Ep. 40 - Ideologies Are Parasites ft. Jordan B. Peterson
Does God exist? Is ideology a destructive parasite? Have campus snowflakes and pajama boys destroyed civilization? Dr. Jordan B. Peterson comes on to explain the world. Then Zo Rachel, Amanda Prestigiacomo, and Jacob Airey join the Panel of Deplorables to talk Trump’s surprise Obamacare smackdown and an American family freed after being held hostage by the Taliban for five years. Finally, the Mailbag!
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Today we discuss only the big questions on an especially covfefe show.
Does God exist?
Is ideology a destructive parasite?
Have campus snowflakes and pajama boys destroyed our civilization?
Dr.
Jordan B. Peterson will be here to explain the world.
Then Zoe Rachel, Amanda Prestigiacomo, And Jacob Airy joined the panel of deplorables to talk Trump's surprise Obamacare smackdown and an American family freed after being held hostage by the Taliban for five years.
Finally, the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
I cannot wait to bring on Dr. Gerard.
Jordan Peterson.
I'm extremely excited for this show.
But before we can, we need to welcome our new sponsor, Policy Genius.
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There actually seems to be a certain providence to our sponsors on this show, on the first part of this show.
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Okay, now we have Dr.
Peterson.
He is a clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.
He may be the leading university free speech activist around today, but I actually don't want to talk about that too much because then we would miss all of the interesting speech that Dr.
Peterson has to offer.
You know, very often the debate over free speech, it stops right there at the form of the speech.
Does someone have the right to say this or that?
Should the government, should private institutions censor this or that?
Those questions seem simple to me and probably to you.
I want to get to the content.
I want to get to the this and the that, particularly how ideology is a terrible, terrible thing.
Dr.
Peterson, thank you for joining us.
My pleasure.
Thanks for the invitation.
Absolutely.
So I want to dive right into it.
I really admire you, and I really admire all of your work.
And I agree with very much of what you say.
Let's begin with ideology.
You have said that ideology is a parasite.
That's a sentiment with which I thoroughly agree.
You've explained the conflict between ideology and traditional strains of thought in the West.
I think most people, even on the right, even conservatives, would find that statement startling.
What is so bad about ideology?
Well, it provides a one-size-fits-all answer to every question.
There's a variety of problems with that.
It's a one-sided, biased, one-size-fits-all answer.
The bias depends on your particular ideological stance.
In some ways, biases themselves aren't as bad as you might think because they're not that distinguishable from heuristics, which are simplifications that you need to operate in the world.
We can't operate in the world considering it in all of its complexity.
We have to simplify it.
But there's dangers in the simplifications, and then there's dangers in a consistently biased simplification.
And ideologies are consistently biased simplifications.
Now, they're right sometimes.
You see, part of the reason that the Western democratic systems work is because they allow people who have specified biases to compete in an open market of biases.
A liberal exchange of ideas.
Exactly, exactly.
So, you know, sometimes the right is right.
Sometimes the extreme right is right.
Sometimes the left is right, so to speak, and sometimes the extreme left is right.
The extremes aren't correct, let's say, very often.
Certainly not the extreme left.
Sorry, go ahead.
But there are situations that arise where less generally applicable principles may speak.
But anyways, the point is that in an open exchange of ideas, you get the opportunity for multiple people to put forward their biased heuristics, their biased oversimplifications, and to engage in the kind of debate that raises the resolution of the question and answer at hand.
And that's necessary because the environment is shifting underneath you all the time.
And so what was right yesterday, what was correct yesterday, isn't necessarily correct today.
You have to continually engage in negotiation and discussion In
the middle, let's say, in the correct place.
Well, I think genuine thinkers should ground their worldview in something more substantive than an ideology.
And one of the things that I've studied for a very long period of time is the relationship between, let's say, ideologies, or belief systems for that matter, to the underlying psychological substructures that the psychologist, psychiatrist Carl Jung described as archetypal.
And so you could think of these archetypal ideas Sub-structures as the grand stories by which people conduct their lives.
And they're structured in a very particular way.
They're very balanced stories.
So, for example, in a typical, properly constructed archetypal narrative, you have a representation of nature or chaos or the unknown.
Those are symbolic categories that are quite similar.
They sort of represent What exists beyond the safety of the campfire and the town and the city and familiar territory.
You could think about it as the archetype of unexplored territory.
And it's negative and positive at the same time.
It's negative because you better watch your step when you aren't where you think you are because you'll die if you're not careful.
And that's the negative element.
And so nature can be a vicious, brutal force and everyone who's alive and thinks knows that.
By the same token, it's also the place, the unknown, and nature is the place that you can go and explore and find new and wonderful things.
Go west, young man.
Exactly.
That's an interesting one to bring up because we'll return to that.
We'll return to that because there's a counter-narrative to that.
So nature has its positive and negative element.
It's often represented with feminine symbols, by the way.
Mother nature, let's say.
And then culture has the same structure.
