"You DESERVE to LOSE the Senate, the House, and the Presidency!" - Jordan Peterson

When Kamala Harris was. Kamala Harris was talking about equity. She either didn't know what she was talking about, which is inexcusable, or she knew what she was talking about, which was malevolent. Those are the options. It's like they just mean equality of opportunity. It's like, then why do they have a different word? They don't mean equality of opportunity, they mean equality of outcome. If you're foolish enough to believe in equality of outcome, then you deserve to live, lose the Senate, lose the House and lose the presidency. Right. And that's what happened. That's that American dream element, that. That admiration for entrepreneurial excellence that while you see that manifested in someone like Elon Musk, and, you know, two thumbs up for that, as far as I'm concerned. And it would be lovely, especially over the next four years, if all you entrepreneurial types of. Stop letting the radical progressives have the moral upper hand because they're for the poor. It's like. No, they're not even a bit. All the bloody green leftists have done in Europe is doom the poor to extensive and deteriorating poverty. That's all they've done. They haven't cleaned up the environment one bit. When Musk jumped the board, I thought, oh, if Musk would do something like establish a Department of government to efficiency, I would support Trump just for that. Like, just that. But that's not all he's got. I think Gabbard is great. She's very, very solid. She's the candidate the Democrats should have run. This is an appalling fact. If Biden would have been willing to give Trump some credit, which he should have, because Mr. Trump might have just ridden off into the sunset if he. If they had been willing to give the devil his due. No, he should have got the Nobel Peace Prize for those Abraham Accords.

It's. Someone just meets on an elevator and says, what do you do? How do you respond?

I often tell them to look up my name, but to beware of doing so.

That's a good answer. That is a really good answer. So what is the best thing and the worst thing about being Jordan Peterson?

Well, I suppose the worst thing probably is that I can't. I'm quite a lot of trouble, all things considered. I'm trouble to my wife, I'm trouble to me. I'm troubled to be around. And so maybe that's the worst thing. It's complicated. The best thing is unlimited opportunity. Yeah, it's absurd. Fundamentally. That's great. It's ridiculous. It's Ridiculously great. And well.

So I have a question here. How do you decide who gets your time, what gets your time, and how do you politely say no to set boundaries? Because it's got to be all these opportunities. There's opportunity costs, right? With opportunities, so you have to spend that time.

