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PBD Podcast Episode 123. In this episode Patrick Bet-David is joined by clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson and Adam Sosnick
Follow Dr. Peterson on tour here: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/events/
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Text: PODCAST to 310.340.1132 to get added to the distribution list
About Guests:
Jordan Bernt Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist, YouTube personality, author, and professor emeritus of psychology. He began to receive widespread attention in the late 2010s for his views on cultural and political issues, often described as conservative. Connect with him on instagram here: https://bit.ly/3ufpRtC
Adam “Sos” Sosnick has lived a true rags to riches story. He hasn’t always been an authority on money. Follow Adam on Instagram: https://bit.ly/2PqllTj. You can also check out his weekly SOSCAST here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw4s_zB_R7I0VW88nOW4PJkyREjT7rJic
Connect with Patrick on social media: https://linktr.ee/patrickbetdavid
About the host:
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media, the #1 YouTube channel for entrepreneurship with more than 3 million subscribers. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Bet-David is passionate about shaping the next generation of leaders by teaching the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and personal development while inspiring people to break free from limiting beliefs to achieve their dreams.
Follow the guests in this episode:
Jordan Peterson: https://bit.ly/3ufpRtC
Adam Sosnick: https://bit.ly/2PqllTj
To reach the Valuetainment team you can email: info@valuetainment.com
Check out PBD's official website here: https://bit.ly/32tvEjH
#jordanpeterson #philosophy #psychology #rulesforlife #lawsofpower #stoicphilosophy #stoicism #robertgreene #marcusaurelius #stoic #carljung #niccolomachiavelli #the #changeyourthoughts #selfhelpquotes #artofseduction #robertgreenebooks #wisdom #robertgreenequotes #nietzsche #suntzu #jordanbpeterson #seneca #changeyourmindset #jordanpetersonquotes #quotes #jordanpetersonmemes #motivation #becomebetter
00:00 - Start
00:58 - Why People Dress Up
10:26 - Will Jordan Ever Leave Canada?
15:40 - Would Jordan Ever Run For Canadian Prime Minister?
23:43 - Who Is Jordan Peterson?
31:02 - Is It Time For Jordan Peterson To Throw His Name In The Political Ring?
46:10 - The Heroes Journey
51:44 - Is Spotify Gonna Drop Joe Rogan?
56:42 - Why Is Mainstream Media Ignoring The Covid Lockdown Study?
1:09:41 - Is The Media Embarassed To Admit Covid Lockdowns Don't Work?
1:14:25 - How Would Jordan Peterson Have Handled Covid?
1:23:18 - Justin Trudeau Flees Ottawa To Escape Freedom Convoy
1:33:49 - Jordan Peterson On Trump
1:42:35 - Is America The Greatest Country In The World?
1:49:27 - Is Xi Jinping In Jeprody Of Losing His Power?
2:04:31 - Is Remote Work A Problem?
2:11:22 - Are Online Universities Any Good?
2:19:29 - Jordan Peterson On Religion
2:32:27 - Is Justin Trudeau Fidel Castro's Bastard Child?
Thank you, Jordan Peterson, for coming back for this.
I think this is fourth or fifth time of us having you on.
How are things?
Strange.
Strange?
But good.
Fantastic.
Yeah.
So I started my tour about 10 days ago.
I saw Joe Rogan first, and that was really good and seemed to provoke a lot of outrage in the predictable places.
We need more of that, though.
We need more of that.
Yeah, well, we're going to get more.
So I don't think we're going to have to wish for that.
That's just going to happen.
And then I've done seven tour lectures so far and with an average audience size of about 2,500.
And they're going great.
They're unbelievably positive.
Everybody, almost everybody dresses up, which I think is really cool.
Really?
Yeah, well, when I went out on tour in 2018, before I went out, I thought I wanted to do this like 100% right, or at least as close to that as I could manage.
So I went out and bought some expensive suits.
And I spent way more money on, this is one of them, actually.
You look great, by the way.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Way more money than I ever thought I'd spend on clothes.
And I really felt quite bad about it.
You know, I thought maybe it was an extravagance, but I thought, no way, man, I'm going to see if I can nail this dead on.
And I'm going to be speaking to 100,000 people.
I'm going to look as sharp as I possibly can.
And one of the consequences of that has been that young men in particular come to the lecture tour dressed up in suits, three-piece suits.
Or the couples come and they're dressed up like they're coming to a wedding.
So that's really something.
Why do you think that is?
Is it because you set that sick acting like kids?
Okay.
You know, our whole culture pushes the idea that teenage life, or even childhood for that matter, but teenage life is some sort of pinnacle.
And then everybody dresses down.
So they look, especially men, they look like overgrown 10-year-olds.
And there's something extremely demeaning about that.
And so to provide people with the opportunity to dress up in a classic manner and to look like adults, to present themselves in that manner, there's something very attractive about that because we haven't done that in our culture.
That's been, I would say, downplayed in importance or for certainly since the 1960s.
Who's to blame for that?
Because you recall anytime you would fly in an airplane, if you see old school pictures, people were dressing three-piece suits to go on an airplane.
This is in the 60s, I assume.
And then now you see someone like Mark Zuckerberg wear a t-shirt to give a speech in front of a TED Talk or something like that.
So who's to blame for this drug?
Some of it's just fashion.
You know, I mean, fashion moves around and then it usually drifts from the top down.
And so when formality becomes the norm, but that drifts down, say, to the working class, then the upper class thinks, well, we can't do that because that would associate us with the unfashionable people.
And then they dress down.
And so then that drifts down the hierarchy.
And so there's some of it's just fashion, but a lot of it, too, is this idea that this sort of reflects of a rebellious attitude that anything that violates traditional norms or even anything that's associated with patriarchal oppression and adulthood is to be eliminated in favor of what's hypothetically a more free individuality, but it's not because everybody looks the same.
I was in Washington four or five years ago, maybe longer than that.
It's probably longer than that when I first went in the summer.
And one of the things that really struck me, all these people wandering around these great monuments, is all the men looked like overgrown 10-year-olds.
They looked exactly like their kids, except they were bigger.
They looked like they'd been inflated with a bicycle pump.
I thought, this is weird that adults are dressing like children and not good.
And so some of it's fashion, but some of it's also that.
Is it exclusive in America?
How about in Canada?
What have you seen all over the world with this?
No, I don't think it's exclusive to America.
I think it was more noticeable to me in Washington.
And I think that's when it really hit me because Washington is, in some sense, a place of pilgrimage.
And people from every class go there.
And that's a good thing.
And they should from every economic class.
And so it was like a cross, it was a real cross-section of the total population.
And that was one of the things that struck me quite bluntly.
And so, anyways, it's very nice to see all these people dressed up.
When you hear the argument being made, it's the follow-on argument.
The argument is, look, you only have so much energy to make so many decisions throughout your day.
Do you want to be in front of the closet in the morning picking and choosing what suit I'm going to wear to tie with what shirt and what tie?
You know what?
I'd much rather not consume my energy thinking about what outfit to put together.
It's a lot easier to just have a white shirt, jeans, regular tennis shoes, and go to work.
And let me make the bigger decisions while I'm running the company.
I've never felt bad not wearing a suit.
Every time I've had a suit on, I felt better than just walking on with a t-shirt on, even though the t-shirt is a lot easier to do.
You know, it's a lot easier, even when you were in the military.
It felt good having your greens on, you know, having your BDU on.
There was something very attractive about having a suit on.
Not for the audience, just even for yourself.
You felt good having a uniform on.
I don't know.
Yeah, well, I talked to my father about this years ago because he always wore a suit when he was a teacher.
He's still alive.
He's a teacher.
And he always wore a suit.
And I asked him why one day, and he said, because it was his way of showing respect for the students.
And I mean, I'm not saying that everyone who doesn't dress in a suit is being disrespectful, but there's something about outfitting yourself for the task at hand.
And there's also something about attempting to put some effort into presenting your, putting your best foot forward.
And I don't really buy the it takes more time in the morning argument.
It takes a bit more time.
But once you, like before I went on this tour, I went through all my clothing and I tossed out everything that didn't fit, which included a number of suits that were old.
And I had to organize them.
And that took about a day to get my closet in order.
But then from then on, it's actually a pleasure in some sense.
Do you do it yourself?
Do I do?
Meaning, like, do you go through your closet, you do it yourself?
Like, Pat has a very unique way of, like, you don't pack anymore, Pat, do you?
Like, you have someone kind of help you out with that.
Packing is not my strength in my life.
I have a lot.
That's one of my weaknesses.
No, I still did that for the tour because I had to figure out what I was going to wear.
But I've had people help me make clothing decisions, let's say.
Now, it's often people who would like to make suits for me.
So I have that as an advantage.
But I did that pretty much on my own.
Anyway, so while we were talking about the tour, it's going extremely well.
And so people come and they're dressed up and they look good.
Not everybody dresses up, but everybody looks pretty good.
I like that.
I like when you go into a room and people are dressed up.
By the way, just for the audience, just so you know what topics we'd like to cover with you today.
Number one, we'd like to cover what a fantastic job your leader is doing, Trudeau.
And I know you're a big fan of his.
We'll cover him a little bit with the Truckers on what they got going on up there in Canada.
Two, we'll talk about what happened with Whoopi Goldberg.
I'm curious to know what your thoughts on what should happen to what the comments she made about the Holocaust.
Some of the stuff that's going on right now with John Hopkins today, a report came out talking about how great of an idea was the shutdown, and no one's talking about it.
They said it was 0.2% effective.
Love to get your thoughts on that.
Some issues with the governor who came out with what they're doing with transgenderism, Governor Noam, on the fairness bill.
I'd be curious to know what you have to say about that and a few other topics that we got going on that's more on the personal side.
When does divorce make sense?
That's a question Adam's really curious about.
And then some other questions.
So today, do you still live in Canada today?
Are you still full-time living in Canada right now?
Insofar as I live anywhere full-time, it's in Canada.
I have a house in Toronto and we bought a new place about three hours north of Toronto on a lake, which we spent a lot of time in over the last six months, very close to that area.
It's awesome up there.
Yeah, it is.
It's beautiful up there.
And so that's been real nice.
My daughter moved to Nashville, partly to escape from the COVID restrictions and for other reasons as well, because Nashville has a really burgeoning creative culture and it's a very cool place.
Great city.
Yeah, it's a great city.
And real estate still is relatively inexpensive, certainly by Toronto standards.
So yes.
Why are you still still in Canada?
Why are you still living in Canada?
Well, I'm living in Toronto because my son and his wife and their son live on the same street that we lived on.
They purchased a house four years ago.
I think it was four years ago.
And that was before I assumed that I would be in Toronto for the rest of my life because I assumed I would work at the University of Toronto and continue doing what I was doing until I was like 90 because I really liked doing it.
And there was just no reason to assume.
And I had a clinical practice, which I also really liked.
And so that was pretty good life.
And I assumed we were there permanently.
And my son liked Toronto.
And so we picked up a house and they lived there.
But that's really the reason I'm still in Toronto.
And how that'll play out over time, I don't really know.
I mean, I'm sure you're seeing everybody that's moving.
You got Joe, who went from California to Austin.
You saw Shapiro, whose company is in Nashville, but he's living here in Boca.
You're seeing Rubin, who I think just moved in to, I want to say Miami, right?
You got Musk, goes to Austin.
You got your daughter who went to Nashville, right?
You got all these people that are looking at, you know, Nashville, Florida, Texas.
It seems like those three states tend to make people the most comfortable.
And they're all red state.
What needs to happen for Jordan Peterson to say, I'm kind of leaving Canada to go to a different state?
Would anything happen that would cause you to leave that place?
Well, I don't think, as long as my son's there, I don't think so, because that's a big advantage to being there.
But we're doing so much traveling, my wife and I, that in some sense, we don't live anywhere.
You know, I mean, we were three weeks, two weeks in the UK and then a week in Washington, and now we've been on the road.
We're going to be on the road pretty much non-stop till March of 2023, because the tour ends in the States at the end of April.
We'll hit 40 cities.
And then Canada, assuming that's possible, but it looks like it probably will be.
And then the UK and Europe.
We're going to be back in Canada for two months in the summer.
And then down to New Zealand and Australia and Southeast Asia.
And then I'm going to Cambridge, I believe, in January to do a seminar on Exodus, which is what I wanted to do at Cambridge multiple years ago before they canceled me.
But that's all been sorted out.
And so it looks like there's a very high probability that that will occur.
And then that's really as far out as we've looked.
So that'd be March of 2023.
And God only knows what shape the world's going to be in at that point.
There's hardly any sense in planning out past that because everything is in such flux, there's no predicting the future.
I asked the question for the following reason.
So, You know, there are certain people who do a lot of work behind closed doors, but nobody knows them.
There's a lot of smart people that are very intellectual, great teachers, you know, great students, loyalty, a ton of strong philosophies who maybe would make a great leader, but we don't know them, right?
And very few, it's very, very few, 0.1% all of a sudden, boom, overnight the world knows who they are and they're enamored by this person.
You're one of them.
This is kind of what happened to you.
Overnight, Jordan, who's Jordan Peterson?
Well, the people who are in Toronto would know who Jordan Peterson is.
Professor, teacher, clinical, I think you said you had 20 patients or 20 families that you were working on.
I think that was the number.
So it's not like it's in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands.
Overnight, the world's addicted to Jordan Peterson.
Who is this guy?
And then you have your moment with the lady that's pushing you feminists and then that goes off and wow, this man's deep.
Then you write the book, sells millions on top of millions of copies.
So then money's being generated, money's coming in, then everybody else comes in, hey, speaking this, speaking that, and that adds up.
That starts getting a lot of money.
And then you had your moment where I remember when I interviewed you on stage, that event was a very special event because it was you.
And then I had also George Bush I interviewed at that event, as well as the late Kobe Bryant, if you remember that event.
That was one event, 6,000 people, and you got emotional on stage when we talked about your wife and your daughter.
And I walked off the stage and I said, I think he's dealing with something.
I don't know what it is.
Talking to my wife.
I said, I think this guy's dealing with something.
And that was your last live event that you did.
And you kind of went hiatus and, you know, the whole thing that you were dealing with with the medication and all that stuff.
But then I kind of sit and I think about, you know, a Jordan Peterson.
Okay, so he makes a comeback.
When you go to a dark place and you come back, I would assume you may sit there and say, you know, stuff that I thought I valued, it's not really that valuable.
By the way, I value this, though.
And maybe you used to value it at 82%, now it's 90%, you know?
And stuff they used to value at 48%, they give energy to because other people cared, you're down to 22%.
I'm like, I really don't give a shit about this.
I don't know why I'm even putting so much time into it, right?
And then you come out.
And when you come out, you're kind of like looking around saying, God, why did I go through this?
What was this all about?
So it's kind of strange.
So then I see someone like you.
Yesterday I posted something saying, look, this whole thing with Spotify and Rogan, I'm sure we'll get into and we'll talk about it because I'd be curious to know what you have to say about that.
I really want to know your thoughts.
I said, you know, in a very strange way, I would love Spotify to drop Rogan.
And we're talking, I said, why?
Why would you want Spotify to drop Rogan?
I said, because the first phone call Rogan would get is from Elon Musk.
And Elon Musk would say, hey, don't worry about it.
Let's go compete.
I'm going to start something.
You be the face.
Let's get a bunch of podcasters.
Come with us and let's go do something.
So I put this video out there and I got commentary people that are posting stuff.
One guy said, that's just not Rogan.
Rogan's not trying to be a hero.
He's not trying to be a legend.
He's not trying to be that.
I said, well, if you read the journey of a hero as he fights it, until eventually it's kind of like, listen, man, I know you don't want to do this, but it's kind of like you could really address a lot of things.
And you're the right guy for it.
But I don't want to do it.
We see this in movies all the time.
It's a constant fight, I asked a question with you in Canada because, you know, who gets more eyeballs in Canada than you?
I don't know.