There's like the tyrannical king and the benevolent king.
And the tyrannical king is the part of culture that crushes you and destroys you and mangles you and forces you to be a cog in a wheel.
And the benevolent part is the part that educates you and disciplines you and shelters you and teaches you to speak and imbues you with all the facets and traits that a civilized person would have.
And again, a story that doesn't involve both of those forces is incomplete, even though they're contradictory.
Of course.
And then on top of that is the individual.
In an archetypal story the individual has a heroic element and an adversarial element and so in Christianity that's represented by the say internal conflict between Christ and Satan if you're thinking about it psychologically It's reflected in the story of Cain and Abel as well and in typical hostile brother stories very common narrative tropes and so a comprehensive view of the world offers a representation of all of those elements and Whereas an ideology,
what an ideology does is slice that representation into a partial formulation.
So, for example, when feminists talk about the patriarchy, they essentially assume that the social world is only a negative force.
It's only tyrannical.
Well, it is tyrannical, but it's not only tyrannical, right?
Try as I might, we cannot force an only tyrannical patriarchy on them.
That's right.
That's exactly it.
There's too much pushback, right?
And I mean, to think about the social structures in the West as fundamentally tyrannical means that you're either, well, ideologically possessed to the degree that's almost incomprehensible or that you know absolutely nothing whatsoever about history or the current world.
And those may not be mutually exclusive.
You may be ideologically possessed and ignorant.
Well, and you said go West, young man.
Okay, so let me unravel that a bit.
So...
That's the frontier narrative.
So the frontier narrative is untamed nature, positive culture, positive individual.
So it's the heroic individual spreading the benefits of benevolent culture into the wild, untamed wilderness.
Okay, so that's an ideology and it's a powerful one because it draws on these underlying archetypal symbolic themes that are deeply motivational, meaningful to people.
But the counter-narrative emerged to that.
Let's say that was the narrative that settled the United States.
Okay, but the counter-narrative emerged and that's the environmental narrative.
The environmental narrative is benevolent nature, toxic culture, adversarial individual.
So this essential ideological environmental narrative is terrible human beings that are cancer on the planet are spreading their toxic patriarchy and raping mother nature.
And I think it's no coincidence, by the way, that the environmental movement as we see it today really sprung up in the 90s in the wake of the fall of communism.
There was the major ideology of the left that crumbled before our eyes, and now this new ideology of environmentalism seems to have largely taken its position of prominence.
Well, see, that's an interesting observation.
No, I don't disagree.
I don't disagree.
And I think it's actually one of the things that really pollutes the Argument about environmental sustainability.
Obviously, exploiting the planet, let's say, in a way that produces unsustainable externalized costs is a bad idea.
Clearly.
Now, the time frame matters, but it's clearly a bad idea.
The problem is that it's almost impossible to engage in a discussion about environmental sustainability without also simultaneously engaging in a discussion that's anti-capitalist.
And so, for me, as soon as an environmentalist becomes anti-capitalist, then I can't trust them as an environmentalist, because I don't know if their environmentalism, it usually is a cover for their neo-Marxism or another ideology.
That's precisely right.
Yeah, it just pollutes the damn problem.
Pun intended.
You can make a very strong case for a conservative environmentalism.
A conservationism, sure.
Yeah, the word is right there.
That's exactly it.
Well, exactly.
And, you know, the conservatives, part of the conservative ethos is try not to do anything too stupid.
You know, whereas you could say that the liberal ethos is try actively to improve things, you know, and that's great.
And act as stupidly as you may, yeah, in order to do it.
Well, the problem is that on the liberal end of things, and this is a temperamental problem, is that Many ideas that are designed to generate solutions to problems actually generate more problems, right?
And so an informed conservative says something like, well, yeah, there's a problem there.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves and presume that we actually know how to fix it in a way that won't just make it worse.
Right, right.
And for me, I'm kind of temperamentally predisposed to be more on the liberal left end of things from a personality perspective because I'm high in a trait called openness, which is a good predictor of, say, liberalism and more left-wing thinking, although I'm also high in conscientiousness, which is a good predictor of more right-wing thinking.
But what really convinced me To become more of a traditionalist, I would say, was this realization of unintended consequences, is that it's very, very difficult to make alterations to a complex system in a manner that doesn't make the system function worse instead of better.
And so I think, generally speaking, that especially when you're perturbing extraordinarily complex social systems, that you should be firmly aware of the limits of your intelligence and the probability of your biased interpretations.
Of course.
And I love that you've brought up this term traditionalism.
I actually made the case a couple days ago that I think Donald Trump himself, maybe counterintuitively, exhibits many aspects of traditionalism in the Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott sort of sense of things.
And I wonder if now, as you've noted, channeling Nietzsche, that at a certain point in our culture, God died for our cultural purposes and ideology replaced it.
Where are we now?
Are we in a post-ideological age?
Is God striking back against Nietzsche and his followers?
Well, that's a good question.
