Everything Wrong With Society Today! - Weak Men, Woke BS, Corruption & Civil War | Jordan Peterson

Do you think men are being taught to be weak right now? Yes, definitely. What that it's worse than being taught. They're being enticed toward that in every way. Tell me more. And punished for not doing it. Well, they're enticed towards it by well, well, the insistence, for example, that there are modes of less worthy being than the masculine, let's say, because masculinity itself is toxic to its core, a manifestation of patriarchal oppression, that male ambition is nothing but a manifestation of the force of tyrannical power, that not only oppresses the oppressed, but the world. Jesus, brutal. So, there's that. So, that's and then any deviation from any deviation in that direction, the desire of a 4-year-old boy to play with guns, for example, well, we have to rub rub that out. It's like, "Oh, well, do you?" You're going to rub out your son's ability to point and shoot, are you? That's That's what he'll do his whole life. Going to go to war with that in your feminine virtue. Toxic masculinity. It's like, "Great, harpy." Warfare. It's awful. It's awful. You know, but it's it's part of this belief and that's derived from this unholy nexus of agreement between the postmodernists and the metamarxists, that the only story is one of power, and men wield the power, and therefore all masculine virtue is identical to the striving for power, and that's immoral in its essence. It's basically the most pathological brandishers of that doctrine presume that male virtue is indistinguishable from malevolence. And so, the best you can do, if you're a man, is to castrate yourself and Oh god. Well, what That's what's happening in the culture. It's literally happening. It's not even It's not even symbolic. That's That's the offering. That's the ultimate offering to the to the great mother. That's a great way Freud knew this, Jung knew this. This is well mapped out. This is well mapped out in the psychological and and symbolic spheres. You've asked a lot of people I don't know if you've ever gotten a satisfying answer. I haven't heard it yet, but what happens when the left goes too far? Or where Yeah, where does the left go too far? Yeah. Yeah, what's the equity? I I posed that to It was either Bret Weinstein or his wife Heather Heying. And cuz I said, "Look, what I see in the world right now is what it looks like when women become pathological. That the things that are good, nurturing, wanting to care for people, when that goes too far and it I devouring mother would be your phrase, but it's a perfect phrase. Um Yeah, it really does of Eve. That's the eternal sin of Eve. To to even clasp the serpent to her breast. My compassion is so overpowering, there's nothing it can't incorporate. Even the fruit of the of evil itself. That's the fall of man. Yeah, that's being played out like in spades, rapidly. Miraculously. Yeah, it's very very bad, very very dark. So, I know that if we don't find a way to make men I won't even say strong. I think strong is a part of it, but Invite them. Invite them to be strong. Invite them to become what healthy masculinity looks like. Now, the question becomes to from where I'm standing, I will give you image that I use a lot. I use this in business all the time. Uh when things are getting really hard, I imagine myself in a loincloth, covered in the blood of my enemies, with a big [ __ ] sword in my hand. Yeah. And that imagery helps me stay focused, be strong, be hard when I need to be hard. Not that I'm, you know, imagining killing indiscriminately, but that I need to be able to step into aggression, and aggression is the right word. And when I That's why Andrew Tate is so so attractive to young men. Dude, Mhm. so much. He's utterly fascinating to me. 90% of what he says scares me to death because it actually is toxic masculinity, but 10% is so good that I'm like, you cannot dismiss this kid. People are complicated, eh? But the thing is is that the the more Okay, so so the perversion of warrior in some ways is psychopath, and you know that because you watch like mafia movies. So we all know this, okay? But but there's a dreadful attraction in untrammeled aggression for men who are so crushed that they're castrated. That's a good way of thinking about it. So so the attraction that the that the Andrew Tate persona, let's say, has on those young men, there's actually a lot of that that's positive. Now, that doesn't mean that that's the right target, but it There are creative ways of being wrong that are helpful. Right. Right. Now, I, you know, you see better examples of that, precisely that, in people like Jocko Willink and David Goggins and Joe Rogan. Like these are tough guys, you know, but they're not They don't have the sex appeal, though. That's one thing I'll give Andrew Tate. Like he that's partly because they don't want it. Yeah. They Yeah, but it isn't that they couldn't have it. Like, it's that they've they've decided that everything in its proper place. Rogan has a family. You know, that's that's where he's put it. And And hey, man, good work good work to him. You know, and that sex appeal that Andrew Tate has, that's the sex appeal of the short-term mater. That's the psychopathic sex appeal. That's the dark tetrad sex appeal. It's shallow. It's shallow, and it will get him in trouble. I mean, it's already got him in trouble. Yeah. And so, that's not going to unless he, you know, wises up. Precisely that, it'll get him in trouble. You know, and I'm I'm not trying to take him apart. I mean, I think what he did with his with his capitalization on female sexuality is absolutely unforgivable. But well, I That's enough of that. I mean, that was That was beyond the pale in my estimation. There's no There's no excuse for that whatsoever. Now, you know, if you're a basement-dwelling incel, the mere fact that you could imagine ever doing that, sort of like you imagining yourself, you know, in a loincloth covered with blood, the mere idea that a man, which is what you are, could even imagine manage doing that, having a harem, you know, of women who are offering sexual favors at at your beck and call. Well, that's a much higher calling than castrated, over obese, resentful loser who can't leave the basement. Right? Cuz that's an even lower I suppose, you know, when you're in the lowest rung of hell, the rung right above looks like heaven. And And it it's up. It's up. That aggression, that aggression is very, very necessary. You know, it's it's very necessary. And sports are a great way of of of putting that in its proper place, especially team sports. Cuz you you can take that competitive instinct and that instinct to win that instinct to be competent more deeply and you can you can put it in its proper place and it is an immense source of implacability. immense Now, in a social something I draw on when I lecture for example. Like it's a source of energy. It's just sitting right there. Interesting. Why is that so effective? Anger aggression is a a very primordial instinct. Very and and it it activates both the positive emotion systems which are forward moving and the negative emotion systems that awaken you. It's high stress. Like there's nothing more stressful than being angry. It's very psychophysiologically demanding. It's very psychophysiologically stressful. But It's also intoxicating. an as a alerting as a form of alerting arousal in some ways it's unparalleled. Mhm. And and it's great to have it at hand. You you don't want to See, the Freudian model with regard to aggression was repression. Like we have this terrible id that's trying to make itself clamber upward, you know, all red in tooth and claw. There's some truth in that, but his model of how that was regulated by socialization it was insufficient. It's not repression. It's not inhibition. Now, he kind of knew that cuz he talked about sublimation. Piaget Jean Piaget had a much better model, much more much wiser. And Piaget observed actual children. A competitive child who's socialized integrates the capacity for aggression into the game and then he becomes the player every kid wants on his team because he still wants to win. So he's he's got that forward driving intensity and skill, but but he does that in a manner that brings everyone along with him. Right? And so then it's not aggression isn't inhibited, it's integrated. And and the more aggression you can integrate, well, the more compelling you are, 100%. Like that's that's the that's what that's what women are after. That's because the fundamental I think the fundamental female hero story is essentially Beauty and the Beast. And a woman is after a a civilized beast. Like literally, that's that all female pornography has that structure. Civilized beast. You know, and it can tilt a little hard in the beast direction when it gets a little masochistic and it you know, can turn a little hard in the in the civilized direction when it's kind of a like when it's a romance that tilts more in the direction of friendship. Woody Allen would probably be a good example of that as a character in his own movies. But you know, there's a you can imagine that there's a range in there where the solution can be offered in a variety of different forms. Yeah, I think you were the one that pointed me to a book that was utterly transformational, A Billion Wicked Thoughts. right. What I find really interesting is it isn't just a civilized beast, it is a beast I civilize with my magic hoo-ha, which is what they say in the book. But that that I find very interesting and has somehow become controversial. That's [ __ ] interesting, man. Uh tell me more about that. That is really interesting. Well, oh, you know, you want a wolf like that's trying to eat you or do you want a wolf on your side? Well, that's the situation women are in. I mean, you've seen the cartoon representations do you Tex Avery's cartoons from the 1940s? I think they were the 40s with the wolf who's like completely sexually what? Obsessed with His heart's flying out of his eyes and stuff. Oh, yes, yes, and and and he's always after the singer who sings oh wolfy, you know, it's perfect. It's perfect. Yeah, women definitely tame men, obviously, yes, clearly. They probably tamed them by offering them sex and fruit. You know, so Cuz they were not gatherers. Women are gatherers. They're not hunters. Really makes me sad that we can't that the uh public discussion around this people get so weird about so fast. You actually did a really amazing interview. I think her name was Dr. Sarah Hill. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh Yeah, Sarah was good. I found that utterly fascinating talking about just what men do to get women's attention, the demands that women make it Yeah. Literally. That all the things Everything and anything is the answer to that. 100% my success is literally tied to my desire to impress my now wife, then uh fiance when I really turned it on and was like, "Whoa, I've got to become something." between male trappings of socioeconomic success and male reproductive success is like it's like .7. For women it's negative. It's zero it's lower than zero. Like with men don't care at all about the Men aren't looking for in women for what women look for in men. Correct. So, and not a bit even. Not a bit even. And and that plays out also in the structure of female motivation. Mhm. You know, men are very competitive. They'll and and in a in a unidimensional in some ways, one-eyed you might say, right? And there's an immense symbolic level of web of associations around that idea, the one-eyed giant. Well, the penis is a one-eyed giant, like obviously, right? And it's it's a seeking It's a it's it's part of a seeking system seeking women. And it'll do that unidimensionally, right? And so and men are like that. Freud knew this, that men are like this from the cellular level up. And so they'll specialize, they'll hyper-specialize obsessively in a manner women are just not interested in. They can, but they're not interested in it. And partly they're not interested in it because that isn't what it doesn't attract men that that capability. I know that the men I worked with in big law firms for example, hyper-competitive men. You know, and they were they are very concerned about their bonus. But not because they needed the money. Said, "Well, the money's just a way of keeping score." And they all said that. They all knew that. They laughed about it. It's like they they wanted a bigger bonus than the next guy. The amount didn't matter. The comparative amount mattered a lot and it was it's part of a status ranking. You know, and and that's everything for young men. Status ranking. God, yes. I mean, they'll they'll die for that. They'll kill for that. Like it's not like we don't know this. It's in the criminology literature. This is crystal clear. You know, the gang a tremendous