And is Canada in a pretty strange place right now with the way Trudeau's handled things where he used to talk about freedom and we can't ever make people do anything to their bodies that they don't want to do and all of it.
It's okay, this guy makes sense.
Boom.
No, if we have to choose between delivering food and delivering this, we're going to choose this because you're like, this guy sounds like a dictator.
Okay.
Is there any aspiration where in a moment like this, with all of these weird things taking place worldwide, where maybe you've sat down behind closed doors with your family, with somebody, and have said, you know, dad, Jordan, why don't you go in there and see if you can be the leader of a great country like Canada and do something about it.
Has that conversation ever taken place at this phase of your life?
Yes.
And?
Well, I've thought about a political career at different points throughout my whole life, starting literally starting when I was 14.
In fact, that's what I thought I would do when I was 14.
I worked for a political party in Canada.
It was a socialist party, as it turns out.
And I had that option open to me when I was extremely, when I was very young.
But I figured out when I was about 16 that I didn't really know anything.
And so I had ideas and I was capable of functioning in the realm of ideas and putting them forth even then, I would say, in a somewhat compelling manner.
But I figured out, partly because I had worked with a lot of small business people and also on the board of governors of this little college I went to.
These are all people who'd built businesses from the bottom up.
They're all immigrants because everybody in Northern Alberta was an immigrant.
And they didn't share my left-wing presuppositions, but they were very admirable people.
And part of what made them admirable to me wasn't their facility with ideological conceptions.
So it wasn't an intellectual attraction.
It was a practical attraction.
I worked in restaurants in this little town I grew up in, Fairview.
And I liked working with the guys that built the restaurant.
And I talked to them one day about the Socialist Party in Canada.
And Alberta at that time had a pretty good small business platform, probably better than the Conservatives had in terms of what it would do for small businesses.
And I asked them one day, why aren't you in favor of this small business platform?
Because they wouldn't vote for the NDP, the Socialist Party, to save their lives.
They said, well, we don't want to be small business people.
We want to be big business people.
And so I learned then that well, the guy I worked with, his name was Scotty Kyle, and Scotty was a rough guy.
He was about 35.
I was about 15 at that time.
And Scotty had been an alcoholic, and he had all his teeth knocked out in fights.
And he was a rough guy, but he is super funny, and he was really smart.
And he said to me one day, people don't vote their reality.
They vote their dreams.
And I thought, hey, man, that's a good phrase.
You know, that stuck in my mind for the rest of my life.
And so in any case, when I went to college, I went to take political science and literature and I wanted to go into law school.
I wrote the LSAT and I was set to go to law school.
I wanted to take corporate law.
And the reason that I wanted to do that was to understand my enemy.
That was the idea.
Who was your enemy at that point?
Well, I was still when I went to the United States.
Yeah, yeah, the big corporations, essentially, big corporations, you know.
But I realized about a year into my college education for a variety of reasons that, partly reading George Orwell, but that wasn't all of it, that I also didn't like, I went to a lot of the NDP party, and it's New Democratic Party.
It's not the NDP party.
New Democratic Party conventions provincially and nationally.
And I had access to the leadership for a variety of reasons.
And a lot of the leaders were reasonably admirable people, or maybe even completely admirable people, who had worked with labor unions.
And they were really, they were advocates for the working class in a real sense.
But the party level activists, I never liked them from the beginning.
I thought, I don't trust you guys.
You just seem to be driven by resentment, not genuine care for the working class.
And so that didn't sit well with me.
any case, I started to get interested in psychological motivations for political behavior, especially as I went through my political science degree, because there was increasing emphasis as we moved away from the classics, which is what I studied in the first couple of years, to more modern political thinking, let's say.
It was all quasi-Marxist in that the political scientists believed intrinsically that people were only motivated by economic concerns.
And I just never believed that.
I thought that's which economic concerns and why?
Well, those questions weren't asked by political scientists.
They took economic determinism as a starting point, and that never sat well with me.
I thought there was a mystery there because it wasn't obvious to me what motivated people.
And we're not ruled by our bellies as far as I'm concerned.
So the idea of pure economic determinism was a non-starter.
And that's really when I started to get interested in psychology.
And I've made a choice all the way through my life.
The choice has always been, say, political, sociological versus psychological, or perhaps spiritual.
And I've always chosen the psychological work at the level of the individual.
And I don't think I'm going to stop doing that.
I mean, I have had discussions, serious discussions with people about a political career.
And first of all, in my current situation, it isn't obvious to me at all that that wouldn't be less effective than what I'm already doing.
That wouldn't be less effective?
Yeah, yeah, it'd be less effective.
Yes, it would be less effective for me to do.
What do you mean by that?
Well, I mean, I know what you mean by that, but what do you mean by that?
You mean to tell me you're having the same amount of impact now as you would as a PM?
No, I think more.
Right now you're having more impact?
Yeah, yeah.
Look, those are hard jobs.
And you get boxed in very quickly.
And they're also brutal jobs.
And it isn't obvious to me that I have the stomach for it.
I don't really like fights.
In fact, I don't like them at all.
Part of the reason that I said what I said back in 2016 when I first stood up and voiced opposition to what the universities were doing and also what my government was doing was because I could see where that was going.
I could see that it was going to generate conflict of all sorts.
I knew, for example, that all this pronoun foolishness was going to confuse thousands, particularly of young women, because there's a whole, there's a very large clinical history of that sort of thing happening for 350 years.
So that's detailed in a book called The History of the Unconscious, which is a great book by a man named Henry Ellenberger, who wrote the best book on the history of psychoanalytic thinking.
And so I knew that.
In any case, part of the reason I spoke up, and this was a hallmark of my clinical practice and also of the manner in which my family was organized, is like, we're going to have that fight right now.
And we're going to make peace because I don't want to have this fight every day for the rest of my life.
And so it's going to be a pain to fight through it because it's always a pain to fight through a conflict.
But if you can fight through it, you can make peace and then you don't have the conflict.
And I really don't like conflict.
So I don't like it deferred because I know what happens if conflict is deferred.
You get weaker because you backed off and the conflict gets more intense because its tentacles grow in a sense.
It's like not paying a utility bill.
It's like for the first month, it's not that big a problem.
I don't know.
I'm trying to think to say that you think you're making a bigger impact right now than being a PM.
I have a hard time with that.
Let me unpack my question and challenge me on this.
Sure.
So, okay, so let's just say who is Jimmy Fallon?
He is the, you know, hey, I'd like to be like a Johnny Carson, hypothetically.
Like, that's the Fallon Carson, right?
Who is, I don't know, Tucker Carlson.
Maybe he's trying to be O'Reilly or maybe whoever it is that the lineage that you're going through, right?
Okay, who's this latest person trying to have a show?
She's trying to be the next Oprah Winfrey, right?
Who would you say what Jordan Peterson is doing in history, who would you have been in the 16 or whatever the century would go to?
Who is Jordan Peterson?
Like if you were to give a hundred years from now, what are people going to say who Jordan Peterson was?
They're not going to say, oh, he was a professor.
Oh, he was a clinical psychologist.
Oh, he was an author.
I don't think they're going to say that.
What do you think people are going to correlate you to 100 years from now?
I really have no idea.
So let's just say, is it like a philosopher, Plato?
Would you say you're more of a philosopher?
Would you say you're more like an Aristotle?
Do you see yourself more as that?
Do you see yourself as, look, I'm just somebody that's sharing my thoughts and my life experiences and I think I'm a clinical psychologist.
Okay, so that's kind of how you see yourself.
Yeah, yeah.
There's a lineage of great clinical psychologists.
I'm not saying that I'm in that lineage, but I would say that people who are the most similar to me are people like, well, Carl Rogers might be an example.
I mean, he didn't have the same social media platform, but of course no one did.
But that's how I see myself intellectually, really as a psychologist, as a clinical psychologist.
And I think that the work I'm doing on my lecture tour is a hybrid of being a professor and being a clinical psychologist.
But is it fair to say that's who you were, but you've evolved into something way bigger than just being a clinical psychologist?
I think that's what Pat's kind of getting at.
He's comparing you to an Aristotle of some capacity.
Yeah, well, I don't know because my focus is still on the individual, even when I'm lecturing in front of large audiences.
And I don't exactly lecture.
I explore ideas in front of audiences, which is what Rogan does.
And I do that even when it's a monologue.
You know, and you think, well, how can you be exploring ideas with the audience when it's a monologue?
And the answer is, well, you're attending to the audience.
You're watching them to see if they understand and if they're nodding and what they're responding to.
Like there's a dynamism about it.
But it's all focused on the individual.
And there's been some unbelievably influential clinical psychologists or psychiatrists.
I mean, Freud was unbelievably influential, and so was Carl Jung.
And there's a half dozen of them or so.
So I see that I'm in that tradition.
Now, the fact that this information now can be disseminated in audio form and video form makes the playing field radically different.
And so I was also a very early adopter of those technologies.
So when I blew up, let's say, it happened overnight.
It's not exactly like because most of these things don't happen exactly.
It takes 20 years to overflow.
Well, the first doublings are invisible, right?
Yeah, but that live outside of the university, that's, listen, everybody's like, who is this guy?
He's right.
makes sense so that was a concept of it well sure there was a tipping point there that That was when there was a free speech rally outside my office at the University of Toronto.
It wasn't organized by me, but I was invited to speak, as was anyone who wanted to speak, by the way, at that event.
And then a bunch of radical types tried to shut it down with white noise, and they were very annoying.
And some of them were clearly psychopathic.
Some of the people, I watched them because I have a pretty good eye for that.
And some of the men that came out, they were bad, bad actors.
In any case, I got shang-haid on the way back into my office by these hypothetically trans activists, mostly young people.
What do you mean, shang-haid?
Well, they just surrounded me.
You know, that's all I mean.
Ganged up on.
Well, kind of.
They were disrespectful, which I wasn't very thrilled about because I think that it's not a good students.
If students are being disrespectful to professors, something's wrong.
That's not what happens at a university.
I had no tolerance for that in my classes.
If you were out of line, you are more than welcome to leave now.
And that didn't mean you couldn't challenge me intellectually.
That was absolutely fine.
If you had a smart question, you were paying attention.
I didn't care what your opinion was.
But, you know, maybe when you're a junior high teacher or an elementary school teacher, you have to put up with misbehavior.
As a professor, I put up with like zero misbehavior.
That's no misbehavior.
We're adults.
We're not doing that at all.
Did you set the tone for that day one in the first class?
Like, this is how I roll.
Yeah, I never had trouble with students in my classes.
Well, a handful of students would pretty much always leave the first lecture I gave, particularly my personality class, because a lot of them didn't know who I was.
In my smaller classes, people already knew who I was, so that never happened.
But in my personality class, there'd always be six or seven people in the first lecture who'd make a show of leaving.
And it was because of the tone I set, which was, don't muck about in this class at all.
You're here to listen or not.
You can leave if you don't want to listen, but this is a serious endeavor.
Any case, these students surrounded me and they filmed it and then they put it online.
And the object was to discredit me, but that didn't work.
But the reason it didn't work in part, and this is why this wasn't only overnight, was I already had 100 hours of lectures on YouTube.
And I basically recorded everything I ever said to students in any professional capacity.
And what I said in my classes was exactly the same as what I said when I wasn't in my classes.
So there's no show there.
And so people came to look to see what was going on.
They came to my YouTube channel and it had like 35,000, 50,000 subscribers at that point, which wasn't none, especially that early on in YouTube development.
And they found out that what I was saying was not only completely unlike what I was accused of saying, but it was exactly the opposite, partly because, you know, I was accused of being this radical right-wing figure.
And I'd lectured about the evils of National Socialism at Harvard and at the University of Toronto for like 20 years.
So the idea that I was somehow radically right-wing was not only a lie, there's lies where you bend the truth, right?
That's one kind of lie.
I think what those lectures did is a way for people to not be able to taint your name by saying, I actually like what this guy has to say.
35,000 subscribers, not a lot of subscribers.
No.
But this is where I'm going with this.
So you're saying you see yourself as a clinical psychologist, right?
Okay, great.
You know, sometimes the challenge I have is to follow.
Like, you know, I sit down and say, why is he still in Canada?
Maybe there's bigger aspirations to stay in Canada because he loves his country and he'd like to see Canada become the country that he chose to live when he was a kid growing up and he's got memories, mom, dad, family, all this stuff.
So maybe to him, because some people don't want to leave a country because they want to make a political contribution to that country.
Some people are like, listen, what country is going to give me the best tax benefits and freedom?
I'm going to go there.
I'm totally cool.
I'm going to go to Singapore.
I'll do my Bitcoins.
I'll go to Puerto Rico, pay 4% on taxes.
This is what I'm going to be doing, right?
You seem like a very deep guy.
Here's where I go with this.
In my life, I've experienced a lot of weird things.
Iran, war, divorce, parents, politics, military, you know, all this weird things out of business.
You've seen coming up and, hey, we're so supportive of you.
We want to see you win, Patrick.
And then I start kind of getting big and all of a sudden we're getting big.
It's like, well, we don't like you anymore.
What happened?
You liked me when I was small.
You don't like me when I'm big.
I'm the same person.
What's the problem here, right?
Here's what I've noticed.
Those who are driven by force are more ambitious on imposing and having control than those who are driven by choice.
Let me unpack this.
Meaning, you know, sometimes people that are driven by force are more inspired to get involved in politics and create laws than those who are driven by choice.
Choice is kind of like, listen, let me leave me alone.
Let me alone.
Don't let me go live my life, right?
But I think sometimes it's kind of like, you know, you made this one example.
You know, who made this example?
Somebody was on yesterday saying, look, you know, the way I look at foreign relations, Mike Ritland, is if I go to a bar and if a fight's breaking into a bar and I go in there, no matter what, if I go in there and fight, I'm going to piss off one side, whether I fight, defend the girl or the guy, someone's going to be upset with me because I chose to fight, right?
Says America is kind of like that.
You're getting into a lot of these fights and you're getting involved in these.
There's a fight going on in your country right now, yours.
And people are still listening to this guy.
He's still got influence.
And you got, you know, these truckers that are coming out that are saying, listen, man, you can't make us do this.
It's 5,500 miles, America, this.
You want us to get vaccinated?
You want us to, we don't want to do it.
We want this freedom.
Don't you think, you know, this may be a good time for you to throw your name in the, you know, and say, hey, you know what?
I'm going to go and here's why.
Because I think 100 years from now, when we sit here and talk about who was the main philosopher when Lincoln was president, only people in that world are going to know who that person is, but everyone's going to know who Lincoln is and what Lincoln did and the impact he made, right?
Do I think his life was a peaceful life?
If you've read about Lincoln and his marriage and that one friend he would travel with, and when you go to Smithsonian and they show the evolution of how much he aged, it's a pretty, it's a lot of burden on what this guy went through, right?
But he was chosen, and he was the right guy for it.
Do you don't at all feel like, you know?
No, it's again, I think I can detail out some of the reasons.
I think I'm more effective doing what I'm doing.
Well, I'm working with a lot of political people in the United States, both on the Republican and the Democrat side, all the time.
And I couldn't do that if I was involved formally and technically in politics in Canada.
I'm working with a bunch of people in the UK as well.
And so, and I'm working with people in Canada.
It's just more effective for me to do what I'm doing.
I don't know about that.
I don't know.
Well, I can give you an example with the truckers.
And a couple of examples.
So a week and a half ago, the former premier of Newfoundland, so equivalent of the governor of the state, he was the premier in the 1980s.
And he was one of the drafters of the Canadian Charter of Rights.
So he actually wrote it with a bunch of other people, but he was one of them.
And he's a mainstream, solidly admired politician, across the spectrum, regarded as a decent guy.
And he mounted a constitutional challenge to the vaccine mandates, announced it a week ago, stating that, see, they put an emergency provision in the charter saying that under certain emergency conditions, true emergencies, that charter rights could be suspended in the case of a national emergency.