Well, the thing is, one of the things that's really necessary to note about Nietzsche is that when he made the pronouncement that God was dead, it was by no means triumphant.
Of course, yeah.
People misunderstand that a lot.
Oh, definitely.
The full phrase is, I'm paraphrasing, but the full phrase is something like, God is dead, we have killed him, and we'll never find enough water to wash away the blood.
Right, right.
And that was associated with thoughts he had at the same time, that the consequence of the death of this traditional value structure, the idea of a transcendent moral structure and ultimate moral responsibility, would be replaced by two things.
One would be a kind of hopeless nihilism.
And the other would be a swing, especially into leftist totalitarianism, which he directly predicted, as did Dostoevsky, although that wasn't the only logical totalitarian outcome.
Of course.
So, I mean, he had that nailed.
It's actually one of the most amazing prescient predictions that I've ever encountered.
And in any way, do you find a link between that nihilism that came out of the death of God and left-wing totalitarianism And these campus snowflakes and the Peter Pan syndrome and the pajama boys, this apathetic, malaise, whiny, bratty culture that we're seeing among a perfectly luxurious, young, healthy, wealthy generation.
Well, you need a direction, right?
And without that, you're bereft certainly of positive emotion, but you're also hyper-anxious, right?
You know, that's the thing that's kind of odd about having direction and responsibility is that it gives meaning to your life because it helps you understand how the small things you do every day are related to crucial and important goals.
Without that, it's very, very difficult to orient yourself in the world.
And Dr.
Peter said...
Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.
Well, it also makes you anxious because there's no limit, say.
And people say, especially people who are high in openness and low in conscientiousness, so they're the liberal left types, They say, well, limits are only constraining.
It's like, no, no.
Limits aren't only constraining.
Like, fences keep snakes out as well as keep you in.
A good example.
Walls can work, yes.
Yes, well, exactly.
And, you know, the funny thing, too, about the radicals on campuses is that they just have no conception of how many walls are protecting them.
Of course.
Like, they're inside a wall, often actually a literal wall, because many of the campuses are walled, And then they're inside, you know, those walls are inside the city and the city's inside the state and the state is inside the government.
The government is protected by the military.
And there's just, and that's all governed by tradition.
There's just wall after wall after wall.
And they say, well, I don't see any danger.
What's with all the restrictions?
It's like, well, yeah, you don't see any danger.
You know, you remember in the Lord of the Rings, you may remember this or you may not, the hobbits, you know, there are these little People who are sort of self-satisfied and smug and naive and completely ignorant about the surrounding world.
And, of course, there's evil gathering all around them, which is the archetypal state of mankind.
And they're protected by the Striders, one of whom is Aragorn.
And they are the descendants of ancient kings.
And they patrol the boundaries and keep the hobbits safe.
And the hobbits know about them, but they just think they're despicable tramps.
So it's brilliant, because we are protected by the descendants of ancient kings.
That's what our traditions are.
And people who casually violate a tradition have no idea what's behind the wall.
They have no idea.
They lack a sense of history, and they certainly lack a sense of human fallibility and malevolence.
And I must note, you've brought up Tolkien, and I don't want to allow the early brief discussion of Christianity go totally without further discussion.
You, in your...
Description of ideology and your description of traditionalism, of symbols, of the symbolized, of the logos as transcendent and divine, if I didn't know any better, I would guess that you were a Catholic.
You sound an awful lot like a Catholic, and I wanted to know if you had any thoughts about that description, and if you are not yet a Catholic...
Well, it's hard to tell, you know.
Well, if you aren't yet a Catholic, can I be your godfather eventually when you do?
Well, the Orthodox...
I've been contacted by a number of Orthodox Jews who think that I'm pretty much an Orthodox Jew, and A lot of Orthodox Christians who think that I'm pretty much an Orthodox Christian, and also a number of Mormons who think...
Or no, sorry, not...
No, who were they?
Jehovah's Witness.
I can't remember.
No, it wasn't Jehovah's Witnesses.
I don't remember.
Scientologist.
It's been funny.
It's because I've been contacted by people from a lot of different denominations, and they've said the same thing, which is that I'm putting the finger on what they believe is at the core of their belief system.
Mm-hmm.
You know, and I've been looking at this primarily from a psychological perspective, like I'm not denying or even commenting on the underlying metaphysical realities, you know, technically speaking, because it's sort of outside of my domain of competence.
I'm not denying their existence or making a case for their existence in my public presentations.
But one thing I have discovered is that there's something really fundamentally important about the idea of the logos, you know, because the logos is the idea that the individual The soul of the individual and the value of that soul transcends the value of the state.
And that's an amazing proposition.
I think that's the central Western proposition, is that the state itself has no final dominion over the individual.
Certainly right.
We may appeal to heaven, as General Washington once put on a flag.
And the reason that that's so psychologically significant, as far as I'm concerned, is that the state— Realized by a number of cultures in a variety of different ways.
The state has a tendency to become too static, right?