amount of gang violence is is status competition. Well, even more than the even the economic element of that is subordinate to the status competition. So, yeah, that's that's crystal clear. Crystal clear. So, All right, there's another idea that I need to put this post in our counter-enlightenment idea up against. Uh what's going on in Hamas, Israel, that conflict. You've got two religions supposedly both packaging up a ton of wisdom, but when they collide, it's ugly and it won't go away. Is there a danger in trying to communicate wisdom in a religious package? Of course, there's danger in every in everything in every endeavor. Um the danger is the confusion of the religious enterprise with dogmatic certainty. Fundamentally, I mean, the there's no reason to assume at all that the religious enterprise can't degenerate into totalitarian psychopathy for that matter. Does all the time. Not least because it's in the interest of the totalitarian psychopath to hijack the religious enterprise. Now, they do that all the time. That's their modus operandi. Again, that's the same people that Christ is contending with constantly in the Gospels. I mean, at multiple levels he contends with the tyrants themselves from Rome, but it's not like there's no tyrants in the Jewish community, and all of those tyrants use religion to be tyrannical with. And yet, it's the most egregious sin, or one of the most egregious sins. So, the third commandment, depends on how you count them, but the third commandment is generally held to indicate something like, "Do not use God's name in vain." And people think that means don't swear, and it kind of means that in some trivial way, but mostly what it means is do not claim divine motivation for self-serving behavior. And that's what all the protesters are doing. "We're so compassionate." In public. It's like, "No, I don't think so." I think you're narcissistic psychopaths, fundamentally. And if you're not, well, at that moment you're certainly possessed by that spirit. Look at how good we are. That's why Christ says in the Gospels not to let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. If you're going to be good, do it in secret. Why? So you don't so you don't fall prey to the temptation to make your good subordinate to your pride. Right? That's what they bloody Oedipal mothers do all the time. Look how much I love my son. Yeah, he doesn't even have a penis anymore. We solved that problem for him. Wow. Yeah, wow. It's so bloody, it's so brutal, it's so dark. It's It's virtually unimaginable. It's such a pit. It's so awful. And then the mother can parade around with What What has she got? Her son's genitals on a stick, so she can parade down the street. Oh, absolutely. And show her neighbors, "Look how compassionate I am. No matter what he turns into, I still love him." Brutal. Would she say that, or would it be something more along the lines of, "He is so loving and so compassionate for having been at my breast that he has essentially voluntarily discarded these toxic That'd be your cover story. And you know, the other part of that secret desire is, well, an immense hatred for men. Immense. Immense hatred for men. For for or for what that particular breed of woman thinks men stand for and are. So, you know, Where Where does that come from? If four Oh, it comes from all sorts of places. Lots of those Lots of women like that were terribly damaged by men, by power-mad men, you know, who hurt them in all sorts of terrible ways. They Lots of these people, you know, you hear their story and you think, "Well, it's no wonder you think that way." But that's that's no that's no excuse, because many people who are terribly abused don't grow up to be abusers. They decide that they're going to take the opposite route, you know? You can learn a lot from being abused, and one of the things you can learn is not to do it. So, what idea has possessed them that makes them break bad when that horrific thing happens to them? I think you have to read my new book. I can't I can't I can't simp It's too complicated to simplify. See if I can come up with some reasonable "I'm virtuous because I was hurt." That'd be That's part of it, for sure. Mhm. Yeah. And that's part of the If you're a victim, you're an infant, and if you're a infant victim, then you're moral and to be protected at all cost, and anything that threatens you as a predator, and there's nothing too terrible for a predator, right, to meet out to a predator, which is another part of the underground attraction for that, because this is the horror show of the oppressor-oppressed narrative. Once you identify the oppressed, and you identify them with innocence, you identify the oppressor with predation, or even worse, parasitical predation. It's exactly what Hitler did to the Jews. 100% predatory parasite. What do you do with predatory parasites? You burn them to the ground. No holds barred. Not No punishment is too extreme. And then, well, then you get Auschwitz. So, brutal. And then you get to have all the delights of being the Auschwitz Auschwitz guard. And then the darkest part of your soul has the chance to come out and play. Is that what you think is going on right now? I was I was taken aback. I did not see it coming that there were pro-Palestine marches on October 8th. So, we Israel's response. It's algorithmic. Oppressor-oppressed. Well, how do you know the oppressors? They're statistically overrepresented in positions of authority. And obviously, by definition, then they're oppressors. Well, who's most statistically overrepresented in positions of authority? Jews. That's like the door's open, man. So, why are they the canary in the coal mine? Why, in a way that is so bizarre throughout history is part of it is the reason I just said. So, then you might say, "Well, why are they more likely to be successful?" Well, they're smarter. That's part of it. By a lot. You mean at a truly um Biological level. That they just as as a group they have a higher IQ. Yeah, and they have neurological problems that go along with that, like Is that controversial or are people debating is. Do people debate the fact? Stupid people debate it. Well, I'm serious. Like the the the the the IQ literature has something in it to appall everyone deeply. I I mastered that literature in like 1993-4 with a student of mine who I still work with, brilliant student. He got bounced right out of the whole academic world because of the response to his work. Partly. On IQ? Well, we were were looking at neuropsychological functions associated with the prefrontal cortex specifically, but it devolved into IQ because everything to do with abstraction devolves into IQ. IQ's a brutal literature and so and Jews, you know, what Ashkenazi Jews specifically, they have IQ's that are probably 15 points higher than the typical than the typical 15 points. Yeah, so they're radically over overrepresented. So, you know, at the middle that doesn't make that much difference although it makes some. They're very likely to be at the top of their class, but if you go out to like IQ 145 where the serious action starts, Jews are way overrepresented. And if you don't like that theory, well, how about they have a giant conspiracy to take over the world as a substitute theory. So, I don't care which of those theories you like. It's like you're going to Both of them are like fire. Both of those theories are fire. And so, but you're stuck with one or the other. So, that's life. That's life, you know, and so what what should happen is that people should be bloody happy that there's smart Jews around. And the Jews should be very careful not to take their intellectual superiority as a marker of What would you say? Excess intrinsic worth? No, I'm not saying that they are more prone to that than anyone else, by the way, but it is a it is a temptation for intelligent people to identify with their intelligence and to become prideful. Right? That's actually how in some ways how God keeps the eternal scales of cosmic justice balanced. So, imagine you're born with an IQ of 145. Well, then you might think, well, that's not very fair because what about the poor guy who's born with an IQ of 85? And those are very different. They're very very very very different. And and you say, well, that's completely unfair. It's like, fair enough, but the guy with the IQ of 145 is is prone to the temptations of the pride of the intellect. And that is Lucifer, right? It's like that's the worst temptation. And so, Lucifer is the spirit of intellect gone most dreadfully wrong. And so, sure, you can have an IQ of 145, but man, you better uh you better be on your knees in gratitude that that gift was given to you, and you better not misuse it because if that thing takes the upper hand, you are in the hands of the worst possible agent of destruction. And of course, like, well, no, it's the intellect that goes most dreadfully wrong. That's not the worst possible threat. Obviously, that's the worst possible threat. And so, you know, it says in the Gospels that if you've been given a lot, you'll there'll be a lot demanded of you. And that goes for intelligent people. They better develop some humility. Uh uh uh a virtue that's sadly lacking at the moment with our worship of pride, let's say. Mhm. Pride and hedonism. Jesus. Brutal. Those two ideas in particular you think grip people today? Power, pride, and hedonism. Yeah, that's a that's a Yeah, absolutely. Well, if you make your sexual identity paramount, it's like you've identified the I with with the impulse, essentially, with the whim, right? Cuz sex is a whim. Like, obviously. Now, does it rule? Well, what what is it that you are if sex rules? You're the wolf, that's for sure. That's for sure. And a wolf to yourself, too. So, you know, when you see this ambivalence on the left because on the one hand, anything goes and all forms of sexuality are to be like celebrated, worshipped, essentially, cuz celebration and worship are the same thing. Yet, sex is so dangerous, especially between like members of a young heterosexual pair, that absolutely every single bit of it has to be regulated right to the last word. It's like, well, you licentiousness breeds tyranny. That's why the [ __ ] of Babylon is on the great scarlet beast of the state at the end of time. Tell me exactly what that means when you break it down. Well, imagine that when masculinity degenerates, the state pathologizes. The patriarchy pathologizes. Well, what happens to females? They pathologize, too. Well, where do How do they pathologize? In the direction of disinhibited sexuality. So. 35% of internet traffic is pornographic. Yeah, but that's not driven by women, that's driven by men. It's driven by bloody women, too. Woah. Parading themselves. Absolutely. It might be Like, there's no shortage of electronic pimps and desperate engineers, let's say, but that doesn't mean the women who engage in that are innocent by any stretch of the imagination. They're they're uh they're doing the same thing with their sexuality that that that the that people granted the talent of intelligence do with their with their with their gift. Look at me. It's It's No. Wrong. Those women online displaying themselves, they're succubae. They're not human. You're a fool if you think that's human. You're a fool. At minimum, it's a machine-human hybrid. A woman doesn't appear in a million places at the same time. Whatever that is, that's not a woman. Yeah, what do you make of the OnlyFans dynamic between men and women? Uh the more I look at this, the more I'm getting freaked out. There was a a woman named looking then. Yeah. Well, looking at it truly through a research lens, but uh Belle Delphine, I believe is her name. Uh back in 2020, she sold 10 million pounds worth of her bath water. Oh, that's perfect. The [ __ ] of Babylon has a cup full of liquid, by the way, in gold, a gold cup full of liquid that she offers the world. Really? Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Look at how wonderful this is. It's actually What does it say in the Book of Revelations? It's filled with the filth of her abominations. God. Perfect. what is that? It's people wanting to consume that thing they can't have, that they have idolized? Of course. Of course. It's It's It's people wanting to consume the thing that is denied to them because they hid their light under a bushel. Because they hid uh they hid who they could become from themselves and never pursued it? Sure. And so, they're not attractive to themselves or anyone else. Holy [ __ ] Okay, so hold on. That's for sure. Oh, yes. Brutal. Brutal. Brutal. Brutal. women uh ascending to a position of power with that weird dynamic of postmodernism. Uh they've been given a gift of being able to persuade men through their beauty to do what they will, to get the attention that they want. Now, as a mechanical hybrid, they're able to appear in tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of places. the chests of men and take their essence from them. And then men are hiding their potential away from themselves, which also for Yeah, I was going to say. that then that gives them an excuse for not doing it. Cuz they think, well, I'm going to the young guys, let's say, who decide to be useless, you know, some of it's genuine response to not being encouraged and to being punished. Some of it is, but some of it it's pretty convenient. It's like you don't have to put your cross on your shoulder. Mhm. No one wants me to do that anyways. It's like, well, yeah, that that's always been the case and I mean in some ways, you know, there's there's new impediments to striding forward confidently, but there's always been impediments. Yeah, so interesting. So, I uh I train anybody that will listen uh that you need to have beliefs in your life and since facts are overwhelming, you it's not about recognizing what's true, it's about recognizing what's useful, is how I think of it. Uh so, you have a set of beliefs, you have a set of values, so you have hierarchy, what matters to me. to the right end, that's Correct. A thousand percent, which is why I always lead with you have to have a goal and that goal needs to be honorable. Yeah. So, you've got beliefs. so the thing is that's where your god lies. The This is where I'm going. Well, your god lies in the ineffable of in the ineffable extent of what you regard as useful. Yes. that useful tilts in a in a direction. The sum total of all that would of all that would be most properly useful. The essence of that. That's the god. That's the implicit god. Yeah, I'm realizing I have built from the ground up a system that In today's volatile and unpredictable economic climate, the challenge of managing your monthly expenses is real, especially with high interest debt eating away at any chance of reaching your financial goals. And if this sounds like you, I recommend that you reach out to American Financing if you're in the market to refinance your home. On average, American Financing customers save $854 per month, the equivalent to receiving a $10,000 annual raise. The process is straightforward, quick, it's very efficient. You can close your loan in as little as 10 days, and it costs nothing to see how much they can save you. Call 800-852-2010. Again, that's 800-852-2010, or go to americanfinancing.net/impact. For terms and conditions, use 182334 at nmlsconsumeraccess.org. is designed to do all the things that religion does. It's really interesting. This to me is it's fascinating because whenever you discover the same thing from multiple different disciplines, you can be pretty sure you're converging on the truth because everybody's just going, "What actually works?" Uh but the last thing, the last part of my cocktail is rules. So, you need rules in your life. Basically, there need to be things that you don't do. Um I'm older That's good. That's good. That's exactly right. That's That's where conscience So, you could imagine the spirit of God in the Old Testament makes himself manifest in two forms, calling and conscience. And conscience is that what you just described. It's like the guardrails. It's like you're going off the path, you know? So, there's fences and warnings on the conscience side. But it's the same thing. And it's the it's the dynamic between This is This is what happens in the movie Pinocchio. So, Pinocchio is called out into the world. His father is benevolent, a benevolent creator. that's Geppetto. He's called out into the world to make himself manifest, to realize himself, to become real. And there's two things that attract him. He wants to go out and learn and have his adventure, that's the calling, and but it that has to be allied with a conscience. And the reason for that is the calling alone gets him in trouble. Like first of all, it it entices him to be coming a narcissistic, psychopathic, manipulative actor. That's when he's on stage. Right? Then it entices him into lying to get away with things and to get what he wants. So, that's another extension of that manipulation. Then it entices him to become neurotic enough so that he can take a permanent holiday. Then he goes to Pleasure Island where he can engage in hedonism. That's where the slavers are. Right. And so, he needs That's what That's what just the calling alone, you know, will take him places that are attractive but not appropriate. You need a conscience along for the ride, and that's Jiminy Cricket. Right? And Jiminy Cricket is what bugs you. Exactly. Yes. And so, that's one of the places you can find your destiny is in what bothers you. There's going to be an array of things that make themselves manifest to you as callings of your conscience. Those are problems. Those are your problems. Why is that your problem? It's like, well, can you stop thinking about it? Does it bug you all the time? Well, hey, there you go. That's your destiny. Right? Where does this all go? You've got Canada has declined economically. You guys are now making 60% of what Americans are making. China can do worse than that with a little work. let's hope not. Uh China is watching everything everybody does. They're way beyond 1984. 2024 in the US is uh it's terrifying. The election, does it actually build up to civil war? I don't know. Yep, UK. You've got conflict Russia-Ukraine. You've got conflict Israel. You've got the farmers revolt in Europe. Yeah, like where does this go? It depends on how many of us shoulder our crosses and walk uphill. I I really mean that. Like we're at that point. Wake up. Figure out which side you're on. If you were a betting man, what odds do you give um US Civil War, what odds do you give World War III? Well, we we're already in World War III. So, I'd give that 100%. How far will it go? Depends on how stiff-necked we are. Right? So, the Egyptian tyrant is visited by is it 10 plagues? The last plague is the destruction of the future itself. That's the death of the firstborn. So, you know, it depends on how hard we have to be hit before we wake up. And there's no end to that. You know, I mean God destroys the whole world in a flood. You know, that never happened. It's like, how about it's happening all the time? How about it's happened forever? It's happening now. It will happen forever. How high does the water have to rise till people learn? And what does it mean to learn? Well, this is why I'm a psychologist, not a politician. Or a theologian, to whatever degree I lay pretensions to that. Someone concerned with spiritual matters, let's say. Psychological matters. Redemption is a matter of individual determination. So, that's why I operate at the level of the individual. How far will we have to go? Depends on how many sins you decide to continue harboring. How are you connected? How is that decision connected to the destiny of the world? We all bear the world on our shoulders. How How can that be true? Here's one way of thinking about it. How much better would the people around you be if you were better? Some, obviously. What's the ultimate extent of that? What if you were everything you could be? That's what you're called upon to be. You're called upon to be everything you can be. Why? Not least because the Try getting through the world without doing it. Then you'll end up in the position of Cain. You didn't offer your best. You'll be rejected by man, woman, and God, and yourself. And then what? Then you're bitter. Then you're fratricidal. Then you're murderous. Then you're genocidal. Then the flood comes. Or you erect the Tower of Babel. It's always the same. And now you can see it. Like it's just right there. Why? Cuz it's happening so fast. Reading the book Beyond Order, there was a part in there that struck me as this is going to be the new battleground that Jordan is going to be fighting on. Oh, good. Do you have a sense of um what in the book is going to trigger people? No. I mean, I didn't think that the lobster in the last book was going to be so pilloried. I mean, I thought it was I thought it was really cool. It's like oh my god, serotonin mediates dominance in lobsters and people. How ancient, how remarkable. But well, that took off in all sorts of directions, you know, and people made fun of it. It's like, well, you can make fun of 350 million years of evolutionary history if you want. You can put your social constructionism up against 350 million years of evolutionary history. Good luck to you. I didn't think it was like and you know, the idea that I was trying to insist that because lobsters live in hierarchies that hierarchies are the source of all moral value. Like that, you know, that's I was trying to insist that hierarchies are are so inevitable that you see nervous systems adapting to them across virtually every level of animal. And why? Well, because some things are valuable. And since and within any given domain of value, some valuable things are more valuable than other things. And so you have a hierarchy. There's no avoiding it. As long as you need something, as long as there's scarcity, a hierarchy is inevitable. Yeah, hi You know, nobody cares how many big pens you have. It's because they're not scarce. So you can't have status because you have 200 of them. But as soon as there's scarcity, there's a hierarchy. And there's always scarcity of one form or another, no matter how rich you get. You know, if you're if you have 100 million dollars, Picasso paintings are still scarce. Yeah, the the pushback on the the lobster thing falls into two things for me. One, I don't understand why people look for a reason not to listen to somebody, which to me most of people coming after you for that one just they didn't want you to be right or to be heard and so they went after something that they thought they could memify and and shut down on. And then the other one that. Like I understand that. I It's obvious why people are looking for a reason not to listen to someone. It's like how god damn many people can you listen to? There's 9 billion of them. You know, so you have to not listen to almost everyone and so you'll fall for any excuse. And sometimes that's not so good, you know, because you have a bias that prejudices you against a viewpoint that you actually need. That's that's a problem. But the phenomenon itself, like, you know, you you you mentioned, sorry to bring this up again, but because it's germane and and relevant, someone said something disparaging about me and they were on your staff. It's like, well, you have lots of options for guests. You're looking for no. You're always looking for no because you can only say yes to a very limited number of things. Mhm. So, that's another reason we have to be very careful about our prejudices because we need them, you know, to I don't mean prejudice in the obviously in the inappropriate social sense, but Jesus, we have to shield ourselves from an excess of information. We're very limited capacity processors. Mhm. No question. I I don't understand though. I don't understand really and it's really killing me, I think. I might might mean that literally. I don't understand why I'm so controversial. I can't figure that out. It's very distressing to me. Do you want me to take a stab at it? Sure. Good metaphor. All right, so my gut instinct in terms of why a certain type of person uh responds negatively to you is when you think of a person as a blank slate and that we all have this collective responsibility to make sure that everybody ends up the same, then you saying some people are better at something than others already is feels judgmental. And so It is. It Oh, yes. It is judgmental. And but when you have a collectivist view and you believe that everyone should have equal outcome, which by the way, I think everybody, yourself included, like if only, right? Like that would be amazing. Like if everybody could live truly in harmony and that didn't violate principles of just the human animal, which is why I always remind people to remember you're having a biological experience. But you say things that are they violate a deeply compassionate person's desire to take care of everybody. The sort of no child left behind type thing. And when you insist on in your own life, like I'm only going to say that which is true and I'm certainly not going to let somebody force me to say something I don't believe is true. So, now with that and by the way, all of that and this is a key thing I think you have to understand, you're fighting with a level of intensity that makes sense when you realize your obsession with what happened in the 20th century, the gulag archipelago, what happened there, obviously Nazi Germany, Mao's China, like the number of people that have been killed in these essentially social experiments. So, you have this deep intense thing trying to get people to understand, like hierarchies are real, there's no escaping them, not everybody is as good as everybody else at everything and by the way, you have to shoulder responsibility and that's where people are like, you just to them, I cannot and before I say what they think, I will reiterate, you have changed my life forever and for the better. I will forever be grateful to the things that you continue to put out into the world and I missed you horribly as a thought leader during 2020 of all years to be on a Jordan Peterson diet. I was not happy about that. But what they think of is that you're being mean for the sake of being mean. That you're not trying to help them see. You cannot pretend reality isn't reality. In pretending that the dragon is not there, the dragon does not go away. The dragon grows more powerful, more likely to devour you and your family. And so I'm saying smaller. They don't see that. And so that's why I'm like when I see people attack you, I'm like Jesus Christ, how many times does he have to say this is about a balance between order and chaos that you need both of these things that you have to show the responsibility because that is what reality demands. That you're in you're nested in an evolutionary context. There are things like hierarchies that will play out in in the the body in conception. Exactly. And so you may not want to feel bad when you walk in the room and are worse at something than everybody else, but you're going to. You may not want to feel bad when you're rejected, but you're going to. You may not want to feel bad because you're just lazing around your house and not doing anything, but you're going to. And you have peered into enough of human nature to recognize, hey, there are just certain truisms. You've now given us 24 of the I forget how many were originally in the core article, 49 or whatever. So 42. 