Jordan Peterson critiques climate models’ unreliable long-term predictions, citing Germany’s 1920s hyperinflation and flawed inductive reasoning, while questioning CO₂ and conflict mineral narratives. He contrasts nuclear safety with solar panel risks, defends free markets in poverty-stricken regions like sub-Saharan Africa, and ties addiction to genetics, not environment. Peterson frames music as a universal meaning-maker, comparing Leonard Cohen’s transcendent performances to Jungian sensory deprivation and wonder-driven growth. His meat-only diet resolved chronic inflammation—50 lbs lost in seven months—and inspired his daughter Michaela’s Oxford debate on carnivore diets, backed by Harvard’s 2,400-person study showing 90% symptom reduction. He critiques anti-meat rhetoric as absurd, linking religious symbolism to psychedelics and shamanic rituals, while dismissing drugs as direct causes of violence like school shootings. Ultimately, Peterson champions curiosity-driven dialogue over media distrust, arguing that engagement—even in struggle—reveals profound human complexity and purpose. [Automatically generated summary]
The Joe Rogan experience That state of intense concentration on that before you can really manage it I think there's mental endurance involved too because I think that we up I think there's mental endurance that comes with
Anything that you do on a day-to-day basis whether it's writing whether it's doing podcasts whether it's doing stand-up comedy, I think anything we have to think and manage complex ideas and manipulate your language and the way you're speaking and be able to engage in the dance between two people...
I think you got to do it all the time.
I think if you just do it every now and again, like especially like if you took time off of speaking to people, like if you hadn't talked to anybody in a long time and then you talk.
Have you ever done that?
Where you haven't talked to anybody in a long time and then you talk to them?
It feels odd.
It feels awkward.
Because I think there's like a thing where you have to get used to it.
Well, you know, it's like one of them is a climate change book and it's intense.
And so it's requiring a lot of thinking.
And then I have to, like, look at the criticisms of this guy and criticisms of the work and, you know, who believes that in 10 years Miami's going to be underwater?
Who believes that this is probably hyperbole?
And that it's a gross exaggeration.
And the reality is, you know, the world sort of always goes through these cycles of change, but human beings are definitely having an effect on it.
But a small effect compared to cows and other things.
But you have to include all these factors in the models to determine that.
All these factors.
Well, what can you not include?
Well, then, by deciding what you don't include, you decide which set of variables are cardinal.
And you have to make that decision in some sense before you even generate the models.
This is a big problem.
It's partly...
It's not the only reason, but this...
There's another problem that bedevils climate modeling too, which is that as you stretch out the models across time, the errors increase radically.
And so maybe you can predict out a week or three weeks or a month or a year, but the farther out you predict, the more your model's in error.
And that's a huge problem when you're trying to model over a hundred years because the errors compound just like interest.
And so at some point, it's all error.
In fact, it's already the case that even if the climate models are right, the error bars are so wide by 100 years out that we'll never be able to measure the effects of the changes we're making now.
We'll never know if the changes we're making, you know, to save the climate actually worked.
But when you're talking about human beings and CO2... Well, we could play a future discounting game.
So this is how this sort of thing is calculated, this discount curve.
So I could say, I'll give you $5 now or $5 in a week.
Which one do you want?
And people say $5 in a week.
Then I say, okay, I'll give you $5 now or I'll give you $10 in a month.
It's like, hmm, okay, $10 in a month.
Okay, I'll give you $5 now, I'll give you $7.50 in two weeks.
Or I'll give you $50 now, I'll give you $500 in 10 years.
And so imagine you do that with all sorts of amounts, over all sorts of time frames.
Then you can compute a discount curve, which is how much people devalue the amount a dollar is worth as it progresses out into the future.
And what you generally find is that impulsive people discount the future more heavily.
That's actually the definition of impulsive.
And you might think, well, the impulsive people are wrong.
It's like the ant and the grasshopper.
You know, the grasshopper's fiddling all summer, and then he starves to death in the winter, and the good old ant who packed away the supplies, he's doing fine in the winter.
He sacrificed the present to the future and isn't that sensible.
Yeah, it's sensible.
You should save.
Except, well, what if it's 1920 in Germany, 1923, let's say, and you're in a period of hyperinflation.
It's like, Grasshopper won, because he spent all his money before it became worthless.
So should you save or not?
The answer is, it depends.
And then there's a further answer, which is, it depends on things that you actually can't predict.
And so it's actually a computationally impossible problem to figure out how much to discount the future.
It's actually impossible, which is why we vary so much in it.
Part of that reason is the magnitude of our prediction error increases the farther out we predict.
And so it's just as possible that the ant will store up all this food and another ant colony will move in and that'll be the end of that.
And this is a huge problem.
Well, you're very unlikely to be robbed and pillaged unless you have wealth.
Right, and so the ability to store wealth across time To decrease the risk of the catastrophes of future, that's the problem in some sense that civilization set out to solve.
How can we stabilize things over a long term enough to make long term investing a reasonable proposition?
Here's a positive spin-off of that.
So I worked on the UN committee that wrote the Secretary General's report on sustainable development.
I worked on the Canadian subcommittee to be technically accurate.
And I was by no means the head of that.
I worked with the team that worked on that.
But we edited and wrote and rewrote a fair bit of the document.
And so I did a lot of work in the background, learning what I needed to learn to work on that committee with some degree of, what would you say, qualification.
I read maybe 200 books on ecological development and economic development, the relationship between the two.
And a lot of it was on oceanic management, because I did realize that one thing we're doing that's extraordinarily stupid on the ecological front is destroying all the marine life within 40 miles of the shores.
And all the marine life is within 40 miles of the shores.
Like, you think, the oceans, they're vast.
It's like, yeah, but they're empty.
Except where the sun can shine to the bottom, and that's the 40 to 200 miles, say, on the coastal shelves.
And we've, like, trawled those bare, like, seven times.
But that was the only real environmental catastrophe that I encountered in all that work that I thought was both credible and addressable.
We know how to fix that.
You make marine protected areas, like national parks, that you need about 15% of the total coastal territory really protected.
And that solves that problem, essentially.
And then everybody has fish, because the fish, they don't just stay there, they move around.
You can have your cake and eat it, too, with marine protected areas.
But mostly what I learned, and this was really cool, was that this was so cool, and I really believe it's true.
The fastest way to make the planet sustainably green and ecologically viable is to make poor people as rich as possible, as fast as we possibly can.
Because the thing about poor people is that...
Well, first of all, they live in...
They're not resource efficient.
They use a lot of resources to produce very, very little outcome.
And so that's a problem.
Slash and burn agriculture, for example.
But even more importantly...
When you're insecure on a day-to-day basis, you don't know where your next meal is coming from, you're not paying attention to the broader environment, that hated word, around you.
And you can't even really worry about your children's future in some real sense, because it's like, no, no, you don't understand.
Lunch is the future.
We don't have lunch.
We're hungry.
And that goes on for like a month.
We're dead.
That's the future.
So what happens?
If you can get resources to the poorest section of the population, as soon as they get to the point where they have some hope of a genuine future, especially for their children, they immediately become concerned about broader environmental considerations.
And then the attempt to make the environment habitable and sustainable That comes up of its own accord at a grassroots level and spreads everywhere.
And evidence for that is clear.
And so this is one of the things that really bothered me about COP26. And that was based in part on this...
That was the big climate meeting in the UK just a few months ago.
You know, the one where all the COVID rules were suspended so the important people could talk about important things.
In any case, I thought...
If the politicians who were discussing environmental sustainability were serious, especially the left-wing ones, and I say especially because the left-wing ones always say, well, we care about the poor and dispossessed.
It's like, do you really?
When push comes to shove, it's like, is it the environment or poor people?
If your idea is that we have to limit growth to save the planet, If we limit growth, poor people starve.
Because whenever we put limits on economic development, who suffers?
The rich?
Are you really?
That's what you think?
And you're on the left, you think if you put limits on economic development, the rich will suffer.
That runs contrary to every theory that your whole political philosophy is based on.
You put limits to growth on, the poor stay poor or get worse.
Doesn't matter because the planet has too many people on it anyways, which it most certainly does not.
If you are serious about the environment, and even vaguely concerned about poor people, all of your policies would be devoted to making the poor rich as fast as possible.
But that would violate the anti-capitalist presumption, let's say, that the reason for environmental degradation in the first place is, say, entrepreneurial and free market development, which it most certainly isn't, that's actually completely backwards, make poor people rich.
So what should a COP26 been about?
That's fairly straightforward.
It should have been about trying to generate as much energy as we possibly can to be distributed as widely as possible in the cheapest possible manner.
Well, that's not so good because, first of all, they cut down the trees and burn the trees.
And second, if you're concerned about pollution, especially particulate pollution, especially indoors, which kills, I think, seven million children a year.
Seven million children a year are killed by indoor particulate pollution.
Look, everything pollutes something, and so the idea that there's any source of energy that we can derive that's not going to produce some pollutant as a consequence, that's the kind of nonsense you hear from people who say things like, net zero.
We're going to hit net zero by 2050. It's like, no we're not.
But let's just read it so that people understand what we're saying, because we can read this.
Together household air pollution from cooking and ambient outside air pollution caused more than 50% of acute lower respiratory infections in children under 5 years of age in low and middle income countries.
You went on these rants, so I want to bring you back to this idea of climate and environment.
We should be concerned not just about particulate pollution, but shouldn't we be concerned about the effect that we're having on the CO2 that we're releasing in the atmosphere?
Now, from what I've read, it has an impact.
They don't exactly know what percentage of an impact it has, but it's most certainly something that we can reduce.
Well, that's not so certain.
What I've also read is that one of the problems is when people start talking about, like, electric cars, is that it's literally impossible for—there's not enough minerals.
These conflict minerals they use for these batteries, there's not enough to give a car As many cars as we have in this country, as many cars as there are in the world that are mostly internal combustion engines, if we replace those with battery-powered cars, I don't think that's possible.
But even if we did get the electricity from nuclear, which, by the way, is fairly clean.
It's all in whether or not there's a disaster and whether or not they have these precautionary measures set in place to have systems That will be able to shut down the core when there is a disaster.
Yeah, but when push comes to shove, that's what they do.
And it wouldn't take much thought to figure it out, because let's say you increase the cost of energy.
And that's the price you pay to move forward to a hypothetically green economy.
But you increase the price of energy.
Okay, so what happens is that in any system that's hierarchical, and the left-wingers know this because it drives their whole philosophy, in any hierarchical system, when you stress the system, The disproportionate amount of that stress falls on the people who are in the lower rungs, because they're barely hanging on anyways.
So, you know, you get a 1% increase in unemployment.
You get a 5% increase in psychiatric hospitalizations.
Well, why?
It's because there's a bunch of people there who are right on the threshold of psychiatric hospitalization, and then they lose their job.
It's like, that's the end of that.
So even among birds, even among birds that don't live in strict hierarchy, so non-social birds, not ones that hang about in flocks like crows, the birds will move into an environment, any environment, and the more Able, in some sense, healthier birds get the best nesting spots.
They're closest to the food, they're sheltered from rain and wind and all of that.
So they're not psychophysiologically stressed.
And so then when any kind of avian flu comes through, let's say, to challenge the bird population, the birds die from the bottom up.
They always, that's the old saying, when the aristocracy gets a cold, the working class dies of pneumonia.
It's like, okay, so fine, increase energy costs.
Well, what happens?
A bunch of poor people fall off the map, like a bunch of them.
And the more you increase the energy costs, the more that happens.
And so if the price we have to pay to move towards a sustainable environment is increased energy costs, and it isn't, that's a policy decision, it doesn't have to be that way, the absolutely 100% inevitable consequence of that will be that you sacrifice the poor.
Yeah, well, that's part of the issue, is that the pro-environment stance is contaminated by an anti-capitalist rhetoric.
Now, the problem with the socialists, so let's take this apart a little bit.
I mean, the socialists always point out something that's true.
And Marx pointed this out, but it wasn't Marx's discovery.
And he's like seriously wrong about it in an important way.
So Marx observed that money tends to aggregate in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
Okay, the first question is, is that true?
And the answer is, not only is that true, it's so true that you can model the distribution of money in a population using equations derived from physics.
Like, it's really, unbelievably true.
But then Marx said, that's capitalism.
That is not true.
And it's actually an underestimation of the problem, because if the problem of inequality, which is an actual problem, was as simple as, let's change capitalism.
Well, yeah, let's change capitalism.
Unfortunately, the problem is so deep that changing capitalism won't change the problem at all.