Well, there's a variety of ways of doing that. And you have to build. As your wealth of opportunities increases, the infrastructure that you have around you to deal with the opportunities also has to expand. And so there's a variety of ways that you decide what gets your time. When you have more opportunities than you know what to do with, first thing you have to do is figure out what your priorities are, right? So you need a vision for the future that's well developed. And then you have to see if the opportunities that you're being presented with are in keeping with what it is that you're trying to achieve. And that should be very well delineated then. I have a lot of people who help me with that. You know, I'm surrounded. I wouldn't call them gatekeepers exactly because that's not right, the right way of conceptualizing them. I have a variety of people around me who help me negotiate and who prioritize potential opportunities for me. And there are people who know why I'm doing what I'm doing and who are on board with that. And so when they're making decisions, I can be confident that they're bringing to my attention and prioritizing opportunities that further the broader mission. And then I suppose that I also use money because money is the way that we negotiate priority. And so. And it's a very efficient way of doing that. If I have two opportunities that look like they're of equal value with regard to their relevance to my aims, and one pays twice as much, well, it's obvious which one to take. And that's partly why we use money, right? Because money is a universal representation system for value. And it can't. It's not perfect because it doesn't fully capture potential opportunity, right? It's like when you're trying to value a company. You can value the company with regards to its current earnings or its profit margin, but you also have to factor in growth. And that's a difficult thing to do. And so if I'm trying to prioritize opportunities, the financial return is obviously relevant, but the possibility for growth coming out of the opportunity is also. Now, that's more difficult to quantify. But that's also why I have lots of people around me who help Me with that. And, like, I have lots of people around me who. Who do this for me. There's probably altogether, all things considered, there's at least 15 people, there's probably more like 30 who are doing this for me all the time. And so all the opportunities that do end up on my desk, so to speak, have been vetted extraordinarily thoroughly, and they're almost inevitably worth further pursuit. But so if you're overwhelmed by your responsibilities and your opportunities, part of the reason for that is that you haven't distributed enough responsibility to other people. You haven't set up a team that's of sufficient quality. And then you have to ask yourself why. You know, one possible reason might be that you're not brutal enough to make the hard decisions that are necessary with regards to staffing. So, for example, I've been running a tour now for eight years, I guess. Eight years. And we're very cut and dried with regards to our touring staffing. We have very stringent rules. And one rule, for example, is don't bother the people who come and see me. You are obligated to be 100% polite to them under all circumstances or all the time. And that goes as well. For I travel with some security guys, for example, and they help me with logistics. And, like, they have to be good to the waiters and to all the service staff that we encounter. Like, I want to travel to the places I'm going, leaving nothing but a good taste behind. And this is something very important to consider if you're running any kind of business, especially as you become more successful, because if people have a certain degree of admiration for you, let's say, or you're even willing to meet you halfway, and then you disappoint them, they will never forget that. And they will tell, like, a thousand people. And you don't have to make many mistakes like that till word gets around and things are not good. And so our policy, especially on the tours, is you don't make mistakes. If you make mistakes, you don't come along. And I shouldn't exactly say that, because people are going to make mistakes. They have to fix them, right? I mean, things are going to slip sideways from time to time, but you have to fix it, and you have to treat everyone well. And that's our criteria for that are very strict and stringent. And that's the case for all the staffing and hiring decisions that we make. And because of that, I'm surrounded by people that I can really trust, and they have their things to do, and I leave them alone. So that's another thing, you know, if you. If you're overwhelmed with responsibility and opportunity, you got to ask yourself if you're trying to control too much. And you might think, well, I want to pay every attention to every little detail. It's like, no, you don't. No, you don't. You want to use your time, which is rare, so that you focus on those things that only you can do and that you do best. And everything else that anyone else could do that should be distributed down to them. And so. And you can do that if you're willing to be picky in your hiring and your. And your. What would you say, Your willingness to maintain people over the long run. If you're picky about that, then you can distribute responsibility. And huge advantage to that is then you get to focus on what you're best at and what you find that's most compelling. And you could get to further your aims, and there's no loss in that. And it also stops you from getting worn out, and it stops you from getting resentful. And you don't want to get worn out because then you do stupid things and you die. And you don't want to get resentful because then you're miserable to yourself and everyone else. And so you maximize the opportunity that's in front of you by building an efficient infrastructure. Then you shouldn't be overworked. You know, you gotta also ask yourself if you're overworked, if that's a reflection of egotism, you know, because you might. There might be part of you that's thinking, well, you know, only I can do this. It's like, there are probably some things that you're doing that only you can do, but you have to be able to maintain that, sustain it across time. But as I said, even more importantly, the probability that you're the only person that can do absolutely everything you're doing is very low. There may be some things that you're particularly good at. You should obviously be doing almost nothing but that. So on the tours, for example, I don't do anything but show up. I show that, like, there's a rule. I'm to be there an hour before come hell or high water and ready, so I have to have a rest beforehand. I don't pay attention to flights. I don't pay attention to hotels. I don't pay attention to restaurants or any. Any details whatsoever. I have people that I follow when I'm walking through airports. Like, all I'm doing is focusing on the tour. And I suppose a subsidiary concern there is my wife, because she travels with me and we have to set up the tour so that she's also thrilled to be along. And thrilled matters because we've been trying to make this, which is probably the most intense thing that I do, we've been trying to make this sustainable. And to make it sustainable, you have to not be upset about it because otherwise you'll just, you'll stop doing it. And so well, You handle more responsibility and opportunity by building a more differentiated substructure under you. And that's the other thing that's cool about that, is there's no limit to what you can do then, right? Because you just keep building layers of infrastructure beneath you. And if you hire properly and you're very careful about that, then you can just keep jumping up the ladder, so to speak. That's how you're. That's how you work neurologically, by the way. When you pay attention to something and you practice it, you build little automated structures that are neurological and then they run unconsciously, and then your consciousness jumps up a letter A level so that you can concentrate on things that haven't yet been automatized. So you're trying to put in routines all the time underneath you so that you can free yourself up to attend to only those things that are crucial. You know that if you study people too, like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, I mean, Jobs in particular was absolute. I know people who've worked with him very closely as well as Musk. Jobs was unbelievably good at deciding what he wasn't going to do. Right. He put all his attention on the things where the maximal return would be. This is something to know, too. He even technically. So, you know, you've heard about the 80, 20 rule. I presume 20% of your customers provide 80% of your business. That's not the rule. The rule is way more remarkable than that. So here's the rule. Among the people that work for you, the square root of the number of people that you, that work for you do half the work. So that means if you have 10 employees, three of them do half the work. But if you have 10,000 employees, a hundred of them do half the work. Now, this is an unbelievably well documented phenomenon. I'm not telling you something that's in the realm of speculation. This is a, this is a solid statistical law. Now, there's a rule that goes along with it. This, and this is very difficult for managerial People to understand because they almost always do exactly the opposite. Spend all your time with your most productive people. Now the typical manager does exactly the opposite. They find the 10% of their staff that are floundering and spend all their time with them. I can understand why you do that from the perspective of, let's say, sympathy, although it's counterproductive. You're not going to help them. You don't have the ability, you don't have the time, they don't have the motivation. It's not going to work. You spend all. It's not going to work. You can't do it. You spend all your time with your most productive people and the same with your own use of time. You spend all your time on those things that are, that you are best suited to do. And you have to be brutal about that. And there's nothing in that that's anything but good because you end up doing the maximum amount of good that you can in the most sustainable way. And you provide the largest possible number of people with the greatest opportunity. Like there's nothing in that that's anything but good. And the people who are floundering, you know, I had a hard time in my lab when I was a professor letting people go when I should have. And I learned to do that quite painfully, I would say. One of the things I realized, and this is something to really get in your head too, if you can, especially if you're a little more on the agreeable side, you don't like hurting people's feelings. Enabling someone's failure is not a moral accomplishment. And so if you have someone who's either outright failing or worse kind of drifting along so they're not, you know, performing poorly enough to really come to your attention, but they're really not all in. It's like there's no reason not to sit down with them and say like, you know, you're not thriving, so what the hell are you doing? You want to drag your sorry carcass through this job doing a second, you know, hitting this in a second rate manner for the next 15 years as you age painfully? Or do you want to go out and see if you can find something you could commit yourself to? Like, this is not a game. And so there's some pain in letting people go, but there's pain in me. There's real pain in maintaining people in a quasi failure situation. And so it's better just to say, why don't you go find something you want to do? And you know, people don't like Change. And they might be all upset about the fact that that didn't work, but you lying about the fact that it's working isn't helping them. And then you could put someone in that position who's like pretty thrilled to be there and is they're going to devote themselves completely to it and then, you know, God only knows how good that's going to be for them and the people around them. The other, the other problem with having people around who are doing a second rate job is that they're really hard on the people that work for them. You know, they don't know how to distribute reward properly. They're jealous of anybody who's working effectively. They're going to push down anyone that they see to be a threat. They're going to, you know, hoard information.

No, you just described the typical day of most entrepreneurs.

Yeah, hey, the management side is a tough one, you know. You know, it's a tough one and it's hard to wrap your head around the balance between separating the wheat from the chaff, let's say and being sympathetic and kind. But sympathetic and kind in the moment is not a good medium to long term strategy. It's kind of the difference on a trait level. It's the difference between being agreeable. Agreeable people avoid conflict and you can understand that and they default towards sympathy and mercy. Let's say conscientious people look at performance and agreeableness isn't a bad ethic for within a family. But conscientiousness is the ethic that works on large scale enterprises. And conscientiousness is pretty straightforward. It's like, can you do the job or not? And if the answer is no, well then you should find a different job, you know, or retool your attitude. That's unlikely by the way. And you know, the probability that you as a manager is going to, are going to get someone to shift their attitude at a fundamental level is pretty low. Like, especially if they're really in a failure pattern because you don't even know what the hell's going on with them. And so better to pay, better to spend your time with your high performing people. This is a very hard thing to learn and it's cruel in a way. You know, it has that element of cruelty, but not in the long run.

You know, I have an idea though, like, so I've got, you know, your first book was Maps of Meaning. Then you got 12 rules for life and then Beyond Order. But if you wanted to do a spoof book and do the complete opposite of everything you just said and then have beyond chaos. I think it would. Bad idea.

Bad idea. Yeah. Well, I thought. I've thought about writing a book on how to fail.

Right. No, I think it would be pretty funny.

Yeah, well, there's lots of ways. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, what's his name? Robert Green. He's kind of done that. He's done that in some ways by laying out the pat. He's laid it. Laid out in his books. He's laid out. What would you say? A description of psychopathy. You know, and that's useful to know because there are psychopaths in the world and you need to know how to handle them without becoming one. Right. Which is a difficult.