State and static are obviously the same word.
And without the dynamic consciousness of the individual continually transforming and expanding the boundaries of the state, the state collapses into a type of totalitarian rigidity and then everyone dies.
So if you don't keep the state Subservient in some sense to the free consciousness and that's the moral consciousness of the dedicated citizen then everything goes to hell and and very very rapidly and and almost literally because I mean if you look at places like you know Stalinist Soviet Union and especially in the 1930s and Mao's China and Cambodia and these places where these totalitarian systems got the upper hand I mean To describe them as hellish is an understatement,
I would say.
Yeah, it's a world of lies.
It's a world of lies that wreaks havoc and hell.
Well, that's the other thing that's so interesting, is that the really informed commentators on those totalitarian states have drawn a very direct causal path between the proclivity of the individual citizen to falsify their own experience, so to lie by commission and omission, and the emergence of these totalitarian states.
Wow.
What they essentially make isn't an economic case or a political case.
They make a psychological and ethical case.
And that's especially well documented.
Well, Viktor Frankl does a pretty good job of that in Man's Search for Meaning.
And Vaclav Havel made the same sort of connection.
So did Gandhi.
But I think it's been best laid out, well, partly by Tolstoy, who was a huge influence on Gandhi, but most particularly, I would say, by Solzhenitsyn in his documentations of the Gulag Archipelago.
Like, his entire...
1700-page case is that the reason that the totalitarian state got the upper hand in the Soviet Union was fundamentally because too many citizens decided that it was in their best short-term interest to lie about everything, including their own suffering.
To lie to themselves.
I think you put it one way.
I may have read this from you or from someone else that to the utopian, suffering is heresy.
The acknowledgement of suffering is heresy.
I know.
Well, that's a really great definition of hell.
Hell is the place where you're in pain and you're punished for admitting it.
You can't even admit it to yourself.
Of course.
And we have all these discussions about which pronouns we should use, which bathrooms people can use.
They seem to be really highly politicized for precisely this purpose.
They say it's trivial.
It's just a little lie that we're telling each other.
What's the big deal?
But that is the big deal.
When we live in enough lies, when we lie even about our own suffering, you end up in a totalitarian state.
Well, and you're the totalitarian.
And you are, yeah, that's precisely right.
You are the oppressor, right?
See, I mean, one of the things that Solzhenitsyn documents in the Gulag Archipelago is his realization that he was his own tyrant.
You know, and it's so fascinating because he wrote the Gulag Archipelago when he was in the prison camps, and he basically memorized the book.
And that's, you know, to memorize a 1700-page book is really something that is...
It's inconceivable, especially a book like that.
And he didn't write the book until he was struck very hard by the realization that his ethical faults had directly contributed to the situation that he found himself in.
And interestingly enough, too, he said that he came to that realization in large part, although not solely, by watching the very few people that he saw in the prison camps resist the The demand for lies on the part of their jailers.
He said most of those people had a deeply rooted religious faith, and that seemed to enable them to refuse to cooperate with the authorities when that cooperation was demanded, which would also preclude them partaking in such roles as being camp trustees.
Because in the gulag system, interestingly enough, Most of the positions of tyranny were held by the prisoners themselves.
Now, there is a great definition of hell.
Hell is a prison where all the prison guards are prisoners.
That's precisely right.
Which actually, I suppose, is the Christian definition of hell.
Certainly Milton's definition of hell.
This does bring up another point, which is...
If we are to look at the man in the mirror and take responsibility for ourselves and recognize that much of our suffering and our oppression comes from within and our own ethical failures, then I have to ask, this has been a meme going around the internet for a long time, do I really have to clean up my room?
Well, you don't have to, but you have to suffer the consequences.
That's not a great alternative.
Well, that's the thing, is that, you know, it's...
In many situations in life, you get to pick your poison, right?
And that's really worthwhile knowing because it isn't that there's a pathway that you can take that's going to make your life, well, let's call it simple and happy because life, whatever life is, it's not simple and happy.
It's certainly not those things, right?
No, it's complex and tragic and you can ennoble that with a certain mode of being and that mode of being has to be associated with A willingness to abide by the truth.
Like, I don't even really think about these things as ethical commandments in some sense.
And it's something that's also struck me as I've become more and more familiar with biblical writings, is that most of the time they're simple statements of fact.
So, imagine...
You know, reality has a structure.
It's complex, and you can tell it has a structure because it punishes you very badly when you do some things you shouldn't do.
Like, you know, toddlers learn very rapidly not to stand up underneath tables when they're first learning to walk.
Don't touch the burner on the stove.
Exactly.
And the table is always hard, and the burner always burns.
And so you can learn to avoid those things because they're, you know, they're cut and dried.
They're walls.
Now, unfortunately, I've lost my train of thought.
That's fine.
When I imagine the suffering of every time I push the burner, that also makes me lose it as well.
I would like to take the...
Oh, yes.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Yes, okay.
Well, the thing is, is that...