42, okay. We've got 24 to the life, the universe and everything. Right. Is that all, Jordan? That's Hofstadter's number. So oh my god, that's perfect, actually. Uh it it is this incredible thing once you break free from ideology. And that's where again, this is one of the rules in Beyond Order, not to fall prey to ideology. This is where I thought you were going in the beginning with identity. I thought you were going to say identity has become pathological because it has become it's been simplified. You talk about this in Beyond Order. Once you simplify something, and this is how an ideologue gets you. They simplify it. They make it very understandable. Becomes very clear who's in and who's out. You can reward and punish based on that. People are grabbing these unnegotiated self-determined pieces of identity that don't necessarily bring value to the larger world, which will create dissonance in their own life because they've got all this substructure running telling them to be that. value. You You know what I mean? It's like I'm not saying they're like your race, I suppose, is a value, but it's not a tradable value. And your gender and your sex, the same thing. It's like I guess it's partly cuz there's no scarcity. You know? It's like we've got enough white people. Being white doesn't buy you anything. So, and I I I'm not saying that with any pleasure. That's what I think people miss. This is why I think people come after you. They don't recognize that you're not saying it You're not relishing in this. You want people to be happy. And I I I I'm always so confused. Jordan, I don't know why you remain as vulnerable and open as you are after the time saying I was like, "What the fuck?" You sounded so kind, open, compassionate after what 4 years of you know, some percentage of the world relentlessly slandering you. And obviously you get people that cheer you on, probably way more people that cheer you on than don't. But you still remain vulnerable, which is [ __ ] incredible. But the fact that they don't recognize that you're trying to help. Like, I could get it if they said, "Hey, look, I disagree with Jordan on this, that, or the other." But Maybe they do recognize that. You know, there's a lot of cynicism about the help, and I I can't understand why you'd be cynical about help unless you weren't that help weren't that pleased about the idea of help. You know, like all these deplorables that I'm helping, these angry young men. You know, they don't deserve help. Well, I don't think that. I don't know anyone that doesn't deserve help. You know, that there's this idea in the New Testament that you should love your enemies. It's like why would you do that? Well, it'd be better if they weren't your enemies. And their unnecessary suffering doesn't help. It's not helpful. It's not like you don't you know, anyone with any sense, anyone who's human is liable to take pleasure in vengeance or even in But, you know, when people go after the journalists that have gone after me, I don't take any pleasure in that. I don't sit back at my home and rub my hands and think, you know, you got what was coming to you. I do think sometimes you got what was coming to you, but I think of that more like watching someone in the road, you know, they're in the road and they have their back turned and a truck runs over them. It's like, well, you were in the road and there was a truck. And so you got what was coming to you because you were on the road and there was a truck, but I don't take any pleasure in it. I don't see that it's helpful. What do you want people to get out of Beyond Order? It It is extraordinarily well thought through. It is very well laid out. Each sentence stacks like a brick upon the next. I wouldn't advise I don't know if you feel differently, but I wouldn't advise people read them out of order. It's literally this very careful case being made that taken in totality is breathtaking in its advice. them in either order. I think you can read them in either order. I tried Maybe maybe they're better read in order, but but um I think that if you read the second one first, then it would color your vision of the first one. I mean I mean the rules. The I think you're right. 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order it doesn't matter. They're yin and yang. mean the rules themselves? themselves. Just it it stacks so well. Otherwise it wouldn't be a book, okay? I mean each The thing about writing a book is that you're outside of time and space in relationship with the book because chapter one comes before chapter 12, but not when you're writing it. You can go back and modify chapter one because of chapter 12. I did try to tie them together so that they make a book, you know, and they one builds upon another. That's like that's the musical element of it as well. The recurrent themes. I'm glad you liked it. See, I can't tell. I can't evaluate it. Um I'm hoping that it it's of the same level of quality that the first book was. And I'm not making any claims saying that about the level of quality of the first book. I'm just That was as good as I could do. And I wrote the second one under unbelievable duress. Yeah. And so I can't tell if it's, you know, whether that was a curse or well, certainly a curse. And no doubt about that. I don't know what how it impacted the book, though. Mhm. It's hard to say what it would be. to get out of it? Well, I'm hoping that they find it useful the same way they seem to have found the first one. How to order their lives. actually hurts me. Actually, both of them hurt me, I would say. Because I'm ashamed, you know, of what's happened to me. What do you mean? And they're books about life and my life is I'm very hurt. I'm a very destroyed person in many ways and so I feel unworthy. Unworthy of what? Tell. You name it. I hope people find it useful, you know. I hope it alleviates some unnecessary suffering. That's the Sorry. goal. Here's how I read your books and everything that you've put out into the world. The people that should write the instruction manual are the people that have struggled and in your suffering, you have been able to piece together useful information, which is the barometer by which I judge a book's value for sure. The reason people flock to your lectures, they buy your book is you have made in modern times the single most coherent and useful instruction manual for life. Period. So, the I fear that the brokenness that you feel, the heartache that you feel translates into something usable that couldn't be written by somebody that hadn't gone through what you've gone through. Well, I would like to believe that was true. You know, there's a bit too much self-justification in it for my taste, but I thought the other day I probably do this too and I I have to record an announcement for this book cuz it's coming out on Tuesday. I thought the best announcement would be just to thank people for all of their kind attention. I'm very fortunate in that regard. I get letters from people all the time that they they open up their hearts, you know, it's really something. But I am somewhat nonplussed, let's say, for all this work. I'm pretty broken. Mhm. In general or just in this moment? Don't know. I think in general. Man, well, I will say this as somebody whose life you have touched and the thing I want you to recognize in me as I imagine countless other people want you to recognize in them more than warm wishes is I have put to use the things that you're teaching and they have made my life better and they have made the lives of those around me better. And man, it is really heartbreaking to see you um go through what you're going through now and I I certainly get it. Um you know, and I don't know you well enough to offer you any sort of um familial consolation. So, I will just say that what you do matters probably more than you think it does, certainly as much as you think it does. And I I had never met you through 2020 and I started reaching out to people that we both know asking about you because I I believe that the world needs the insights that you uniquely have coming from your background of mythology and understanding what is deeply ingrained in the human psyche from an evolutionarily shaped perspective. And that nobody is putting it together the way that you're putting it together and the fact that you've been you know, I mean, hopefully it's it's small in comparison to the people that are supporting you, but Jesus, like I don't I know I would not put up with the amount of [ __ ] that you've put up with and the fact that I think that individual's the only way to approach any systemic problem. Like you just have to deal with the individuals and then from there it will echo out into society. And so the fact that that's your approach um I kept telling people we need Jordan Peterson right now. And I'm so grateful you're back. And I know this book will be very successful because it's good. you liked it. I'm glad you liked it because like I said, I it's really hard for me to evaluate it. You know, sometimes I Well, I have every possible thought that you could have about it. You know, sometimes I read it and I think, "Oh, that seemed to have turned out pretty good." And other times I think, "Jesus, I've said this 50 times already." And yeah, I'm all over the place. I can't I think that happens it happens when you write a book. You get so cuz I you know, if when you read someone else's book you can kind of tell if the ideas are original at least in so far as you're concerned. Mhm. Well, I can't tell because I these are my ideas. Well, not all of them obviously, but they're ideas that I'm at least deeply familiar with. So I can't tell to what degree it's original. None of it. And so I and it's it's also I suppose I'm quite apprehensive about its release in some sense because I've set myself up an impossible second act. You know, because the first book was so insanely popular. I think it's 6 million copies now in in all the languages that it's been published in. So, um that's impossible. That never happens, right? It's It's certainly It's like winning the lottery. It's probably less probable than winning the lottery. In fact, I'm virtually certain that it's less probable than winning the lottery. And to to imagine doing that twice is well, that's just It happens, but it's highly improbable. Anyways, it's going to all come and then you know, I'm in a different space than I was when I released this first book. So, this is compared to all This is going to be compared to all my electronic avatars, which are busily working out there in the world. I think there's more of me outside of me now than there is inside of me, weirdly enough. That's another phenomenon I can't really get my hand my my my mind around. You know, the power of YouTube. Jesus, that's quite the technology. When I put those first videos up, you know, I was this was bothering me, this piece of legislation. And for a variety of reasons, some of which we've discussed, I talked to my wife and my son sort of casually. I said, "Well, I'm going to make these videos, see what happens." And it's like