Is it like contagious, where you can become a psychopath?

Yes, well, it is contagious. I mean, one of the things we do know, for example, is that the worst thing you can do with people who have an antisocial proclivity is to group them together. So there's a famous study done in 1930s in a town called Somerville in Massachusetts, was one of the first large scale epidemiological studies designed to remediate antisocial behavior. And that would be behavior that's associated with criminality. And children who have a criminal bent. Their diagnosis is childhood conduct disorder. And so you can identify precursors to criminal behavior in children. Early sexual experience, for example, is a marker. Just so you know, the Summerville crowd did an intervention with inner city kids in the 1930s designed to sidetrack kids who were at risk for later criminal behavior. So from broken families, for example, in lower socioeconomic, in lower socioeconomic neighborhood. And they basically threw the works at them in terms of interventions and divided them randomly into an intervention group. And a non intervention group was actually a well designed study. And you know, they taught them to read, they taught them social skills, they taught their parents parenting skills. They did everything you could possibly imagine that might help remediate this developmental trajectory towards criminality. One of the things they did was they took the kids out of the urban environments and put them in camps, in summer camps for two weeks a year. And the kids loved it and the counselors loved it. And everybody thought this, the whole program was great. And then they de blinded the study and analyzed the results. And the kids in the intervention group did far worse. Much more likely to be alcoholic, much more likely to be criminal, much more likely to suffer from severe illnesses like schizophrenia. And when they did the detailed analysis, they found that the reason for that was that they Grouped them together in summer camps and they learned to compete to be criminal. Right. And so one of the things we know, this is one of the real failures of the prison system is there isn't anything worse you can do for antisocial people than to put them with other antisocial people, because then they're around antisocial experts and they compete. Right. Well, it makes sense. Right, right. Well, we also found too, that. So the psychopaths. Not all criminals are psychopaths, by the way. It's a minority of criminals who are psychopaths. But if you put psychopaths in group therapy, it makes them worse. Why? Well, they get better at doing what they do. Like, they're already manipulators. That's pretty much how they operate. Like, if I'm a psychopath and I'm talking to you, the only thing I'm concerned is, is with what you can deliver. Like, that's it. You're just a landscape of opportunity. And if you happen to be kind and sympathetic, so much the better. Right. So if you put psychopaths through group therapy, they get more effective. Doesn't remediate the psychopathy at all. It's also very, very difficult to change that. Very, very difficult. Very, very stable from like age four onward. Gotcha. So, yes, you can teach people to be more criminal and more psychopathic. And we do that quite effectively in our society by the way we handle them. Wow. So, yeah, it's bad.

So you, you've, you've had Chris Voss, who's sitting here, front row on your, on your podcast before. So I was. Yeah. And I just wondered if, if you were to categorize him as a narcissist, sociopath, or psychopath, how, how do you think you. He would rate?

Well, fortunately, I don't have to answer that question.

You know, you know what? You are so good at debates and making your case and backing it up with, you know, not only your own view, but stats. I mean, you have this incredible ability to resource. You know so much. How does one develop that skill? I don't know if everyone can, but.

Because you can to a greater or lesser degree, I mean, it's helpful to have the innate ability, let's say. So one of the things people differ in, for example, is a trait called verbal fluency. It's associated with extroversion and sociability and positive emotion, by the way. But verbal fluency is the rate at which you can think up words, and there's massive variation in that. So, for example, if I had all of you, you can test it very easily. So imagine I had all you people write down as many words as you could that begin with the letter s in three minutes. Okay? Some of you would produce like 30 words and some of you would produce 150. I guess a huge variation. And it's, it's associated with verbal intelligence, which is in turn associated with general cognitive ability. But there are other elements of intelligence that aren't verbal. So you can have lower verbal fluency and be very good at spatial intelligence, for example, or manipulating images. But high verbal fluency is very useful with regards to a career as a debater or public speaker. I don't know if you know who Camille Palia is, but she's off the charts in verbal fluency. Ben Shapiro, he's another machine gun speaker. Russell Brand. Those are the people I've met in my life who are the most verbally fluent. And that's huge. Part of that's an innate skill in terms of developing your ability to speak. I would say, well, there's a variety of things that you can learn to do. I don't debate to win. I'm not particularly interested in winning. I stopped doing that when I was in my 20s. When I learned that that was a counterproductive strategy. What I'm trying to do when I speak is to say what I believe to be true. That's a long term victory. Like the truth is a long term strategy. Right. And it's the opposite of manipulation. And so all I'm trying to do is to formulate my words as clearly as I possibly can. And some of that's an embodied sense. Like if you, you can learn to, you can learn to do this. It's really worth learning. Although it's very unsettling when you start, you, you want to feel out whether or not the words that you're saying are like, firm. Imagine you're crossing a swampy plain and you can't see into the water. You know, there's a trail, and underneath the water six inches or so, there are well set foundation stones. And you can sort of feel them out as you make your way. That's how Moses went across the Red Sea. And you know, the sea of chaos is. You can tell when you're speaking, if you pay attention, what words you're saying make you confident. And that's a way of telling that there's firm ground under your feet. And it's the opposite of being self conscious. You know, if you start speaking publicly and you become self conscious, it's because You've become concerned with how people are responding to you. Well, it's not about you. It's not about you. It's about the validity of your words. And if you're focusing on what it is that you have to say and you find the firm words, you'll be a compelling public speaker. And that's the case too, even if you're not particularly verbally fluent, because people will be able to tell that what you're doing is wrestling with the ideas at hand and trying to find your way forward. And everyone wants to see that that's a, that's a kind of high wire performance. And so, and that that's way different than wanting victory. Like victory, there's lots of different kinds of victory. You know, there's the egotistical victory of the moment and there's the setting the foundations for success across the broadest possible span of time and place into the future. And the truth is a way better long term strategy. You might pay for it in the present, which is why people lie, obviously. But, so you want to find the right words now so you can learn to do that. You got to listen to yourself talk and you got to think, well, do I actually believe that, or am I trying to impress this person? Or am I trying to close the business deal? You know, am I manipulating the situation so that I get what I want rather than merely trying to represent the truth? Now you might say, well, why shouldn't you get what you want? And the answer is, well, what the hell do you know? I mean, how often have you been wrong about what you want? Lots, I presume. And how often have you got something that you wanted, maybe by a route that wasn't the straightest, let's say, and found out that that didn't do you any good at all. It's much better just to say what you believe to be the case. And that also helps you build a foundation for speaking into the future. It also allows you to draw on your own experience, you know, like there isn't anyone who can't comport themselves in a manner that's interesting. One of the things I learned as a clinician was that and I had a very wide variety of clients, ranging from people who were just barely clinging to the edge of the earth by their fingernails, to people who were extremely accomplished on multiple dimensions, you know, and even the simpler people, even the cognitively impaired people that I dealt with, who had, in some cases, virtually nothing going for them. If I could listen hard enough and get them to talk about what they knew they were immediately compelling and interesting, and they had things to say, and I had things to learn from them. And so you can be a compelling public speaker if you actually talk about the things that you know to be true. Right. But that means you have to forego the ego games that are associated. It's the same in a debate. You know, it's a victory if you clarify your thoughts in the course of a discussion. That's a victory. That's sort of independent of the perceived victory of the moment, let's say.