Those elements of suffering are built into the structure of the world.
The structure of the world is real.
And the problem with lying is that you replace accurate perception of the structure of the world with a wish, an arrogant wish.
Like the wish is that you could have things the way that you want them.
On my terms.
That's exactly it.
The arrogant part is on my terms and I'll get away with it.
And it's such an absurd proposition because the probability that you can bend the structure of reality in your favor Without it having it snap back and hit you in the face, which is, I suppose, in some sense, a definition of God in a perverse way, it's zero.
In my clinical practice, and I swear that this is the case, and I would say also in my private life, observing people over long periods of time, I have never seen anyone get away with anything.
It always comes back to haunt them in one form or another.
And they may not realize or understand the causal connection.
Sometimes that's what psychotherapy is about.
But the causal connections are there.
And that's the sort of thing that Solzhenitsyn detailed in the Gulag Archipelago.
You know, it's so weird because he was a victim of Hitler because he was on the front lines.
And then he was a victim of Stalin.
And I mean, if you want to make a case for being a victim, that's a good case, man.
That's for sure.
Right.
But instead, he decided that he was going to take the responsibility on himself.
And become one of the greatest men of the century, right?
Well, that's the thing that's so incomprehensible, is that that book really was a few death blows to the integrity of the communist system, but from an articulated and And verbal perspective and intellectual perspective, nothing topped the gulag archipelago.
It took the substructure out from underneath any moral claim that communism had.
Just a glimpse of reality, does it?
I know I said that was the last question, but I actually have one more.
This is a very practical question.
For young people or people who are wandering around in these shallow ideologies and this Sort of nihilism, living in lies, whatever you want to call it.
What advice would you give to them?
Is it go worship God?
Is it read the Bible?
Is it accept the tragic fact of life?
How can they pull themselves out of the mire and wash all that blood off of us that Nietzsche said we'd never get off?
Well, Carl Jung said something that is quite similar to Solzhenitsyn's prescription, which was that with a sufficient moral effort, Psychoanalysis was unnecessary.
I would say that the best advice that I might give to people is that they try to stop saying things that make them weak, which is a variant of trying to learn not to lie.
Because if you pay attention, if you pay attention, Nietzsche said, who among us has never sacrificed himself for the sake of his good name?
And what he meant by that was, well, you know, you're in a social circumstance and you act In a manner that's different than how you actually feel, or you refuse to put forward your viewpoint, or you can't, or you falsify yourself.
And some of that is akin to being socialized, let's say.
But put that aside.
I'm thinking about the falsification part.
It's like, if you watch yourself very carefully, if you watch what you say, and I would include your nonverbal behavior in that category, you'll see that certain things that you say put...
Solid ground under your feet and certain things turn the ground that you're standing on into quicksand and you can feel that in an embodied sense is something Carl Rogers who's a great psychiatrist psychologist Realized quite I guess probably in the 50s or the 40s and that there was an embodied sense and in some sense that would be equivalent to the voice of conscience and so you know when you're betraying yourself you know when you're weakening yourself and if you start to pay attention to that and You can learn to stop doing that.
It's interesting, because I was just reading Socrates' Apology, which is the description of the trial that eventually ended in his death, and his reaction to that, his heroic reaction to that.
He talked about the thing that differentiated him from other people.
And he said, well, he had this internal voice, which he called a daemon, which obviously is related to the word demon, but it wasn't that.
It's an internal spirit, an internal voice.
And he always listened to it.
And it never told him what to do.
But it told him what not to do.
And so if the internal voice objected to something he was doing or saying, he would stop.
He would stop doing it.
He would stop doing it.
He'd reformulate it.
And so the reason he didn't defend himself at his trial, interestingly enough, is because his internal voice, and leave, because really they just wanted him to get the hell out of Athens because he was a troublemaker.
So they warned him long ahead that he was going to be tried and found guilty, essentially.
And His friends told him to leave, and he went and consulted his daemon, and it said, no, don't leave.
And he thought, like, well, what the hell?
What do I do now?
Yeah, exactly.
And then he thought it through, and he thought, well, he was getting very old, and maybe the gods had granted him the opportunity to...
Step out of life gracefully and put his affairs in order and so on.
You know, I mean, you can think about it as a rationalization, but it was Socrates that we're talking about, so I wouldn't do that too quickly.
Of course.
I must say, my internal voice is telling me not to end this interview for several more hours because it is just so illuminating and I could talk to you all day long.
But unfortunately, the voice of Ben Shapiro in the next room saying that we need to close off the show is...
The one that writes my check.
So unfortunately, we'll have to end it here.
Dr.
Peterson, thank you so much for coming on.
This has been a wonderful discussion, and I hope that we can have you back.
Thanks a lot for the invitation and for the discussion.
Absolutely.
Make sure to everyone who's watching, you go to YouTube and watch every one of Dr.
Peterson's videos and listen to his show.
It's really, really excellent.
Some of the best commentary out there.