And in fact, in most of the places where it's being attempted, especially the more radical forms of communism, let's say, rather than socialism, because we can distinguish the two, and should, it's important to do so, in countries that became communist, It wasn't like a small percentage of the people still didn't own all the resources.
It's just that there were hardly any resources and almost everyone had nothing.
There was still a tiny fraction of people who were the privileged elite.
And so, you know, if you play Monopoly, what happens when you play Monopoly?
Everybody starts out equal and one...
Yeah, exactly.
And so you can actually model this problem with something as simple as a Monopoly game.
That's actually a fairly good model of how money distributes itself in the environment.
And you can blame that on capitalism, but you can get the same, you can get exactly the same result if you have people trade because they flip a dice.
So if you took 100 people, let's say give 100 people $10 each, and then they had to trade with each other.
If I, you flip a coin and I flip a coin, and if it's, we flip a coin, if it's heads, you get a dollar.
And so that's your game.
Heads gives you a dollar.
If you play that out, Till it concludes, what happens is some people lose, let's say they have $10, they lose 10 times in a row.
Well, then what happens?
At zero, well, they can't trade anymore.
So what happens is that people lose at different rates, but if you lose enough, even if it takes you 100 trades to lose all your money, as soon as you hit zero, you're done.
If you play that out to its conclusion, even though it's random, completely random, the trading, one person ends up with all the money, and everyone else ends up with zero.
And so, I'm a member of a...
Native Canadian family, West Coast Indian family, Native family.
And this particular culture had a tradition, the potlatch.
And they had the same problem in their culture.
And the problem was that some of the big chiefs, over some period of time, would end up with, like, all the stuff, all of it.
And that wasn't good because, well, for obvious reasons, you know, it would destabilize the society.
That's, in some sense, the least of the problems.
And so they evolved this mechanism.
They'd have these big celebrations that rich people would put on where status was determined by how much of that wealth you would give away.
This might be a biased sample, but I don't think so.
And if it is, it's biased towards entrepreneur conservative types who you would think in the parody sense would be the least likely to do this.
I haven't met anyone who has a vast fortune whose primary concern isn't What the hell can I do with all this money that's beneficial as fast as possible?
They're not sitting around thinking, I need another super yacht.
Now, look, there's going to be people like that, you know, but I haven't met any of them.
When people start talking about capitalism, and we talk about capitalism uplifting poor people, one of the issues that a lot of people have in this country is when you ship jobs overseas and you ship companies start manufacturing things overseas for essentially pennies on the dollar.
To the progressives in America, that they complain about capitalism on a fucking iPhone.
Because if you knew where that iPhone was, if you went down to the factory where that iPhone was manufactured, you'd be heartbroken.
If you went further...
To where the minerals are dug out of the ground in the Congo, you'd be devastated.
That's the reality of capitalism.
That's the reality of sending jobs overseas.
The cure to that is a more even distribution of wealth within the company, meaning that The company would have to, and I'm not picking on Apple like any company, name them.
They would have to pay the people that work there a decent living wage with great benefits and health insurance and dental and all the stuff that people want and need in order to feel secure and safe.
Give them a great working environment.
Don't overwork them.
And now how much money do you have?
Because the amount of money that Apple has put aside, and obviously I'm an Apple fan.
I have an Apple phone right here.
I'm not picking on Apple.
But they are one of the richest companies that's ever existed on the face of planet Earth.
But how are they doing that?
One of the ways they're doing that is by paying people very little to make their products that they sell for a giant amount of money.
So what's the solution to that?
Is the solution to pay people a fair amount?
And if you do that, is the solution to pay people a fair amount in another country?
Or is the solution to pay people a fair amount here where we can regulate it?
Because we do manufacture some things here, but we manufacture way less than we used to because it costs too much money to do so.
But that word, too much, or that phrase, too much, is bullshit.
It's not that it costs too much.
It's just that it costs more, and they don't want to pay it.
They would rather just reap in profits, and the way they do that is on the backs of poor people.
unidentified
Now, if you do that on the backs of poor people— We can take that apart a bit.
If you really wanted to make these other countries, like third world countries, and raise them up and really increase the economy, what you would do is pay people in third world countries where you have these plants the same amount that you would have to pay them in America.
Then you'd have a complete change in those environments.
I mean, part of the advantage to manufacturing things where wages are relatively low is you give those countries a competitive advantage.
So part of the reason that there aren't millions of people starving in China is because even the Chinese communists woke up enough to realize that if they opened up their economies, that free market Free market is nothing different than allowing unrestricted choice among consumers in some sense.
So when we're talking about the free market, we should be careful about what we're talking about.
It's like you get to have choice about what you buy.
That's the central spirit of free market capitalism.
Exporting those jobs stopped a huge proportion of the Chinese from living in absolute privation and likely decreased the probability of a broad-scale war.
And it also brought the Chinese into the economy, which is a big deal.
The Chinese produce more engineers every year than Americans have engineers.
And so now we've unlocked an unbelievable amount of brain power.
And that's produced an insane technological revolution.
Now, I think it's unfortunate that a lot of that was done on the backs of the American working class.
And I think that the Democrats abandoning the working class when they were in that state of privation was a catastrophe of public policy.
And also part of the reason why Trump got elected.
But it isn't obvious to me that exporting those jobs Was a bad long-term decision.
Because, well, you want a world where 20 million Chinese are starving?
Look, that's a good question, you know, but for me, the problem with utopian theories is that they're hypothetical.
So I like to look at what's actually worked.
And what's clearly worked is the introduction of free market principles into poor countries.
So for example, Africa has the fastest growing economies in the world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa.
That's really something.
And some of those countries are really getting on a reasonably solid footing.
And most of that's happened, almost all that's happened since the Berlin Wall fell.
And part of the reason for that is that that continent isn't being riven by a terrible conflict between the communists and the capitalists.
And most of the reason the eradication of that conflict has been beneficial is because they're not doing unbelievably stupid and counterproductive things at the policy level.
They're letting markets flourish to at least a limited degree.
And that's making, that's, people aren't, you know, there's, I talked to some people, I was in Washington for a week, last week, and I talked to some people who are working with a UN committee that's prime goal is the eradication of hunger.
Well, there isn't any hunger in the world anymore that isn't caused by political conflict.
Everyone has enough to eat.
In fact, it's so interesting that one of the emerging problems, especially among the poor all over the world, is that they have too much to eat.
And so we're seeing diseases of affluence replace diseases of privation.
And you think, isn't that too bad, these Western diets?
And you know, fair enough, but you want to be fat or dead?
When you're talking about the prosperous areas that have prospered because they brought in the market and these companies have shipped these jobs over to these places and allowed these people to flourish, the flip side is Detroit.
Detroit was one of the wealthiest cities in this country and hence one of the wealthiest cities in the world just a few decades ago.
It wasn't that long ago.
When they were in the height of their manufacturing, all the American automobiles were made in Detroit.
Cadillacs and Chevys and Fords and that was where everybody worked and then it was also where the union autoworkers Well, Henry Ford did what you said that capitalists should do.
I mean, when Ford was pressed on how much he paid his workers, because he paid them a lot, he said, I want to pay them enough so that they can afford a car.
And so he ramped up wages dramatically.
And that was partly part of his, you could say, self-interested vision, although I think that's an oversimplification.
It's like, well, if we want to sell our product, why don't we expand the consumer market?
When I was a kid, I had friends that had done gigs in Detroit when I was just starting out doing stand-up, and they were like, whatever you do, don't go to Detroit with a fucking Japanese car, because they will fuck your car up.
I go, really?
They go, yeah, these guys are auto workers.
Like, they don't want to see foreign cars that they don't make in their city.
They rusted fast, but nothing rusted faster than a Japanese car in Canada.
Those bloody You could put them outside in the winter when there was salt in the road and watch them dissolve.
But what was very interesting about that, I saw this with the Chinese too, because in Alberta, I went to Edmonton, I think this would be 1975 about...
It was the first Chinese trade fair in Canada.
So they had Chinese manufactured implements at this display.
It was really interesting because it was like walking back into 1945 or 1950. We looked at all these things and we thought, oh, that looks like exactly like what Grandpa was using on the farm, you know, 40 years ago.
So with the Japanese, it's like their cars were junk to begin with.
Well, the net consequence of opening up that competition was the Japanese got their act together.
I mean, in the 80s, particularly, Japan got so powerful that everyone thought it would be the dominant world economy for like 10 years.
And they just went from nothing after World War II to like superstars in 40 years.
And it's really hard to see how that wasn't everyone's benefit.
Now, to your point, When you open up competition internationally, especially in manufacturing, you pose a tremendous threat to the current working class in your country, a tremendous immediate threat.
It might be a long-term benefit because it stabilizes international relations between countries that might otherwise go to war, in which case it would be working class people that would be being slaughtered like mad.
But it's no doubt that, to me, there's almost no doubt that The freeing of trade worldwide and the benefits that that produced were paid for disproportionately by the American working class.
And it also raises another really complicated problem, which is when your economy switches to information and services, which is more complex cognitively.
To deliver.
What do you do with people who would have been really good at working class jobs, but aren't going to be good in the knowledge economy?
And the answer is, we don't know.
Which is not a very good answer.
And the idea that we could just somehow give them money.
You can't solve people's problems by giving.
I had a client who had a cocaine problem.
And he was rather intellectually limited, this client.
And would have agreed with that assessment, by the way.
I've dealt with many people in my life who weren't going to university.
They probably weren't going through high school.
And it isn't because they didn't work hard.
Sometimes that was why.
But it was because, no, they couldn't do that.
They couldn't do it.
And so they struggled, man.
And this guy in particular, it was so interesting because he wasn't doing too bad when he had almost no money.
But he got a disability check because he'd been hurt at work.
And every time he had a disability check, he was gone for three days on a cocaine and alcohol binge, and he'd just drink up all his money.
Then he'd end up in a ditch somewhere, like really 80% dead, and then eventually dead, because eventually it was that kind of behavior that killed him.
Let's explain that to people what we're talking about because there are studies that were done where initially people thought that cocaine was so addictive that if you gave it to rats, they would just take the cocaine until they died.
But then they realize that if you take these rats, that when you were doing this, you're taking these rats in these highly stressed out environments, you're putting them in cages, nothing's natural.
And if you take these rats and you put them in a far larger environment with trees and everything that a rat normally has.
And maybe in that case, maybe they'd prefer alcohol or benzodiazepines because that would specifically alleviate anxiety.
And so it is the case.
And this was brilliant research showing that...
See, a lab rat is not...
A lab rat is actually a pretty good model of a human being for reasons we can go into later.
But...
An isolated lab rat who's been genetically bred is not that much like an actual rat.
And when Skinner did all his studies on lab rats, not only were they isolated, which rats never are in the real world because they're communal and social, they play, they laugh.
They wrestle.
They have very complex social environments.
They're not that interested in artificial forms of psychomotor stimulation if they're in a natural environment.
But some of them will still be more interested than others.
There's still that variability that's lurking in the background.
And with these monkeys, most of them wouldn't...
Take alcohol repeatedly, but a small percentage of them would.
And you see very much the same.
And all I'm saying, I'm not saying anything revolutionary here.
I'm saying, for example, if you experiment with 20 different drugs, you'll probably find the one for you, right?
And people react differently to pharmacological substances, and a huge part of the variation in that reactivity is genetically determined or genetically influenced.
So that's not a surprise.
It's not much more surprising than saying some people are born more anxious than other people.
Well, you put two rats in a little arena where they can wrestle.
And then the next time that they know they can go into the arena, so maybe do it a couple of times so they learn that, then you can make them press a bar to open the door to get into the arena.
Well, then you measure how many times they'll press the bar and how fast they'll press it, and then you can derive...
Insight, direct insight into how motivated they are, because motivation is directly proportionate to the willingness to expand energy, logically enough.
And you can do the same thing with drugs.
How hard will the animal work to obtain a given pharmacological substance is an indication of how rewarding that drug is to them.
Those studies have been done unbelievably carefully, and we know there's tremendous variation.
So you can have your cake and eat it too.
You can say, look, under most normal and natural conditions, it's not that easy to addict animals to an addictive substance, but there's still a percentage of them that are more susceptible to that than others.
And even in highly stressed human environments, not everybody becomes a cocaine addict or an alcoholic.
And then you might say, well, why do some people become cocaine addicts and some people become alcoholic?
And some of it is availability, but some of it is, well, they like alcohol better.
Or they like cocaine better.
Other people can take it or leave it.
And so, when you say, because you asked me, is it nature or nurture?
Mostly because you can really impair people by putting them in situations of deprivation.
And so one of the things that's happened over the last century is the mean IQ has gone up seven points per generation, which is a lot, like it's really a lot.