Right.

Yeah. Now, the other thing you can do on the public speaking side is you watch, watch your speech. And you should eliminate ums and likes and all those filler words that people use. That has to go. It makes you inarticulate. And you can learn to control that. And instead of filling the pause with an or a like or a, you know, you can just be silent. Like, there's nothing wrong with taking a pause and collecting your thoughts. And you want to have your goal in mind. Like, when I go on stage, when I'm doing my lectures, when I'm touring, I always have a question in mind. Right. And that's a priority. It's like, okay, what am I talking about tonight? Here's the question. And what does the talk consist of? It consists of an attempt to not only answer that question, but to push the answer to the question farther than I've been able to push it before. And that adds some novelty to it. And then the. The talk becomes an exploration with the audience. And that's way more interesting for everyone. You know, the last thing you want to do is, like, read if you can avoid that. Don't do that, don't do that. No matter how good your presentation is, you're going to lose most of the audience if you read it. Best to have. If you're going to use PowerPoint, use images or just a couple of phrases. And you can read the phrase and then discuss it. But people want to see you actively engaging in the ideas. They don't want to hear some canned and stereotyped set of responses. And you're not there to please the audience. You know, you're there to figure out something with everyone. And what else can you do when you're in front of a crowd, you're going to be afraid of the crowd, but you shouldn't be talking to the crowd. There's no crowd. You can talk to an individual, everyone. So what you do when you pick out people in the group and you talk to them, you know and you look at them and when you walk on stage, you look everywhere so that you're not afraid of what's in front of you. And then you just talk and you always pick people out and look at them and see if they're paying attention. And if they're not, well, you got to play with the audience, you know, and so what is it? Get rid of the filler words. Get rid of the idea that you're there to accomplish your goal, your narrow goal. Try to say what's true. See if you can find your way, Find the words that make you feel solid. It's the opposite of self consciousness. Play a bit, explore, have a question firmly in mind, you know, and risk some failure too. That's fun. You go out on stage like I never know when I go on stage, stage for a talk, I never know if it's going to work. And neither does the audience. And so they're all. Part of what grips them is the fact that I could just miss the mark, you know, that it could go nowhere. And that's a real challenge to see if you can put together new ideas on the fly and address the issue at hand and to bring everyone along for the ride. And that's the. There's no failure if you do that. Even if it doesn't work out that well, at least it's a noble attempt that went somewhat sideways. That's something. And then people get to know who you are too, and so do you. And that's a good deal. Can be a good deal.

So to that point, to get to know who you are. So you have put yourself many times in positions, having discussions or debates or interviews with people that you know, dislike you. You know they're going to try to challenge you. Are you doing that? I love to have you break down to reach people that you feel need to be educated on a different way of thinking about it. Are you doing it to help yourself get better at thinking through these difficult sort of challenges?

I don't, I don't set out precisely to put myself in situations like that. It's more like they arise, you know, I've done a lot of interviews and some of them have been with people who are genuine interlocutors and others are people who want to play a game. And so I give people the benefit of the doubt. So if I meet someone, I assume that we're playing a straight game and then I watch them and if they're playing a straight game, then, then I treat them politely. And if they're not playing A straight game. I think, okay, what the hell are you up to? And the problem is, for them generally, is, like, I was a clinician for a long time, and tricky journalists think they're tricky, and they're nowhere near as tricky as the people that I've dealt with. They're not even in the same universe. And so I'm serious. And so if I think, okay, you're not playing a straight game. I see, so now we're playing clinician, are we? And so then I can usually figure out what the person's up to, and that's usually not very good for them. So. And I don't like doing that. You know, like, when I meet someone socially, I'm not bringing my clinical eye to bear. It's the polite thing to do. And the appropriate thing to do socially is to assume goodwill and meet people there. And if you're not naive, that's a form of courage, you know, because I could be very skeptical when I meet people, but I'm not. I think probably you're playing a straight game, at least mostly you are. And, good, then we'll go. We'll proceed on that basis. But if that's not the situation, then I'm also prepared to play that game. And so that's worked spectacularly well upon occasion. Yeah, and it was. It was often with journalists who. They weren't there to play a straight game at all. And they were. One of them confessed, in fact, a woman named Nellie Bowles, who. She got me probably more than anyone else did, because she was. She was very, very devious. Very, very devious. And she fooled me into thinking she was someone other than who she was. And she admitted several years later that her role at the New York Times was to seduce essentially the people that she was interviewing and then continue to talk to them until they said something that she could twist into reputation destruction and elevate her status in consequence, she said, lots of the New York Times reporters are playing that game. And that's a. That's a pretty. That's a psychopathic game. And she was particularly good at it. Now, she did admit it and apologize, but those things aren't easy to change once you practice them. And so, you know, maybe she learned her lesson and maybe she didn't. So. So I don't look for trouble, you know. Well, I don't. I don't look for trouble. And I've avoided universities mostly since about 2018 because they just got way too annoying. I don't know why anybody ever goes and speaks at University, they're a pain in the neck. They don't pay anything there. They think that it's a privilege for you to speak. Speak there. And sometimes it is, you know, that there is occasions where that's the case, but mostly it's just, it's just not worth the trouble. Yeah, and so I don't, I do that rarely, you know, and still now and then, but rarely in terms of interviews, mostly what we've changed as a family is I, I won't do an interview without recording it. And so often now if I run into someone who's playing games, we just released the whole recording. And that usually does the trick because I, you know, I, I'm not concerned about revealing what it is that I've said. And like, you know, you may know that the Ontario College of Psychologists and Behavior Analysts, they changed their name. How convenient for them. They're trying to take away my license, you know, and right now we're negotiating because I'm supposed to be re educated, which, you know, isn't really going to work that well. And you know, I told them that I would do their re education but there's no bloody way they're going to be able to do it in secret. And they told me two weeks ago that they would proceed with the re education because they found someone who apparently is willing to do this. But they told me that I couldn't record it, that they'd have a court recorder there to make a transcript, but that I couldn't have the transcript if I didn't agree to keep it secret. And now the reason that those processes, procedures are usually secret is to protect the person who's being disciplined, let's say not the people who are doing the discipline. And so I said, well, no, I'm not doing that. I'm going to make every bloody second of this 100% public. Clearly, obviously, you're not doing this behind closed doors, so. Well, that was the last letter we sent back to them. I don't know what the hell they're going to do about that. But, but there's, there isn't a hope in hell that they're going to be able to stop me from recording this. Like, not unless they're willing to do a cavity search. So seriously, like, this is not happening in sea secret. I've got, would I say I have nothing to hide? You know, everyone has something to hide. Let's make those, you know, mistakes about that. But there's certainly nothing that I could possibly say in the course of a re education episode, whatever the hell that would be, that I wouldn't be 100% willing to make public. And that's also part and parcel of this. The consequence of this finding my words carefully. You know, it's like I'm not saying things I don't mean. And then you might say, well, what do you mean that you mean something? It's like if I say something, if I say no, for example, and I've said no, I've said no to government legislation in Canada, what no means is, there isn't anything you can do to me that would force me to comply with your request. And I've thought it through. And so I did a lot of negotiating, counseling with my clients. You know, I know what no means. I know how rarely you use it. You use it when you mean it. And to mean it means you have to think it through. If you want to stop someone from having the upper hand over you, you just have to give up everything they want. You have to think that through. It's like, okay, you're going to take my license. Can I live with that? Well, then I have to have a plan. If that happens, what am I going to do? You know, if I'm all panicked about that, well, then I lose. But if I've got a way forward, it's like, okay, do your worst. And so, well, then what? You know, if you take away the upper hand, you're free. And all you have to do to take away the upper hand is to give up what's being requested. And now that you may have to think that through, but they might take it anyways, even if you don't think it through. So you might as well think it through. And, you know, you may also find that unbeknownst to you, there's tremendous opportunity in that sacrifice. You know, like with the college, for example, with the psychologists, it's, like, not obvious to me that I want to be part of their damn club anymore because they've become unbelievably corrupt. Like the medical establishments, the medical associations, you know, I'm not going to let them take my license because I'm not going to let a pack of faceless bureaucrats take something from me without making their life hell. But that doesn't mean that I'm happy to be part of their little coterie. So. But I've already. I can live without my license. I've got lots of. I'm not out of options, not by any stretch of the imagination.