And we have a whole panel of deplorables and we have the mailbag.
There is so much more for you all to see, but you can't see it unless you go to thedailywire.com.
I know what you're thinking.
You are thinking, I want to watch this on Facebook.
I want to watch this on YouTube.
Well...
It's $10 a month, $100 a year.
You get me.
You get the Andrew Klavan Show.
You get the Ben Shapiro Show.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But look at this.
Look at what you get.
You get the Leftist Tears Tumbler.
This is actually the tumbler out of which Socrates drank the hemlock.
The hemlock was those leftist tears.
They couldn't take all of his truth bombs, so he drank it like a courageous man.
This is the finest vessel for leftist tears out there.
You have to go over right now, and we will be right back.
There is some excellent news.
Thank you so much, panel.
Sorry we took a little bit longer, but I couldn't stop talking to Dr.
Jordan Peterson.
That guy's like the most interesting guy ever.
We have, from the Daily Wire, Amanda Prestigiacomo from the Daily Wire also.
We have Jacob Berry, and then we have the incomparable one and only Zoe Rachel.
Let's get right into the news.
President Trump announced today that after Congress's failure to repeal Obamacare, he would now use all of the executive power at his disposal to reduce the regulations and free up American businesses and just take out some of the burden of Obamacare that he can do from the White House.
Amanda, is this the sort of bold action that is the reason we elected Donald Trump, or is he overstepping his bounds?
Thank you.
No, this is good stuff, and he's doing this with Rand Paul, so he's about as libertarian as you're going to get in Congress, so we know that it's going to be constitutional as well.
Basically, he's repealing regulation, and Rand Paul was talking about it today, is that it's just basically exploiting a law from the 1970s that any president could have done since then.
It just allows people to kind of, small businesses, for instance, can now pool together from different states to provide insurance coverage for their employees.
And then also now you don't have to have, like if you're I don't know, like a 20-year-old man, right?
You don't have to have maternity care.
So it's smart.
I'm still going to have it just to be safe, frankly.
I just don't want to get caught without it.
But it's nice for other men, yeah.
Riskier guys.
So it's great.
It's great.
They just keep repealing as much as they can.
Of course, Congress is terrible, so it's kind of led to this.
Anything with Rand Paul involved, it's going to be pretty decent.
It's going to be pulling back a regulation and it's going to be constitutional.
So this is good stuff.
I love it.
Jacob, what do you think?
Is this executive order going to accomplish anything?
Some executive orders haven't accomplished that much.
Amanda's pretty bullish on here.
What do you think?
I agree with Amanda.
I think it does accomplish a lot.
I noticed that all of a sudden the Rand Paul haters on the Trump train are very silent about this.
They're very on board and excited about it.
And I think it does.
If Obama used his executive orders to expand Obamacare, I think it's personally reasonable to say, hey, President Trump, you can use the power of the pen to dismantle Obamacare.
I don't see a problem with this.
And I think it'll help Republicans.
Get in gear finally.
And President Trump, he has a pen and a phone.
A huge pen and a huge phone.
So why won't Congress act?
Why are they going to give President Trump all of the credit for repealing all these terrible Obamacare regulations?
Oh man, you know there's a little bit of an ego trip involved, a little power trip involved, but I think what would be really cool is if they get that wall built and Trump can have his healthcare plan.
He can contract a bunch of graffiti artists and then just go ahead and graffiti his healthcare plan on the wall, and I think it would make both of which digestible to the public at large.
And that's subtlety in the age of Trump.
The largest physical structures in human history with just gigantic words written across them.
I believe it.
On another strange news story, an American woman and her Canadian husband, who were held hostage by militants by the Taliban in Afghanistan for five years, have been freed along with their children.
I'm sorry, we worked with Afghanistan and Pakistan on this.
Zoe, this does raise one question.
What the hell were these people doing in Pakistan and Afghanistan?
With their young children, the woman was pregnant?
Like I said, man, I don't know.
I think I hear it's really nice there this time.
The honeymoon is good.
The service is good.
Don't you want to go?
Well, you know, I've got a week between Christmas and New Year.
I will say all that blank book money is gone, so if Laura Bores out...
You don't want to miss a beer for Christmas.
You do not want to miss a beer for Christmas.
They've already got to check this out.
It's really heartwarming.
It's like a Thomas Kinkade painting.
Absolutely right.
Jacob, Trump has been pretty good at freeing Americans who have been held hostage overseas.
He got Otto Warmbier freed in North Korea.
He got an Egyptian-American woman freed out of Egypt.
Now this family.
Why is he so good at this?
Why has he been so successful where Barack Obama has not been?
Well, I think it's because Trump says what he means.
It's not like President Obama, or I should say former President Obama, where he was like a helicopter parent.
I'm going to give you to the count of three.
One, two, one, two, over and over again.
Trump just goes, one, two, three, bam, and it's done.
One, three.
Boom.
Exactly.
And so I think in this case, they realize that he's serious.