So 15 point IQ difference is the average difference between the typical high school graduate and the typical college graduate.
So 15 points is four years of university.
Roughly speaking, seven points in a generation is half the difference between a high school student and a college graduate.
And it's gone up seven points a generation every 15 years.
It's a lot.
And so is intelligence mutable?
Well, there's some evidence that it is.
Why did it happen?
Well, partly because there are far few extremely deprived people Even on the information front, some of this was the introduction of television.
You know, you hear, television makes people stupider.
It's like, no, it makes smart people who could have been even smarter if they would have read Shakespeare stupider than they would have been if they read Shakespeare if they're watching TV. But if you're a deprived kid and sitting in the crib with no one paying attention to you for like three years, TV is way better than that.
And so if you give people access to information and access to enough food, let's say, you pull up the bottom end of the cognitive distribution tremendously.
And a lot of that, a tremendous amount of that has happened all over the world in the last hundred years.
And that's a great deal for everyone because, well, that's that much more brain power that's available for everyone to benefit from.
Like it's unbelievably valuable and you can see the cascade in that part of our technological transformation.
It's so incredibly fast.
It's like, well, the Chinese are producing as many engineers every year as the Americans have engineers.
It's no wonder that things are accelerating at such a rate.
Now, they don't innovate at the same rate as the U.S. innovates, but they're not doing too bad.
And soon, you know, depending on how much they continue to flirt with totalitarianism, just think of all that billion people, all that creativity unleashed.
The totalitarianism versus innovation, versus giving people the freedom and also removing the fear of that totalitarian government so they have the ability to take risks.
It's the part of the eternal dance between freedom and structure, even.
And that's a tough one, because there's no freedom without structure.
Like, I used to play a game with my students when we were talking about Jean Piaget, who was very interested in the development of morality through games.
This almost took the top of my head off when I realized it.
And it took me about four months of thinking to figure this out.
Because when I was in graduate school at McGill, I was really interested, I became really interested in the reality of evil, and I was very interested in the viability of nihilistic beliefs.
You know, why bother if everything's going to disappear in a hundred years?
Who cares?
Life, you know, it's meaningless.
In the final analysis, life is meaningless.
Okay, well, you know, you can make a credible case for that.
Now, it's an upsetting case.
Because once you accept that, first of all, you're anxious and hurt by it.
So that's not so good.
And second, it kind of makes you aimless.
And that's part of nihilism.
It's like, you know, you're anxious and upset, but you're also aimless.
Because why bother?
And fair enough, but you can make a credible case for it.
But then I thought, well, when that gets out of hand, Maybe you're nihilistic because you're mortal and life ends in death.
So you're sort of nihilistic because of suffering.
And so then you become nihilistic as a logical response to that, and then what happens?
And then what you see is that nihilistic people definitely make suffering worse.
Definitely.
They make it worse for themselves, for sure.
But then they get bitter because their lives are so unbearable, and then they start to take it out on other people.
So if you are nihilistic, that's not neutral.
It gets bad real fast.
So then I thought, well, are there any antidotes to meaninglessness?
And rational antidotes are hard to come by because you can just say, well, who cares?
If in a thousand years we're all going to be dead, why get out of bed in the morning?
You can't really mount a rational case why that's not reasonable.
Now, I'm not saying it is reasonable, but I thought about music.
Music is a very strange art form.
I had a great journalist friend of mine, he said to me the other day, he said, all art aspires to the condition of music, which I thought was great.
But music, you think about the revitalizing effect music continues to have in our culture, especially among young people, and that's really, really been the case since the beginning of the 60s.
It's like...
We got more nihilistic and less religious and all of that as our culture became more secular and more rational, more materialistic.
And at the same time the power of music as a cultural phenomena just grew and grew and grew and grew.
So music gives you the intimation of meaning.
Directly.
So I used to watch punk rockers.
I went to a Ramones concert once, which was really fun.
We were up in the second floor of this theater in Montreal, and the Ramones were playing on stage like a hundred feet away with their huge stadium.
Equipment!
It was so loud in there.
Like, I had to listen to the whole concert with my ears plugged, and I was still like three-quarters deaf for three days.
And beneath us, on the stage, sort of, in front of the stage, there was a flat place, and all these punks were down there smashing into each other and doing this really rough dance.
And I thought, this is so cool.
We got all these nihilistic punks in here, like, half beating themselves up, dancing, and being taken in by this rough music.
That gave them, even in their aggressive nihilism, a sense of meaning.
I thought that was so cool.
So why does music do that?
That's a good question.
Because people think of music as a non-representational art.
Well, you could say it represents emotions, and fair enough, fair enough.
But I was thinking more like a picture of an actual thing.
Okay, so let's think about what music is.
First of all, it's a pattern.
So, non-pattern music is noise.
It's a pattern.
But then it isn't one pattern.
It's multiple patterns layered on top of one another in a harmonious manner and in a manner that indicates, in some sense, communication between all the patterned layers because they have to go together.
And so, what's the world?
Well, the world is made of objects.
No, it's not.
It's made of patterns.
So, music is just like the world.
Because the world's made of patterns.
And then music has layered patterns that are all moving together in a harmonious manner.
And so what do you do when you hear that, especially if it's got a beat?
Well then you move your body.
And you want to, right?
The music calls to you to move your body.
So now you're moving your body in sync with the patterned layers of the world.
That's meaning.
And then there's more to it, so that's so cool.
Music is an analog of the structure of existence itself, and it calls to you to take part in that.
So maybe you dance by yourself, or maybe even better, you dance with someone else, and so then you both bring your bodies into this patterned relationship with this multi-layer harmony together in a spontaneous way, indicating that you can both play and are therefore potentially trustworthy future mates.
That's unbelievably cool.
And birds dance.
It's not just human beings, you know.
So this is a deep thing.
And then music does something else, too.
It puts you on the border between chaos and order.
Because a boring song does exactly what you expect it to do, and gets dull very quickly.
And an unlistenable song is so random you can't follow it.
And so what you want is predictability, With a leaving of unpredictability.
And everyone loves, oh man, I went to this bar in Nashville.
This band was playing Kelly's Heroes, a great guitarist, the best guitarist I've ever seen.
And they were playing old country music with a heavy blues rock twist.
So they do this great version of Ghost Riders in the Sky.
It's 15 minutes long.
And this brilliant guitarist just goes way out on a limb.
Everybody in the crowd, it was so fun to be there.
They're just thrilled to death because they're watching this man doing the same thing that surfers do.
He's like dancing on the edge of chaos and order in this virtuosic manner.
And everyone is so taken by that that it just lifts them out of the normality of their existence.
You know, they see this joy just transfuse them.
And that's because they got an intimation of genuine meaning.
And it's not amenable to rational criticism, which is the thing that I thought that struck me as so miraculous about music and why it has this element of salvation.
It's like it puts you directly in touch with the meaning that sustains you in life, directly.
And it shows you what that would be, which is something like to observe the harmonious interplay of the patterns of being stacked on top of one another, and then to bring yourself into alignment with that, Which is what yogis strive to do and what disciplined athletes strive to do and what we celebrate in athletics.
It's real also in what it imparts on other people.
It doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Even though people can play beautiful music when no one's around, it's not the same as playing beautiful music in front of people because there's a thing that happens when people interact with that music.
Yeah, so he had to go back on tour, which turned out to be a great thing because he made way more money on that tour than he did, I think, in his whole life.
So, Cohen, when he came onto the stage, everybody gave him a standing ovation, and then he played his sets, and it was like a religious experience, you know?
Well, it was.
It was a religious experience in the most fundamental sense.
And everybody in the audience was there, in the same place, at the same time, doing the same thing with him, you know?
And you know what that's like when you go to a great...
Well, that can happen to...
I'm sure it happens to you at your comedy shows.
When the whole audience is united and the stories are unrolling and everyone's focused on it, it's not exactly the same thing, but...
But it's a horrible generalization, because you're taking an enormous group of people and you're looking at their ethnic background and their gender, and then you're dismissing them.
Women are more interested in fiction than non-fiction, and men are opposite to that.
So if you look at book buying preferences, for example, women tilt towards fiction, and men tilt towards women in fiction.
And if you want to know why that is, it's because the most reliable difference that psychologists have ever found between men and women, the biggest difference, is interest.
So, women are reliably more interested in people, and men are reliably more interested in things.
Now, there's still overlap.
It's one standard deviation, which is a big difference.
But that isn't to say no women are interested in things, because some are, and no men are interested in people, because some are.
Like, I'm a man who's more interested in people than things.
That's why I'm a psychologist.
You know, I actually have a relatively feminine personality structure because I'm pretty high in negative emotion, and I'm pretty high in agreeableness.
And that's the typical feminine structure.
And that's an interesting discussion to have, too, because, you know, we have this idea in our culture that you can be a woman born in a man's body.
And that's not true.
But you can definitely be a man with a feminine personality structure.
Like, 10% of men are as feminine in their personality as the average woman is.
And vice versa.
10% of women are as masculine in their personality as the average man is.
Now, you can move those boundaries around and say, well, it's 5% and 40 or something.
It doesn't matter.
But the point is, there's plenty of men who are as feminine in their personality as the average woman.
That doesn't mean they're in the wrong body.
It just means that men and women are more alike than different, even though they are different, and that there's huge range within both genders.
Well, then I would say it depends on what period of time you're asking that question about.
Right now, if you look at teenagers, for example, who want to switch genders, 95% of them are unbearably confused.
That's what's causing that.
And I think there's other reasons, too.
I think this is a conjecture.
When the trans teenagers came after me when I opposed Bill C-16 in Canada on compelled speech grounds, I spent quite a bit of time watching them.
And I already kind of knew about that fluid identity crowd.
So when I was at Harvard, piercing and tattooing started to become a cultural rage.
And I was interested in, well, who's doing this?
Because I knew it was...
It was a practice that was limited to criminal subtypes and outcasts for a long time.
So, for example, if you worked in the circus, you were likely to be tattooed, you know, and you toured around the circus and that was a kind of carny life and it was an outsider life.
And if you were a prisoner, same thing.
But then all of a sudden it started to make its inroads into the popular culture.
So we studied a group of early adopters of tattooing and piercing.
From the perspective of personality.
Like, who are these people?
And they were all highly creative people.
And creativity is a trait.
And all people who aren't creative, that's wrong.
In fact, most people aren't creative at all.
And I can explain that later, but they're not.
We developed a scale called the Creative Achievement Questionnaire, which assesses lifetime contribution to 13 different creative domains.
And your scores would range from zero, I have no training or talent in this area, to, I think it was eight.
I'm an internationally recognized expert in this area.
And so, 70% of people, if you sum their scores across all 13 domains, scored zero.
And I ask audiences, like, how many portraits have you painted?
I knew a kid in Toronto who was on the autistic spectrum and a lot of the people who were manifesting serious issues with gender identity are on the autistic spectrum.
Yeah, well, that's a different thing, the rapid onset.
That's more like...
So part of the reason I objected to Bill C-16 to begin with was because I knew full well as a clinician that as soon as we messed with fundamental sex categories and changed the terminology, we would fatally confuse thousands of young girls.
I knew that because I knew the literature on psychological contagion.
And it stretches back like 500 years, that literature.
300 years.
It's all outlined in a book by Henri Ellenbergé called History of...
History of...
What's the name of the book?
History of psychoanalytic ideas, it doesn't matter.
It's Henri Alenbergier and it's his main work, if you want to look it up.
And so, psychological contagions are very common.
And so, one of them, for example, was the satanic ritual abuse accusations that emerged in daycares in the 1980s.
And that was a consequence of women going into the workforce en masse, leaving their children with strangers, and starting to have pathological fantasies about it, especially if they were borderline schizophrenic.
And those fantasies propagated into the population.
Well, okay, so you see people with blue hair, the blue-haired crowd.
Well, they're the same people that were doing tattooing and piercing, and they often are literally the same people because they have piercings.
It's like, well, they have mutable identities.
They're not stable in their identities.
They're creative.
Creative people, by definition, aren't stable in their identities.
That's what makes them creative.
Now, the downside of that is...
Creativity is a high-risk, high-return strategy.
Your new idea is probably stupid and wrong, and maybe it's fatal.
But now and then, it's unbelievably successful.
And also, now and then, our culture would die without it.
So we always have this problem, because we have to maintain stability.
Because otherwise everything degenerates into chaos.
But mere stability won't work because the future is different from the past.
Like technically different.
Different in a non-deterministic way.
It's actually different.
And so then we have to figure out, well how do we modify our memories or our traditions?
At a rate that enables us to keep up with the culture.