So, yeah, that's for sure. So you did this? I Thought fascinating video where you analyzed Elon Musk.

Oh yeah.

Tulsi Gabbard and J.D. vance and Bobby Kennedy and Trump. Right?

Yep.

And so in. So I had a zoom with you the day before the elections and Trump has won. And now we have all these people that are losing their minds that have Trump derangement syndrome, but there's people that have Jordan Peterson derangement syndrome or Bobby Kennedy derangement syndrome or Tucker Carlson derangement syndrome. First off, love to get your thoughts on where we're at. Now you can't vote because you're Canadian, but you have a tremendous amount of insight on politics and you're, you're doing stuff.

Well, I could talk about the Democrats. You know, I worked with the Democrats behind the scenes for like six years, a long time and, and quite a lot. A friend of mine who I worked with who was very well connected with the DNC and the Democrat hierarchy nationally, he's one of their main political strategist. He just so you all know, this is something perhaps you like to know. In 2017, I made an offer to the Democratic Party elite. Me and Rogan and Dave Rubin and Brett Weinstein and Ben Shapiro, we invited them all to come on our podcast. It was an open ended offer. We have it in writing. My friend, his name is Greg Hurwitz. Released this the other day on Twitter because all the Democrats and the legacy media types are squawking up and down about the fact that the conservatives have, you know, created this new non legacy media space and are dominating it and how unfair that is. It's like you sons of bitches, we asked you for seven years, seven years to come and talk to us. And he, Greg got nowhere. He couldn't find one. Now I eventually talked to Dean Phillips who had run for president on the Democrat side. You may remember Dean, because he dropped out fairly early in the presidential race and he was willing to talk to me because he just got savaged by the Democrat Party structure when he dared to put his foot forward as a genuine contender on the Democrat side. So I did get to speak to the odd Democrat who got bitten so hard by the radical leftist that they, well, that they were, that they were willing to share their experience, let's say. Why am I bringing that up? Well, one of the things that we're going to have to wrestle with going forward is, you know, the country is very disunited and it isn't useful that half the population, let's say the rough half that voted for Kamala Harris are living in terror of the Trump mobile, first of all, because I don't think that's necessary. And second, Trump's going to have to work with those people in many ways anyways. And generating a bunch of additional enmity isn't going to be helpful. Like, the Democrats are going to have to wake up to the danger of the radical leftists. And they're so asleep on that front that it's a kind of bloody miracle. You know, even When I interviewed Mr. Kennedy first, that was a year ago when he just was struck starting his presidential campaign, I asked him a question that I've asked all the Democrats that I've had private conversations with, because these people will speak with me privately, but not on the podcast. I said, when does the left go too far? None of them, by the way, I never got an answer from any of the centrist Democrats to that question, which is really quite appalling. And Kennedy said, I don't want to run that kind of divisive campaign. And I thought, well, you know, fair enough. But that's not a very good answer because there's real problems on the radical side of the Democrat political spectrum as there are. There are commensurate problems, although they're not as profound yet on the right wing side because there's no shortage of derisive, anonymous, gleeful, right wing, anti Semitic trolls online. And there's plenty of them and they're noisy as hell and they're not good, good. But they don't have the institutional power that the progressives have, especially in the universities. They're just completely blind to the danger of the progressive movement and they won't. We've been talking to the Democrats for seven years. Like, the message was very clear. The radicals are going to do you in. And their answer was, they don't mean what they say. It's like, have it your way. They mean it. When Kamala Harris was coming, Kamala Harris was talking about equity. She either didn't know what she was talking about, which is inexcusable, or she knew what she was talking about, which was malevolent. Those are the options. It's like, they just mean equality of opportunity. It's like, then why do they have a different word? They don't mean equality of opportunity, they mean equality of outcome. And if you're foolish enough to believe in equality of outcome, then you deserve to live, lose the Senate, lose the House, and lose the presidency. Right. And that's what happened, you know, and I think I was talking to Hurwitz today and he said that he believed that the swing issue was the trans issue. That was enough to swing the vote, and rightly so, because what's happening with regards to this surgical sterilization and mutilation of children is. I have never seen any worse form of medical and psychological malpractice in not only in my life as an observer of the psychological and medical community, but in my studies of serious psychopathology. It is brutal and unacceptable beyond belief. And it's part of the ideology that the Democrats would. The moderate Democrats would not recognize. And so they've got a fair bit of mopping up to do, and I hope they manage it, because it would be good for a Trump administration, especially one that's got the reins of power the way that Trump now does. To have an effective opposition, you always need an effective opposition. You need an effective opposition within the confines of your own family, you know. So hopefully they'll do a little soul searching and decide that postmodern communism is not the right way forward. So we'll see.