I mean, that Moab bomb dropped on ISIS, the world heard that.
And I think that was one of his greatest plays because now when he says, you better let this person go, the country listens and they get out.
And he uses it to his advantage.
He plays a little crazier than I think he is.
And clearly it's to his advantage.
People do wonder if the guy is out of his mind.
Amanda, President Trump claimed after this that America is, quote, finally being respected again.
Is that true?
Is that a fair assessment?
Yeah, no, I think that's true.
Especially if you just look at how we're handling, you know, I mean, ISIS is being obliterated right now.
Nobody's talking about that.
But like Jacob was saying, I mean, we are taking a stronger front in foreign policy.
And we're actually letting our men fight and, you know, lessening rules of engagement and stuff like that.
So we actually have, I mean, we have the capability to wipe out ISIS. We just didn't before.
So now we're actually doing that.
That's one example.
So, you know, President Trump kind of We're not leaving from behind anymore.
He's taking action.
I think that kind of helps us with greater standing in the world.
Even if President Trump does say things that you want to criticize, like for instance, his whole Twitter account.
Like it doesn't- I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with this.
Have you ever seen a skinny person drinking Diet Coke?
I don't think so.
Some of those gems are fantastic.
I hear that.
But it's all background noise.
I mean, his actions speak louder, and that's what's making America, America again.
It's not his Twitter feed, to be honest.
M-A-G-A, folks.
All right, that was a short panel, but unfortunately, I've got to get to the mailbag.
Thank you all for being here.
An enlightening, illuminating, expert covfefe panel, as always.
Amanda Presto-Giacomo, Jacob Berry, and Zoe Rachel.
Now we must get to the mailbag.
Hey, Michael.
Settling a debate here.
Do you think modern and future medical advances will allow humans to live as long as sea turtles?
And if so, what are the implications that would arise from such expanded lifetimes?
Thanks, Bill.
I don't know.
I suppose so.
It might be the case.
We are living much, much longer.
I think the question that comes out of that is, why would you want to?
Are you sure that you want to live forever?
Humans have always tried to live forever, tried to discover the fountain of youth and the We're good to go.
But I certainly don't think that.
I think there's everlasting life, and why would I want to be stuck here with Marshall for another hundred years when I could go up and hang out with St.
Peter, you know?
So we'll see, but I won't stick around too long to see any of it, I don't think.
From Brendan, Mr.
Still the Only Good Knowles, you have good taste, sir.
What is a typical day like for you?
From Brendan.
Great question.
I usually roll over pretty early, about 11.15.
I'll stumble out and I'll have my morning meatballs and my morning whiskey while my fiancé, sweet little Elisa, writes my show for me.
Then I'll roll in for a typical work day.
I'll punch in about 12.15, punch out about 2.
Then I guess the rest of the day is followed by some light reading, a season or two of Always Sunny, 15 cigars and a bottle of port.
Then I do have to make sure I get my rest.
I need my beauty sleep after that.
So it's demanding, but you need structure.
Otherwise, you're just not going to be productive.
So just like Dr.
Peterson says, make sure you clean your room.
I don't clean my room, but obviously someone does for me, and you'll have a good and productive life.
From Mark, Dear Michael Knowles, I really like your interviewing style.
Thank you.
This became most apparent to me when you interviewed James Alsip about the Charlottesville protest.
Do you have any advice or resources on how to give an interview like you did with him?
You were relevant and challenging without being overbearing in your opposition, and even when you would cut him off, it was more to keep him on topic and on track than to talk over him.
Thank you, Mark.
I appreciate the compliment.
I actually do somewhat regret cutting James off as much as I did in that interview.
You are right.
I only cut him off because I felt we had limited time.
He was evading certain questions or veering off track.
I wanted to keep him on track.
But the thing that I really enjoy about interviews is I really like people.
I really am curious about people.
I'm fascinated by people.
That's why I've been an actor and I like politics a lot.
So that is the one common thing.
You have to like truth and you have to like people there.
So there are a couple kinds of interviews.
You can do the SmackDown interview where you just want to score points.
That's a debating style.
That was my job interview.
Yeah, that's right.
That was his job interview.
But there's that one where you just want to win the points and smack them down.
And I don't have any interest in that.
That isn't my personality.
I don't.
Stand personally to gain anything from that.
The other kind of interview is where you learn something or you convince somebody of something, as I tried to do with James.
But I'm interested to hear what people have to say, and I'd like to convince them.
So I think if you have an interest in people, a genuine interest in what they have to say, I think your conversations are going to be better and your debates are going to transform into something that actually is productive and not a bunch of We're good to
doing other things.
This is the same feeling I had when I used to play loads of video games.
Would like your thoughts, Dave.
You should read better books if you find that there's nothing worthwhile coming out of them.
I've I don't read a lot of fiction myself.
I should read more fiction because some of the books that have shaped my view of the world, that have influenced me to the point of really turning into a different person or a more aware person, Or fiction, crime and punishment, Dostoevsky, obviously Shakespeare and Dante and Milton.