famous last words. Yes. Yeah, man. Look, it's resonated. It will continue to resonate. You are You have an extraordinary ability to translate what people are feeling into the actions they need to take to get out of it. It is not a mistake that you are a very practiced clinical psychologist that is able to scale what you were doing one-on-one now to the many. It's extraordinary and I think it's really had an impact on society. My fantasy being a clinician. It was a great job. You know, I really loved it. There was nothing better than intense conversations about how to make things better when both partners in the conversation are fully committed to that. It's such fun to produce incremental improvements, sometimes more than incremental, you know, collaboratively. There's nothing better than that. I love doing my lecture tour because it was that on a large scale. It was I talked to Dave Rubin about that this week cuz of course he was long on the tour. And it was such it was so perfect to be talking to people about making things better and to have everyone at least in that moment fully on board with the idea. You couldn't You couldn't ask for anything better than that. It was great. And to have the support I've had from people, it just stuns me. You know, I think it's actually traumatic to have that much support. That's interesting. Why traumatic? It's not easy to know what to do with. You know, the cheers of a million people. It's overwhelming. It's dangerous. Dangerous because it can seep into your identity or is probably not directly relevant, but I don't know. You know, I've thought a lot about Hitler. You know, was it his arrogance or his humility that led him to be the savior, so-called, of Germany? He had millions of people cheering for him. How could you not think you were right? How could you possibly think you weren't right? And so there's danger in that. You know, I don't think I've I don't think I've unfairly benefited from it. I'm not a hedonistic person. My life style hasn't changed. Um but it's still it's it's just difficult to See, I also think These are things I don't know what to think about, you know, that I'm talking about. If you're a movie star, people are your fans, you know, for your roles. But I'm not playing a role. Or if I am, it's me. I'm no different on in this conversation than I am whenever I'm doing anything. You know, I think, well, what is it? Well, I'm talking about all these great clinical ideas. It's the power of the ideas. It's the power of the communications technology brought together. And that's probably sufficient explanation. But it's still strange. And maybe I was pretty old when this happened to me, and maybe that's makes it more difficult to adapt to. But you know, my videos have been viewed something like, if you count them all up approximately with the ones that people have cut, it's like 600 million times. Some insane number. It's incredible. It's incredible, man. It speaks to the impact. So, not that anybody would have a hard time finding you, but if people want to track you and the book and the progress and you getting more involved now again, uh where should they do it? Well, you can go to jordanbpeterson.com, and everything's laid out there. I have a list of recommended books. That's quite fun. There's about 100 books there. If you read all those books, well, you'd be educated. Not in everything, but you know, you'd have an education. So, there you go. There's an education for anyone who wants it. They're 100 great books. That doesn't mean you know everything about everything or even something about everything, but what you do know would be useful and you would know it. And lots of people are reading those books. I can tell because I run it through Amazon uh as a third-party vendor. Mhm. Okay. So, I get some sense of how many book affiliate, yeah. Get some sense of how many books are being published a month and it or bought a month. It's a lot. So, that's fun. Um the exercises that my partners and I have developed, self-authoring, and the personality test, UnderstandMyself, are are you can find them there. And self-authoring helps people write out an identity, past, present, and future. And that seems to be really useful for people cuz it's better to have a plan. You know, what's the idea? If you don't have your own plan, then you're the tool of someone else's plan. So, that's probably not good, especially if you don't know what their plan is. You have to explain what's happening now with LLMs and how they're finding the patterns in the language cuz that that really made me look at the digital corpus in a new way. Absolutely. Well, I think that we'll be able to use the large large language models. We're I'm I've tongue-in-cheek established a new scientific discipline with a former student of mine, uh Victor Swift, who now works with me and works on large language models, which we've been playing with a lot, computational epistemology. So, he's found a set of 10 words that functionally replace the notion of God in the English language corpus. What are the 10 words? I don't know all 10 of them to tell you the truth, but you know, you can imagine. So, imagine God is the shared variance of words such as good, true, beautiful, just, merciful. Interesting. Right. Right. So, then imagine that God dies. So, that center word disappears, but the spirit's embedded in the cloud of concepts. Well, that the cloud of concepts around a given concept is the archetype. The center, sorry, the central tendency of a cloud of related concepts is the archetype. Yeah. But then we can map it. We can map it now with the large language models. Yeah, it's stunning. That's really important for people to understand that that in cracking at least mimicking human intelligence in a way where we can't distinguish the difference, what you're looking for are these interconnected patterns. Well, well, that's exactly That's what the models do. That's how they're trained, right? Is that they're trained on conditional probability essentially towards a goal. So, you can tell a word, let's say a non-word like "nant", n a n t, nant. That's a It's a non-word, but it's not It's less of a non-word than z x q r. Well, why? Well, because the statistical relationship between the letters in the word "nant" are more akin to English words than the statistical relationships letter to letter in the all consonant other non-consonant all consonant non-word. Okay. Well, the large language models map the statistical relationship not only between letters, but between words, adjacent words, but then words two words away, words three years words away, two words two two words away from two other words, like the whole map essentially. Right. Right. And so, but they do that statistically. They do that mathematically. So, that what really what that means now is that if these models are programmed honestly trained honestly, a very difficult thing to manage, then we can use statistics to evaluate the structure, the implicit structure of meaning. And that's what literary critics have been doing forever. And you know, Harris, when he argued with me, he said, "Well, you know, you're just that's just your interpretation." Which meant of the biblical text, for example, which turned him instantly into a postmodernist, right? There's an infinite number of interpretations of any text and there's no canonical order between them. That's the postmodernist claim, the lack of meta-narrative, let's say, which means there's no you you union. It means there's no comprehensibility. It means everything fragments ultimately, which is what they wanted so they could dance in the ruins and pursue their own short-term gratification, right? With power as their as their as their hypothetical guardian and guide. Terrible, terrible. These interpretations aren't arbitrary. They're not arbitrary. They're coded into the language. That's what makes the language comp- Without that coding, language would not be comprehensible. Now, with the postmodernists even knew this to some degree because they knew Saussure. He was he wasn't a postmodernist, but he was a precursor. He knew that the meaning of a word was coded in its relationship to other words. Now, it's more complex cuz it's the same for phrases and sentences and paragraphs and the entire structure has that what would you say? That networked that networked nature, right? But none of that's arbitrary. And and here's why it's not arbitrary. This is so cool. It's it's not arbitrary partly because it has to be comprehensible to you and to me and to everyone else. So, that's a terrible constraint, right? It's like it has to be a game everyone can play. So, that's a really wicked constraint, one of those multi-dimensional constraints we're talking about earlier, but there's more to it. I had a vision of this this this week about how this and it's been developing for years, this idea. So, imagine there's like a central pillar. I envisioned it as a pillar of fire with sort of God at the base of that and then there are stacked discs of manifestation, material, imaginational, no, material, behavioral, imaginational, semantic. Right? So, the material world has an implicit structure that's captured in imagination. And so, the world of images is going to have the same network structure as the world of words that the LLMs have modeled. Soon the LLMs will build a model of the world of images and soon they'll be able to lay them on top of one another. And that's what we do because our semantic representation system is isomorphic with the underlying imaginational system and that's isomorphic with the behavioral system and that's isomorphic with the material system. And so, there and then the concordance between those is the truth of the claim. Right? So, if it's true, it's true semantically, imaginatively, behaviorally and it's reflective of the structure of the material world. That's a tight set of constraints. There's nothing arbitrary about that. There's no the meaning is only in the text. That's the ultimate claim of the disembodied rational prideful intellect. It's all in the words. It's like No. No, no. Yeah, that that to me is the punchline about what you're calling the counter-enlightenment of all of these patterns are present in the biblical corpus and that's how you know That's right. That's right. It's a reflection. That's exactly right. It's a It's well, what the hell else do you think we've been doing for 4,000 years than trying to map this? That's what we've been trying to do with every tool at our disposal. Now, and you but you pointed to a further constraint. The representation has to be made manifest in a form accessible to everyone. Mhm. Right. Right. Well, is that going to be in the form of complex scientific theories? No, that's the domain of specialists, obviously. Obviously, obviously. And besides that, even that specialized knowledge, you can't use that to orient you in the world. There's no reason to assume that your you know, typical evolutionary biologist is any wiser, you know, than your typical plumber. Mhm. Often far less. At least a plumber is constrained, you know. The world of constraints that a plumber operates in, that's a pretty tangible world. You're wrestling with the essence of material reality. That's for sure. who wrestle with pipes. Yes, definitely, definitely. Well, and plumbers, you know, I would say there's it's hard to uh imagine a profession that has contributed more to the world than plumbers. Right. So All right. This this whole idea I find utterly profound. Um I worry though we are in a super weird moment. You are you're a canary in a coal mine for me in terms of freedom of speech and the Overton window, what people are allowed to say. Mhm. Um the the authoritarian game only works if there's nobody there to challenge the ideas. You refuse to go away, but you're proving hard to kill, but they have certainly tried. Most people are very easy to kill in the world of ideas. They can shut down their career, make it impossible for them to make money, which then makes other people just way too afraid to speak. I get it. You know the hell that awaits on being silent, but most people don't. And honestly, the hell comes so slowly that most people are like, well, this is just a little bit of hell by being silent, a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. hell. Yes, exactly. And hell is deferred hell is eternal hell. That's not good. It is and it isn't good. the hell like now. Yes, but you are very, very rare. And so, there's two things I want to see if we can get to the other side of using what the um counter-enlightenment is going to teach us. Okay, so one, I I spend a lot of my time absolutely freaked out about the authoritarianism that I see creeping in. As somebody who grew up in the '80s, like this is just whiplash. in. Yeah, it it's insanity. Oh, yeah. And it scares me because there's people telling