But he's not convinced in the least that the COVID epidemic, even at its height, constituted such an emergency.
He said that was not the intent of the drafters and certainly doesn't constitute that emergency now.
And so he talked me through this, and I thought, well, isn't this interesting?
We have a person who actually drafted the Charter of Rights saying that the, and a former premier of a major province saying that the government is acting in an essentially unconstitutional manner.
I don't think that's ever happened in the history of a Western democracy.
And I said, well, okay, that's something.
He's 82 now, sharp as a tack.
Why do you want to announce this on my podcast?
That's preposterous.
And he said, well, our team has talked it over, and we don't think there's one news source in Canada that will handle this credibly.
I thought, that's not good.
So we released that a week and a half ago, which was timed very nicely, as it turned out, with the truckers' protest, because people are saying, well, are the truckers breaking the law?
And the question is, well, just exactly who's breaking law here.
And that's by no means obvious.
And so that was extremely helpful.
And then about a few days after that, I released another video calling on the conservative types in Canada to seize the moment, given this popular uprising and the fact that countries all over the world are dropping the COVID mandates, to seize the moment and drop the mandates at a provincial level.
It's enough is enough.
And somebody's got to be the first actor.
And so that got a million and a half views in no time flat.
And so I'm able to play a useful role as a, well, on the media front, weirdly enough, but also as someone who's standing apart from the details of the political fray.
I mean, I get that, but it's like saying if Reagan would have stayed being the B actor or a GE, getting paid a million dollars a year to go around the world and talking about his political philosophies and how great GE is or president of SAG, would he have been able to tell Gorbachev to take that wall down?
I don't think so.
Would he have influenced a country like Russia to become a little bit more free where people are staying?
They're not leaving.
They're a little bit more comfortable staying there because now there's a capitalistic opportunity.
It's no longer communism.
Karl Marx and Engel and those guys don't have the influence that they had before because Stalin and Lenin and what travesty they did to people.
Does that credit go to Gorbachev?
Does it go to who?
It goes to Reagan, right?
So if you think about Churchill and Chamberlain.
It goes to Solzhenitsyn, too.
I totally get it.
And he was obviously a writer.
And so it's, look, I mean, it's not like the political domain doesn't have its purpose and its function.
But there's a lot I would have to stop doing if I did that.
And it isn't obvious to me that that's the right thing for me to do.
Partly, again, because I started doing what I'm doing back in, say, probably 1985, because I realized that one of the pathways to totalitarian catastrophe was deceit at the individual level.
This is something that Solzhenitsyn made very much of, Orwell as well, Huxley as well.
These great thinkers concluded in the aftermath of these totalitarian catastrophes that there was an integral link between pathology at the individual level, which was fundamentally the willingness to use deceit in an instrumental manner, I'll lie to you to get what I want, and authoritarian catastrophe, and that it was a direct causal link.
And I actually buy that argument.
I think that's literally true.
And so partly what I'm doing, I hope, is helping people walk through thinking about why telling the truth is a good idea.
Not only for them, not as a top-down, shake-your-finger moral injunction, don't lie, you shouldn't lie, but in a detailed manner to explain the relationship between the instrumental use of deceit and the collapse of civilizations.
And that connection is way closer than people think.
So one person influences a thousand people for sure in their lifetime and sometimes a lot more than that.
And a thousand, the next rung out from that, a thousand times a thousand is a million, and the next rung out from that is a billion.
And so you're always at the center of a concentric circle that two rungs out contains a billion people.
Well, it turns out that what you do matters.
And basically what I'm doing, I hope, is touring and talking to people face to face in these lectures, for example, and making the case that it's a terrifying case.
Everyone says, well, we want meaning in our life.
Do you now?
Do you now?
Because you might ask yourself, what's the more threatening possibility?
That nothing you do matters, which means you can pretty much do whatever you want.
That's the upside of that nihilistic claim, no responsibility, right?
And why not pursue narrow-focused hedonism since nothing matters anyways?
So that's the shadow of nihilism.
Or everything you do matters.
And it's a lot more terrifying to contemplate that, is that you will be held accountable for everything you do.
And I believe that firmly, partly as a consequence of my clinical experience.
I never saw any one of my clinical clients ever get away with anything, even once.
And you think, well, people get away with things all the time.
It's like, no, they don't.
They might gain a narrow advantage in one dimension in the short term.
But, you know, let's say that you use deceit in your business practices.
First of all, that doesn't work very well because people will figure you out.
So as a long-term strategy, it's terrible.
It just doesn't work.
No one is going to play with you if you're a cheat.
But let's say that someone asked me the other day, well, what about these dictators that ruled their whole life and they were at the top of the hierarchy, let's say, and they had all the power.
Stalin's a perfectly good example.
It's like, didn't he win?
Well, everyone Stalin ever talked to lied to him because they were absolutely bloody terrified of him.
His country was a nightmare.
It was a hell or as close as we've been able to produce with the possible exception of the Nazis and the Maoists, but it was up there in terms of hell.
And did he rule?
Yes, but he ruled hell.
And if you think that's a victory, well, go ahead and try it and see how much of a victory it is.
You know, Milton Satan said, I'd rather rule in hell than serve in heaven.
It's like, fair enough.
Go ahead.
Use deceit.
Use instrumentality.
Rule in hell.
You'll be the ruler.
See how much good it does you.
See where that takes you.
It takes you somewhere terrible.
And so I'm much more interested in talking those things through with people.
And I do do political work, but it's not the right thing for me.
I got the last question for you on this, and then we can move on to the next topic.
So Churchill, you know, his writing, what he did, kind of started like you at a very young age.
He's a guy that if you follow his writing, the guy's done a lot of stuff, right?
And then eventually last minute, hey, we can't figure this guy out from Germany.
We need your help.
Chamberlain stepped away.
Hey, goes and recruits the guy that he hates the most.
And we know how history ends up.
We speak in English today, big part of it because of Churchill.
But this is the last question.
You know how you said, at this phase of my life, this is what I'm doing.
Do you think the right thing to do is what's always what we want to do?
Or sometimes we have to do things that maybe the world or family or somebody else is relying on us to make a decision that's more impactful to the world than what would be more fruitful to us.
I think that happens a lot.
You know, I have a, I don't know, a fantasy, I suppose.
And I don't know how well thought through it is.
But one of the things I've been thinking about doing is I'm writing another book at the moment, which I plan to publish in the next year and a half or something like that.
It's called We Who Wrestle with God.
And perhaps there'll be a tour associated with that.
And I want to do a public lecture series on Exodus.
But I've been pursuing more artistic endeavors recently again in detail.
I did some of that when I first went to graduate school.
I made a variety of paintings and so forth.
And I really like doing that.
And I really like doing this.
I've been working on a musical project with a friend of mine and with my family, which is really, it's really fun.
I really like it a lot.
And I wrote a screenplay that's a musical, which I really enjoyed doing.
I seem to have somewhat of a gift for writing verse, weirdly enough, especially amusing verse.
I think it's amusing, and some other people have thought so.
It's really playful and fun.
And I think I could do that.
I could do a lot of that.
And it would be, in many ways, less demanding than what I'm doing now.
And I've talked to my family about that.
But they seem to think that, you know, when my wife and I planned this tour, I was unbelievably ill still.
And it just seemed like a pipe dream that this was ever going to occur.
But if we were going to try it, we had to do it months in advance.
And so, but, you know, I outlined the tour for her with my agents.
And she said, I asked her when we got off the phone, I said, do you want to do this?
And she said, yes.
And I was quite surprised that, actually, I mean, Tammy had been unbelievably ill for months and months and months, like at death's doorstep every day for like eight months.
It was awful.
And yet she was on board.
And, you know, it's got this great adventurous element to it.
And it seems, to your point, that the time is right for it, whatever it is.
And so away we go.
And that's what we're doing.
And it would be possible, in principle, for me to be in my cabin up north and record music and engage in artistic activities and be with her and my family in a more private way.
Now, I don't know if I'm suited for that.
So that's why I'm saying, well, maybe it's a pipe dream because I really like being as busy as I can possibly be all the time.
And I've kind of trained myself for that.
I started training myself for that really when I went to graduate school because I wanted to find out how much I could do.
And I like running at top speed all the time.
And so maybe I wouldn't be suited for that.
Although the days we've spent and the weeks we've spent engaged in it, I have an art book coming out, Strange Art Project is going to cause all sorts of trouble, coming out probably in September or October, and a bunch of music that'll accompany that, which is also going to cause a lot of trouble, I believe.
I really enjoyed doing it.
It's really engrossing and fun and playful.
And I liked working on this screenplay.
We've got a bunch of music being recorded for it.
And that's called The Water of Life, the screenplay.
It's a great old fairy tale.
So, but to your point, sorry, you have a responsibility beyond the narrow confines, let's say, of a particular interest, even if it's an artistic interest, a valid interest.
And you play the role that is set in front of you that constitutes the best path forward.
And there's obviously a market for what I'm discussing, a market, let's say, an interested audience.
And so, and I love doing that too.
That's the other thing.
I love doing it.
Pat, can I ask you a question?
Because I think the line of questioning that you're asking, Dr. Peterson, is, overall, you're talking about being the reluctant hero.
That was the sort of the initial analogy that you gave with Joe Rogan, where the guy said, that's not what Joe is.
Joe is not trying to be a hero.
And you're like, sometimes, you know, it's not who you want to be.
It's who people need you to be.
I mean, it's like the...
Joe isn't trying to be here.
No, he is.
He's just being a hero.
Okay, correct.
But, you know, it's almost like Neo from the Matrix.
It's like, we need you.
You're the chosen one.
It's like, whoa, what are you talking about?
So, Pat, essentially, what he's asking you is like, Lincoln, you know, Churchill, Trump even.
These are people, whether they were reluctant heroes or not.
These are people that have changed the world.
And you're more saying, like, look, Sigmund Freud, Gandhi, you know, more the philosophical line.
But ultimately, what I think Pat is getting at is like, who changes the world more?
Dignitaries, presidents, prime ministers, or thinkers?
Thinkers.
And you say it's thinkers.
So that's ultimately.
That's for sure it's thinkers.
So that is ultimately both Churchill and Lincoln are good examples.
I mean, they're a melding of the two.
So that's really unique.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that's ultimately what your line of question is.
No, all I'm saying is, listen, all I'm saying is the following.
I'm sitting there looking at a lot of guys that should throw their name into and go out there and compete and they're not.
That's a problem.
Okay, so we could have.
Well, look, a lot of the people I know who would make. extraordinarily competent political leaders.
So these are people who've built exceptionally complicated enterprises from the bottom up in an extremely creative and diligent way and who mastered that.
They won't throw their hat in the political ring, partly because they have other things they're doing that they regard as more significant.
And often they are.
And this is a big problem because what it means is that, perhaps, is that the pool of qualified political candidates is much narrower than it might otherwise be.
So, and that's something you're obviously wrestling with ethically.
You know, when are you called upon to throw your hat in the ring in some sense despite your own personal interests?
I don't have any contempt for the political arena.
You know, I think it's a big mistake for people.
People go from naive to cynical, and then they think cynicism is wisdom, and it is compared to naivety.
But it's not compared to what comes after cynicism, which is something like courageous trust.
And that's the right attitude to have towards the political sphere.
And often people don't want to take the risk of courageous trust, and so they justify that avoidance with their cynicism.
I'm not like that.
I know the political realm is valuable and necessary.
And I don't have contempt for it.
And I don't think anyone should.
It's a mistake because it's your system, man, and you're sovereign.
You're a sovereign individual.
It's your system.
If it's corrupt, that's on you.
I can have definite sense.
And people say, well, there isn't anything I can do as one person.
It's like Joe Rogan's one person.
And he didn't, his success is really remarkable.
First of all, you can't just push it aside as chance because Rogan was a good fighter, and that's hard.
And then he was a good comedian, and that's really hard.
Maybe no harder than being a fighter, but hard.
And then he had a pretty good TV career, and that's hard too.
You forgot he was on news radio, which was good.
Rogan's established.
Yes, exactly.
Established his credibility in three different domains.
And then it's also extremely difficult to be a good interviewer.
You actually have to listen.
And he listens.
And so Rogan's a very good example of someone who, as an individual, stayed closely allied with the truth and has had, well, we have no idea what his impact is going to be because Rogan has 11 million listeners per episode now.
I see absolutely no reason why he won't have 20 million listeners per episode in a year, especially if people keep trying to take him out.
And it's so funny, especially watching CNN go after him.
You know, they're all treating the mainstream media.
They keep treating Joe like he's the fringe.
I think, are you people, well, I know these legacy news media sources are dying.
All their really competent people have already gone off to do other things because they could.
And they're living in like 1975, which is a very weird place to live at the moment.
And they look at Rogan and they think, what did the CNN guy who was criticizing the other day said?
We have all these departments devoted to news analysis.
Yeah, yeah.
Rogan is just winging it.
It's like you try winging it, buddy, in front of 11 million people and see how successful you would think that's easy, dancing on a tightrope where any word you say that's false is going to result in, well, complete and utter pillorying of you from multiple news media sources all over the world every day, which is what's happened to Joe nonstop in the last month, despite the fact that he hasn't said anything stupid.
So wing it.
You think that's so easy.
It's not so easy.
And look what he's done.
It's like, it's amazing.
And all he's done, all what do you think is going to happen with him with Spotify?
Oh, Spotify won't remove Rogan.
You don't think so?
They'd be out of their mind.
What are the odds?
They dropped from $60 billion valuation to $36.
That's $24 billion.
You think the board is sitting there, they're die-hard Joe Rogan fans, or do you think they're profit margin top-line revenue fans?
Oh, I hope that I would rather that they were the latter, the profit margin types, because that's what a corporation should do.
And I'd trust them more if they were doing that.
I'm with you.
But I also think that if they have any sense, and I know how this is going to turn out, it's turned out in my life like 50 times this way.
The heat goes on.
The pressure's on.
You're in the desert.
It's unpleasant.
You wait it out.
You haven't done anything wrong.
You wait it out.
You don't apologize.
You don't back down.
You wait, and things viciously turn in your favor.
Now, waiting it out while you're roasting, that's not pleasant.
And if the Spotify types have any sense, they think, yeah, well, that's a drop.
But, you know, it's part of the death throes of the legacy media.
And once all the dust settles, CNN will have half the viewers they have now.
And Joe Rogan will have twice the viewers, and we'll be doing just fine.
And Rogan, as long as he keeps doing what he's doing, he came out on Instagram.
This is so funny.
He came out on Instagram to talk about all this a few days ago.
And I thought, you nailed it, Joe.
He came out and he said, it's a paraphrase, and I'm going to do it a bit comedically.
He basically said, well, everyone knows I'm kind of a lunkhead and I have lots to learn.
And I probably haven't managed this like perfectly because I do my own scheduling and I just talk to people I'm interested in.
And so possibly I could have presented a more balanced view some of the time and I'll try to do better in the future.
And so all the legacy media said, Joe Rogan apologizes, which is not really the case.
And then he talked about how much he liked Neil Young.
And none of this was for show.
And none of this was as sincere as he gets.
Absolutely.
He told the story when he was at a Neil Young concert.
I mean, he's not a fan of security.
This is great, man.
And so as long as Rogan keeps doing that, and he's been doing it for five years, and it's not like he hasn't faced pressure before, it's clear to me that he's I just can't see any scenario short of his assassination that ends up in Rogan not having 20 million viewers, an episode in a year.
And so as long as he's careful, like he is, I don't think Rogan can be canceled.
So even if Spotify dumps him, it's like, who's dumping who here?
Rogan, he's on Spotify.
It's not necessarily.
Spotify might be on Rogan.
It's not so clear.
And so what's going to happen?
They kick him off?
Well, he'll just have another platform like tomorrow.
Immediately.
Yeah, and he'll have all the money Spotify gave him, which was actually quite a lot of money.
Yeah, exactly.
Did you see what Pat had to say about this topic yesterday?
I don't know.