So fiction is really important, but you have to read good fiction.
If you read slowly, I read very slowly.
Just make sure you pick out decent books.
It's the most worthwhile thing you could possibly do because it will, for not a lot of money and for not a lot of effort, totally expand your view of the universe and of physics and metaphysics.
Now I have a special offer for you.
It's funny that you asked this question today because Andrew Klavan has a new book out.
It's really a story called Another Kingdom and he and I have been working together We're releasing it as a podcast, and we're releasing it tomorrow.
So we're releasing it on October 13th.
You'll be able to get the first episode then.
It's really been a lot of fun.
It's about a Hollywood schlub who can't catch a break, can't work in show business.
I don't know where Drew got the idea to cast me in this.
And so he stumbles into another land, another kingdom, with crazy mythological beasts and warlocks and all of these sorts of things.
And I can certainly attest, living here in Hollywood, it is not clear which place is more surreal or terrifying.
So check that out tomorrow.
And you can Don't read books.
Have me read books to you.
From Lucas, my wife and I are expecting a new baby very soon.
Congratulations.
And as I have done in the past, I'm buying a box of cigars to give to friends and family to celebrate.
We're waiting to find out the sex of the baby.
Who knows?
It could be years before we know the gender.
And I'm fairly well versed with cigars, but do you have any recommendations?
That's wonderful news.
For that occasion, for you, I would smoke My Father.
That's a cigar called My Father by Don Pepin.
It's reasonably priced.
Very good.
Seems fitting.
In terms of non-Cuban stuff, I've been smoking a lot of Fuente Gran Reserva recently, Ashton VSG. If you're giving it out to your friends and family, I would...
Myself, I'd be a huge cheapskate, and I think the best value for your buck is Oliva Series V in that little Perfecto size or Toro or Robusto.
Those are excellent cigars, and they're pretty reasonably priced.
As for Cubans, lately I've been smoking a lot of Monte Cristos.
The 80th Anniversario is one of my favorite cigars.
The limited edition 2016 Dante I just had in the UK is very good.
The Anyado, also very good.
But those are expensive.
Don't waste those on your buddies.
Give them the Oliva.
That'll be an excellent cigar and pretty cheap.
From Sean.
When social justice warriors are triggered on international talk like a pirate day, are they obligated to say, shiver me triggers!
Just curious on your opinion.
Sean, is Jack Sparrow a transsexual?
Duh, the answer is obvious, man, of course.
From Bridget.
In nomine patris et fili et spiritus sancti, amen, dear St.
Michael Knowles, patron of trolls.
Two of my co-workers have recently put signs on their office doors.
One of them says, hate has no home here.
Probably like love Trump's hate or something like that.
Never got that expression, by the way.
Seems pro-Trump.
They use it as anti-Trump.
They don't know anything.
In several different languages.
And the other is from the campus LGBTQ LMPIA organization that says the office is a safe space.
I would like to troll them back with a sign of my own, but I'm not sure what to get.
I work at a state-funded law college, so I don't think anything blatantly partisan would be acceptable.
Please send a suggestion my way.
Well, if you work at a state law college, what I would do is put up a nice copy of a very scholarly political tome in the window called Reasons to Vote for Democrats a Comprehensive Guide, and that will contribute to the tone of scholarship and seriousness at your office.
In general, though, You've got to do something.
I don't have the answer for you right now, but this is not the time to be timid.
This is not the time to let these guys run over you.
We are winning the culture right now.
Conservatives are winning the culture for the first time in my life, for the first time in a very long time.
Don't give them an inch.
Don't give them one inch.
Don't give them one little lie.
Just as Jordan Peterson said, don't Give them anything.
It was pretty soon one lie turns into a million.
You'll be living in lies.
Hit them back.
We are winning despite the constant negative press.
Go Fefe!
Absolutely keep going, and I look forward to seeing what you come up with.
Okay, we've got to make sure that you tune in for the conversation.
That is going to be next week.
It's going to be the Andrew Klavan conversation.
You can only submit questions and have your questions answered if you subscribe to The Daily Wire.
So everybody can watch it.
It's going to be broadcast everywhere, Facebook, YouTube.
It's going to be October 17th.
Anybody can watch it, but only subscribers can have their questions answered.
Drew is just for an hour.
He's going to go through all of the questions.
So have the pearls of wisdom from the supreme leader of the multiverse be dispensed upon you and tune in for the conversation and subscribe before then so you can get your questions answered.
Also speaking of the ruler of the multiverse, Another Kingdom comes out tomorrow.
That's that book that Drew and I have been working on.
He wrote everything.
I perform it.
It's going to be out somewhere tomorrow.
I'll post the link to my Twitter, Michael J. Knowles, and to Drew's as well, and our Facebook pages.
But it's finally the cure for the Klavan-less weekend.
There may be a chance that there will not be chaos or mayhem on this weekend for the first since Andrew Klavan started going away.