What advice would you give to someone that is, in their mind, they believe Trump is a rich rapist, Trump is a racist. Trump is this horrible human. He doesn't care about people, and he's also the President of the United States.

Well, the first thing you could probably do is stop watching CNN and msnbc. It's like, seriously, you know, I've been watching in the last week. It's been unbelievably interesting from my perspective, personal perspective, even, to watch the legacy media finally wake up and realize that it's not 2005. You know, six months ago, seven months ago, I read an account of Gavin Newsom opining about Joe Rogan and me, said that his own son was watching Rogan and me and other fringe figures. And I thought, I don't know what planet you occupy, Mr. Newsom, but Joe Rogan is the most powerful journalist who's ever lived by an order of magnitude. You know, CNN is the fringe. MSNBC is the fringe. Gavin Newsom is the fringe. Joe Rogan is. He runs the most popular podcast in 92 countries. It's like, that's not fringe. And so if you are suffering from Trump derangement syndrome, I would say you could watch the podcast he did with Rogan and with Theo Vaughn, and you could see what he was actually like when he wasn't completely on the defensive from being attacked like no other politician in living memory has ever been attacked. But more importantly than that, even independently of Trump himself. And I actually think that all the torture that he's gone through in the last eight years has mellowed him out to some genuine degree. Even if you're frightened of Trump, it's like, oh, so you're also frightened of Kennedy, who. Who was a Democrat, and you're frightened of Tulsi Gabbard, who was a Democrat, and you're frightened of Vivek Ramaswamy and Vance, who in a normal world would be a Democrat, and Trump himself, who's pretty weird Republican. It's not like, well, seriously, Trump as a Republican, what a crazy world we live in. And so Trump has gathered these people around him, and he's invited them in and accepted them, and they're a very strange crew. And even if Trump has his rough edges, which he genuinely does, it's like, well, he's not alone there now. And so that's a really good deal. Like, my sense was, especially when Musk jumped the board, I thought, oh, if Musk would do something like establish a Department of Governmental Efficiency, I would support Trump just for that. Like, just that. But that's not all he's got. I think Gabard is great. She's very, very solid. She's the candidate the Democrats should have run. She's everything Kamala Harris claimed to be. It's like, why the hell didn't they run her? They could have. You know, maybe it's because she had her own thoughts. I mean, who knows? Well, sir, I'm. So, you know. Well, and then the other thing, thing I'd say about Trump, and this is even more important than the team, which is really relevant, but more importantly, the best predictor of someone's future behavior is their past behavior. So if you're hiring someone, you should look at their general cognitive ability. You should look at their temperament. But if you have a track record that's quantifiable of their performance in that position, and it's positive, it's like, there you go. That's the best evidence that you have technically. And I don't know if everyone forgot, but Trump was president for four years, and he wasn't Hitler. In fact, zero wars. Zero wars is not many wars, right? And more than that, more than that, zero wars. That's not nothing. That's remarkable accomplishment, you know, And. But more than that, he also spearheaded the Abraham Accords. Now, the possibility of establishing the Abraham Accords was there in the previous Democrat administration, and they. The State Department defined it as impossible, and they had for decades. And even in the Trump administration, it took the Trump people a couple of years before they were willing to take the risk, but they did take the risk. Risk. And you know, you may have noticed or you may not have is even after October 7, even after Iran did absolutely everything it could to drive the Muslim world into the hands of the extremists, they pulled no punches in doing that. It was a last ditch attempt to save their sad Mullah hides. The Abraham Accords held. And I know that if Biden would have been, this is an appalling fact. If Biden would have been willing to give Trump some credit, which he should have, because Mr. Trump might have just ridden off into the sunset if he, if they had been willing to give the devil his due, you know, he should have got the Nobel Peace Prize for those Abraham Accords. But even more importantly, the Saudis were ready to sign that damn accord and Biden wouldn't do it because it would shed positive light on Trump. And that was inexcusable. Was inexcusable. And my suspicions are that, you know, if things lay themselves out, like we hope they might, that the Saudis will sign the Abraham Accord in the next year or so, and that's a big deal. You know, it might even stop the, you know, there's terrible animosity developing in many ways between the extremists in the Islamic world and the West. Broadly speaking, if you're paying attention to X, you saw what happened in Amsterdam this week, which was just absolutely unforgivable and almost completely under reported on the legacy media, you know, but there are positive things brewing within the Islamic world and it's possible that the Abraham Accords are a pathway in that direction. And so, and Trump, he established those, so no wars and the Abraham Accords in four years without peace in Hitler, it's like, what the hell are you worried about? He's going to be Hitler now. Why now? Like, what's changed? Why would he be. He's not going to run again. Not least because he can't, but he's also. How old is he? 78. He's like four more years. I know he's a tough bastard and he can keep. Well, he is. And he's got a tremendous amount of energy, but, you know, he's got all these other people around him now. My sense is he'll be able to just finish out these four years and end it with grace. And given that he was president already for four years and his track record, it's like, what are you worried about? You think that was all a ruse? And the thing about Trump is he didn't know what he was doing the first time around. You know, he didn't know who to hire. He didn't. He didn't. He wasn't a politician. He didn't know anything about the Internet ins and outs of Washington, really. Well, he's a whole different character now. And, you know, his team has already started the difficult process of hiring the, you know, tens, 10,000 people that they have to staff the new administration with. They're already all over that. And so I think, I think and pray that he'll be much more successful the second time, and hopefully he can be magnanimous, you know, and say to the Democrats who've been terrified into paralysis by the lies of the legacy media, it's like, you know, you guys can just relax. We're not going on a witch hunt. We're just gonna get the economy rolling better than it ever has in history. And we've got the people behind us to do this. We've got important things to do. And so, you know, sit back and watch and try not to fret too hard. And, you know, the probability that the world's coming to an end is actually much lower than it was was a week ago. You know, well, you've already seen that. You know, you've already seen Hamas make peace noises, and you've seen the same thing with China and Russia. That's not too bad for, like, three days. And so it wouldn't surprise me, it wouldn't surprise me at all if Trump had a peace agreement in. In hand with Russia and Ukraine before he takes office. And I know, I don't know if you know this, but there were peace offerings on the table in May of 2022, and they were solid, and the Russians were ready to sign, and the Biden administration refused it. Now, you know, I think there's room for wide, relevant differences of opinion about the situation in Ukraine and Russia, but it is not like. It's not like the Russians won't deal, especially if they're dealing with Trump. And so I guess I'd ask the Democrats, who are reasonable, it's like, well, hold your nose for six months, you know, and try not to freak out. And another thing to think about, too, and this is good in a general political sense, I've thought about this very deeply. No. In the biblical story of Exodus, Moses is the archetypal leader, and he leads his people away from slavery and tyranny toward the Promised land, which is always what a leader does, by the way, through the desert of doubt toward the promised land. And Moses is severely punished at the end of his life for using force when he's called upon to use persuasion right so near. When the Israelites are on the border of the promised land, they run out of water. It's physical water and the water of life. And God tells Moses to. To speak to the rocks and have them deliver the water that will redeem the Israelites. And instead, Moses takes his staff of authority, that rod that can turn into a serpent. That's the magical symbol of healing, by the way, that the physicians use. He takes that rod, and he strikes the rocks twice to force them to comply. And God's response to that is that he sentences Moses to death before he reaches the promised land. And that's a hell of a punishment for someone who had been. Awhat would you say? A devoted. A devoted servant of God for decades and who undertook an unbelievably responsible task and who united the fractious Israelites and took them away from slavery. He's punished. Why? Because he used force when he was asked to invite and convince. And so one of the things to consider, too, when you're trying to evaluate the claims of any given political leader, any leader, or yourself, for that matter, is if you use fear and compulsion, then you're a tyrant in waiting. You should formulate your offerings to people in the form of an invitation. It's like, here's something we could do together. You know, are you on board now? It's a little bit more difficult in the case of those people who just will not fly. Right? You know, like, what do you do with criminals? Invitations don't work very well. And so, you know, you still have to have a cynical eye for people who misbehave, let's say. But by and large, you should be structuring your policies on an invitational basis. That's also how you foster trust. That was the big catastrophe with the COVID debacle. It's like, we're gonna use force. It's like, okay, we're not gonna trust public health for the next five decades. How's that for a response? Well, that's a bit counterproductive, all things considered. You know, that's a good thing to think about when you're negotiating, too. It's like, you want people fully on board with your offer, because then they bring their best to the table, and you don't do that with fear, and you don't do that with compulsion. And so when you're watching the Climate Nazis, for example, brandish their flags of terror, you think, well, you're trying to frighten me into commission, into submission. Maybe I don't trust you then if your tools are fear and force, we're doing this for. Because it's better for you. It's because it's going to bring a better future into being. I see, so you're going to use fear and force to bring a better future into being. I don't think so. I don't think so. And so that's part of what makes me skeptical of the climate. Well, there's 50 things that make me skeptical about it, but one of them, the most fundamental, is likely. I see. You're going to compel people to do this, are you? Instead of making energy cheaper, which is what you would do if you were competent. No, we're going to make it five times as expensive and we're going to force you to use it. It's like. Okay, got it. I understand they've done that in the uk, right? UK energy prices are about five times what they are in the US and that means all the poor people are way poorer than they would have to be. And I don't see that as a net gain.