And the answer to this is, in part, we let creative people play multiple games on the fringe and some of them are radically successful and then we copy them.
But there are for sure a lot of people that transition, and there has been work on this that shows that if they didn't transition, they wanted to transition at one point in time, and then they eventually wound up becoming gay men.
I also think, by the way, that part of what we're seeing in late adolescence, with this insistence on the primacy of felt identity, is the re-emergence of suppressed fantasy play that should have taken place at between, say, three and five.
That's been suppressed by the imposition of technological artifacts like television and phones and by the absence of free play among children who are hyper-supervised.
His sister was about three and had a little gaggle of friends, and they used to dress him up like a fairy princess.
And this didn't happen for, like, years, it happened for a couple of weeks, you know, and he was playing along, and I went down there, and I'm a northern Albertan, you know, and so the gender roles there were fairly finely defined, and I was watching this, I thought, Is it really a good thing that he's got wings on, a little fairy hat, and a wand, and a dress?
Is that okay?
And I talked to Tammy about it.
I said, the girls are dressing Julian up like a princess.
And it kind of I have qualms about it, but I'm not sure what to do.
Because he was having a good time and he was playing with the girls.
We should be able to play with people of the opposite sex.
So he's learning to play with the girls.
Good.
Is he enjoying it?
Yes.
Are they bullying him?
No.
Are the girls enjoying it?
Yes.
That's all good.
Okay, so what does it mean he's playing at being a girl?
Oh!
He's trying to understand what it means to be a girl.
Well, how do you understand that when you're three?
Or maybe when you're fifty?
You play at it.
Which means you allow that pattern of being to inhabit you.
And you experiment with it.
Now, a lot of older transgender types, the late onset types, they're playing.
They just don't know it.
Now, there are often people who have kind of a rigid identity, and part of their escape from that rigid identity is to develop some of the characteristics that are typical of the opposite sex.
Yeah, sure, it can be anxiety too, but then often, under anxious conditions, people will revert to their persona, because it's a well-rehearsed set of routines, and that they know is socially acceptable.
Okay, so for the Jungians, the first step outside the persona was the shadow.
Because there's a subset of men that like to hit women during sex, and a lot of them turn out to be these kind of male feminist types, which is really strange.
So the second stage of development in the Jungian sense is the integration of countersexual possibilities.
So I just watched Joachim Phoenix in Joker.
And he's a very charismatic actor and...
And I was thinking, well, God, because he carried that whole movie single-handedly.
It's a dark, dark movie, and it has to do with resentment.
This man who was forced to be nice by his mother, who turns out to be absolutely crazy and abused him like mad when he was a kid.
And then he becomes this role model for the dissemination of complete catastrophe into the entire society.
It's a story of Cain, in part.
But Phoenix really carries that, and part of the reason that he does that is because he creates a compelling character who's sympathetic.
Like, you can be sympathetic to him because he really did have a hard life, like, really hard.
But Phoenix is an extraordinarily charismatic person, partly because he's so unbelievably—he's masculine in his features and carved, but he's so graceful.
Every single thing he does in the entire movie is a dance.
Like, he's conscious of every single movement he makes.
Every turn of his head is conscious.
It's dance-like.
And you can't take your eyes off it.
And a lot of stellar performers had that ability to integrate, male performers had that ability to integrate that feminine grace into their masculine character.
You saw that with Bowie, David Bowie.
You saw it with Mick Jagger.
They're good examples.
A lot of those 70s glam rockers were gender benders, long hair, a lot of flashy outfits.
And they did show, and they weren't exactly androgynous, that's not the right way to think about it, is they manifested a higher order integration of masculine and feminine, and that made them charismatic.
And I would say that part of the compulsion between adult-onset transsexuality of the autogynephalic type is a consequence of the sexual instinct manifesting self as a guide to the integration of personality across the sex divide.
So it was a cool thing to walk through because it's chronological.
They have one floor, which is the history of the Bible.
But it's not exactly that.
It's really what it is, is the history of the book.
Now, in many ways, the first book was the Bible.
I mean, literally.
Because at one point, there was only one book.
As far as our Western culture is concerned, there was one book.
And for a while, literally, there was only one book.
And that book was the Bible.
And then before it was the Bible, it was scrolls, and it was writings on papyrus.
But we were starting to aggregate written text together.
And it went through all sorts of technological transformations, and then it became...
Books that everybody could buy.
The book everybody could buy.
And the first one of those was the Bible.
And then it became all sorts of books that everybody could buy.
But all those books, in some sense, emerged out of that underlying book.
And that book itself, the Bible isn't a book, it's a library.
It's a collection of books.
And so, what I figured out was, partly because I was talking to my brother-in-law, Jim Keller, who's The world's greatest chip designer and has now designed a chip that's as powerful as the human brain, which is optimized for artificial intelligence learning, by the way.
And so I talked to him about that.
He said, you heard of the internet?
I said, yeah, Jim, I've heard of the internet.
He said, this is way more revolutionary than that.
So, in any case, we were talking about meaning in text because we were talking about translation and the problem of understanding text.
And Jim said...
The meaning of words is coded in the relationship of the words to one another.
And the postmodernists make that case, that all meaning is derived from the relationship between words.
That's wrong, because, well, what about rage?
That's not words.
And what about moving your hand?
That's not words.
So it's wrong, but part of it's right, because The meaning we derive from the verbal domain is encoded in the relationship between words.
So now then you think, well, let's think about the relationship between words.
Well, some words are dependent on other words.
Some ideas are dependent on other ideas.
The more ideas are dependent on a given idea, the more fundamental that idea is.
That's a definition of fundamental.
So now imagine you have an aggregation of texts in a civilization.
You say, which are the fundamental texts?
And the answer is, the texts upon which most other texts depend.
And so you put Shakespeare way in there in English, because so many texts are dependent on Shakespeare's literary revelations.
And Milton would be in that category, and Dante would be in that category, at least in translation.
Fundamental authors, part of the Western canon, not because of the arbitrary dictates of power, but because those texts influenced more other texts.
And then you think about that as a hierarchy, okay, with the Bible at its base, which is certainly the case.
Now, imagine that's the entire corpus of linguistic production, all things considered.
Now, how do you understand that?
Like, literally, how do you understand that?
The answer is, you sample it by reading and listening to stories and listening to people talk.
You sample that whole domain, you build a low-resolution representation of that inside you, and then you listen and see through that.
And so it isn't that the Bible is true.
It's that the Bible is the precondition for the manifestation of truth, which makes it way more true than just true.
It's a whole different kind of true.
And I think this is not only literally the case.
Factually, I think it can't be in either way.
It's the only way we can solve the problem of perception.
That's the problem if you are stuck somewhere where the only conversation that's available is with dull people.
Like if you have a job and the people at the job are like your friend who was on cocaine and alcohol and wound up dying from it.
Those kinds of people, if you're only around them, it can severely limit the way you express yourself and the way you see the world and the amount of stimulation you get out of interacting with people.
So it'll inhibit your intellectual development, because you won't be interested in expanding ideas, and you may look to escape.
It inhibits not just your intellectual development, but the entire unfolding of your existence.
One of the things that I hope to talk to people a lot about on this tour is the idea that I did a series on Genesis that became quite popular, and one of the stories I analyzed was the story of Abraham.
Very cool story, because Abraham's like 80 years old, living in his father's tent.
Talk about failure to launch.
And God shows up one day and says, you have to leave everything you know and journey out into the unknown.
And you think, well, what is that?
Well, that's the call to adventure.
That's what it is.
And so, and what happens to Abraham is it's a bloody catastrophe.
Like, the first thing he runs into is a war, and then he goes into a totalitarian state, Egypt, and they try to steal his wife, and it's like...
Man, he's thinking, things are pretty good in that tent.
But, well, he goes on this tremendous adventure, and then he's the forefather of, you know, biblically speaking, half the people on the planet.
He has this tremendous adventure.
Think, well, what do you set against the suffering of your life?
Well, the adventure of your life, that's what you said against it.
It's not safety.
Forget about that.
There's no safety for mortals, that's for sure.
And besides, safety?
That's what you want?
You don't want that.
You want adventure.
So then the question is, where's adventure to be found?
Don't you think that that is done a lot by people that have not taken those chances, that that diminishing of effort by calling a painter or a musician and saying that those people are motivated by power These are from career intellectuals who don't venture outside of the universities.
And I think we should be very careful people aren't charitable.
Very careful of people who aren't nice.
There's people that make a career just insulting and shitting on people all the time, and they never can look at things from that person's perspective.
I'm going to New York, so I'm going on a 40-city tour, which is going to be, I hope, playful and fun, you know, as well as serious, because we're trying to maintain a spirit of play while we undertake it.
That's part of the goal.
And I'm inviting some old friends from high school to join me in New York, and they were this group of people that I knew who were competitive comedians, essentially.
And all we ever did when we hung out together, all of the status...
I was walking through New York Times Square with Douglas Murray about a month ago, and we had gone to an opera and we were on the way to this unbelievably fun Russian bar.
And we were walking through Times Square.
And then in Times Square, there's these people dressed up like superheroes, say, and kids that have been hired to do this.
And Spider-Man ran up to me and he said, Are you Jordan Peterson?
And I said, Are you Spider-Man?
And that was pretty damn funny.
unidentified
And then Douglas Murray, we were walking by and Douglas Murray said, I wish he would have asked me if I was Douglas Murray.
So I went to Cambridge and Oxford in December after I had been disinvited, and that's a whole interesting story in and of itself, because there's a real free speech movement developed at Cambridge and centered on the School of Divinity that's so interesting, yeah.
So it's really starting to manifest itself in...
In all sorts of fascinating ways.
But I tested out some of the ideas that I talked to you about today, about the idea that we have to look at the world through an ethical structure, not an objective structure.
A literary structure, in fact.
And I developed a little bit more when I was talking to you today, because I hadn't realized at that point that this literary structure was composed in part of the relationship between foundational texts, and that the Bible was by definition at the bottom of that.
It has to be, technically, because—I'll go back to that for a minute—because imagine that as we moved forward through time, at one point we had no books at all, we had no writing.
Well, then the question might be, well, what did we write down?
And the answer is, well, stories.
Well, what are stories?
Well, they're descriptions of people moving through time and space doing things.
Now, that isn't all they are, because they can be boring.
So they're interesting stories about, they're interesting descriptions of people moving through time and space.
But it's not just that, because while you're expanding, you're also discarding.
Right?
Yeah, so that's part of it that makes it redemptive, right?
And there's a reason that in Revelation, Christ comes back with his sword to judge the elect and the damned.
There's a reason for that, because that's a symbol of the operation of the Logos.
And the Logos, even in dialogue, says...
That's an interesting point.
We'll keep that.
Let's focus on that.
Well, we can ignore that.
We can get rid of that.
We can junk that.
And it's this constant, part of it's mercy, because let's keep what's good, because we want everyone to flourish, but part of it's judgment.
That's the sword.
It's like, no.
No, not this.
And you get rid of most things, right?
You can't keep most things.
You have to put them aside.
Well, there's an old idea that Jung elaborated on that God rules with two hands, mercy and justice.
And the mercy is, well, let's let everyone flourish and welcome people and forgive them, all of that.
But justice is more, yeah, but let's do the right thing and leave what's wrong behind.
And that requires judgment, judiciousness.
I talked to Jimmy Carr about how he prepared for his comedy tour.
And maybe you do exactly the same thing.
And he said, stand-up comedy is the most dialogical of artistic enterprises.
And I thought, well, what do you mean?
Because you're just talking like I do on lectures.
I'm listening to the audience all the time.
He's making contact with them, watching how they're reacting.
I'm listening.
Carr said, well, I do a hundred shows before I go out on tour and I try out new material.
So he generates new material, a lot of it.
That's the creativity part.
Then he goes and tries it out in audiences.
And they either laugh or they don't.
And because he's brave and listens, he notices when he's not funny and he stops being not funny.
And so the audience just tells him what's funny, and then he collects that across a hundred instances, and then that's funny and verified by the audience, and he goes out and tells those jokes.
And so that's dialogical and redemptive as well.
It's like, what jokes need to be told?
Well, our culture has some sacred cows.
Those are idols.
The idols that the Israelites worshipped in the desert, the golden calf, sacred cows.
They need to be punctured.
Why?
Well, because they're impeding our progress.
Well, how do we puncture them?
Well, one way is we show that we can transcend them.
And the Canadians are doing that all the time.
Here's something we can't laugh about.
Let's laugh about it.
Everybody breaks down.
Everybody cracks up.
You know, it's so cool when people laugh, they can't fight.