I think Rogan is a billion-dollar guy.
I think Elon needs to sign a 20-year, $50 million-year contract with Rogan and start a company, like a social media company.
Choose which route you want to go, a direct competitor to YouTube, to Google.
It's not like Elon hasn't done it.
He didn't create a company that was revolutionary.
He went against cars.
Cars have been around for a while.
Well, invent cars.
Yeah, but what I'm saying is cars and rockets have been around.
So it's not like he went and invented the rocket or invented a car.
You don't need to invent something.
Just go direct against YouTube.
Go directly against Spotify.
And Elon N. Rogan could pull it off with the help of Peter Thiel.
It'll work itself out and they'll recruit the right people.
They'll make a few phone calls and the world's going to come saying, hey, if you like to have a platform for free thinkers and where you're not going to be censored, give us a call or, you know, do this.
And it would take off.
But going back to the question with you, you know, I watch you when you get interviewed.
And I say this to myself.
I'm like, okay, here's a clinical psychologist.
Okay.
What does he do for a living?
You listen to every whatever problems you hear people tell you, right?
If you really don't want to entertain an idea and you want to push it away, you'll do it in your own creative way.
You're a heavyweight chain, you know, heavyweight type of guy that's gone up against everybody, and you know how to handle a topic that you don't want to talk about or give the answer to.
You're a pro.
You've been around the block for a while.
I just think for you to think about like right now when we're talking about, I think as an individual, we can make more impact than being a PM or being a president or somebody like that.
Canada is in shambles right now because of Trudeau's policies.
Canada's shut down right now because of Trudeau's policies.
Well, it's not just Trudeau.
You know, there's lots of conservative premiers in Canada.
Well, who's done exactly the same thing?
Well, flip it.
If Trudeau's philosophies were different, the other guys wouldn't be able to do what they're doing.
If Trudeau had the influence at the top, it would have been open.
Can you pull up the market, the Johns Hopkins article?
I just want to read this and get Jordan's.
It's that article.
Yeah, so here's CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, WAPO, Washington Post, completely avoid John Hopkins study, finding COVID lockdowns ineffective.
FYI, would you say John Hopkins is a conservative organization like Hoover Institute or Heritage?
No, but Johns Hopkins is one of the most reliable medical scientific research enterprises, universities in the world.
Barnum.
That's very important for people.
But Johns Hopkins is extremely reliable.
So it's not like it's a CNN.
No, no, this is like this is Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge level.
Johns Hopkins, especially in the medical domain.
So watch this.
ABC, CBS, NBC also ignored the anti-lock lockdown study.
So go up, let me read this.
So here we go.
There has been a full-on media blackout in the study online, the ineffectiveness of lockdowns to prevent COVID deaths.
According to Johns Hopkins University meta-analysis of several studies, lockdowns during first COVID wave in spring of 2020 only reduced COVID mortality by 0.2%.
That is not a lot.
In the U.S. and in Europe, while the meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effect, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted, the researcher wrote.
In consequence, lockdown's policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.
If you can go a little higher, I want to read the next two and I'll get Jordan's thoughts.
However, the Johns Hopkins study received no mention on any of the five liberal networks this week.
According to Grabian transcripts, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC all ignored the anti-lockdown findings after having spent much of the pandemic shaming red states with minimal restrictions and events deemed by critics as super spreaders.
It wasn't just the networks avoiding the study.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, Reuters, USA Today, Axios Politico, amongst other outlets, also tuned a blind eye to the findings according to search results.
Jordan, how important is this research?
Like, how important is this analysis that we're reading here right now?
What does this tell us?
I should tell you what a meta-analysis is to begin with.
Well, imagine there's a group of studies done on a particular topic, and you write a review, and you try to interpret the findings.
That was called a narrative review.
You use your opinion in some sense to wade through the data and try to understand what the compilation of studies reveals.
Well, there were techniques developed 25 years ago that are statistical where you can aggregate the statistical results from studies statistically.
So you do a statistical analysis of all the statistical analysis, and that's a meta-analysis.
And hypothetically, it's more objective, and there's some truth to that claim.
You still have to select which studies to include, but I don't believe that that was a detriment in this particular case.
And so solid methodology, and it's basically something approximating a cost-benefit analysis.
And that has its, that's tough too, because it's not that easy to assign costs and benefits in a quantitative manner.
Having said all that, it's, well, it's an amazing study, not only because of what it reveals, which is a 0.2% decline in overall mortality, but also in that the researchers felt so strongly about their findings that they came right out and said that this was ineffective policy.
And that isn't that common for researchers who generally hold off on drawing that sorts of conclusions.
They kind of lay out the facts.
Out of black and white.
They're typically not going to come out as black and white is what you're saying.
Yes, yes, exactly, exactly.
And so that's really something.
We rushed to imitate a totalitarian state in panic.
And the consequence of that, according to this study, was there's zero, there's nothing positive about it.
Now, I've talked with some Democrats about this study because they were paying attention to it.
And their response is something like, well, it did help control hospital overrun.
And time will tell whether or not that's true.
I think the data suggesting that COVID vaccines decreased the seriousness of illness when people contracted COVID, who were vaccinated, I think that data is credible.
I could be wrong about that because things are being done in a rush and it's very difficult to draw appropriate scientific conclusions in a rush.
But I think the bulk of the information suggests that.
But I also think that is not how they were marketed and that was not the initial intent to merely reduce severity of the illness.
It was to reduce transmission and so forth.
And then, of course, this is a cost-benefit analysis which says, yeah, there was some gain on that front, conceivably, maybe, although all-cause mortality doesn't seem to have gone down much at all.
But the economic, the secondary consequences were devastating.
And well, we don't even know what the secondary consequences are yet.
You know, here's one secondary consequence, which is revealed in what you just read.
The collusion of the press and the government.
Like, how do you know that's not worse than the epidemic?
It could easily be worse than the epidemic.
Or the idea that now we've been coerced into having to share our medical information with people all through the bureaucratic hierarchy, all the way down to servers and restaurants.
So we've trained people that that's okay, to ask, and also to offer.
Is that worse than the pandemic?
Well, these are arguably, all of this involves violation of our fundamental rights.
Where's the evidence that that's not worse?
Well, we're going to see it play out.
Well, the collusion between the press and the government, that's so intense in Canada, as I already said, when the ex-Premier of Newfoundland wanted to launch his constitutional challenge, he couldn't use a mainstream news source.
I mean, that's a bloody catastrophe.
Much as I dislike CBC, which is a lot, by the way, I think that it's an absolute catastrophe that it's come to that.
And that's just one of, you know, two consequences of the lockdown.
There's the supply chain problem.
That's a big one.
You know, my publisher, Penguin, told me a week and a half ago, we were talking about putting out a two-volume set of my last two books, which I would really like to do.
They're going to do that in Great Britain.
I think that people would turn to it as a gift for graduations and so on.
That would be a nice set for that.
They told me they can't get paper.
This is Penguin Random House, right?
And it's paper.
Paper isn't that complex given how complex everything is.
The fact that there are paper shortages, that's a big deal.
I was in a Mazda dealership in Canada a couple of months ago now.
They had one car.
One isn't very many cars.
And so we have no idea what the supply line crunch is going to produce in terms of economic catastrophe.
And then the next issue is, well, how about all the money we've been printing?
You know, we've already seen that produce a massive bubble expansion in housing prices.
That's being driven by other factors.
How do we know that's not worse than the pandemic?
You know, it could easily be.
I'm not saying that it is, because I don't know, but that's the issue.
I don't know.
And this is partly why this mad rush to impose top-down solutions to complex problems, this is in some sense what makes me a conservative insofar as I am, it's part of the caution I learned as a social scientist.
Social scientists, I'll give you an example.
This is a good example.
I worked with this woman named Joan McCord, and she was one of America's great criminologists and a woman who was involved as a faculty member when very few women were.
She participated in a study in Boston, in Somerville, which is a working-class community back in the 30s.
They did the first large-scale intervention to deflect children from a criminal pathway.
So they're looking at deprived inner city kids thinking they have a higher probability than average to become criminal and to suffer all sorts of other negative consequences as well or to inflict them.
And perhaps you could intervene at an early age and stop that or slow it down at least.
And so they put together a very comprehensive set of interventions, parental lessons for the parents, lessons for the kids, health and nutrition interventions, a whole broad spectrum of all the things you think.
This was in the United States, in Somerville, Massachusetts, a famous study, Somerville study.
One of the first large-scale psychological public health interventions, I would say.
And targeting a problem that was troublesome for left-wing people and right-wing people alike.
The right-wingers would think, well, fewer criminals, that's good.
And the left-wingers would think, well, let's do some remediation at the root of the cause.
So everyone was hoping this worked.
And everyone was happy about it.
The kids thought it was good.
The parents thought it was good.
The researchers thought it was good.
They also put kids, they took the kids out of the inner city in the summer and put them out in camp because of nature and all of that.
And wouldn't that be a nice break for them?
And then they did the analysis.
And the kids in the intervention group did worse on virtually every measure.
Worse.
Like substantially worse.
And so they were all shocked and seriously shocked in a major way.
In fact, Joan McCord was so shocked she spent the rest of her life going around talking about what had happened.
Turns out that it's a really bad idea to group anti-social prone kids together in camps in the summer because they learn to compete with each other in terms of the manifestation of antisocial behavior and they get better at it.
It's like criminal camp.
And so that single consequence of one part of the intervention was so negative that it overwhelmed the entire study and produced negative results.
So McCord, she was part of a group of very, very able social scientists that I worked with when I was in Montreal, a broad group, and it was an international group.
And they beat the drum all the time.
Never, never, never, never do a large-scale intervention without building in an evaluation.
25% of your intervention budget should be evaluation because you do not know that your stupid intervention, which you think will do what you think it will do.
That's just a guess.
It's a guess.
And it could go wildly wrong in 10 ways you don't predict.
And if you've ever run studies in a lab trying to predict how people are going to behave, you figure this out real soon because they don't behave the way, what was the old idea?
Put a lab rat in a cage under controlled conditions and the rat will do exactly what it damn well chooses to do.
And that's true for rats.
It's even more true for people.
And so these large-scale interventions, which the pandemic lockdown was certainly one of those, is like, and this is the conservative objection.
The law, iron law of unintended consequences.
Do something large-scale to systems you don't understand at all, not a bit.
You know, we have just-in-time supply now, right?
And you think about how efficient an economy has to be to rely on just-in-time supply.
So it used to be that if you ran an industry, maybe you're making, you're a car manufacturer, you have a warehouse full of parts.
But the parts are just sitting there, and so that's like money invested that's not accruing any interest.
It's a cost, and you have to store it, that's cost.
And so that's an expense.
And so maybe you want to just have your part supplier supply the parts exactly when you need them.
And then maybe the part supplier has to get the metal just exactly when they need it.
And so on all the way down to the miners.
And maybe that's in China.
Then you think there's 30 steps there and every bloody thing has to work absolutely perfectly on time for that to work at all.
And then you throw a lockdown into that.
It's like, well, you've never run a business.
You have no idea how complicated things are.
You think electricity comes out of plug-ins in the wall.
That's not a complicated problem.
You just put the plug-in and there's the electricity.
And you muck things up in 50 different directions and that's what we've done.
And God only knows what we've done.
And then this issue that the mainstream press won't cover this.
You think the reason they're not is just purely embarrassed the fact that this is going to lose even more credibility with the audience that, well, we've been saying this the entire time, we've been wrong.
We haven't done real true investment.
No, I don't think that's it.
I think, no, I don't think that's it.
If that was the reason, I could understand that reason.
I think it's part of this implicit and explicit collusion.
It's like, this isn't the story, and so we're not going to report it.
And I think that economically even that's a foolish decision because Newsweek, I've been reading Newsweek recently.
Newsweek has some journalists.
They actually have some real information again, which is quite interesting.
It's still a left, though.
It's still a liberal magazine.
Yeah, but my experience has been in the last couple of months.
I thought, oh my God, there's some actual news in Newsweek.
And so that was really cool.
But I see all this not only as collusion, which is absolutely appalling.
So that's the death of journalism because journalists are colluding with politicians.
It's like, well, they're not journalists anymore.
And they're also not politicians.
Because if they were politicians and journalists, they wouldn't be colluding.
Whatever they are as a consequence of this collusion is not politicians and journalists.
It's some completely new thing.
Now, I'm less worried about it than I might be because I also see it as part of the inevitable death spiral of the legacy media.
They're dead.
And why?
Well, they don't have a monopoly over the dissemination of information at all.
YouTube, for all of its flaws, which are manifold, is an unbelievably powerful and accessible technology where the cost of entry is zero.
It's like no TV station can compete with that.
Period.
They're done.
And then these print media sources, especially when they're great people, Barry Weiss might be example, leave because they can't say what they want to.
They don't have to lose much of their talent before all they've got left is hacks.
And then everyone can publish to an international audience instantly online.
So part of what we're seeing in the mainstream media is a technologically fueled death spiral.
And I know how large corporations die.
So there's this principle, Purito principle, which is that the square root of the number of people in a given creative enterprise do half the work.
And so if you're a news organization with 1,000 people, 30 of them do half the work.
And you think, no, and you can think that all you want, but you're just wrong because this is one of the most well-established findings in social science, period.
So you got 1,000 people and 970 of them are putting in time and 30 of them are doing half the work.
And then something shifts.
Those people can't say what they want to say, let's say.
The 30.
The 30.
Well, what do they do?
Well, they leave.
Why?
Because they can.
Right?
These are people.
These are competent people.
They're really smart.
They're on the edge.
They're tough.
They have immense networks of connections.
As soon as the ship rocks, they think, ciao, you think I need you.
It's like you got your priorities wrong.
You need me.
They go off like Barry Weiss did and start their own thing.
And so then you're left with the 970 that was only doing half the work.
And then the next 30 competent people leave.
And soon all you've got is people who run the legacy media.
And they say things like, well, Joe Rogan, people should listen to him because he just wings it.
It's like, how clueless can you possibly be?
Or you have people like at CNN who treat Rogan like he's an outsider, despite the fact that he's pulling in numbers that are at least five to eight times their average viewership.
Joe is fringe.
It's like, really?
We'll see who's fringe here.
And so, and part of this is purely technological.
It's like, there's no way these legacy apparatuses can compete.
How can they?
Printing with universal distribution is free.
Video with universal distribution is free.
How can a network possibly compete?
It can't.
So spiral death.
And as they die, they lose their editors.
They lose their fact checkers.
They lose their good journalists.
They lose everybody with courage.
And then they put out Pablum and they're tempted by clickbait because that's what you have to do while you're dying.
It's like, Christ, we have to attract attention somehow.
So you say, well, Joe Rogan apologized and everybody clicks on it and they read it and they think that's a lie.
And so you've lost another 5% of your viewership.
CNN is probably sitting in their board meetings saying, God, please, we need Trump to be president again because when he was president, we were making money.
We need somebody like that to be president.
They're begging this guy to come back.
Can you imagine if CNN ends up putting him on left and right to berate him?
But at the same time, they're getting more eyeballs.
But going back to it, okay.
So Jordan, let's just say you are the PM of Canada.
Let's just play this let's just say game.
Okay.
And you watch the decisions Justin made.
He's your PM.
You live in that country.
How he handled truckers, how he handled vaccine, how he handled lockdowns, how he handled everything.
How would you have handled some of those things if you were the PM of Canada?
Well, I'd have to say that I don't know because those decisions are extremely complicated.
And it's very hard to speculate.
I do have something to say about that, though, that I think is relevant.
When I watch Mr. Trudeau through the lenses that I've developed over the years, I see someone who never, ever says a true word.
And so I've met lots of people like that.
They're all persona, and everything they do is crafted, in a sense, to obtain what they think is appropriate in the situation, whatever that might be.
It's all instrumentality.
And so when Mr. Trudeau comes out and addresses his audiences, it's all a game.
It's all an act, all of it.
