we have been living through, and to make this a decisive victory in which we re-establish the values that are the basis of not just the Republic, but also the West more generally.
And so, Why should you come?
It's hard for me to explain it any better than this.
So you're not going to tell your grandchildren?
Yeah, you will want to tell your grandchildren that you were there.
That's right.
And I hope I've got this right.
Do you know who wasn't at Woodstock?
I think the Grateful Dead missed Woodstock.
But Sha Na Na was there, right?
Now, how much better is it to have been Sha Na Na and made some weird decision and actually have been at Woodstock than to have been the Grateful Dead and for whatever reason not having made it?
So, please, if you can, Come to Washington.
If you can't, spread the word.
Jordan is coming, which that is such a tremendous blow against the forces of evil.
I'm just thrilled to have you on board.
And I'm also very grateful to you for, at the end of a long day, sitting down with me and having this marvelous... It's always a pleasure talking to you, Rick.