I used to go work out with Jim Keller, this chip designer, and we did this for years, and one of our jokes was, you know, we'd be striving to bench press whatever we were managing at the time, 175 pounds, like it's really straining, and then we'd crack a joke, and that was always funny.
We spotted him, of course, because as soon as you laugh...
All your muscular tension disappears.
And so that's so cool, Ace.
When you laugh, you can't fight.
You can't fight when you're laughing.
So how much laughing should we be doing?
It depends on how much fighting we want to do.
And maybe if we didn't want to do any fighting, we'd be laughing all the time.
You know, I'll write it out and then I try to go on stage and on stage I'm informed by the feeling that I have interacting with the crowd to take it to a different place, to take the subject to a different place, to abandon parts of it that just don't feel organic to me.
And you learn through the crowd that you can't just write.
Sometimes you can.
Sometimes jokes come out in full form.
There's some jokes that I wrote that I literally wrote them down and then I did them on stage the exact way that I wrote them down.
And they always stayed that way.
I don't know why.
But some of them, they don't come that way.
They come like as a thing...
That you have to piece together.
Here you have some material.
You have some raw material.
And I guarantee you this could be a house.
But you're going to have to figure out what the layout is.
And I have a whole bunch of questions that I've investigated...
And what I try to do in a lecture, and that's what I do on the tour, is I have a question that I haven't investigated to my satisfaction.
Then I sit backstage and I think, okay, what question am I investigating?
It has to be one I actually want to investigate.
It can't be a lie.
This is a good hint for people who want to write essays.
Don't write an essay about a question that you don't want an answer to, because that's a lie.
And it'll be dull, and you'll hate it, and you'll hate writing, and you'll get a bad grade, and you'll get cynical, and you'll drop out.
It's not good.
So you've got to be a real question.
So, okay, this is a question.
I think it's worthy of pursuit.
I'd like to get farther with it.
Okay, here's a theory I know about that we could explore it with.
Here's another one.
Here's some examples of that that make good stories.
Here's another place I could go to investigate that.
So I have that in my mind, and then I go out and I'm watching.
I always watch single people in the audience.
One at a time.
The lights kind of interfere with that.
Because I like to be able to see the people at the back, but I can't.
So I watch the front people, and I see, is this landing?
Are the lights going on?
Because you can tell.
I think the thing that's most similar to what I'm doing in my book tour is stand-up comedy.
So you can tell if it's landing, people are nodding, and they're not fidgeting, and the crowd isn't rustling.
They're all focused, and some of them are looking like this.
And then you see someone who's kind of nodding off, and if there's a lot of them, that's a problem.
But if it's one guy, you don't look at him, look at someone else.
You know, maybe he had a bad day.
You don't take that personally.
And then the crowd, you said, informs you.
And inform is really an interesting term.
Information.
So now you're looking at the crowd and you're looking at their eyes in particular and their face and their eyes tell you what they're focused on so what they think is important and their face tells you how they're reacting and then you glance around the crowd and then you get a sense of the whole crowd and you map that onto your body and that gives rise to a set of intuitions that allows you to communicate because otherwise you couldn't communicate and that's listening although you're doing it with your eyes but you're still listening And that does inform this dance, and that's partly also why people love stand-up comedy.
That's partly why they like my lectures, is because they don't know what's going to happen, and neither do I, and it could fail at any moment.
And then sometimes that'll happen mid-lecture, and I think, then I get self-conscious, then I forget everything I'm talking about, and then that can be real awkward.
Generally, so far, knock wood, if I pause, I can recreate the argument, and then I can figure out where I was headed, and then I can think, oh yes, that's why I made that point, and then I can go back.
You know, one of the things comedians often do...
Is they'll tell a joke early in the set.
And then quite a bit later in the set, they'll reintroduce the joke.
So, when you're in the zone, which you love to be in, and you know when you're in it, and so does the audience, so does everybody, they're in the zone, man.
Athletes are in the zone.
Everyone's like, oh my god, they're in the zone, isn't that cool?
I think what's going on with comedy at least I can speak to that I've never really done any lectures but that with comedy what's happening is there's it's kind of a mass hypnosis and the audience is trusting you with their thoughts if your thoughts are clean enough meaning if they're they're precise enough that someone can follow you with wonder Like, not knowing where you're going with it.
It can't be too obvious.
One of the worst things a comic can do is have too many words to set up a premise and to set up a punchline, because then it allows the person to formulate their own punchline.
But one of the things that I love the most about psychedelics is that it informs me of that—just by existing, it informs me that all of my notions— Of reality itself are bullshit.
They're all bullshit.
And I live in this sort of confined, this restrained, narrow, carved pathway world because that's where I live all the time.
Now, when you start to wonder about something, what you're actually doing when you wonder about it is freeing your perception from the constraints of memory.
And that's a place of dancing.
It's a place where memory itself is updated.
And if you trust someone and you express that sense of wonder in the confines of that trust, then you are in fact...
You are in fact participating in the process that reveals the underlying complexity of the world to you, and then does literally inform you.
And you feel that, I've been very interested technically in the instinct of meaning, because what is meaning?
And is it illusory?
Because that's the fundamental question in some sense.
It isn't even is suffering real.
Is the meaning that keeps suffering at bay, is that real?
That's a more fundamental question.
And the answer to that is, it's not only real, it is the most real thing.
And you have an instinct that signals its presence to you.
And part of that manifests itself as wonder.
It's the openness to transformation.
Because it isn't even the new ideas that are redeeming.
It's the process of continually opening yourself up to the transformation of new ideas.
Well, I thought a bunch of the things that we just talked about.
You know, what happens is that in a sensory deprivation tank, You become increasingly sensitive to less and less because there's almost nothing going on.
So the threshold for perception, you get more and more and more sensitive as you're trying to pick up signal where there's no signal.
And that can open these gates of imagination, for example.
You know this already because to some degree, imagine you want to go figure something out.
You usually go somewhere Where you can be by yourself.
You're not flooded by sensory information.
Maybe you go for a walk, maybe you go sit on your bed.
You kind of shield yourself from outside input.
And then, by concentrating, you open yourself up to this internal revelation that's otherwise blotted out by the external world.
And that really happens to a huge degree in the sensory deprivation tank, or can.
And I think that is akin in many ways to, and people have made this case many times, is that it's analogous to a psychedelic experience, and I think that's technically true.
It certainly is, because if that experience was achievable through a psychedelic, I think it'd be a very popular psychedelic.
If the experience of having no sensory input and being able to be alone with your thoughts, like completely without The influence of even gravity on your body and the seat or the floor on your feet, you don't feel any of it.
Yeah, you start to get, because you've eliminated all that external stimulation, you allow yourself to become aware of things happening that would otherwise be in the background.
Jung believed, for example, as Carl Jung, that we're always dreaming.
Always.
We just don't perceive it because the outer world blots it out.
It's even deeper than that because, look, there's a thread of meaning that guides this conversation.
And neither of us know what it is.
We know when it manifests itself, because we get interested, right?
Think, oh, that's interesting, and then, you know, I say something, you think it's interesting, and you nail it with a bunch of words, and then I pick up some of the words, and I think, that's interesting, and I nail it with a bunch of words.
But there's this thread, it's the golden thread, that leads you out of Ariadne's maze, by the way, and that's part of the redemptive process, is By following that manifestation of spontaneous interest, truthfully, we participate in this process that revitalizes our perceptions.
And that's technically true.
That's what's happening.
And then what's even more cool than that is that there's nothing we can experience that we would rather do than that if it's happening intensely.
And that's because that is the best thing we can do.
I have other things I do that are probably partial substitutes for it or reasonable substitute.
I do kundalini yoga in the morning with my wife.
I have for 20 years.
Not every day, but I'd say a third of the time and often for months on end.
And I've learned what that means.
So you know when you do those yoga poses?
That's not yoga.
That's training for yoga.
It's like, imagine that you go to a dance studio and they teach you moves.
That's not dancing.
Dancing is what you do on the stage after you've written your jokes.
And yoga is what you do with your body after you've mastered the poses.
Because it's all spontaneous.
And so, when my wife and I do kundalini yoga in the morning, it's a series of flexion exercises and breathing.
But mostly what it is is, so maybe one is rotation of the head.
Like that.
And then, but you're paying attention.
It's like, okay, oh, my back hurts there.
Okay, I'll move my head back and forth a little bit.
Relax.
Move my head.
Relax.
Okay, it doesn't hurt anymore.
Oh, that hurts.
Oh, got to explore there.
Let that go.
Let that go.
And you go through your whole body.
It's like, oh, I'm cramped there.
Oh, that hurts.
And what's so cool, it's like massage.
You know, if you're hurting and someone massages that, the pain goes away.
What the hell is going on there?
Facilitation of circulation, removal of toxins from that locale, but also the drawing of your reparative attention to that spot.
Well, yoga is like that.
It's like, oh, I'm out of alignment there.
Oh, I'm out of alignment there.
So what you're doing, and this is akin to stacking the chakras, which is the same as a musical experience, is imagine that to get that process of optimal self-revelation right, you have to be aligned.
Adam's aligned.
With the molecules above them, the molecules aligned in the cells, the cells aligned in the musculature, the muscles aligned in the body, the body aligned with the environment, broadly speaking, all stacked up.
That's the cosmic tree, by the way.
That's the tree the shaman climb up and down in the psychedelic experience.
That cosmic tree that unites levels of being.
We can climb that with our consciousness.
We do it all the time.
You know, if you're writing a book, you concentrate on the word or the paragraph or the whole chapter.
You know, and when we're conversing, I could concentrate on each word or the phrase or the sentence or the context, or I could look around the room, up and down these levels of analysis.
In yoga, you're trying to get your body psychophysiologically aligned so communication between all those levels isn't interfered with unnecessarily.
And then that opens you up, in some sense, to the possibility of speech emanating from the depths.
One of the things that people who do Kundalini talk about is that they are able to achieve psychedelic states and psychedelic states that ordinarily are achieved through drugs.
I have many friends who have done Kundalini and for whatever reason I never have but they have said that through it with long-term commitment to practice they can achieve these bizarre states where they have hallucinations.
Okay, what about oil sheiks that have had slaves and have treated people like total garbage, had people assassinated for criticizing them, heads of state of these bizarre countries where you do have these oligarchs that are running the military and they're in charge of massive amounts of currency?
So one of my graduate students, I used the word dominance hierarchy for years.
He took me to task, former student, brilliant guy, slow to speak, but never says anything he hasn't thought through for like five years.
So when he talks, I listen.
He said, stop using the term dominance hierarchy.
Shocked me because it's like a term used in biology everywhere.
He said, why?
He said, it's full of implicit Marxist suppositions.
I thought, okay, I'll think about that for a while.
He said, here's the dominance hierarchy.
I strip you naked, put a choke chain around you and lead you around on the floor.
It's like that's dominant.
That's not what's happening in most human hierarchies and you know that because you have comrades you joke with, you play with.
You said that organizations that are functional aren't based on power.
What are they based on?
Well, not power.
So not dominance.
It's like, okay, I thought about that for about two years.
It's like, oh, that's a really fundamental criticism.
And I didn't realize that implicit Marxist presuppositions had been structuring biological thought.
And that's exactly right.
And so what's the proper hierarchy constituted by?
Well, it's not the expression of the will to power.
That's basically the admission that satanic forces rule the world.
It's the same idea.
Well, what rules?
Well, satanic forces rule hell, and yes, you can be successful as a hellish ruler.
Now, whether you can maintain that, Frans de Waal, world's greatest primatologist, studies chimpanzees.
They're tough, and they're male-dominant, unlike Bonobos.
They're male-dominant.
So they're patriarchal hierarchies.
Okay, rough, tough chimp can pound everybody flat, maintains the highest power through intimidation.
He's got preferential sexual access to the females.
He does that by chasing away the subordinates.
It's like, heaven, he's dominant.
What happens to him?
One day he has a bad day, and two subordinate males that he hasn't really been attending to and has been harassing quite a lot jump him, and they castrate him, and they tear him to pieces.
Well, let's not underestimate the utility of oppression as a means to ruling hell.
We can agree on that.
But, I mean, you're asking an absolutely germane question.
In the book of Exodus, the Pharaoh is a tyrant.
But he's up against God.
And the Pharaoh loses.
And you might think, well, what does that mean?
Well, it's complicated.
It's a complicated story.
That's why it's been around for like 3,000 years.
And why it's the fundamental narrative, for example, it was the narrative that black Christians really identified with in the United States, which is something that's really worth thinking about, the fact that that's the case.
The Pharaoh is tortured by God.
Well, what's God?
Well, we said already, at least to some degree, God is the amalgamation of all that is good.