And so what I would hope I would have done differently if I was in that position is I would have said what I thought and hope that that, I always think that's the way that carries the day.
It doesn't mean you're right because what the hell do you know?
But at least it means you're engaging in the process that might make you right if you opened up your eyes and your ears and listened.
And so what to do isn't, in a complex situation, in some sense, isn't as important as how you do it.
What approach do you take when the chips are down and things are tense?
The good politicians that I've met, and this is relevant to this, they listen.
You know, they go out among their people, actually go out, and they listen to them.
And that way they learn what to do.
And that's not opinion polls.
Opinion polls are, and my country and yours to a large degree, is ruled by opinion polls to a degree you can't possibly imagine because the politicians won't take responsibility for saying what they think.
And so then they default to their handlers, and their handlers rely on opinion polls.
And opinion polls provide a bad, short-term sample of people's careless thoughts.
And you think, well, you're following the public.
It's no, you're not.
The entire parliamentary system is set up to follow the public in an intelligent way.
It's not easy to figure out what people think or what they want.
It isn't even easy for individuals to figure out what they themselves think or want.
It's really hard.
And these traditions that we've set up of representative democracy are ways of listening to the people that are measured and thoughtful and long-term.
And they're being supplanted by idiot opinion polls that are run by people who have instrumental desires.
They want to win the next election.
And I know you have to win the damn next election, you know, but pandering to a mob who's frightened because you scared them, that doesn't constitute leadership.
It's certainly not democracy.
There's a reason we don't have direct democracy.
There's a reason for that.
It's like rule by impulse.
It's not a good structure.
It's not a good strategy.
We figured that out a long time ago.
Our organizations are way too large and complex for anything like direct democracy to work.
We're going to have a vote on every issue.
Obviously not.
People just don't have the expertise for that.
And it's not like they shouldn't be consulted.
They absolutely should be.
The voice of the people is the sovereign master of the political enterprise.
But what a leader does is aggregate that voice.
I'll give you an example.
This is a good example.
What a leader does is aggravate that voice.
Aggregate that voice.
Yes, yes, yes.
Collects it, collects it.
So I interviewed Jimmy Carr, the bridge comedian.
He's very, very smart, Carr, and I asked him how he did what he did.
And I kind of knew this from other comedians I've talked to.
He said, comedy, stand-up comedy is the most dialogical of all the artistic enterprises.
I thought, well, what do you mean by that?
Because you actually, you have a monologue.
What do you mean it's dialogical?
He said, well, before I go out on a tour, and he's had a couple of successful world tours, so that's pretty good when you're that funny.
That's amazing.
He said they go out and do 100 shows.
Rogan does the same thing.
All the comedians do the same thing.
Louisique does this.
They all do it.
They go to small clubs.
And they try out their material.
So they're sitting at home trying to be funny and sometimes they are and sometimes they're not.
And then they go to an audience and they lay out some jokes.
And sometimes people laugh a lot and sometimes they don't.
And so the comedians who do this repeatedly listen and then they collect all the things that people think are funny.
And so, isn't it so cool?
You don't even have to be that funny in some sense to be a comedian.
You have to be a little bit funny and then you really have to listen.
And so if you go out to your audience and you tell them jokes and they tell you what's funny, then you can collect all the things that everyone thinks is funny and then you can go on a world tour and just say things that everyone thinks are funny.
It's so cool.
That's the pathway.
That's aggregates.
Exactly, exactly.
So when the comedians are doing what a political leader who is functioning properly does, they're doing exactly the same thing.
I talked at length to a Canadian politician, Preston Manning.
He's on the right of the political spectrum.
And he built a political party from scratch in Canada and became the leader of the opposition, which is no trivial thing to do in the span of a single lifetime or even in the fraction of a career, which is what he did.
And he told me that what he really liked was going out to make a speech, but that wasn't the part he really liked.
He really liked the question period because people would just tell him what they were concerned about.
And then he derived the policies for his party as a consequence of addressing those concerns.
So it was really a bottom-up enterprise.
And so I would hope that had I been in that position, I would do what I'm doing when I'm on my tour, which is watching people and listening to them and then responding.
And this happens, first of all, when I lecture, which isn't exactly the right word.
When I explore ideas in front of people, I'm watching them like a hawk, blinded as I am by the lights, you know.
But I'm watching to see if people are following and modifying what I'm saying to make sure that everybody's staying on the track.
And then I have thousands of people.
I have had thousands of people meet me in meet and greets after the talks and then on the street.
And I always listen to them.
And so then I can address those concerns.
And then that keeps the situation dynamic, right?
And so in the UK, in the House of Parliament, there's this great dome at the center of the building.
And it's the lobby.
And that's where the word lobbyist comes from, by the way.
And the citizens of the UK have the right to enter the lobby and petition their member of parliament at any time, essentially.
And so the lobby is where the voice of the people meets the voice of their representatives.
And it's the center of the British House of Parliament.
And it's built that way architecturally, which is so brilliant.
It's stunningly brilliant, the way that that's laid out.
And that's exactly right, because the people are somewhat inarticulate, like the truckers.
Like, they're not making an argument in some sense.
They're bringing their trucks to Ottawa.
Showing, not telling.
Yes, exactly.
And people who aren't primarily intellectual, let's say, they have to act out their moral presuppositions in a more concrete manner.
But that doesn't mean they're wrong at all.
It doesn't mean that at all.
And so then the job of a leader is to note that inarticulate expression and to give it voice publicly in speeches, let's say, but also to have that voice manifest itself in the body of laws that governs all of us.
That's how the system works.
And so, and the alternative is to dismiss that.
And that's not a good alternative or to demonize it, which is I want to read this to you because it goes kind of based on what you're saying.
Here's a Yahoo News story.
Trudeau flees as trucker convoys enters Ottawa.
As thousands of protesters enter Ottawa, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his family were moved from their home to an undisclosed location somewhere in the city on Saturday afternoon due to security concerns.
A freedom convoy of some 2,700 truckers entered the Canadian capital of Ottawa Saturday to protest Trodo's Trudeau's.
Due to security concerns, security concerns.
This is a PM.
So COVID-19 policies, according to the Independent, around 100 big rigs blockaded a main street running past the Canadian Parliament building.
So that's going on.
He just tested positive for COVID.
Now it's coming into U.S.
They froze the GoFundMe account, which raised over $10 million and nearly 130,000, 140,000 people that donated.
And now American truckers are kind of getting involved and saying, listen, we're kind of— Facebook kicked them off yesterday.
Facebook kicked them off.
137,000 subscribers to that group.
They kicked them off.
Yeah, you wait till you see your election this year.
You're going to see plenty of that.
That's for sure.
How bad do you think the consequences are going to be?
You really think, you know, some people, I talk to some people who are professionals in my community are like, what are you talking about, truckers?
I haven't seen anything on the news.
I'm like, you haven't seen anything?
I haven't seen anything on the news.
You don't know what's going on with truckers?
No, I read Wall Street Journal and New York Times.
I know nothing about what's going on in Canadian truckers.
So they don't watch, obviously, Fox, and maybe they don't watch podcasts, right?
But isn't that the same thing with the John Hopkins?
Yeah, same exactly.
Exactly.
It's like, how did you know?
Here's the point.
How would I?
Yeah, so he said, he says, you really think these truckers are going to have any kind of an influence on anything?
It's truckers.
You think they're going to have any influence?
The way he said it, he said, because they can't express it with intellectual thoughts.
The leader of the Socialist Party in Canada.
So hypothetically, on the side of the working class, the people who are most opposed to the truckers in Canada are the people who vote NDP, the socialists, about 20% of the population, stably in Canada.
And now and then we have a socialist provincial government.
And they've done some good.
I don't want to get into that.
But like I said, there are people on that side of the equation who, for example, were fostered in the labor movement.
And they had things to say.
The working class needs to have their say.
But the vast majority of people who vote NDP in Canada are opposed to the truckers.
It's like, I thought you guys were on the side of the working class.
It's like, what's happened?
Well, not them.
It's like, hey, man, welcome to the working class, those truckers.
Well, they're all white supremacists and racists.
It's like, really?
In Canada?
Are they now?
White supremacists?
Really?
Or Nazis?
In Canada?
There aren't any of them.
There was some Dimwit was waving a Confederate flag at the rally.
And the truckers, he was masked.
The truckers stripped him of his mask and chased him away.
But all the mainstream press reported Confederate flags at the trucker rally.
As if that matters.
It's like, it's not like there are a lot of Canadians, by the way, flying the Confederate flag.
First of all, that's not our country.
Exactly.
And second, most Canadians, I would say, don't really know in any deep sense what the Confederate flag stands for.
I mean, you know, people aren't that informed.
And I'm not being condescending.
They have other things to concern.
It's comments like what you just said that validate some people how much of a role people like George Soros plays to get protesters out there that are actors and they're not real and they're trying to instigate to say, you know, this is how people are feeling because you know the biggest mover and shaker emotion is what?
Anger.
Anger is the way you get people to say, you know what, these guys are white supremacists.
These guys are this.
And so this validates how some people have that argument.
It also validates how Facebook does their algorithms.
They want people arguing in the comment section because anger basically begets more comments and basically more eyeballs and more support and more.
Like, how many Canadians even know what the hell the Confederate flag even means?
Right.
And there's one.
Like there's 50,000 people.
We don't even know how many people are in Ottawa.
I've seen wildly different numbers.
The idea that there was 100 trucks, that's just completely insane.
There's like 10 times that number minimum.
And so that's another thing that's so appalling is you can't actually get accurate information.
And then, yeah, well, this Trudeau fleas issue, that's highly clear.
I don't like that.
It's not like I view that with any sense of satisfaction or delight.
Like, I'm not a fan of Trudeau because I don't think he's capable of saying an honest word.
And I truly mean that.
And I've watched his speeches over and over, watching to see what's going on with him.
And all I see is acting.
But despite that, why would I be happy that the leader of my country ran away from a protest citing security concerns, which is a very bad move to begin with?
It's like, well, I have to leave because you people are so dangerous.
You think it shows weakness?
Well, no, it's worse than that.
It's an instigation.
It's an instigation.
Because he said that the reason he had to leave was because of security concerns, which means you people are dangerous and not to be trusted.
And I don't think the truckers so far are dangerous and not to be trusted.
And I've been watching them handle this.
They're playing this.
It's been very peaceful for the number of people who were involved in the demonstration.
And that's despite the potential effect of instigator types.
And that's a real threat.
So even with that, it's been peaceful.
And they've set up food camps to feed the homeless and they're shoveling the snow in front of the war monument.
And now they have a guard around the Terry Fox statue.
Terry Fox was a man, one-legged Canadian, who ran across the country raising money for cancer, and he's a Canadian hero.
And his statue was desecrated in the language of the mainstream press.
They put an upside-down Canadian flag on it and put some clothing on him, which was desecration, which, okay, have it your way.
In any case, the truckers set up a guard around the statue, so that's not going to happen again.
And they seem to be not taking the bait.
And so I hope that that continues and that this proclivity to instigate, which would be extraordinarily convenient for Mr. Trudeau and which is an easy out for him, I'm praying that that doesn't happen.
Is there a reason why you wouldn't show up to something like this?
Like to support the truckers or at least lend your voice?
No.
The reason I'm not there is because I have other commitments, right?
I'm on this tour and people have bought tickets and there's thousands of them and that's what I'm doing.
And, you know, I put out videos in support of them, which I think in some sense is, yeah, well, the video I put out last week, which was a message to the conservative premiers, essentially, and the conservative leader who lost his position last week because there was a revolt at the federal level.
And so our main opposition party transformed leadership last week in no small part as a consequence of the trucker convoy.
Put out this video calling on these conservative premiers to drop the damn mandates.
And so it's.
I said I mentioned earlier, it's got about a million and a half views.
It's called seize the day and that's as if that's as effective or more effective than me being there.
So, as far as I can tell, and besides, it's the best I can do under the current circumstances, given everything yeah, so you know, you know it's crazy.
While this is happening, I was listening to Charlemagne got.
You know Charlemagne got I don't know if you know who he is he Breakfast club he's.
He's big time radio hip hop guy big yeah, in the hip-hop world very, very well known.
At this point, you know, I think he's necessary.
It's not about a fan.
I think he's necessary.
Anybody that's pushing the envelope and you're fair and you push your own side.
Salute, hats off to you.
I respect that guy.
He said something the other day on a podcast which pissed a lot of people off.
He says, you know what, at this point I miss Trump.
He said, let's get that, you know, back here, because at least you knew he would say some shit and he meant it.
And you're like you could say, I disagree with this guy.
He's crazy and he's not a fan of Trump.
No, he's now the zero fan of the interview.
He's a supporter of Kamala.
He's a supporter of Kamala Harris and and is not a fan of he asked the question, said, who's run this country?
Is the president uh, Joe Manchin, or is the president Joe Biden, who was really the president?
But anyway, to Kamala he said, then you know, Kamala acted like she got pissed off.
But so, Trump?
Hey, maybe we need this guy back right, maybe we need somebody like that to come.
And you saw Shaq the other day.
Can you pull up Shaq, what he said?
I don't know if I want to play the video.
To be honest with you, if you can find what he says, and maybe do this, maybe do this press unmute on the video.
You see that button on the audio.
Bring it all the way down.
But they're going to pick up the algorithm.
So go and say Shaq, vaccine force.
Just google Shaq vaccine force.
I don't know if you saw this or not.
Jordan, did you see this?
This was just yesterday.
Did you see this or no?
Adam, did you read?
I have not.
Okay, I know he did say something, so so watch this go.
Shaq rips covet vaccine mandates.
You shouldn't be forced to make something.
You don't take something.
Yeah, now go all the way down.
Because I want to read to exactly how he said it.
Because if they have the whole back and forth, go a little lower, go a little lower, go a little lower.
I wish I could show it to you so.
So the lady's like well no, they're not really forcing us to take anything.
Says no no, they are.
No, they're not.
No one's forced me.
Says, what are you talking about?
If you don't take it, do you have a job?
She says no, you don't have a job, but they're not forcing me to take it.
Says that's forcing you, that's forcing you.
So what is starting to happen is some people Charlemagne is like, listen, maybe this guy that we hated on as much as we hated on, maybe he took positions, maybe he came out there and talked to us.
Maybe at least we had, you know uh, something to say, took a position on what we had to do rather than, hey uh, what are we doing today?
Hey, you know, how do we handle the situation here?
Do you think there's certain people right now?
Uh, because we're in Florida.
So in Florida it's Desantis and Trump.
It's a very competitive.
There's a lot of people that want the Santis and there are a lot of people that don't want the Santis to run for office because they like him as a governor.
They're worried who would replace him.
But there's still, you know, let's go Brandon flags outside of uh, you know, all these boats that you see, everyone's got some kind of a let's go Brandon flag, which i'd like to get your uh feedback on how you feel about Brandon, if you this Branding guy or not.
But uh trump, your thoughts next election coming in, U.s.
With everything that's going on.
When I watched what happened in the United States with Trump and Clinton, I thought people like they liked the unscripted impulsive lies of Trump better than the scripted, instrumental lies of Clinton.
What do you mean by that?
Well Trump, Trump gave a different speech generally when he went from audience to audience.
He kind of shoots from the hip kind of a lot, and it isn't obvious to me that shooting from the hip is really the right way to lead a country.
But calculating everything beforehand for maximum impact on your political future, that is not also not a way to run a country and that's how you get pulled into politics by handler, by pr by, by opinion poll, by image we have.
You know.
You see politicians, we have to protect our image.
It's like really, do you?
You have to protect your image, do you what?
What's your image exactly?
Well, it's what we want people to think we are.
Well, how about you be that, instead of being the image of that and this, you see this dialogue taking place.
People don't even notice it.
It's like we have to protect our image.
It's like Rogan doesn't protect his image.
He doesn't have an image.
He's actually there, which is why people are listening to him.
Or or come up with some other excuse, he's a gateway to the alt-right.