Yeah, I want to do a shout out. We have a mutual friend, Alex Epstein, who wrote the book Fossil Futures and his first book was A Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. He has a great website, energy talking points.com that actually gives people the research and the data and the language so that they can speak effectively about energy. And he's just, I think he's absolutely brilliant and has put so.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a single minded terror. Alex Epstein. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's very useful.

Totally. Well, you know, it's when we were.

Talking.

You know, I have a book, Life Gives to the Giver, which is, this is a really clever way of me plugging my book while I'm interviewing you. Well, we were talking about giving and you had made this comment which I loved because me and Dan Sullivan did a whole podcast on this where you said the term and I didn't initiate this. You said it, you're like this whole, the, this term, give back, it's just, it's just not. I think you maybe use toxic. I'm not sure how you described it.

But I'm finally going to give back. I've been robbing you people blind while I made my fortune and, and finally I'm going to give back. It's like that's a great message for capitalists and entrepreneurs. It's like you're completely right that I was A thief. But now I'm guilty. And so it's like one of the things I've been talking to entrepreneurs about, especially on the energy side. It's like you, you gotta give up your guilt. It's, it's pathological. Like maybe you have some things to be guilty about. You should sort that out. But with regards to your. Well, seriously, but with regards to your fundamental enterprise, it's like you, you, you built a thriving business. Well, what are you getting are guilty about that? You think you, if you stole from people while you're doing it, well, then you need a slap and you should straighten yourself out. But if you actually built an enterprise that works and that you're offering people a valid service and they're accepting it voluntarily, and you're efficient enough to do that profitably and you employ a bunch of people and you're growing, it's like, that's good. You, that might be good enough. You don't have to give back. You know, all that means is you've accepted all that leftist propaganda that property is theft or some bloody thing. Property is theft except their property, you know, and so, no, no, it's, it's time for especially conservative entrepreneurs, or just entrepreneurs in general to drop that idiot guilt. I mean, one of the. I've been in a lot of countries, like a lot, and mostly in the West. But one of the things I can tell you for certain, there is something about this country that's different from every other country. And what's different about this country is that there is a default admiration in the United States for success. The default assumption in the United States is you can succeed and you can deserve it. And then there's another assumption which, that's sort of right underneath that, which is my children could be one of those people who succeeds and deserves it. Now, everywhere else in the world, including my home country, there's this ambivalence about success. It's like it's. Well, you know, are you sure you're not part of the power mad patriarchy and just taking from people and, you know, that's a question for your own conscience. If you're a crooked dealer and some of what you've accrued is a consequence of, you know, sharp trading in luck, well, you know, that's on your own conscience and you bloody well will pay for it. But if you played a straight game, and generally the only way to make a business that succeeds across any reasonable span of time is to play a straight game, then you should stop being guilty about it. You should be the opposite of that. I think it's that this is what Ayn Rand got right. It's like there's an element to entrepreneurial kingdom building that's as laudable as anything you could manage. It's not an easy thing to run an efficient organization that offers people a genuine service at a competitive cost that they can use voluntarily and that they're happy with. That's a moral accomplishment. And your country, it is definitely the case. You know, I mean, I've gone through almost all of Europe and, and met many people in all of those countries, and I know Canada and the UK extremely well, and Australia, New Zealand. Now, you guys, there's something unique about the United States and that, that's that American dream element, that, that admiration for entrepreneurial excellence that while you see that manifested in someone like Elon Musk and, you know, two thumbs up for that as far as I'm concerned. And it would be lovely, especially over the next four years, if all you entrepreneurial types stop letting the radical progressives have the moral upper hand because they're for the poor. It's like, no, they're not even a bit. All the bloody green leftists have done in Europe is doom the poor to extensive and deteriorating poverty. That's all they've done. They haven't cleaned up the environment one bit. Electricity is five times as expensive in Germany as it is in France, and they burn more coal than they did before they shut off their nuclear power plants. So not only is energy expensive and unreliable and provided by dictators, it's much filthier than it was. They failed on every single front, all the while raising, you know, flying the flag, we're for the poor. It's like, I don't think so. If you're making energy more expensive, you hate the poor. It's straightforward. You make people rich by making energy cheap. And so hopefully the Trump administration will act on that, as he did before, and drive energy costs down so America can, like, bullet forward, like this country is capable of, and establish an example for the world like you have so many times. So that would be a lovely thing to see. And, you know, if you're figuring out how to provide better services for lower cost, which is what all of you are doing, at least to some degree, insofar as your enterprises are successful, you are in service of the poor. And we know perfectly well, we know with 100% certainty that free markets and voluntary trade is the pathway out of poverty for the world. There is no doubt about that. And anybody who Claims different is ideologically addled, narcissistic, and what would you say? And morally posturing. And so it's time for you entrepreneurial types to drop your guilt with regards to your success. That, I mean, assuming that, like I said, you know, you may have bits of your conscience to come to terms with, but so does everybody else. And you can fail dismally and be an immoral rat too, you know, so the mere fact that you haven't accomplished anything doesn't indicate that you're virtuous. So.