I'm not speaking religiously when I say that.
I'm speaking conceptually.
God is the union of all things that are good.
Okay, but that's not conceptual exactly, because that's also something that you exist in a relationship to and that you act out.
It's not just an idea.
Okay, so God is that spirit that calls to Abraham to have the adventure of his life instead of languishing in his father's tent, so it's called to adventure.
It's truth.
It's the burning bush.
It's the psychedelic experience.
It's God against the Pharaoh.
The Pharaoh's a totalitarian, and he keeps imposing his edicts, running contrary to freedom, promoting slavery, let's say.
Well, the kingdom fractures and crumbles continually, continually, continually.
And you might say, well, time frame.
Time frame's a problem, man.
Maybe you can be a successful tyrant even over the course of your lifetime.
But maybe you doom your country to death.
You doom your country to hell.
Is that success?
It depends on what you mean success is, because these things do depend on definitions.
You can trace the religious experience, the religious revelation, the central religious revelation, back at least 25,000 years of continued transmission.
I think – I can only say what I've concluded by looking in as many places I could possibly look, ranging from the theological, through the literary, through history, through the scientific – The biochemical, all of that, trying to stack all that up.
So it's multiple, it's called a multi-method, multi-trait construct analysis.
The idea is, if something's true, it will manifest itself in multiple different places with independent methodologies.
So it's like your senses do that.
Is this real?
Well, I can see it, I can hear it, I can touch it, I can taste it.
Five things say it's real.
Is this cup there, Joe?
Yes.
Okay, now you said it's real too.
Okay.
Real.
Now, is that finally real?
No.
But that's a different question.
It's real enough for the purposes.
Same thing here.
I think the idea that, like Jack and the Beanstalk, the magic beans climbing up the magic stalk to heaven, that's a shamanic tale.
Well, it is right, and there's a lot of people that still aren't aware, but at least in academia, at least in Harvard, it's now being pursued with sincerity.
He's a really traditional Biological, psychological researcher.
And he said, well, we'll measure people's heart rate and we'll check their psychophysiological responses and, you know, we'll see what this DMT does.
It's like, and then all these people came back from the experience and said, hey, I got shot right out of my body and I went into a domain where I met alien beings.
It's like, you were dreaming.
No, no, you don't understand.
I've dreamt before and this was not only real, it was the most real thing I've ever experienced.
And so, I read The Spirit Molecule, which is a very interesting book, and by the end of it, Strassman is, well, he kind of got shell-shocked, like our whole culture did, when it discovered LSD. Well, he had to be very careful in his depictions, too, because he can't talk about personal experiences because he wants to be taken seriously as an actual researcher.
From his great trip, and that's also a retelling of the oldest story we know, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.
And Tolkien knew this.
I'm not making this up.
And he talked to C.S. Lewis a lot, who is a radical and extraordinarily well-informed Christian.
All of this is lurking in the background of that.
That's why that book had captured the imagination to such a degree.
It reintroduces shamanic-level religious preconceptions back into popular culture.
That's why it has that power.
Because how else do you account for it?
It has religious significance.
That's why everyone read it.
It's the definition of religious significance, that it was attractive enough that everyone read.
Well, when The Hobbit comes back, it's like all the heroes who come back from that journey Share what they have with the community and integrate it.
It's the opposite of dropping out.
Timothy Leary let his unformed political preconceptions contaminate the sacredness of his experience.
And he warped the entire culture in doing so and pretty much put an end to psychedelic drug research for like 50 years.
Drop out?
No, no.
Man up!
Get your act together.
Get your act together.
Because you get an intimation in states like that of, first of all, the fact that things are infinitely more than you could possibly realize, including you.
And the dialogue is so sharp and witty and on point.
So I watched King Arthur.
And it's a chaotic movie.
He's trying to do a lot of things at once.
And I don't think that technically it's one of his most successful movies.
But there's parts of it that are extremely interesting.
And so one part is, this is very, very cool.
So when Arthur first grips the sword, he's blown off it.
Now, he can pull it out of the stone, because he's the guy.
He's the long-lost son of the rightful king.
Long lost.
You said, well, wasn't everybody opposing the tyranny of the times?
It's like, yeah, welcome to the world, man.
Welcome to the world.
We're all long-lost sons of the rightful king.
And the king's now a tyrant.
And don't we have to deal with that?
And the answer is, bloody well right we do.
So, Arthur...
Who's got his eyes open and he's born in straightened circumstances and has to grow up street smart and his friends are all funny and they engage in witty repartee.
He knows the world from the ground up, grabs the sword, he pulls it out of the stone, but he's blown right off it.
He can't wield it because he has visions of his evil uncle who conspired with Feminine forces of chaos and killed his father, murdered his father and his mother.
So his uncle's a murderer.
His uncle's a murderer.
Well, so is your uncle.
And so is my uncle.
That's our historical guilt that the lefties weaponize all the time.
It's like the soil we walk on is soaked with blood.
And Arthur can't wield the sword that's his rightfully because he has visions of historical atrocity.
It's like, welcome to the world, man.
It's like, how do you know your masculine ambition isn't part of the world-destroying force?
Because, yes, it is.
So then, why, when I accuse you of racism and so forth, and your white privilege and your masculine privilege, like, why don't you just wander off in a corner and feel terrible and apologize?
And the answer is, you probably will.
Because most people do.
You don't, but most people do.
And I know why.
Partly because they're reasonable.
If 30 people come after you and say, you're a racist tyrant, and there's 30 of them, you go home and you think, 30 people think I'm a racist tyrant, and like, I got my flaws, man, and I might be a little racist, because we all have in-group preferences, and I shoot my mouth off sometimes, and I haven't always been the way with women that I should be, and maybe I've mistreated some people, and maybe I did it too much, and Sorry!
So, if you are working on an assembly line, and you're next to some other guy, and he brings up Ricky Gervais, and you're like, fuck that guy, that guy's a piece of shit, and he starts saying all these horrible things about the guy, that's just talk, right?
Well, this is just talk, but it's written down.
The first person to say that to me is Louis C.K. He was talking to me about the way people talk on Twitter, because it's just talk.
People talk like that all the time.
But now, when you see it written, You think it is different than just talk.
Because it's not the way they would talk to you.
So if Ricky Gervais visited that assembly line, and he was talking to those guys, then they would have to...
You would never say the things that you, even if he was not an imposing, threatening person, but you would never say the things that you would say to that guy when Ricky's not there.
If people were stationary and they were in cars and they looked over at each other, they would never talk to each other the way they do when they're driving fast.
But they don't tell you why you're getting road rage.
A lot of you're getting road rage is just your physiological response to the fact that you're going fast and your body's required to make very quick movements.
The real problem with a lot of what's going on on Twitter and I there's a bunch of people that I follow on Twitter They don't have anything to do with me.
They're just negative people and I don't even follow them follow them I bookmark their page and then I go visit them because they're so fucking crazy and I see them 12-13 hours a day tweeting It's straight madness.
And it's 100% an addiction.
And the amount of interactions that they have that are negative, the amount of expressions they have that are negative are overwhelming.
That is an addiction.
It's an outrage addiction.
They're addicted to recreational outrage and the response to their recreational outrage.
It's constant and consistent.
It doesn't vary.
They're not learning anything.
They're not They're growing and expanding the way they communicate with people and becoming better human beings and more kind human beings who are addicted to outrage.
So the kind of comment that you described where someone will say, I don't agree with your views and you're hurting all these people, those comments don't make me angry.
So the question is, if someone's being a thoughtless prick to you on Twitter, I mean, maybe one, and maybe this is the proper answer, is that you should just ignore it.
And if you continue to interface with people who 1 out of 10 is going to say something fucked up to you, and that's going to hurt your day, it's going to hurt your feelings.
I have friends that will go on Twitter all day long, comics, and they'll read comments about them, and then you'll see them at the club, they'll be a fucking wreck.
And I'll be like, hey bro, stop reading that shit.
And I'll tell them.
You know, I'll do podcasts with comics and they'll say something that's fucked up or they'll go a little too far or they'll talk over people too much and I'll tell them afterwards, like, don't read the comments.
I've found that YouTube comments were the first things I stopped reading because they were so negative sometimes.
We're so disproportionately angry about takes on certain subjects and the way they would exaggerate interactions with people and make it seem like these were horrible, aggressive exchanges when they weren't.
They were just casual disagreements between people that sometimes are clunky.
Well, also, I'll be punished because I'll hate myself.
I'll be angry at myself for my poor handling of any sort of verbal situation.
But in doing that, I have become much happier, I've become much nicer, because it's made me think of all of my interactions, like the way I interact with people, all of them are person to person.
All of them.
All of them are face to face.
Even though this podcast is reaching fucking millions of people.
All of my interactions with people are face-to-face, and it's a much healthier way to communicate with people.
Yeah, well, all the interactions I have with people face-to-face, I might as well say all, because I've had, like, I don't know how many interactions with strangers in the last five years, but it would be at least...
It's at least 75,000.
Like, at least.
It might be way more than that, but it's definitely at least that.
There's been three that weren't positive.
And weirdly enough, there's only been three that weren't extremely positive.
They're so positive that it's almost unbearable.
Because one of the things that's very strange now, I don't know what happens to you when you're out on the street.
Well, the other thing about being in a position like the one you occupy is because people know you in a way that you don't know them when they approach you.
And the reason they approach you is because you're an idol of sorts, because otherwise they wouldn't hold you in esteem.
And that is even the case if they're negatively attracted to you in some sense, right?
And so the problem with those interactions is that if you make a mistake, That person will never forget it for the rest of their life, and they will tell everyone about it.
You could have done a better job in interacting with them, and then, you know, sometimes people come up to you and...
Look, one of the things that I've done when I've met famous people that I really admired is I've been awkward and clunky.
Very likely to be the case.
And if you're awkward and clunky, especially when I was younger, and you catch someone who's tired, maybe someone who's jet-lagged or hungover, you can have a bad interaction.
And then you get burned, and you're really betrayed by that.
Like, it's a deep betrayal.
I spent a lot of time in my clinical practice working with people who are socially awkward.
I've analyzed social awkwardness at the level of detail.
And one of the things I do when people come up to me, because they're often awkward, and they'll say things like, oh, you know, I'm fanboying or something like that.
And I always shake their hands, and I always look at them, and I always ask them their name.
And no matter how awkward they are, they can almost always remember their name.
And so, once they say their name and they look back at me, 95% of that awkwardness goes away.
And then, so I can put them at ease instantly, and then we can have a little, a real interaction.
Not long, because otherwise I would only be doing that.
And that always goes wonderfully, and it's amazing.
But I think it was hard on me.
It's hard on me in a way, because...
A lot of the people who come up to me are emotional.
And so it's weird.
My life is so weird because wherever I go, it's like being surrounded by old friends because I'll go down the street and everybody says hi, you know, or they come up to me in this friendly way and open, eh?
Where you were a university professor and then all of a sudden you were famous.
And you were famous in your late 40s.
And really famous.
Not just famous, but famous as a worldwide...
Depending on who you ask, either you're a voice of reason and rationality and personal responsibility, or you're a voice of intolerance and bigotry and anger and hateful— Sexual oppression, prejudice— What did Eric Dyson call you?
Unless you're talking to someone who is like 100% African from the darkest place where they're not wearing any clothes all day and they've developed all that melanin to protect themselves from the sun.
Even the term black is weird.
And when you use it for people that are literally my color...
Like, what is it like to- and then I know you've gone through a lot of shit, and this latest thing with getting off of the benzodiazepine, That to me was a real shocker, because first of all, I had no idea that you were taking it, and then to find out that it's that difficult to get off of, and then to hear from other people that have tried to get off of it how difficult it is, and then to realize how many people around me have an issue with that stuff.
Xanax is a motherfucker.
And I didn't know what a motherfucker it was until I talked to a friend who is a counselor at a drug rehab center where he was saying that that is one of the ways that people get locked back into drinking and doing drugs is a psychiatrist will prescribe Xanax.
And sober people who get on Xanax all of a sudden start drinking.
He said it's super common.
He said that it's one of the most difficult drugs to get off of.
He said, and this is something that Dr. Carl Hart, who's, I love him to death, he's brilliant.
He speaks so openly and honestly about drugs and, you know, the guy's a professor at Columbia.
He said that there's two drugs that will kill you when you get off of them.
He goes, it's alcohol and benzodiazepine.
Those are the two that if you just quit, you'll fucking die.
Well, unfortunately, when you're dealing with people that are extremely troubled, oftentimes they look for external reasons why they're troubled and they find oppressors.