It's like really, this left-leaning person with high degree of sympathy for socialist views on the working class site, who's a psychedelic experimenter hippie, countercultural person, is a gateway to the alt-right?
Really, that's your story.
Yeah, of all the stupid stories, it's so, it's so ridiculous.
You, the only way you could possibly believe that is if you knew nothing about him, because that's just not who he is at all.
It's preposterous.
But the only other explanation is that people are listening to him because they trust him, because he's trustworthy.
Well god, could that possibly be?
And all the media forces that are raided against him aren't trustworthy.
It's like, well, a lot of that, as we already talked about, that's a consequence of rapid technological transformation.
How much of that is based on the conversations he has regarding the backs?
Because prior to Covet or even vaccine mandates, nobody thought that he was center right nobody.
Oh yeah, he was no.
No, he was getting that because he was before Covet.
Yeah yeah, he was hypothetically.
You know, a founding father of the Intellectual dark WEB, and that was going back five years ago and everybody review reviewed, everybody who had a mainstream view, let's say, viewed all the people who were in the intellectual dark web for lack of a better term as gateway to the alt-right.
You know Brett Weinstein and his and his wife Heather.
You know those terrible right-wingers.
It's so preposterous.
And uh, Sam Harris as well.
Another, you know, hyper conservative person.
Well, it's just not that at all, not at all.
Are these people actually tuning in and listening or Or are they just making assumptions?
Oh, no, they don't listen.
No, people who criticize, well, what happens often, and this is why Rogan keeps growing in popularity, and it happened with me to some degree, is that people come because they're curious and then they do listen, and then they think, oh, this is nothing like what I've been told.
It's in fact, and I think this was particularly true in my case, in relationship to accusations of, say, far-right sympathies.
It's like, well, what about all the lectures I gave on Nazism for like 30 years at two of the biggest educational institutions in the world?
What about those?
And then what about this?
What about the fact that I had, I now have like 300 hours of things I've said online, and you haven't been able to find one phrase, even taken out of context, that was enough to damn me in any serious sense, not one.
So now you can take some of the things I've said maybe about gender differences in personality and clip them and then put them in the most like abysmal interpretive context possible and warp that seriously and kind of make an argument that I'm a misogynist, but even that's incredibly ineffective.
First of all, because I'm not.
The fact that I think there are differences between men and women and that I actually appreciate the differences makes me the opposite of a misogynist.
Because if you're a misogynist and you don't like femininity, then you deny that it exists and it does exist.
And so, and all the data support that.
Men and women are broadly more similar than they are different in terms of their personality structure.
There's no doubt about that.
But the differences aren't trivial.
They have major influence on occupational choice, for example.
And the data on that's absolutely clear from, and it's all been generated by left-leaning psychologists because the entire psychological research community, the academic community in general, is left-leaning.
So all this data showing that there are differences between men and women at a personality level has been generated by people who are antithetical to that idea politically.
So, yeah, yeah.
Did you used to get in arguments with your colleagues?
Meaning, I think 90 plus percent of professors are left-leaning.
Is that the number, Pat?
I want to say?
It's 13 to 1, according to Wash Eyes.
So more than 90%.
So meaning if you're in a room and there's 13 professors and you're more to the right conservative and you're in the break room having a coffee, having a cake or whatever, are you arguing with your colleagues?
How did that work?
I didn't argue with my colleagues much.
Now and then I checked.
I want to argue with you.
Okay, faculty.
Oh, people were irritated at me from time to time because I worked with the business school and you know how reprehensible they are.
And so that was annoying because my attitude to that was, you think all the sins on the side of the business school?
It's like, what the hell's wrong with you?
That's your viewpoint?
You think you're sophisticated?
And so, but I didn't argue about that because it just was pointless.
I argued very seldomly with my colleagues.
And I spent most of my, I had lots of colleagues who were friends of mine, although at the University of Toronto, they tended to be people who eventually went elsewhere.
And that was more a matter of happenstance than anything else.
But I had colleagues who were close friends of mine at Harvard, and we got along just fine.
And they weren't, I wouldn't say they were also that they were particularly left-leaning.
But I would also say, I'm not particularly right-leaning.
You know, the fact that I was branded conservative or right-wing for that matter really came as quite a shock to me because temperamentally, I'm kind of halfway between a liberal and a conservative because I'm very conscientious, but I'm also very high in this trait openness, which is a creativity dimension.
And so the openness tilts me more in a liberal direction, and the conscientiousness tilts me more in a conservative direction.
So I kind of, so I suppose in some ways the easiest political slot for me is something like libertarian, but insofar as I would put myself in the political slot, but I never thought of myself as a conservative.
So apparently, well, I'm conservative in some ways now, partly from being a social scientist.
As I said, I'm a firm believer in the law of unintended consequences.
I also believe the conservative dictate that the best level of government is the level most proximal to the problem.
And that's a really good principle, even for running an organization, right?
You want to devolve power, distribute it as much as possible, facilitate local autonomy, and you want the decision makers to be as close to the people that the decisions are affecting as possible.
And that's actually why I thought Brexit was a good idea.
You know, it's like two Tower of Babel, the European Union.
It's like, nope, the representatives got too far away from the people.
Very, very dangerous.
And so I think the UK made a good choice.
It's like, no, we're not, especially the UK.
It's like center of free speech in the world.
All things considered, historically considered.
You know, Americans and Canadians differ on this to some degree, but in Canada, we kind of view the American Revolution as Englishmen standing up for their rights.
As Englishmen standing up for their rights.
Yeah, well, the UK had a very well-developed tradition of belief in intrinsic human rights long before the American Revolution.
I'm not saying the American Revolution was trivial, because it wasn't trivial, but it's an extension and elaboration of a set of principles that were there long before the American Revolution occurred.
As a Canadian, do you think America is the greatest country in the world?
It's probably.
Yeah, probably.
I mean, I was, every time I go to the UK, I'm, or Europe in general for that matter, I'm stunningly impressed.
The UK is an amazing place, and its institutions are so remarkable.
Oxford and Cambridge, they're so, I mean, I was at Harvard for a long time.
The depth of history there, the weight of that tradition, the commitment of people to free speech.
The UK is an amazing country.
The United States has the advantages of the UK, and then it's much bigger.
You have a huge population.
It's incredibly diverse.
Your political institutions also allow for a diverse range of experiments at the state level.
That really seems to be working out well, much better than in Canada.
For example, the United States has this amazing theatricality that's such a potent force.
It's so obvious when you come here from Canada, because everything in the United States is like a movie set.
I was at this gala a week ago.
DeSantis spoke at it, a common sense society.
And it was a European organization set up to foster free speech.
And they had an ex-military guy, a black guy, sing the national anthem before the formal dinner started.
And he just belted it out, you know, with this kind of gospel undertone.
And this whole culture, your whole culture is saturated by this unbelievably powerful pop culture that just has its tentacles out everywhere in the world.
And so he belted out the national anthem, a cappella, in a way you'd never hear a Canadian belt out whole Canada.
And then they had another guy who's also black as it turned out, get up and do the prayer before dinner.
And you could just see him channeling that kind of gospel evangelism that's a big part of southern U.S. culture.
And so that was amazingly theatrical.
Do you want to attempt to reenact that?
No, no, no, no, I couldn't do it justice.
And then, you know, they showed this video about freedom that was all theatrical.
And the Americans, you Americans, you're unbelievably good at that.
And it shows a culture that has this immense belief in its dream.
And that manifests itself, especially in pop culture.
It just manifests itself everywhere in pop culture.
And American pop culture clearly dominates the world.
And part of it is that dream of a better future that's accessible to all, that is given voice through all of that pop culture.
I mean, including the automobile for that matter, because that's an expression of pop culture.
It's certainly not obvious to me at all that it wasn't the automobile that doomed the communists.
Because nothing says freedom and individual sovereignty like a 16-year-old with a 400-horsepower Mustang.
And I know perfectly well if the automobile was invented today, that no ordinary person would be able to have one because they'd be too dangerous.
You have to take a 10-year course and then pay a million dollars a month for insurance and be encased in styrofoam.
And the car, that's a bloody miracle.
It's like, well, why don't we let people go wherever they want in these unbelievably dangerous contraptions?
Because there's almost nothing more dangerous than driving, right?
And you let kids do it.
It's like 16, yeah, you can drive.
Why not?
It's like, well, because you run people.
But you can't drink.
You can't have a beer.
But it's so wonderful.
And you have all this autonomy in a vehicle.
It just yells out individual liberty.
So then you export those to communist countries.
It's like you think you're exporting cars.
You don't think there's a political message embedded in the existence of an automobile?
See, we haven't thought about it.
It's crazy you're saying that because yesterday we had a guest here, Mike, who said he asked about a car that I own.
He says, hey, you know, is it true about this car?
And I said, if you want to go drive it, and allegedly yesterday, he drove it.
Allegedly.
Keyboards of cops are listening to this.
Allegedly, he went 170 yesterday.
What's the car?
It's an SF90.
It's the fastest streetcar Ferrari.
It's got 1,000 horsepower.
He was shocked.
When you're like, yeah.
Here you go.
Here's the keys.
He's like, what?
Have you matched it against a Tesla?
Well, 0 to 60, Tesla would destroy it.
210 miles an hour it's just going to destroy Jordan would you like to drive the car after the show?
No, I mean, by the way, you know, the first time you came to Dallas, I think I took you.
You did.
I drove you to your hotel to meet your wife, right?
Because you guys would always travel together.
Very good conversation.
What did you have?
What car was that?
That was a, what did I, I drove you in a... Bentley?
Oh, that was a Blue Rolls Royce convertible.
Oh, that was a Rolls.
We're at a red light.
Guy into the car next to us.
He's like, it's Charter Beer, sir.
He went crazy.
What kind of car do you drive?
I have a Mercedes SL 550.
You can drive any car you want.
Why do you pick that one?
That's a pretty legit car, by the way.
Yeah, it's a nice car.
Well, I bought it five years ago.
My brother-in-law had one, which I used to drive in California.
I really liked it.
I really liked the way it felt.
It's got great acceleration.
It's cool, too.
And so I bought one, a second-hand one.
It's like eight years old, this thing, or nine years old.
But it's in great shape.
And I like it.
It's two-seater.
I zoom around with my wife in it.
And it has a really good sound system.
And so we put in whatever we're listening to.
Yeah, what do you pump in when you're driving?
What's your music choice?
CMS.
I like classic rock.
I have about an eight-hour playlist of old jazz and blues standards, crooners.
That's more on the romance side of things.
I have a really good playlist of old country and blues music that's about seven hours long, which I really love.
My wife and I listen to that a lot in the car cranked right up.
Do you have a particular?
A carter family I really like.
I think it's a very interesting thing.
Okay, I was going to ask you, is there particular names that you listen to more than anyone?
Neil Young.
Neil Young comes.
I like Neil Young.
Yeah, yeah.
And so he's in my classic rock collection, or he was, because it's on Spotify.
I don't know if he's going to be there much longer.
I don't like what Jon Stewart's doing.
My son did a real good cover of Harvest Moon that's on Spotify.
And so, you know, we were Neil Young fans.
I liked his music, and I still like his music.
And artists, if they had any sense, would stay out of that political debate because they're artists and that's way better.
Creative.
Barbara Schreiseng came out and said that yesterday that she's going off of Spotify's book.
But John Stewart said it best.
John Stewart's like, first of all, we need to keep Rogan on there.
And I think John was on Rogan about a year ago, a year and a half ago, when he was on.
But he said, here was the biggest surprise.
When I heard, look, I listened to Neil Young.
I think his music's great.
I've listened to my entire life.
But I didn't think Spotify was going to lose $4 billion because of Neil Young.
He was kind of shocked by it.
But let me ask a couple of stories.
One, do you follow anything with China?
Are you somebody that's okay?
So Soros, which we know the name Soros.
Here's what Soros said recently.
And I'm curious to get your take on this.
Soros is a guy that's worth, I don't know, $20 billion guy.
He's a guy that is hated by the right.
And a lot of people on the right think he is manipulative, deceptive, and he wants to inject his philosophies politically to this country.
But here's what he said.
He says, this is a Bloomberg article.
Soros says, China's real estate crisis, Omicron, threatened Xi rule.
Billionaire philanthropist George Soros and China's Xi Jinping may fail to extend his rule of the country later this year.
And contrast to what most observers expect, Soros cited Xi enemies within the party, a real estate crisis, ineffective vaccines, and a failing birth rate as factors working against him.
Internal divisions in China are so sharp that it has found expression in various party publications.
Soros said, Xi is under attack from those who are inspired by Deng Xiaoping's ideas and want to see a greater role for private enterprise.
What do you think is going to happen with Xi and China?
Well, my sense of it, and I'm definitely no expert, is that it's not easy for the Chinese to maintain internal unity.
And so they tend to focus on that.
And perhaps that's partly why China hasn't been as expansionist a power as it might have been.
Maybe that's changed to some degree in recent years.
But it's a very large country.
It has an incredibly diverse population.
And so they have their own problems, their own internal problems, which are significant and preoccupying.
And so I hope that they stay focused on their internal problems and that they stay focused on solving them.
I mean, China has been forward-looking enough, thank God, to allow the free market enterprise to flourish despite the proclivity for implementing top-down radical left state solutions.
And the consequence of that has been, first of all, now China is a player in the international scene, for better or worse.
I think mostly for better.
I know that a lot of that was accomplished on the backs of the American working class.
And that's catastrophic in many ways.
But the fact that there aren't tens of millions of Chinese people starving, that's a really good thing for international security and stability.
And that's of no trivial benefit to the American working class as well.
And the fact is that China makes a lot of cheap stuff that works mostly, and that people who are more stressed economically have also benefited to that to a tremendous degree.
So it seems that all of that has been good.
The twist towards a more totalitarian mode of governance in the last 10 years, that's obviously extremely worrisome.
The fact that China is a totalitarian state has had a very negative consequence on us in the West, especially in the immediate, what would you call it?
In the immediate emergence of the pandemic, because what we did was we rushed to imitate a totalitarian state.
We thought Chinese locked down, we better do it.
It's like, really?
Really?
We better do what the CCP did.
Well, that's what we did.
And we'll see.
We don't know what the consequence of that is yet.
We'll see.
Not good.
Not good, in my estimation.
And certainly the Johns Hopkins study seems to, it's only a partial study, in some sense.
They've done the cost-benefit analysis.
Costs so far.
We have no idea what the costs are of having kids in masks for two years.
We have no idea what the consequences are.
What that's done, especially to introverted kids who are high in negative emotion, because they're going to be looking for a reason to hide anyways.
And who knows what that's done to their psychological development, both as children and as adolescents.
We'll find out over time.
But we haven't paid the price for the pandemic lockdowns, even a little bit yet.
Did we destroy our economy?
Like these things take a long time.
You know, they say if you're piling an oil tanker and you detect an iceberg in your path, you can see it.
You've already hit it.
Because it takes so long for you to turn that it's too late.
Well, in some sense, these huge systems that we're a part of are like that, is that you can't tell when they're broken because they take a long time to fall over.
And I don't know if our system is broken, but we're going to find out.
And I don't know if the pandemic lockdowns broke it.
And maybe they didn't.
And hopefully they didn't.
I mean, I was in New York City in Manhattan a month ago.
And it was the first time I'd really gone out anywhere other than Toronto.
And I'd been to New York a few years before, and it's a bouncing place, Manhattan.
I love New York.
It's such an amazing city.
You know, the fact that Manhattan can even exist is just an ongoing absolute miracle.
7 million people compressed onto that island and it's pretty damn clean and it's pretty safe and it's really cool and there's something to do all the time and you can walk around free and like.
That bloody place is a miracle, that's for sure, and it looked pretty good.
I thought, isn't this something?
These people have been locked down for like 18 months and this place isn't on fire?
It actually is pretty clean and most of the businesses are still open.
And isn't that a bloody miracle?
And which it most definitely is.