me I can't 700 million CCTVs in China. Jesus, man. Yeah, they have full gate recognition, right? They locked down knives in people's houses. What? That's really scary. That that freaks me out the way people are saying. Yeah. Right, that's what makes them tyrants, right? There'll be nothing that you There'll be no autonomy. That's the Like zero. Zero autonomy. Cuz you know, well, and if if you if you haven't done anything wrong, you'll you'll have nothing to worry about. It's like, well, good, great. Find me someone who hasn't done anything wrong, who has nothing to worry about. Yeah, right. So, how do you I heard at one point you were spending like $90,000 a month fighting everything that's coming at you? Um that's crazy. So, how do people who just absolutely cannot do that, how do they push back? Substitute ad- substitute adventure for security. Okay. Security, it's like you're going to pursue security, are you? You How's that going to work? You're You're going to die. You're going to encounter malevolence, like you can you can defer the the encounter to some degree, although not very successfully. There's no security. And and then the thing is, that's the thing that's so interesting to understand is you don't want security. You're not an infant. It's not what you're after. You're actually after adventure. So, where do you find your adventure? Aim up. Tell the truth. And adventure will come your way. And then that's so much better than security that there's no looking back. It's so incredibly exciting. It's It's uncharted territory. The thing about the truth is that you don't know what's going to happen when you utter it. You have to let go. You know, so if I could come in here, you know, calculating what I want from this interview, figuring out how it's going to increase my social status or make me more money and I mean if it does those things, okay, but that's not the aim. The aim is to come in here and have wrestling match. And why? Because I have faith in outcome. So what's the faith? The faith is whatever happens to you when you tell the truth is the best thing that could happen, no matter how it looks to you. That's a statement of faith. Now, there's an alternative statement which is, oh no, no, no, I'll say something and there'll be a consequence and I'll have faith that that consequence is the defining what would you say? Defining feature of that utterance. I said something, I got in trouble, therefore I shouldn't have said it. It's like, well, what if you get in trouble, but like 3 weeks later what everything's way better for you? Christ, like, it's not like there's any shortage of things like that in life. That's what work is. Work is I'm going to do this thing now that's difficult so that something better will happen in the future. Well, truth is like truth is the ultimate investment in that matter. Definitely, that's why truth is what stores up treasure in heaven. That's what that means. And so So, how can people how can people learn this? Try telling the truth. I mean I wrote a chapter about this in one of my books that was quite accessible. It's like, start by not saying things you know to be a lie. Just start with that. Play with it. See what happens. See what happens. Walk me through the morning when that person does that. I'll talk to young men right now. Uh they say what they think is true. They get fired from their job. They go home. then they probably bit off more than they could chew, right? The eternal sin of Adam, to bite off more than he could chew. It's like you know, if you don't know what you're doing and you're in a dangerous place, maybe, you know, start on your knees, humbly, carefully. You know, don't go out there and brandish your new truth and make yourself into an idiot martyr so you can tell yourself that you're the Messiah, you know, with one utterance. That's not wise. You have to be as wise as serpents, right? That's the idea. This isn't a game. You have to you have to do it with your eyes open. You know, and if you pay attention, you'll see your opportunity. You'll see you'll see. It'll make itself manifest. You'll see where there's a choice point where you'll be conversing with someone and you could take the easy route out that you usually take or you could dare, right then and there. And there's an excitement about that. And then you'll try it, and, you know, the other person, you know, maybe you're kind of a cringing milksop sort of person and and so you're you're being intimidated by one of your friends who's actually a bully that you hate, and you decide at that moment that you're finally going to say at least a fraction of what you've been thinking, and, you know, it takes them aback. And then actually likes you better and is 10% less likely to bully you. Now, you might get punched, too. You know, that's well, hey. It's real. Like it's That's right. This This is This is real. It's It's It's the ultimate game. I suppose the ultimate game is what's real, but but it's not like there's not consequences. One of the The other thing you have to understand, and this is a good thing for young men to understand, is you're going to pay one way or another. There's no way out of that. So, choose your method of payment. That's what you can do. And and weirdly enough, if you choose the proper God, if you choose the proper method of payment, the price you pay is is one you would pay happily. That's what That's why See, Abraham is called upon to sacrifice his son, for example. And in the service of God. And he says, "Yes." And then he doesn't have to. And that's right. And it's the same We know this even in our families. A mother who will sacrifice her child to the world, let the child go, foster that child's independence, offer the child to be broken by the world, full-heartedly will get that child back. Right? The child won't leave. It's It's so interesting cuz the child leaves, but not really. Right? Because that's the child who wants to maintain a relationship with the mother for the rest of the child's life. Who wants that mother as a grandmother and who wants her around and who will return as much as is appropriate, but no more. And so, everything you give away, you'll get back if you give it away in the right spirit. And we know that even on the reciprocal front, you know, I I worked with many many professors and and society scientists, but let's say as a graduate student, I had a great graduate advisor, Robert Peel, who's still alive and who I still work with. That case in point. I loved working in Bob's lab partly because he was insanely generous with his ideas. He'd just give them away. Like, there were professors who like they'd have an idea and they'd shelter the damn thing. It's like, "This is my idea and someone's going to steal." It's like, first of all, probably it's not your idea. Second of all, it's not that great anyway, so don't be so concerned. There's not a lot of people lining up to steal your ideas. And third, it's not that easy to steal ideas anyways, so there's a fair bit of and and lack of faith in that. But imagine, we could even imagine psychophysiologically what happens to you if you give away your ideas. So let's say, you know, you're blessed with a creative spirit and and you're just giving your ideas away like mad, like you're a tree that's full of fruit and you're just distributing it. Well, everybody that you give an idea to is thrilled about it and they reflect that in their enthusiasm and that enthusiasm is rewarding and that reward creates a dopaminergic kick and that dopaminergic kick reinforces the dominance of the creative spirit and so then you have more ideas. Mhm. Right. And this is that's a great example of how you get back what you give away in spades. It's by far the best strategy. That's why Christ says that, you know, if someone asks you for I don't remember the this phrase exactly, but you know, you give the person who asks your coat, you walk the mile with them, you give more than you're called upon to give, even to your enemies. Why? Because there's no better strategy than that by any stretch of the imagination. This is why there's such an emphasis in the Old Testament on hospitality. Be welcoming and productive generosity. Productive generosity. Well, what does that ensure? It ensures your own security, weirdly enough. Because if you give to a thousand people and then you're in trouble, you have a thousand people who are ready to help. You know, maybe you could give to a hundred thousand people or a million people. I mean, how could you possibly put anything in a more solid bank than in the goodwill you generated in the embodied imaginations of other people. That's the kingdom. That's the That's the treasure That's treasures in heaven. And they are an eternal form of treasure in some sense, not least because that reputation can last in some cases throughout the ages. And then it's it's part of the manifestation of that underlying spirit of creative generosity that gives rise to the cosmos itself. Thing I don't want to get lost in all of that is that that is somebody who has a hierarchy of values, whether they got it religiously or they just decided it. But the hierarchy of values is what I would tell people to lean on in times of trouble. have just decided it. If they decided it, it's because something moved within them, right? Cuz we just aren't self-created. You know, you know what I mean? I mean, we we have that self-creative capacity to some degree, but we're the inheritors of one tradition or another or mishmash of traditions or we're socialized creatures, intensely socialized creatures. So, there's all sorts of things that give rise to impulses within us. And so, I would say if someone technically atheistic is generous and productive in spirit, then they're infused with the word, regardless of what the semantic system sitting on top has to say about it. It's like, I don't believe that. It's like, well, it kind of looks like you do. You know, if we're going to judge the tree by its fruits. And so, Dawkins, you know, Dawkins doesn't know how much of a Christian he is. God, I want to see you two down at the same time. I want to hear him respond to that statement. he's a terrifying guy, you know, I I unfortunately, the few times I have talked to him, I'm still quite ill and um you don't want to talk to Richard Dawkins when you're not at your best. And so, but I do believe that we are scheduled to have a public discussion at some point in the relatively near future. So, That would be amazing. Um going back to young men, there's an idea that you put out there that I have talked about just ad nauseam. I'm so grateful to you for this concept. I hope you're right that in the Bible, the idea that the meek shall inherit the earth makes no sense when you think of meek as weak, but when you think of meek as somebody who is a total badass, but they keep their sword sheathed. Rogan's a good example. Why? What's meek about Rogan? Well, it's not that he's weak. It's that he every guest he has he he tries to learn from. You know, it's it it's a kind of there isn't anything more compelling and powerful than a well-armed humility. And I've seen this in great people. I've met I have been privileged to meet many great people. And I've met the shells of great people, too. But the great people I've met are they're striking in their humility. Striking. It's a core part of their character. And they're not They're wrestling all the time. When they talk to someone doesn't matter who it is. They're they're there with them communicating. You know, one of the things we learned as we moved along on this tour was I have security people who also help me with logistics. And uh We've had to be very careful about who we gather around us because all the people on the tour have to treat everyone they come into contact well with well. All everyone, especially the people who come to my shows, but in restaurants, in hotels, like I don't want to leave uh This is especially true if you're in the public eye because okay, if if you're unknown and you offend someone, they'll forget it. But if you're well-known and you offend someone, they will never forget it. Mhm. It will burn itself into their imagination and they will tell absolutely everyone. They're they'll feel deeply betrayed and and they have been. So, so we ensure that everyone around us treats everyone not well in the manner that keeps reputation intact, but well, not so that reputation stays intact, but because it's the right thing to do. And that's a form of that meekness, you know, it's it that's that's what it's referring to. This is what I tell people. So, your identity is going to drive your behaviors. Ultimately, your behaviors are the only thing that matters. So, you're going to begin by telling yourself identity statements. You're going to say, "I'm the type of person that." So, for instance, "I'm the type of person that gets out of bed