Well, she was also angry with me because when all this blew up around me, it interfered with my clinical practice and she had come to rely on our weekly meetings and so she was angry about being abandoned and it was really sad because I didn't want to abandon my clients.
I had to stop my clinical practice, which was also very upsetting to me because I had like 20 clients and I knew these people, man.
I knew these people.
You know, I'd fold them through thick and thin and then all of a sudden so many things piled up around me that I found when I was in a clinical session that I was distracted.
So you can't be distracted in a clinical session.
And so, anyways, what emerged from that, and it was in the middle of the winter, and I have seasonal affective disorder, I couldn't sleep at all for quite a long time.
And I went to my doctor and I said, I can't sleep, and he gave me a sleeping medication and an anti-anxiety drug, and I took a little bit of the anti-anxiety drug, and I could sleep.
And my life was pretty stressful, and I thought, okay, I'm much better.
I'm just going to leave this be.
This is working.
I'm not going to muck with it, because I could barely go back to work.
Yeah, I hate to talk about it because I don't really recommend this to people, you know, because I'm not a dietician and I'm not really that interested in it, in a sense, you know.
And I had peripheral uveitis, which caused my right eye to be full of floaters because there's inflammation on the bottom producing tissue production, and that would fill the aqueous liquid in my eye, and I could see all these floaters all the time.
And that's pretty much gone completely.
I lost 50 pounds in seven months and now I weigh exactly what I weighed when I was 23. I don't have an ounce of excess body fat.
The sides of my legs were quite numb for like two decades.
Yeah, it was great because it really worked out nicely because when I was so ill I had something to look forward to because I knew Yulia was going to send me a beautiful image and I didn't know what it was going to be and then we assembled it into a book and then I started working with this musician Marshall Tully who I really like and who's a good arranger and he can play all sorts of instruments and he's got a great musical sense and So we started working on music together.
So he'd write the music and I wrote some of it, but he wrote most of it and he played almost all of it.
And we had a band involved for one part and we'll do that some more.
And so he'd write the music and then I'd write the lyrics.
And then I'd send...
And then we'd record it.
I'd send the music and lyrics to Yulia, and she'd generate a bunch of images, and so then we made a bunch of videos out of it, set to music, which we'll release on YouTube in, like, fall of this year.
And, you know, that was part of marketing for the book, but then it turned into its own complete enterprise, and so we're going to put out an album of all these songs, and so that's...
It started to get worse about the same time that Tammy went into the hospital, because she was fighting her way through, you know, catastrophic cancer at the same time when this started to happen.
I think it made me, again, it made me more susceptible to something that was already happening.
So whatever this illness has that's plagued my family, my father, my grandfather, multiple cousins, and a lot of immunological problems on my mother's side too.
I have a cousin whose daughter died of immunological problems, the same ones that Michaela had.
Well, Michaela was invited to Oxford to debate, and that was fun because I was invited about the same time, so we got to go there and speak on the same night, which was really cool, you know, because how unlikely is that, right?
But I really am hoping that this debate is released soon because one of the people on the other side who was rallying against meat delivered the most preposterously unsatirizable politically correct rant That I'd ever seen anyone deliver anywhere by a factor of about five.
She just about made me convulse.
And part of it was sympathy, you know, because it was so over the top.
It was so utterly miraculous that anyone could, and two of her compatriots were sitting in the audience, and she said things like, every hamburger is served with a side order of misogyny, which is a really good line.
You know they crafted that line.
It's a pretty good joke.
But, you know, she said...
Because it's a female cow?
Which is a dangerous territory to wander into, that analogy.
And she said that she compared the husbandry of animals to slavery, which is also a place that you wander into with real care when you choose your metaphors.
And she said the reason we're bombarded with images of sexy chickens and sexy cows is because we feminize our farm animals before devouring them.
And there were two people who helped craft her speech, and they were sitting in the audience.
And while she was on this unbelievable rant, It was just jaw-droppingly miraculous.
And they kept yelling genocide.
It's like they're sitting in the audience and she'd make a point about meat and how appalling the human race was, especially the men, especially the white men, impressive, patriarchal, racist, white, supremacist.
And then her compatriots were randomly yelling, genocide!
It's like, genocide!
Genocide!
It's like, what?
Yes, we think that's bad.
We think that's bad.
We've already established that.
But that was so...
It was like theater of the absurd.
It was so...
If they release it, I think it will be a cultural moment, because it was the point, at least it was the point in my life, where the politically correct argument reached an apogee that cannot be exceeded.
It was like, that is as absurd as it can possibly get in every possible way in ten minutes.
It was theater of the surreal.
And everyone, well, the audience was full of vegans, and so they were on the side of the anti-meat people, and so they kind of gave her a pass, although a lot of people walked out during her, whatever it was she was doing.
But I did feel bad for her while I was convulsing, because...
I really did because I thought, oh my god, you're so crazy.
You're so utterly crazy.
And there's no way that you can bring that set of presuppositions to bear in a real human relationship and have it go anything but terribly wrong.
And so that means that you're completely isolated and all your so-called friends are never...
Offering you any corrective feedback whatsoever, right?
They're just feeding into this terrible ideological mess you've wandered into.
And so it was painful at the same time, which is partly why it was sweating.
In its own way, it was like an ultimate work of art.
It was just something beyond comprehension.
Every trope, every politically correct trope you could possibly imagine was magnified beyond its normal range of reference and then applied in this utterly scattershot.
It was like...
She brought every ideological tool in the playbook randomly to this issue.
It was very civil, although it was stacked to some degree because a couple of the people on Michaela's side damned the freedom to eat meat with faint praise.
And I have my suspicions that it was staged that way.
Yeah, and Mick talked about sustainable agriculture.
And made that case as well, that our relationship with animals that we devour can be made as humane as possible and that's acceptable and perhaps even desirable in a broader moral framework.
And a woman, I wish I could remember her name, autistic professor at the University of Chicago who revolutionized the treatment of animals in the slaughterhouse industry, She made the case that the animals that we eat don't suffer a humane death in nature.
I have some other projects, too, that I'm working on.
I have a new book that I'm working on called We Who Wrestle With God.
And I outlined some of the ideas we talked about today.
And I'm interested in the weaponization of guilt and how to deal with that.
Why it's possible and how to protect yourself against it and what we should do in face of the fact that we walk on soil soaked with blood.
You know, how do we atone for that because we have to or we get guilty about it and then we're exploitable even by ourselves.
I have an app coming out.
In a month or two, hopefully a month, called Essay.
And I've been working on that with my son Julian and some other people for four years.
And it stemmed out of our project to sort of universalize the university, which was too big for me to manage when I got sick.
And sort of we narrowed it in scope because we wanted to teach people how to write.
And that's really hard to scale because you usually learn to write by having people...
Read what you've written and critique it, and that's very labor-intensive and expensive.
So we built a writing program, like a word processor, that has built-in conceptual tools that aid in the conceptualization of an essay.
So imagine when you're writing, first of all, you have to pick a good question because you want to answer it.
It has to be a genuine intellectual enterprise.
And so the kids are never taught that.
And so pick something important that you want to explore.
And then, okay, so what are you doing when you're writing?
Choosing words.
Forming phrases, organizing them into sentences, sequencing the sentences and paragraphs, sequencing the paragraphs into the chapter and then chapter into books if you're going that far.
But so it's a hierarchical enterprise.
And so when you write, you have to get the word right and the phrase right and the sentence right and the sentence order right.
And you shouldn't do all that at once because you can't because it's too hard.
So you write a rough first draft that's twice as long as the thing you're trying to write, and then you edit.
You shorten the sentences, you pick the right words, you pick the right phrases, you rewrite the sentences.
So we built in tools to guide people through this process to help them conceptualize their essay at the level of the word and the phrase and the sentence and the paragraph.
And to build those ideas of multi-level editing into the process, and then we've tested it on a lot of people, and we have a nice, elegant user interface, and we're hoping that...
Because one of the things I've learned is that words are power.
No.
Wrong.
Words are authority.
Words are legitimate authority.
And so, without having your words in order, you have no legitimate authority.
And that's the last thing you want, unless all you want is irresponsibility, but that isn't going to work out for you anyway.
And so, the pathway to success for virtually everyone is facilitation of their capacity to communicate.
And so we're hoping...
We really want to pull young men into...
Using this product because they're the hardest market to target with such things and the most in need of it and part of that is Engaging them in an honest dialogue about what exactly writing is it's like there's no difference between writing and thinking and There's no difference between thinking and not failing So you let your thoughts die instead of you and That's thinking.
You test everything you do before you implement it.
That's thinking.
And writing is a massive aid to that process.
And so if young men, in particular, were taught properly about writing and thinking, they would come to view those as like arrows in their quiver.
So...
Or shields in their combat.
Or the means by which they aggregate their allies.
Or even more importantly, the means by which they serve themselves and the world properly.
And like, really?
No moral overlay on top of this.
Well, you know, you're a communicator.
Like, you're a comedian.
You're a master of words.
You're a master of wit.
You're a master of listening.
That's why you're successful in this weird, radical way that's completely unpredictable.
And it's also the pathway to adventure.
Get your words in order.
And so that's SA. And like I said, I think if you go to my website or to SA.app, SA.app or to my website, you can sign up for that.
We're going to do a beta release, test it broadly to make sure it doesn't fall apart under use pressure and before we release it completely.
But we're very excited about that because...
How to teach people to write is a really hard academic problem to solve.
And the idea of building the writing tools into the software, if we got it right, maybe could at least in part address that problem.
It's a massive problem.
It's a massive problem, right?
Most people come through university now without learning how to write.
And that means they don't know how to think.
And that means they don't know how to talk.
It's not good.
So there's that, and it's the book and the music and the screenplay and this essay app.
Oh yeah, I'm going to be chancellor of a university, Ralston College, in Savannah.
And I also started this thing that we're going to launch called the Peterson Academy, where I'm going to get all the great lectures I know to make courses.
That'll be a free, that'll be a universally accessible university.
It won't be free because I run things on a for-profit model for all sorts of reasons.
Efficiency not being foremost among them.
I recorded two courses for this when I was in Nashville.
One on Jean Piaget, nine hours.
I got way deeper into his thought than I'd ever been able to at the university.
And then I recorded an updated version of my Maps of Meaning course.
I compressed it from 40 hours to nine, which took me like 40 years to do.
40, 35 years to do.
And I got way deeper into that too.
I realized some things about the Exodus story.
There's a scene in there in the Exodus story where God sends poisonous.
This is so cool.
It's so stunning.
I'll tell you a little bit about it if you don't mind.
It's so cool, Joe.
I can't believe it can possibly be true.
So, Moses leads his people out of the tyranny, right?
But weirdly enough, they don't go to the Promised Land.
This is very weird.
They go into the desert.
Well, why?
Well, we're all, say, prisoners of our own tyrannical misconceptions and misperceptions, psychologically and socially.
So let's say we free ourselves from those.
Well then, we're nowhere.
At least we were guided by that.
That's why people have nostalgia for tyranny.
It's like, at least we had enough to eat then.
At least we knew who we were then.
It's like out of the tyrant's grasp into the desert.
And so you think, why don't people want to challenge their own preconceptions?
It's like, yeah, it's out of the tyranny into the desert.
And the worse the tyranny, the worse the desert.
So if you've been tormenting yourself with tyrannical preconceptions and totalitarian obligations and you decide to drop it, or maybe you're shocked out of that by trauma, you don't go to paradise.
You go to the desert.
Maybe that's even worse.
So no wonder people don't do it.
So now, the Israelites are out in the desert.
You think, why are they there for 40 years?
And maybe it's because it takes three generations to recover from tyranny.
You're in the desert, man.
And so, the Israelites start worshipping idols.
It's ideology.
It's the same thing.
And that's why.
Because they don't have anything to orient themselves.
Because they're not tyrannized anymore.
And they get all fractious and they fight with themselves.
And Moses...
Has to spend like all day judging their conflicts because otherwise they're at each other's throats.
And anyways, they turn to false idols.
And so God isn't very happy about this.
And he sends poisonous snakes in there to bite them.
So it's like...
Out of the tyranny, into the desert.
Now we're fractured by ideologies.
Now the poisonous snakes come.
And so the poisonous snakes are biting them and biting them and biting them.
And they finally break down and go to Moses and say, look, you want to have a chat with God and get him to call off the damn snakes?
And Moses says, yeah, okay.
And so he goes and talks to God.
And God says, this is weird.
This is one of those impossibly weird stories.
You think this is either insane or it's true.
Because that's the only options.
It's not boring.
It's not predictable.
It's either insane or it's true.
Okay.
And maybe we can start by thinking it's insane.
But whatever.