And so let's pray and not be too resentful about all the foolishness.
Let's pray that we wake up and we treat the pandemic like the flu and we get back to something resembling the normality of Florida and we put this behind us and we don't get too upset about january 6th and we don't get too vengeful about the Democrats and the radical left and we elect someone half sensible to run the Republicans and we carefully weave our way through to a peaceful future.
We let's pray for that, because the alternative is pretty damn dismal and I don't think we have to have the alternative.
You know, one of the we talked about, Trump earlier.
Here's my dilemma with Trump.
One of many um he's beating.
The election was stolen and drum pretty damn hard.
And I look at that as an outsider, again, because I'm Canadian, and I think, well, you Americans, you've been split 50-50 for like five decades, like right down the middle, eh?
And there's always election trouble, because no system is 100% perfect.
Maybe there's like a 1%, 2% margin of crookedness, something like that.
And you're probably really not going to get rid of that.
Maybe you can maneuver carefully to keep it so that it's never any more than 1% or 2%.
But to get rid of that last bit of malfeasance and deception and corruption would take such a heavy hand that that would become worse than the problem.
And that's a real problem when you're split 50-50 because small election irregularities can throw the whole election.
Okay, so it isn't obvious precisely what can be done about that.
But the election was stolen narrative, I think it's weak for a variety of reasons.
The first is it's pretty whiny.
Like, why didn't you win with 5% margin then?
So how do you know this isn't your fault?
And you think the Republicans aren't gerrymandering congressional districts?
Because they are.
And so it's not obvious that even if it is the case that there is substantive election fraud, that it's all from one side.
And so there's that.
And then you're sure that's the message you want to be sending people?
That they shouldn't have faith in their most fundamental institution?
You might be right, but it's in your interest for that to be true.
And so that's a moral hazard.
And then, well, what happens when you retake the House?
Because that's what's going to happen.
I think the Democrats are going to get stomped in the upcoming election.
Are those elections somehow valid, but yours wasn't?
And so why, magically, when the Republicans get elected, that's honest, but when they don't, it's not.
And so doesn't that take the wind out of your story?
It's like, well, it was stolen.
Well, you have the House and the Senate.
How do you account for that?
So to me, that's going to weaken that narrative.
Trump is capitalizing on anger.
He's using the election issue as a means to an end.
And he may believe it, but it doesn't matter because it's a weak story, especially when the Democrats lose the House.
It's a weak story.
So it's not going to, it doesn't have any momentum.
But then it's worse than that because I also think, and I've talked to lots of Republicans about this, is that the best story you've got?
You've got tradition on your side.
You've got the truth as an adventure on your side.
You've got belief in truth on your side.
That's been abandoned by the radical left.
You've got belief in science on your side.
You've got responsibility on your side.
You've got the fundamental purpose of higher education on your side.
You can't conjure up a better story for Americans than the election was stolen with all that on your side.
That's just not very impressive.
And I have sympathy for politicians in general in the United States.
Congress people have very hard jobs.
It's not a job I would like.
I don't think it's a pleasant job.
They spend a lot of their time fundraising 25 hours a week on the phone out of their congressional offices because otherwise they're not supported by their party leadership.
40% of them sleep in their offices when they go to Washington.
They don't even have apartments.
Those that do usually have little bitty apartments.
Their families aren't there because it's hard to get families to move to Washington now with dual career families.
They don't have much of a social group.
They have to run for their job every two years.
This is not a plus they're under attack all the time and they're micromanaged and micro-scheduled.
So I'm curious, what point are you trying to make?
Are you trying to make a point with Trump saying the fact that election was stolen?
Because that's exactly what Hillary Clinton's position was for four years, that elections were stolen from her.
No better when she does it.
Oh, no, I'm not even.
What I'm trying to say is I looked at it as a weak position.
It is a weak position.
It is a weak position she was taking.
I think, okay.
That's the worst of it.
It's like, really?
Where are you going with this?
Are you going with the fact that you're a better story?
Tell a better story if you want to get re-elected?
Is that?
No, The way to re-election is through a better story, but that's not the reason to tell it.
The reason to tell it is because you believe it.
And for the first time in my life, really, I believe this to be the case, conservatives really have something to sell to young people.
And they can sell the meaning of responsibility.
Because young people are bereft of meaning.
And most people find meaning in responsibility.
And when the right talks about responsibility, they kind of do it in that finger-wagging way that makes conservatives unpopular among young people.
You should be responsible.
It's like, yeah, you should.
Why?
Well, because your life is chaotic and meaningless and you're stuck in this juvenile surreality and it's really painful for you and you're anxious and aimless and goalless.
And then you look at people who have a life, because maybe you could have a life and you think, well, what does that life consist of?
It's like, well, you have a committed, intimate relationship.
There's one.
You have friends that you're honest with and playful with.
So you have a group of friends.
You have a job or a career.
You learn how to use your life, your time outside of work in a productive, engaging way.
You regulate your susceptibility to the multitude of hedonistic temptations that are in front of you.
You pay some attention to your mental and physical health.
You make a goal, some goals for the future that are concrete.
Well, there are seven things you can do.
They're all responsible things.
Why?
Because then your life will have some meaning.
Now, you might say, well, what's the ultimate meaning?
It's like, get those things straight first.
They're not nothing.
And maybe you won't be so damn miserable and bitter and resentful and angry and aimless and anxious and frustrated and disappointed and then ashamed if you had five of those seven things going well.
And the conservatives can make that case.
No, bloody left isn't making that case.
It's like for them, responsibility is pretty much equivalent to totalitarian patriarchal oppression.
The conservatives could just take that and say, no, no, our institutions, they're pretty solid.
Maybe if you don't like what's happening on the political front, you join a group, a church, the Elks, the Rotary, some civic organization.
Get in there and do your part.
Why?
Not because you should, even though you should, but because, well, why not meet some people who are like-minded and have a social group?
You think Biden can have the kind of impact to push people away from the political party to the opposing side, similar to how Goldwater and what they did back in the days on how civil rights was handled when Barry Goldwater did what he did annexing, you know, African Americans went from only 60% of them voting Democrat to 92% four years later.
They went from 60% to 92% four years later in the next election.
And Republicans haven't had a chance on the African American vote since 1964.
Do you think the current climate is that big of a climate where the conversion from one side to the other side to say, listen, I don't agree with you guys on censoring.
If the guys want to talk, leave them alone.
The way you handle COVID, by shutting everybody down, I don't agree with that.
Constantly printing money, I don't agree with that.
Do you think it could be something where it could flip that big?
I don't know because the next presidential election in this climate is a long way away.
Because, you know, who can predict the future even a year out, especially given the rate of technological change that we face now?
I mean, you don't even know what's happening today.
There's so many technological transformations just today, many of which have world-shaping consequences.
God only knows where we're going to be by the time of the next presidential election.
But it certainly does seem to me the case that the Democrats are going to lose big in the fall.
And so, you know, that's what we'll focus on for the time being.
We'll see what happened there.
We'll see what happened.
Couple other topics before we wrap up here.
So remote work.
It's a conversation everybody's having.
I'm going to read the Vox story on remote work, and then we'll talk a couple other stories here, and we'll wrap up.
So Vox comes out with this article.
Remote work isn't the problem.
Work is.
Executives are nearly three times more likely than non-executives to say they want to return to office full-time, according to SLAC survey.
The report found that while nearly 80% of knowledge workers want flexibility in where they work, their employer thinks that the arrangement will lead to a variety of ills, diminishing the company's collaboration, creativity, and culture.
As people have quit their jobs or stepped out of workforce in what's called the great resignation, you've heard that before, or the great reshuffling, those left behind have had to pick up the SLAC.
Two-thirds of workers said their workloads has increased significantly since they started working remotely as if increased work-related work weren't enough.
Pandemic-related obstructions, the lack of child care, smaller social support system has caused many people to have work outside of paid work.
So this whole concept of the great resignation and what's happening, you know, some people are sitting there, listen, you guys got to come back to work.
I'm in the financial industry.
I can't tell you how many people are having a hard time getting their people back.
Like the biggest thing CEOs will tell me is, Pat, we screwed up.
We screwed up taking a position of it's okay, you can work from home, because now they are only looking for jobs that allow them to work from home, and other companies are willing to take that position, even though it doesn't work.
So we're cornered right now, and we don't think long-term this is an effective way of running a company.
What are your thoughts with the great resignation?
Well, one of the things I learned when I was in Washington, we were trying to understand, I went there in collaboration with a group that runs the presidential prayer breakfast.
And so they're Christians, self-admittedly, let's say, who have been operating in Washington since the Eisenhower administration.
And most of what they do is bring people together, congressmen and senators, within parties to have some social time, a meal, some chance to talk, or across party lines.
And they're trying to provide the kind of hospitality that produces social relationship.
And we talked a lot about this because one of the things that's happening in Washington that is fostering polarization is the breakdown of the social community.
So it's hard to get people to move to Washington, often because their spouses have jobs and so they're localized in their community.
Hard to move the kids.
And so as I said, 40% of congressmen, I believe it is, sleep in their offices.
And then you can do a lot of remote meetings.
And then you can fly in and fly out.
And you think, so what?
Oh, and then there's cameras recording your speeches in the House.
So that means you're always acting instead of saying what you think.
And so there's this confluence of technological transformation that's devastating the underculture of Washington.
Because what used to happen more was that, well, people would go to each other's soccer games with their kids, you know, their kids' soccer games or baseball games, and they'd get to know each other a bit.
And if I disagree with you, then it's easy for me to think you're bad, because I think that what I think is right, because I wouldn't think it if I didn't think it was right if I'm a good faith player.
And you might not be bad, you might just be different.
But I need to get to know you.
Well, what does that mean?
It means that I need to step out with you in the actual world and do something in the actual world that shows how much we actually have in common.
And a lot of that's social.
Like I had a lunch I set up five years ago, four years ago.
We invited, I think, eight Republican congressmen and eight Democrats.
And they were all juniors.
And they didn't know most of the people within their own party organization, much less people across the aisle.
And they're not exactly rewarded for talking across the aisle either, especially when the leadership has a top-down vision of what constitutes leadership.
And so instead of having them talk about anything political, we just had them talk about, why are you in Washington?
You know, most of these people, these snake pit dwellers, you know, in the cynical parlance, they had perfectly functional lives before they went into Congress.
They gave up a lot to seek political office.
You think, well, they're power-hungry.
It's like they were doing all right.
So it isn't obvious that this was a step up for them.
And so all of them, I said, take three minutes and just say why you were here.
And it was the same speech.
Every single one of them gave the same speech.
And it wasn't nonsense.
And it was deeply cinematic in that American sense.
You know, they talked about their love for their country and their patriotism and the fact that they felt that they had to give back.
And every single person, now, they personalized that.
They talked a little bit about their own story and how they came to that realization.
But there's no way you could tell the Democrats from the Republicans, not on the basis of that.
And I tell you, if you were there, you would have walked out thinking, that's a pretty decent group of people and they're really trying hard.
I swear that's certainly I was there with people, one person in particular, who's much more tilted to the Democrat side.
And that was his take on the whole room.
And so...
How old were these people?
Oh, anywhere between 35 to 45, basically.
And so my point is, the problem with the distance work is that it's predicated on the idea that everything we do that's important is done in the abstract, right, in the domain of information exchange, explicit information exchange.
And that's just not true.
So that's a danger because we don't know what that will do to cooperative organizations.
Now, it might be a good thing.
It might be a bad thing.
I often meet with my son on Zoom when we're doing business-related, when we have a business-related matter, because it's actually easier to share our computer screens and do what we're doing than it is to meet in person.
But that doesn't mean I don't want to meet him in person.
I want to meet him in person, for sure.
So there's that.
And that's a beware of what your technology is doing because it's doing all sorts of things that you do not understand at all.
Like it could be that the decimation of the underlying social community in Washington is enough to drive polarization to the point where the whole system will rock and crumble.
We have no idea because we don't know why it worked.
It worked.
You know, I've been thinking about online universities.
Well, that's easy.
Lectures and tests.
That's what universities do.
It's like, no, that might be, maybe that's 5% of what universities do.
5%.
Yeah, I would say so.
Here I can go.
Well, here's a bunch of things universities do.
They confer an identity upon you.
Who are you?
I'm a student.
Okay.
Respectable.
So for $120,000, let's say it's more than that sometimes and less than that, you now have an identity for four years that your culture respects.
And that means you have a container within which you can have intellectual freedom while you're deciding what you want to do with the rest of your life, instead of torturing yourself about how useless you are because you don't have a productive job yet.
So that's a big deal.
God only knows what that's worth, but not nothing.
Well, how about finding a mate?
So there's evidence now coming out.
I don't know how reliable it is.
You know, that it's about two women for every man in many academic institutions now.
And that proclivity towards female dominance seems to be increasing.
However, it appears that once the men drop to one-third of the population, the women stop going.
Well, you think, why is that?
Well, why the hell do you think it is?
You go out of your little town, you know, you want to find a new peer group, and you're young.
It's one of the things you want to do is find a mate.
So part of the reason you go to a good university is because the sorting has already taken place.
It's like, well, you know, this person's got a high school diploma and they're clued in enough to pursue college education.
Filtering system.
Yeah, so that's a huge deal.
And then universities also act as a filtering system for businesses because they use the SAT as an entrance requirement.
So if you hire someone as a graduate from a high-end university, you knew that they had a high IQ because the SAT is an IQ test.
And God only knows what that's worth.
And then you shed your peer group, your old peer group, and you establish a new one, maybe when you're a bit wiser.
And that's a, I mean, one of the major elements of my college education was the transformation of my peer group.
That was huge.
And then there's personal relationships between you and the professors if you're lucky enough to establish them.
That's a big deal because then you get to interact with someone who's an embodiment of the academic tradition and see how they act.
That's different than listening to what they say in a lecture.
And then there's the social surround, the joint meals.
This is, they make a big deal of this at Cambridge and Oxford because the students eat together in their colleges.
And God only knows how important that is.
And then there's a part of being an embodied actor in that academic tradition and learning to speak and write.
And so that's just a handful of things universities do.
And that's not lectures and tests online.
And to reduce it to that might destroy it completely, could easily be.
And it's the same with our political institutions.
They depend on these real world substructures that, like engagement in civic society, we have no idea how important that is.
And the fact that that's starting to deteriorate in Washington could be fatal.
You know what I would be curious about?
You know how in America, the one school university that was popping 20 years ago and everybody said, I can get my MBA on online.
It was what, Phoenix University?
Phoenix University, right?
And I recruited a few of their sales guys, and they're legit sales guys because they're selling is what they're selling.
I saw their sales training was great.
But one of the things I'd be curious about is how much do they get from boosters?
Like kids graduate from Phoenix University and they got the degree online.
Like, I wonder, oh my gosh, I'm so loyal to the school.
I got to give these guys 10 grand.
You know, I want to contribute because this university changed my life.
Did it, though?
Like, is there, you know, someone I'm saying?
Like, because for me, there's no culture.
I don't think games have.
How do you do that?
Like, you know, you want me to go to church on Sundays on a Zoom?
Yeah, okay, great.
Fine.
Yeah, I'll do that.
I'll listen to a service.
I mean, every church does it nowadays.
And they'll say, our service today was viewed by 73 countries because YouTube said 73.
with 73 countries right but am i sold you know am i really emotionally i don't know i i i don't validates your point about the five percent lecture and you know well you also don't know what people were doing when they went to church and people were cynical about that the people who fell out of the church they say well you know they're one hour a week christians it's like well better an hour of contemplation of higher order moral virtue than zero So zero is not much.
And you think, well, the church didn't do that good a job.
It's like, okay, do better.
See if you can do better.
But then also, well, what are you doing when you go to church?
Well, you're singing.
That's not nothing.
With other people, that's not nothing.
You're trying to orient yourself ethically with your community.
You're sacrificing part of your weekend to indicate your willingness to do so.
Like you're in a drama, right?