in 10 minutes or less." Now, I started telling myself that even when it wasn't true because I needed to start getting out of bed in 10 minutes or less. Then an aspiration. And then I put more. I'm the type of person Monday through Friday, if I'm awake, I'm either working or working out, right? These become my identity. Um I am a husband first, right? So, even before being an entrepreneur, I'm a husband. Like and I repeat these things over and over and over. Some are aspirational and become true over time and some are a recognition of something that I'm already doing that I want to reinforce. So, all I'm trying to do is use basically cognitive dissonance against people so that they're not saying something to themselves and other people cuz I always encourage them to say it to other people as well. So, they're not saying something that they're not actually doing. So, now you're trapping yourself into getting out of bed in 10 minutes or less, working your ass off Monday through Friday, prioritizing, in my case, my wife, things like that. But it's all like this really rudimentary thing about behaviors. Just say statements that you're going to adhere to that make you act in the way that you should be acting. Well, that's what a behaviorist does in as a therapist is that is to break things down to the level of implementable behavior. And yeah, you you group behaviors like an ethical statement is actually a grouping of behaviors. Right? An ethical statement is a statement about a group of behaviors or it's empty. So, I want to be a conscientious person. Okay, we have to decompose that into implementable actions. What you did there to some degree. I need to get out of bed at 8:00. I need to get out of bed at in 10 minutes or less. I need to have breakfast within the first half an hour half hour that I've woken up. I need to be able to cook my breakfast. I need to be able to go get groceries because otherwise I won't have any breakfast to cook. And so you decompose it yet you it is decomposed to the level of implementable behavior and that means bodily. That's the point where the abstraction meets the world, right? Through the actions of the body. And behaviors concentrate on exactly that level rather than you know the psychoanalytic types might be more inclined to alter global statements. That would be say part of the self narrative. Those are abstractions because they're collections of behaviors that are that have an abstract description associated with them. And yes, part one of the things that you do do in therapy is you notice where there's disjunctions between the way people describe themselves and the way they act. Of course you do that in relationships all the time as well. You say to people, well you said This is especially true in intimate and familiar relationships. You said X but you do Y. It's like there's a there's a discordance there and that makes you unpredictable to me. I don't like that. It's probably not that good for you either. Many many arguments are like that. So getting back to now how people can leverage this information in a usable way in their life and I'll put it in the context of what I see going on in the cultural war. The thing that drew me in is I'm not worried about myself. I'm worried about other people. And my big thing is so I've worked in the inner cities a lot and so I've seen people that have a an identity what I often refer to as a frame of reference that leads them so far astray because their parents will tell them things like people don't want somebody who looks like you to be successful. And so they don't even try to be successful. And so that belief about who they are and how the world conceives of them stops them from doing the behaviors that would lead them to be successful. And so when I look at your core concept, which I love and think is so brilliant, that we've been talking to kids about rights and we really should be talking to them about responsibility and what you owe the world instead of what the world owes you. Now, I'll frame it a little bit different. to balance those, right? Because I mean, even technically speaking, your rights are my responsibilities and vice versa. And so we can't only have half the dialogue because the responsibility makes enables the rights. So, you know, it could easily be that we could be in a situation where we should be talking more about rights, but I don't believe that we are in that situation at the moment. And I I I mean, I think for me that's been born out by the fact that people have been interested in what I've been saying because one of the things I've noticed time and time again is that whenever I talk about the relationship between responsibility and meaning, the crowds that I'm talking to go silent. Say, look, you need a meaning to sustain you through the vicissitudes of life. Okay, well, try to debate that. It's like, is life painful? Yes. Is it anxiety-provoking? Yes. Is it uncertain? Yes. Is it painful beyond bearing sometimes? Yes. It's difficult. Everyone agrees about that. Now, they might disagree about how difficult, but that doesn't matter. That the central point holds. Okay. What if you think that's all pointless? Well, that doesn't seem very helpful. Okay, so you need a sustaining meaning. Well, where do you find that? Well, you generally find it in responsibility to yourself and to other people. And people ask themselves those questions when when I'm talking cuz I asked them to ask themselves those questions and that's the answer. Well, what's meaningful? Well, I have a meaningful relationship with my father. I have a meaningful relationship with my wife. I have a meaningful relationship with my pet, you know, because I take care of that pet. Um when I commit to something and make sacrifices, that sacrifice is something I also talk about a lot in both of the last two books. You know, if something's valuable, you'll make sacrifices to attain it. And that that discovery of sacrifice, I think that's what separates human It's one of the primary factors separating human beings from animals. Because we discovered that we could let go of something we value in the present and we would gain something we value even more in the future. We acted that out dramatically in all sorts of strange ways over thousands and thousands of years before it was formalizable psychologically, but it's a massive discovery. I can forego gratification in a particular way and benefit in the future. So, I can share the proceeds of my hunt and I store up future food in the form of reputation and the favors I've owed I'm owed now by other people. It's a massive discovery. So, No question on that. So, when I start to put this back in the context of you know, what's going on today. So, I I see you in a certain way. I see you as somebody who um has had a long-standing desire to help people make sense of the world and how to move through it. Uh both as a public intellectual and as obviously a psychologist who's working with people. And so, when I hear you talking about um whether it's identity, whether it's the culture war, whether it's, you know, the balance, the needed balance between chaos and order, um it's in trying to get people to understand something so they can use it in their life and and move forward. So, taking that, the the reason that I think identity becomes so important for people now is they the generations coming up seem to be using as a part of their identity a desire for their rights to focus on that, what I'm owed. Um, and if they were to flip it over to the responsibilities that they have, now they're getting into an identity statement that changes their behavior set so profoundly that it gives them the meaning and purpose that you were talking about earlier. Am I gluing these pieces together? you can run yourself. One of the tenets of cognitive behavioral therapy is collaborative empiricism. So, okay. So, so when you have a client and and you say, "Well, you know, maybe your mood would be better if you got up at 8:00 in the morning regularly instead of 2:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon irregularly." And then you say, "Well, we don't really know if that's true. Let's try doing it getting up at 2:00 regularly for a week and see what happens. And then maybe we'll try moving it back an hour week by week, but you can see how it goes." Well, so this isn't So, I would say run the experiment. It's like is your life better? And you can even look at the way that you evaluate your past. When you upheld your responsibilities, did that improve your quality of life even though it might have been difficult? And you know, generally people say yes to that. We derive a certain amount of satisfactions from past accomplishments and generally in proportion to their difficulty. And so, if that's not true, fair enough. And I mean, there's variation. Highly open people tend to take more delight in extraordinarily creative ventures and extroverted people in being with other people. Conscientious people are more duty focused, but it doesn't really matter. It's still it's still responsibility. So, it's just I I see that the the So, there's this this presupposition, let's say, with this this set of identities that we've been taught to regard as categorical that good should be distributed equally according to those categories. And that to me, because those categories aren't functional, you can't trade on them, they don't bear any relationship to outcomes. Now, you say, "Well, no, that's just evidence of prejudice." It's like, "Well, no doubt there's some prejudice." I mean, no one in their right mind would would deny that. But But that's There's That doesn't mean there's no competence. The fact that there is some prejudice doesn't mean there is no competence. in the hierarchy itself. Mhm. So, I once got asked, um, uh, speaking at Google, and, uh, an African-American gentleman, um, asked, "Hey Tom, do you think that it's harder for me to be successful because I'm black?" And I said, "Almost certainly true." Like, even just from the perspective of a school of fish, right? You from an evolutionary standpoint, we group up with people that look like we look. So, if you're a minority in any country, then it seems self-evident to me that it's going to be more difficult. But my question is, and now what? So, you've got options. You can sit in the unfairness of that, and I don't even think people would argue it. It is unfair. Or, It's even counterproductive. Right, because hypothetically, we want to exploit all people equally for our own benefit. You know, to speak very coldly about it. Obviously, there's more to it than that. So, my thing is, um, you talk very profoundly about resentment in Beyond Order, and that resonated with me really well. It's like, look, you're going to have every reason to be resentful in your life. There going to be a million things that come at you, but it doesn't serve you. Doesn't serve you. It doesn't serve the community." Like, that is the fastest way for your I wish I had better words for this, I'm sure you do, but for your sort of energy to go dark, for you to step into the role of the adversary, which you define very clearly is essentially the devil. Uh you liken adversaries to Mephistopheles, to the Columbine shooters, and that is seeing those as archetypal roles. You can play the hero, you can play the adversary. If you're going down the path of bitterness, even if you have every reason in the world to be bitter, the thought of where that path leads you should be so terrifying that you should U-turn and say, "Even though I have the right, even though everybody is going to tell me it makes all the sense in the world for you to be angry, bitter, resentful, it's going to take you somewhere that will be so self-punishing that there's just no point in heading in that direction." Yeah, unless you want unless you want the desolation and waste that comes with it. Yeah, I mean, in that chapter, that's do not allow yourself to become arrogant, deceitful, or resentful. I might have the order wrong there, but that's the chapter. Yeah, it opens with a discussion of why you would get resentful. It's like, "Well, culture is arrayed against you, so you're the target of tyrannical forces that are beyond your control. They're arbitrary. They don't work in your interest, at least not entirely. And the more eccentric you are, let's say, the more tyrannical culture will be to you. And so, you're stuck with that, and then nature conspires to destroy you constantly, and is going to do that with pain and anxiety and aging. And then there's the uncontrollability and darkness of your own psyche. And everyone faces those. Now, we face the positive elements of those too, the beneficent of culture, the beauty of nature, the glory of the human spirit, that's there as well. You have reasons to be deceitful, resentful, and arrogant, but it's not a good game unless you want