Moses talks to God and God...
God could just call off the snakes, right?
That's what you'd expect him to do.
But that isn't what happens.
He says...
Go make an image of a snake in bronze and make an image of a stick, like a staff, and put the snake on the staff and then stick it in the ground.
And then have the Israelites go and look at the snake.
Look at Richard Dawkins is a brilliant man, but he stands on this foundation of a lack of experience.
The lack of experience of psychedelics.
And he's been tempted to do it before under clinical settings.
He's talked about it, but he's never done it.
So the idea that that's preposterous.
Everything when you're on psychedelics is preposterous.
But they're real.
Not real in the sense of you can put it on a scale, but real in the sense of if I give you DMT, you will fucking go there.
You will go there just like everybody goes there.
And if you try to hang on, good luck, you're gonna get shot through a cannon to the center of the universe.
And that's just how it goes.
And so you can either have experienced that or you're talking out of your ass.
So if you say, do you think those people thousands of years ago could have had a shamanic experience where they saw the double helix pattern of DNA? Yeah.
Yeah, and you can too.
You can too.
And it's not just because you know what the double helix pattern of DNA is, because you can also see souls.
I mean, we were talking about this before, that the roots of these religious experiences almost certainly come from some sort of transcendent experience.
Well, you know, what university was it in Israel, in Jerusalem, that made the connection between the burning bush and Moses and DMT because of the acacia tree.
The acacia tree, which is rich in DMT, and they made this connection, like, most likely— No, we don't know what was in the Ark of the Covenant.
We know that the people who were going to approach it purified themselves before they dared do it.
You know, we know that a good psychedelic experience will drag you through your sins.
That's known as a bad trip.
So what do we make of the fact that the shamanic experience, which is replicable cross-culturally and which dominated the human landscape for at least 20,000 years, we know that it involves a death and a resurrection and an entry into paradise and a reunion with the ancestors.
So what does it mean?
Who knows, man?
How fascinating.
This is way past my knowledge, but I know that connection that I just told you about between the story in the New Testament and that story in Exodus.
That took me like 30 years to figure out.
Because there's also the idea that the hero goes into the abyss to rescue his father from the belly of the beast.
But that's the same idea, right?
You go down, and I thought, I knew this the last time I went to lecture two, is like, You look into the abyss long enough and you see the spirit of the Benevolent Father manifesting itself.
That's the case.
That is the case.
If you look into the depths of evil and suffering, what you see is not the finality of evil and suffering.
You see the victory of the spirit that Obtains victory over that.
And then you might think biologically, well, how could it be any different, Joe?
That's the spirit of life.
Life is mortal suffering.
It's like, but we live.
What's the spirit of victorious life if it's not...
The benevolent Father who overcomes the catastrophe of suffering.
Like, what else could it possibly...
Even if you think about this just as an instinct.
It's like you're threatened by what's worse than death.
And there are plenty of things worse than death that you can be threatened by.
And yet you have a revelation that enables your transcendence of that.
Well, what could it be other than the Spirit that overcomes death in some fundamental sense?
Now, how fundamental?
Look, think about it this way.
Maybe we're running at 10% capacity, us human beings.
I don't mean we use 10% of our brain.
That isn't what I mean.
I mean, we're not fully committed to the enterprise.
So let's say here's the enterprise.
Let's make everything better and better as fast as we can for everyone.
And so you could say, well, their selfishness, which is like a narrow self-centeredness, makes it impossible for them to cooperate, and then they can't even play very good games, because it's actually more fun to play with other people than to play with yourself.
Even sexually, for all you pornography addicts, by the way.
Oh!
Yeah, so in any case, it's a form of...
But at least the people who are selfishly achieving value achievement You can get way...
Look, I'll tell you a story.
Someone wrote to me two months ago, and Warren Farrell wrote The Boy Crisis.
We had a conversation about boys who aren't encouraged and how bitter they can become for all sorts of different reasons.
And somebody wrote us who was planning to shoot up high school.
And he'd written a 53-page manifesto.
And he was in touch with the last person who shot up a high school.
They were corresponding.
Because it's a competition, you know, that shooting up high schools, that's a competition.
It's a very, very dark competition.
You have to do a lot of brooding over evil before you want to emerge victorious in that competition.
That's like months of pathological fantasizing that you nurse and nurse.
And it's all resentment-driven.
And so...
That's way worse than just a bit of a warped desire to achieve.
But also, see, when God, when Cain slays Abel, when Cain gets jealous of Abel in the biblical story, and no wonder, because Abel is like, He's everybody's golden boy.
He's good looking.
He's successful.
He works hard.
He's a really good person.
He gets everything and deserves it.
The Harvard students were very annoying in that way when I was there.
They had these positions of privilege, let's say.
It's a very terrible way of conceptualizing, but we'll give the devil a stew.
And it's like you'd hope that they'd be whiny, spoiled, self-centered, narcissistic brats, because then at least you could hate them in good conscience for their success.
But they weren't.
They were smart, attractive, hard-working, talented, athletic, polite, cooperative.
They were great.
And so how annoying is that?
If you've rejected all of that.
How annoying is that?
Well, so that's Cain and Abel.
So Cain goes to God to crab and complain.
You know, what's going on?
Abel makes these sacrifices and you reward him and I make a sacrifice and I don't get anywhere.
And that's the complaint of everyone bitter.
I made all these sacrifices and God rejected them.
It's like, yeah, that sucks.
Well, so God says to Cain, I had to look at a bunch of different translations to kind of get this right.
God says something like, sin crouches at your door like a predatory, sexually aroused animal.
It wants to have its way with you.
And you invited it in and let it have its way with you.
And it's this great metaphor because That kind of evil, that's creative.
That's creative.
It's like inviting a vampire in.
It's like, invite that in.
Say, inhabit me.
Then you toy with it and toy with it, and you let the fantasies of revenge build in your head until it inflates you into something that's indistinguishable from demonic.
Read the writings of the Columbine kids if you want to find out about this.
The question of whether or not it causes something or the fact that they're on these drugs because they've been so tortured by life that they needed these drugs.
I had a friend who was on, I think it was on Zoloft, and their take on it was that they lost a whole year of their life, where they just didn't give a fuck about anything.
Like I said, zero of anything is pushing too hard.
So I wouldn't rule out The possibility of idiosyncratic responses, but these drugs are extraordinarily widely used, antidepressants, and the proportion of people who commit atrocious acts on them is infinitesimally small.
There's no evidence, for example, that they make psychopaths worse or that they tilt people into kind of psychopathic behavior because they decrease negative emotion.
That's not a behavioral consequence of SSRIs or even of serotonin itself.
Because then you'd also have to say that raising someone's serotonin level, which does make them more calm, by the way, like less prone to negative emotion, because as you move up a hierarchy, you produce more serotonin.
And the consequence of that is that...
Threatening things become less threatening.
Well, they should, because the higher you are in a hierarchy, the less dangerous it is.
And so, partly, you can destabilize people by threatening their position in a hierarchy, because you dysregulate the structure, you dysregulate their claim to valid occupation of that position, and then you destabilize their nervous systems.
That's partly, say when, let's say, you see this in academia, A new young faculty member comes in for a job talk and lays out his theory, and an upstart graduate student puts up his hand and pokes a hole in the idea.
You might say, well, the professor on stage gets taken aback and is destabilized because his theory has been...
Challenged, and he uses the theory to protect himself against anxiety.
It's kind of a terror management idea.
That isn't what happens.
Not exactly.
It's close, man.
It's real close.
What happens is, the young faculty member comes in using his claim to valid knowledge as an indicator of his suitability for that position.
So I'd say, I know a bunch of things that are useful.
That I can use in trade.
And because of that, I'm justified in occupying this position.
And so, then the student stands up and says, You're a fraud.
You don't deserve that position.
And it's the specter of the loss of the position, the hierarchical position, that's destabilizing, not the threat to the integrity of the belief system.
Now, there can be some of both, right?
But the reason that people don't like to lose faith is because it undermines their moral claim to their position.
And people hate that.
And no wonder, because that's a severe threat.
You're a fraud.
To have that revealed means that the system could validly take away your position.
Well, the terror management theorists regard your theory as a defense against death anxiety.
But your position is actually a defense against death.
Not just death anxiety.
It's like that's your space in the culture.
That's why people don't stone you.
That's why you're a valid member of society.
That's how you make your living.
That's not an illusion.
That is actually the structure that defends you against catastrophe.
And part of what the mob does is come up to people continually, especially from the left, but the right can do it too, and they certainly have done it, if you look back at any reasonable stretch of history, but the left comes up and says, you're a white supremacist, racist, oppressor, part of this patriarchal system.
You have no moral claim whatsoever to the position you occupy.
Well, that just strips people, you know, especially if they're good people.
They think, oh, I need a moral claim to this position.
And they're trying to undermine the idea of merit itself because maybe they're not living particularly meritorious lives and so the light shines on them in their darkness.
Yeah, and there's lots of good discussions on YouTube.
If you like long-form discussions, I find people that I want to talk to, and they'll say yes, and then we have as interesting a conversation as I can manage, and maybe I share that with Joe, and that's our intent.
Like, I've had senior political figures in Canada now tell me, This is so awful that they cannot say what they have to say in our current political situation because they cannot find a single media source in the entire country that they regard as trustworthy and reliable.
And these aren't fringe political figures.
These are people who've had stellar political careers.
And that's what they tell me, point blank.
And the same thing is happening in the United States.
I could not have imagined a world where just talking to people about whatever subject matter is their area of expertise and asking questions and being curious could be that popular.
Well, one thing that does happen, that I hope does happen, and I didn't mean to set out to create a kind of a format or to pioneer a kind of a format, but what I do hope is that the people who enjoy it, and I know this is the case, they're starting to do their own thing that's similar.
It's the only opportunity for a career in any real sense because even if I tried to teach a friend of mine this and he eventually committed suicide For a variety of reasons.
And he managed it now and then, but finally was overcome by the demons that possessed him, let's say.
You know, he was a very smart man, but he hadn't made much of his education, and so he was in positions he felt were beneath him.
And I tried to tell him that the idea that those positions were beneath him was his own blindness.
Because there was an infinite amount of possibility everywhere.
So, like, I worked in restaurants and I had lots of working class jobs, like 30 of them.
Like, lots.
And I really liked working in restaurants.
I was a dishwasher.
I loved it once I got good at it.
And the reason I loved it is I was a kid, 14, and...
I got treated as an adult because I worked hard, you know.
And I loved that, man.
That was so great to be treated as an adult, a legitimate contributor.
You bet, you bet.
And then because I worked hard and was interested, the cook in the first restaurant who was a German chef, he taught me to cook.
Then I was a short order cook and I was like 15 and that was really fun because it was fun to work in the kitchen and the place was full of jokes and tricks all the time and I learned how to cook and I learned how to handle the domestic environment and clean and put things in order but also to work with people and I had really good friendships with those people and that fostered all sorts of opportunities for me.
There was an infinite amount of possibility in that dishwashing job Because I wasn't in a bloody box with people pushing dishes in through a slot.
I was in this dynamic environment where people were trying to be hospitable, which is really, really hard, you know, on a mass scale under a lot of pressure, because restaurants can be high-pressure jobs because of the rushes that go with it.
Everything in the world was in that restaurant.
If you had eyes to see it, like dozens of my friends, I think it was literally dozens, came to that restaurant to get a job as a dishwasher.
The bartender from next door, I was really mouthy and he'd come over now and then and he'd say something and I'd mouth off in some spectacularly horrible way and he used to stuff me in the ice machine.
She was a famous social psychologist and she had a vicious wit.
And Ellen's role was the meeting would progress and then she'd say something completely different.
Completely outrageous!
And everyone would laugh, and then we'd have the meeting some more, and then she'd say something else.
Completely outrageous!
And there was a real sense of humor.
And among my colleagues, Jill Hooley and Richard McNally and Brendan Marr, who knew Timothy Leary, we had meetings of the Personality and Psychopathology subdivision, and it was really fun.
It was fun.
And I didn't experience that much in the intellectual realm once I was a faculty member, but I did there.
But in those working-class jobs, Like, that humor and camaraderie...
If you listen to people, I learned this in my clinical practice, if you listen to people, they are so goddamn interesting, you can hardly even stand it.
And so if you're surrounded by people who are dull, try listening more.
They start telling you their story?
People are so weird.
Even so-called simple people, it's like, think people are simple.
You try building one.
They're not so simple.
Even people that, you know, wouldn't register in some sense on any normal social barometer.
You sit one of those people down and you have them tell you their life story?
Oh my God.
It's so interesting that it's, like, it's traumatically interesting.