You're acting out something.
It's not merely fictional.
It's like we get up in the morning.
And you saw this in The Simpsons all the time with Marge Simpson trying to get her family to go to church, which they did.
It's like, get up, put on a suit, dress up, go out there with members of your community and show your allegiance to something higher.
And the atheists are cynical about that sort of thing, you know, because they reduce God to a set of propositions, but they don't have any real appreciation for the embodiment.
It's like I was in these beautiful chapels in Cambridge and Oxford.
My God, they're so beautiful.
It's just beyond comprehension.
They're so stunningly magnificent.
And the boys' choirs were singing.
They have excellent boys' choirs.
They're like world class.
And then they read these ancient words and those things ring true.
And there was a bunch of ideological nonsense at one of the chapels I went to, and that was off-putting.
But you have to be there and doing that for that to work, right?
It's not replaceable in any real sense by a virtual experience because it's not just information content or it's not abstract information content.
It's the acting out of something.
And that's what happens when you join a civic club.
You know, it's a mark of willingness to participate.
It's a mark of faith in the system.
And you think, well, I'm cynical about the damn system.
It's like, good for you.
You're not naive.
You know, thumbs up for you.
But you're going to top out in your wisdom at cynicism?
That's pretty dismal, man.
You can do better than that.
Like cynicism, that's beginner's place.
How often do you go to church?
That's a good question.
I don't attend church.
And so you might think that makes me a hypocrite.
And possibly it does.
I would say I participate avidly in civic enterprises, however.
You know, and for me, this, the lectures, that's a church for me.
You know, I'm trying to make things better.
And I think I'm participating with people, my audience members, my viewers and listeners.
They're committed to making things better.
And they're committed to, I hope, at least in some sense, they're committed to the truth.
And so it's always been awkward for me to go to church because for a variety of reasons.
And some of that might just be the unwillingness to do it.
But I find myself uncomfortable in them often because I always got the impression that the people who were reading the words didn't believe them.
The trado factor.
Yes.
Yeah.
And so that's not necessarily any reason to be cynical.
But then again, I'm not cynical about religious matters.
So quite the contrary.
So.
I had a guy, I had a guy, Marvin Delvae.
You know who Marvin Delvae?
Of course.
So you're his hero, okay?
He brought you up at the event in front of 6,000 people.
He says, Patrick, I'm begging you, if you can, ask this question.
He's a Catholic, and he's a very, very well-read Catholic, okay?
And he's from Honduras.
He's done well for himself in business.
And when I read this question for you, you're going to realize how technical of a question he's asking you.
And I'm curious to know what your take is going to be on this.
It has to do with a comment you made about the Catholic Church.
Let me read this to you, see if I have it.
Here we go.
Okay.
It's long-winded, so just brace for impact.
In his video, Who Dares to Say He Believes in God?
He criticized the Catholic Church very harshly.
It's not the first that he had done, and he basically compared the Catholic Church to the Protestant approach to salvation.
Number one.
Number two, he then had the opportunity to interview Bishop Barron as part of his podcast name, Christianity and the Modern World.
And most of us expect him to ask some really tough questions about the issue.
He criticized, but he never happened.
He almost looked overwhelmed by the moment and the conversation.
He almost looked like a man that wanted to confess.
Okay?
First question.
He's got three of them here for you.
Number one, why did he avoid the tough questions?
Bishop Barron was the best person, the most qualified person to clear what I believe is a mistaken perspective about the Catholic Church.
Number two, he was also just coming back from a difficult health situation he experienced in 2019.
Did that influence his approach to the conversation?
You called me the day of my birthday, September 20th.
I called him.
Let me know that he was really not doing well.
You when we knew kind of what you were going through.
I was very emotional and was praying for him ever since.
You have to realize this guy's a true believer of you.
Number three, my final question is about the Catholic Church.
To which Catholic Church is he referring to?
The Latin American Catholic Church that was heavily influenced by liberation theology for the last 60 plus years?
By the way, very poor Catholic Church.
B, the very wealthy North American Catholic Church.
C, the European Catholic Church that almost like Anglican Church feels like a social club.
D, the grown missionary African Catholic Church, also very poor and persecuted church.
The Russian Catholic Church suffering persecution by the Russian Orthodox Church.
The Asian Catholic Church persecuted by the Chinese government, or the persecuted, almost decimated Catholic Church at the East.
Is he talking about the pre-Vatican II or the post-Vatican II church?
Is he familiar with the current conflict that emerged from the Vatican the Second?
He made a blanket statement about the Catholic Church.
Which church is he talking about?
Does he know the difference between them?
Between the missed opportunity with Bishop Barron and not being specific enough about his position with the Catholic Church, he left a lot of unanswered questions.
Where do you stand with that?
Well, one of the things I learned from reading Carl Jung, I mean, this isn't a statement he made explicitly, but it emerges as a consequence of reviewing a fair bit of his thought.
His proposition in some sense was that Catholicism was as sane as human beings could get.
And it's a very interesting rejoinder to the atheist types because they think we could be rationalist materialists.
But I don't think we can be because that isn't what we're like.
We're all going to become rational in this scientific sense.
There aren't that many scientists.
And even among scientists, there aren't that many scientists.
It's actually really hard to be a scientist.
It takes a lot of training.
It's a very specific way of thinking.
And it isn't how obvious how broadly accessible that's ever going to be.
And I say that as an admirer of the scientific enterprise.
Catholicism is a great drama.
It's an inclusive, encompassing ritual and drama, as well as a system of beliefs.
And more power to it as far as I'm concerned on that regard.
I don't remember what my fundamental criticism was, unfortunately.
There's many podcasts that I've done because I was so ill and sometimes while doing them that I don't remember them at all.
I meet people that I interviewed for two hours and I don't remember meeting them.
It's very distressing, but that's life.
I would say, and I think the idea that a critique should be differentiated, that's a very good idea and fair enough.
And I certainly don't feel like engaging in a blanket condemnation of the Catholic Church.
I've been grappling and trying to do this with Bishop Barron, too.
Part of the reason Barron wanted to talk to me is because the people who are actively engaged in the religious enterprise professionally, and this is Orthodox Jews, Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics, Protestants, Protestants less so, but some, they're interested in the popularity of my lecture series on Genesis.
Because I did that lecture series in 2017.
It was really the first public lecture series I gave.
We rented a theater in Toronto privately and booked it for 15 weeks.
And I offered these lectures and all the tickets sold out.
And most of the people who came were young men.
And that's weird.
Because you imagine going to a bank with this business plan.
So I'm going to rent a theater.
I want you to loan me some money.
I'm going to rent a theater.
I'm a professor.
I'm going to rent a theater.
And I'm going to lecture.
The first lecture I'm going to give will be two hours on the first sentence of Genesis.
And my target market is young men.
It's like they're not going to lend me any money.
That's a no-starter.
But the lectures sold out.
And they've been watched, I don't know, 40 million times or something on YouTube.
And so the civil apparatus of many religious organizations are interested in this because I obviously tapped into something that they're not tapping into.
And my criticism, if I remember, was a criticism aimed at addressing the fact that that's not being tapped into.
One of the things I talked to Bishop Barron about, and I may not be addressing your friend's concern because I don't know what specific criticism he was concerned about.
I suggested to Barron that the reason the church is, the church, the Catholic Church, is not doing as well as it might, there's many reasons, is that they actually, in the attempt to popularize the faith, especially in the 60s, they ended up not asking enough of people.
We shouldn't ask so much.
Like, no, wrong decision.
Meaning, expect to make it more accessible.
Got it.
Got it.
One of the things I learned from reading Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard said at one point, in a real comical piece of writing, that once everything has become too easy, that there'll be a massive outcry for voluntary difficulty.
And I thought, that's smart.
Well, he was smart.
He was Kierkegaard after all.
And the church can offer that.
That is what it has to offer.
Like, that's the straight, narrow path.
This is very, difficult.
But it's the alternative to hell.
So there is that.
And I think that's there's true and there's meta-true, and that's meta-true.
That's powerful because, you know, churches sit behind closed doors and a board will say, whoever the board may be at a non-denominational church, hey, Pastor, this last time you talked about, you know, pick whatever it is, transgenderism, a little bit too much.
We're losing our, you know, attendees.
You talked about this.
Don't spend too much time talking about gay marriage out of the Bible because we have to be a little bit more diplomatic.
You know, let's not raise the standard too much where people are doing too many Bible studies or too many, you know, whatever, you know, events at the house.
You're saying, no, double down and raise the standards and keep them high.
Expect more from people.
That's what you're saying.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it isn't, and not in a finger-wagging sense.
It's more, I've been thinking, I've been talking to a lot of Islamic thinkers and I have a lot of people who, a lot of Muslim people have watched my biblical lectures, like a lot.
And so I have a following, strangely enough, among the Muslim community, and among Orthodox Jews and broadly among religious communities.
And, you know, the Christians are often on me to come out and just profess my faith in Jesus Christ as our universal savior.
And whenever I'm, let's say, questioned in that manner, it's always a trap.
It's like, join my club.
It's like, you just stay in your own club.
And I've got lots of people to talk to, you know.
But a huge part of, you know, the Muslims say it's pretty funny.
Peterson doesn't realize it, but he's actually a Muslim.
And I had an Orthodox Jewish fellow in New York make a comment about his friends watching my videos and seeing them in accordance with the deepest elements of their teachings.
And it's a lovely thing to see.
It's very surprising to me.
It's quite staggering.
But, you know, what I'm doing is predicated on the idea that there's way more to people than they let out.
And a lot of that's to be found in their darkness.
And I'm making that case.
I suppose the people who've been most attracted by that case have been young men.
And I think that that's because they're so actively discouraged in the expression of their possibility by our culture.
Actively discouraged because they're regarded as, you know, oppressive patriarchs in training or some bloody thing like that.
And so caustic and so horrible.
I guess the question, the question I was more asking is, you know, the idea is if we lower the standards, attendance will go up.
We've been losing attendance because standards have been very high.
Let's lower it a little bit.
Let's be more welcoming.
And more political and more relevant.
Religion isn't politics.
Religion is the structure that contains politics.
It's far deeper.
It's like politics, literature, religion.
That's sort of the structure.
Politics, literature.
Yeah, politics is embedded.
Well, you Americans, I said you're all theatrical here.
Well, it's because your whole polity is encapsulated in narrative.
Everyone knows that.
That's the American dream.
It's like, what's the American dream?
Well, it's hard to put your finger on it.
And you guys are exploring that all the time, not least in your popular culture.
It's constant exploration of what constitutes the American dream.
That's the container for the political structure.
And it's the dream that unites you.
The political structure does as well.
But it can't unite you if the dream doesn't unite you.
And underneath, so the dream is, that's in the domain of literature, essentially, in storytelling and dream.
And underneath that, the deepest strata of the literary endeavor is the religious endeavor.
The Bible is a story.
Is it true?
Well, it depends what you mean by true.
And people say, well, that's weasly.
It's like, no, it's not.
If you ask a profound question like that, is the Bible true?
You can't assume true and then cram the Bible into that.
You have to make both sides of the equation open to question.
What do you mean by true?
Well, you're not answering the question.
No, I'm just not answering it the way you want me to.
This is why people like Richard Dawkins always kick the hell out of religious people when they're debating them.
It's because Dawkins comes armed with a conception of the truth, and it's not trivial.
It's like the scientific conception of the truth.
This is a big club.
And before he even begins, the whole structure of the debate is predicated on the fundamental acceptance that that definition of true is valid and complete.
And so the religious people just lose because they're up against the might of science.
It's like, how are they not going to lose that?
So what do you mean by God?
God is not great.
Is that Sam?
I've read it.
And by the way, he is very, very influential on how he influenced the world.
By the way, I want to keep you on time with what you've got going on as well.
Yeah, very.
I had a conversation with him at Oxford.
We're going to release that in a couple of weeks.
How long ago was that?
A month ago?
That's great.
Oh, it's very cool.
Yeah, it's only audio.
But yeah, I would have liked to have talked to him for like 35 hours.
I bet.
I can only imagine that, especially so.
How much more time do we have?
Now, I've got to wrap up because it's anyways.
Let me show you this.
A neighbor of mine asked me this question.
He's Canadian.
He says, can you ask Jordan Peterson this?
Go to the picture with Trudeau.
What can you say about this?
This is your world.
I don't know if this is this even talked about over there with the whole story of Justin Trudeau's related to Castro because years ago, like, is this a show the other picture where this other guy posted it?
So apparently this is go to the picture of Fidel, the wife, and the father.
So this is a picture of them three.
That's his mother.
That's him.
That's the father.
But then you put Justin right next to Castro.
Can you go back to the other picture on Twitter?
Yeah, that one right there.
Looks really similar.
Yeah, is there any, is this even a conversation in Canada?
Has anybody been telling?
Because this is written about many, many different places to the point where they tweeted about it and said, no, Castro is not Justin Trudeau's father.
No, it's a nasty bit of innuendo.
And I think it's resentment fueled fundamentally.
Like, in some sense, it's a satirical joke, you know, and fair enough, but it's not helpful.
Look, one of the things that happens if you're a political leader is you're exposed to criticism of all sorts.
And part of that's to stop your power from degenerating to something approximating a tyranny.
So you kind of have to put up with it.
This, I would say, is I wouldn't propagate the idea.
Okay.
First of all, just it's speculation, clearly.
It's mean-spirited speculation on the part in relationship to the behavior of Trudeau's mother.
Even if it was true, then, well, what's your point?
He's born a communist.
That's your point.
That's a stupid point.
Or what?
He knows that Castro is his father, and so now he's tilting hard towards the left to please him.
Well, that's not helpful and clueless.
Now, the Trudeau's, in some sense, set themselves up for something like this because Trudeau played, the senior, played FTSE with Castro in a way that was rather unique in the Western world.
And I think that was ill.
That was not a good decision.
He was less stringent in drawing a line between the left and the radical communist left than he might have been.
And so those chickens have come home to roost in some sense in terms of this assault on his son.
And Justin himself doesn't do a very good job of drawing a distinction between his views and the views of the radical left.
And so all of that's mangled around in this satirical attack, but I don't think it's the most effective.
It's got an element of real gossipy innuendo and mean-spiritedness about it that I think overwhelms whatever humorous satire it might also contain.
I mean, they did this with Obama's, you know, when Trump came out and said, $5 million, prove to me your birth certificate you're born here.
These types of stories tend to do well and they tend to go viral.
But, you know, this is just, when you look at this, it looks a little too real to, you know, that's why people are giving it credibility.
Anyways, we are at the end of the podcast.
Jordan, I appreciate you coming out.
A couple things.
Yank, if you are in Florida, he's performing.
He's speaking tonight.
If you can't even get the tickets, at Miami, Florida, Fillmore, today the 3rd.
No, it was yesterday.
I'm sorry, 7th, you're going to be in Houston.
This is where you'll be at the Bayou Music Center.
8th, you'll be in Midland, Texas.
9th, you're in Irving.
10th in San Antonio.
15th in New York.
16th in New York.
17th in Providence.
21st in Norfolk, Virginia, then D.C. on the 22nd.
Philadelphia 23rd.
Boston 24th.
We're going to put the link below.
If you haven't had a chance to go spend some time with this man, I highly recommend you take your family, wife, kids, and have them hear from him because he's going to get everybody thinking and at least to great conversation.
And I have a feeling this will not be the last time we'll have you on again.
Jordan, thank you so much for coming out.
See you guys again.
Yes, and what we're doing is every time we get a guest, somebody signs one of these lockboxes.
You pick one, sign it up there.
So we know Jordan Peterson was in the house.
Folks, this has been a week of us doing podcasts four times.
I think we got some lined up next week's only give me one time because I'm all over the country.
But it's been great having Jordan on today.
Hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.
Give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel.
Tyler, you look like you're, Taylor, you look like you want to say something.
I'm going to say we got Rolo Tommaso, Tomasi Tuesday, and maybe a few other things in the work.