to produce hell. I want to talk about that. So, you were the one that got me to read The Gulag Archipelago. Um you're the one that got me to And And this has profoundly changed my life for the better. You got me to distrust myself, which was such a brilliant move. So, you said, "Hey, when you think of Nazi Germany, don't think of yourself as the one hiding Anne Frank in the attic. Think of yourself as a Nazi guard, because odds are that as much as you want to think of yourself as the one hiding Anne Frank, the numbers just don't bear it out." And I thought, "Whoa, like even if it is just a thought exercise to recognize my potential for bringing hell on Earth through silence, through cowardice, like not necessarily that I'm rushing out to do it, but that I am capable of weakness. I am capable of silence at a critical juncture. I'm capable of resentment, bitterness. Um Well, silence at a critical juncture, I mean, for sure that. I mean, you you told the story at the beginning of our talk, I believe, about Oh, no, you didn't. You told me this story though about um Or maybe you did mention it, about not having me on your show because someone called me a misogynist. Well, that's a good example. It was like And it was just kind of a throwaway in some sense. I mean, it's not like I hold it against you. It's It's obvious why that would happen. But that's actually what's terrifying about it. These things are easy. You know, when I I worked very briefly, visited very briefly, and a small number of times, a maximum security prison in Edmonton, Alberta, with a very eccentric psychologist, and I met a man there who had shot two policemen in cold blood, and um he who seemed by all appearances, when I met him, to be an ordinary harmless guy, you know, um certainly wasn't very physically prepossessing. And another one of the criminals that I met had held down a third a couple of weeks later and beat his leg to a pulp with a lead pipe because he was a snitch. And I imagined doing that. It was very shocking. I lay that out in the beginning of Maps of Meaning because I was having aggressive impulses at that time, too. And so I was curious about these impulses and I imagined doing it. And I I mean, I actually imagined doing it. And then I thought, I could do that. And then I thought, it's even possible under some conditions that I might be able to enjoy that. And that was a terrible still a terrible shock. It was a terrible shock then. It's no wonder people don't do this sort of thing. I mean, this sort of imagination. But, you know, I took the idea that we were supposed to learn something from the horrors of the Second World War seriously. Never forget. Okay? You can't remember what you don't understand. So, what are we supposed to remember? What are we remembering? The fact that all these people were murdered? No. We're supposed to remember that that was a revelation of the genocidal nature of the human psyche. That's partly why I'm so impressed, let's say, with the story of Cain and Abel, right? I dealt with that in my biblical lecture series and in my writings. You know, the first two human beings, according to the book upon which our culture is predicated, for better or worse, the first two human beings, brothers, the adversary and the hero, the the archetypal adversary and the hero, put right at the beginning of that amazing book. It's the beginning of history. Cain's sacrifices are rejected by God. Okay, well, how do we understand that? That's easy once you know the key. You make sacrifices to make the future better. Well, what if that doesn't pay off? Well, you know, think about that. You know what that's like. You endeavor to do something and it doesn't work. You're not appreciated for who you are. You fail. Maybe you failed despite your best efforts. Well, are you rejected by God? Well, it's as if you're rejected by God. Does it make you resentful? Does it make you bitter? Does it make you want to pull down the successful? Does it want to Does it make you want to pull down the successful out of spite? Does it make you want to pull down the successful out of cosmic spite? The answer to that happens to be yes. You shake your fist at God. You say, "I'm going to harm those whom you blessed." And no wonder. It's no wonder. You know, it's a it's harsh that the rewards of life are indiscriminately distributed. It's hard on everyone. But it doesn't help doesn't help to become bitter. And it's not like I don't understand the temptation. I mean, I think part of the reason I get away with being so bloody preachy is because I'm talking to myself, you know. It's not like I don't put myself in the boat of the damned and lost. Very well said. dangerous. Now, I listened to the whole times And And I see this in this culture war. I see this resentment. It colors the definition of identity. This attack on meritocracy. It's an attack on merit itself. You know, that says nothing about whether or not culture is tyrannical. Yes. But it's not only tyrannical. And it's important to get those distinctions correct. So, I want to then put a coda on that because I think you covered it so well in your book and in the in rule number one, don't denigrate social institutions or creative accomplishment. Uh reading that title, I didn't realize what you meant until I read the chapter. And what that is ultimately, and correct me if I misstate anything, but cultural institutions are the order. They're the stability. And the creative granted. They're these these They're these identities that are handed to you ready-made. And thank God for that. Marriage is one. It's like, well, you can critique marriage. Fine. But what game are you going to play? Try coming up with some Try coming up with one on your own. Maybe you can. Maybe you're like avant-garde Picasso. Maybe you are. And maybe you have a right to to make your own arrangement. Maybe you have the psychological fortitude to craft your own social institution. But I bloody well wouldn't count on it. You're lucky that there's such a thing as a job or better yet a career. You're lucky that there's such a thing as friendship, as marriage. All of these social institutions. You know, and and you And when you criticize them, Nietzsche put as one question of conscience in I think it's in Twilight of the Idols whether you're a leader or whether you're running away, you're outside the pack and moving in a different direction in either case, you know, are you a rebel rebel because you can't fit in or are you a rebel because you could fit in but you see a better way. It's like people in that category are not that common and the first question of conscience should be well, which of those two are you? It's highly probable that you're the first one and not the second. Because that would mean you're being intensely disciplined plus creative on that dimension. Maybe that is you and God then we need you, you know, like you're the an avatar of the savior under those circumstances. And maybe everyone has some of that in them. That that's a a big question and I think it's one of the fundamental questions that you address which is the almost the need to have them both. And so you give an example in the book in Beyond Order where you're you said let's take a city and imagine a really run-down dangerous crime-ridden area. The people that find themselves attracted to that inevitably become the artists and they move in and they think hey, with a little bit of effort this could be kind of cool. And then they move in, they start to make it cool, then the first coffee shop pops up and then the gentrifiers start moving in and then the chain stores start moving in and then that place is no longer suited to the artist and the artist must move. And I thought oh my god, like in in one description of a city and this like when when people listen to you this is the very thing I want them to understand which is there is a nature to things and instead of you know, shaking your fist at God, you know, why why is this like this is to recognize how predictable this [ __ ] is and to find a meaningful way, right? To find your meaning, to shoulder your burden, put your shoulders back, like, you know, climb your way up the the competence hierarchy by getting so good that you can't be ignored. But, recognizing, "Hey, dear artist, what a beautiful contribution you make. It is necessary in a certain place at a certain time, but that will evolve." And so, instead of being angry that the natural course of things is that you've made something beautiful, which attracts people, such is the nature of beauty, recognize that, you know, there's like a Johnny Appleseed quality to that, and to relish in that identity of I am the artist. I make things beautiful. I attract people to my beauty, you know, hopefully in some transcendent way. I mean, you talk in Beyond Order about the need for beauty in your life and how Chapter seven, yeah. the very things that we consider, um, impossible to put a price tag on, is always art. And so, there is that thing. But, like, tying it all together from identity to meaning and purpose to the the almost cruel nature of things, that description arrested me in the book because I could both feel the joy of the artist when they discover something and create something, and also feel their heartbreak as the place changed so much, you even say in the book, where they could no longer afford the rent. And so, there there is a cruelty to you are the one that gave birth to this thing and made it what it is, and then it gets to the point where you can't afford it, and you have to move on. And now, to really tie [ __ ] together and bring it back around to you getting me to read The Gulag Archipelago, you realize even I have the impulse to be like, "Oh, that's not fair. Like, how do we make sure that the artist can stay there?" And you know, they've done so much to contribute. And then you realize the hammer is essentially the only way. And that's where it all starts to get scary for me, and where I don't feel like people are extrapolating and looking into the future of uh, don't know if you know Thomas Sowell, but he has a great quote which is the last 30 years have been marked by tape replacing what works with what sounds good. And to me that feels like the fundamental flaw of today which ties into your notion of rights versus responsibility. Well, the chapter on artists so artists are high in trade openness. And open people live in they live farther in chaos. They're good at pattern recognition. They tend to have high verbal IQs. The pattern recognition manifests itself to some degree in their artistic proclivity because like visual art is a a patterning of the world an investigative patterning of the world. And so they're the intuitives. They see they see what's coming. They live on the edge. They live on the frontier. Well, there are frontiers everywhere. There's frontiers in every discipline. There's frontiers in cities and you talked about that. It's like this the artist is someone who can see possibility and so they'll take a rundown place and beautify it. That's that's their niche. And it's it's an evolutionary niche. Technically speaking, we have five dimensions of personality. There's variation in each of those dimensions because there's a niche for every every what would you call every place on the distribution. And you have to find your place in the world according to your temperament. I mean you can change your temperament to some degree although it's not it's not it's no simple matter. It's pretty stable. It's better to find the place that you belong. You know, an open people might be very annoyed that they're not appreciated by more conservative types, but the conservative types fill a different niche. They're conscientious and dutiful. And so if something's working, you want conservatives to run it. Because they're dutiful and efficient and orderly. By the book, patriotic. This works. Let's uphold it. Let's make it work efficiently. Let's not change it because we might break it. But it needs breaking. Well, that's the debate. That's the purpose of free speech. That's That That's my sense of it. You know, there there's this balance that has to be obtained between tradition and transformation. We have to have respect for both of them. And how do we know when something needs to be changed? We don't know. So, we have to argue about it. And in order to argue about it effectively, we have to be able to talk to each other across our identity boundaries. And then we can decide, well, should this be maintained or should this be transformed? Check out my intense conversation with Patrick Bet-David about masculinity. To truly be free, you have to be strong enough to control your own life, and many men today simply do not qualify. Many of you have been told the pursuit of power is disgusting. You shouldn't do it. Many of you don't even have a clear definition of what it means