So it's really hard to get you excited about certain subjects. I mean, that's. Let me do some rapid fire questions then. I'd love to take just a few minutes for some, just maybe a couple of questions from the audience. So two to four tops, just because of timing. So, favorite book?

Crime and Punishment.

Solution to suffering.

Responsibility.

Most difficult time in your life?

Oh, there was a period of about three years not very long ago where my wife and my daughter and I were both extremely ill. And so that lasted about three years. And so that was. Three is a lot. One is a lot, three is a lot. So. And that was really brutal.

Favorite place to travel.

Florence, Italy is hard to beat. I went to this place called Meteora in Greece too. And man, that was something else. That's a strange place that used to be an underwater ocean. And it's. All it is is this landscape of mesas. They're really tall, like 1500ft and in this stark mountainous landscape. And there's 24 monasteries there built on these absolutely inaccessible cliffs. It's. Well, they filmed a James Bond movie there for a reason. It's like Shangri La Meteora. Deadly. Remarkable place.

I'm glad I'm getting my travel plans here too. This is helpful entrepreneur you admire?

Well, Elon Musk is definitely one of them. I have a brother in law, Jim Keller, and he's an absolute genius. Jim, he's worked for Elon, he worked for Steve Jobs. Jim designed all the computer chips and everything that you use, all the Apple chips, virtually all the AMD chips, all the intel chips. Jim is the chip designer who moves from company to company, competing with the last chip that he built and he's built. He's building a printer at the moment that he thinks will be able to print anything. And so like a 3D printer. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, yeah. Atomic level deposition. So we're going to see things come up in the next 10 years that we just can't possibly imagine. And Musk is definitely on the forefront of that, you know, that those cars he's built, those self driving cars, those aren't cars, those are robots. They just happen to have four wheels. And Musk is going to take all the data that those robots have already collected, which is a lot, and he's going to put all that data into his Optimus robots. And that's coming down the pipelines unbelievably quickly. So assuming that we don't allow everything to go to hell in a handbasket, which we certainly could, we're going to see things in the next 10 years that no one's going to be able to believe. So and Musk is definitely going to be at the forefront of that. He's quite the improbable creature. And now you've got him in your government, assuming that everybody allows him to live. I guess we'll find out about that.

But I got to find that meme that I, you know, if some, someone on my team could text me the meme I showed yesterday morning about Elon Musk, now he, you know, it, it was said along the lines of how stupid of him to spend 44 million on Twitter. Now he just controls three branches of government.

Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, yeah. You don't second guessing Elon Musk is a fool's game. He doesn't know what he's doing. It's like, how many rockets have you sent to Mars? Well, seriously, you know, people are so presumptuous. You know, if he'd only done one impossible thing, you'd think you could, you know, you could excuse that because you're so embarrassed to not be him. And you could excuse that and say, well, it's government subsidies or it was handed to him, which is all complete bloody rubbish because you can hand government subsidies to a fool forever and all that'll happen is you'll get 1600ft of high speed rail built in California in 20 years for $12 billion. You know, and so that happened, right? That happened. And so. But Musk has done like five impossible things. And so five is a lot. Like one is a lot. But five, that's just, that's really a lot. And so second guessing him, it's like, why did he spend $40 billion on Twitter? It's like, because he knows things you don't like many things. Books full of things.

So that's great. Yeah, he's, he's an incredible entrepreneur.

Yeah. And I think he's a good person. Or I say in my analysis, or he's an absolutely terrible person trying really hard to Be good. Which is. That's even better and closer to the truth. And I think it is the truth in his case because he's a complicated guy. He's got some dark corners, but, you know, he's doing his best to aim up, as you could tell by the fact that he's shooting rockets to Mars. And so. And he's very pro human in his orientation. And, you know, that's another rule of thumb. If you are talking to someone who's says, you know, there, there are too many people on the planet, it's like, oh, yeah, what devil has your tongue there, buddy? Which people do you mean exactly? And what's your plan for the excess? Oh, I didn't mean that. It's like, no, but the devil that had your tongue meant it. You're just a puppet. You got to be careful when you're a puppet of genocidal cliches. And seriously, I'm dead serious about that. And so Musk, you know, Musk is very pro human in his orientation. And so since we're all human, that's probably a good thing. And it's a good thing that someone like that is maybe on the cutting edge of the AI revolution because, you know, Chat GPT and these other models that have been trained on woke stupidity, they've got a few knots to untangle, you know, I think Chat GPT was asked recently, for example, if it was whether a nuclear holocaust would be preferable to misgendering Caitlyn Jennings. And it said no. And so that's not good. Like, seriously, because no matter what you think about Caitlyn Jennings. Jenners Jennings.

Caitlin Jenner.

Jenner. Caitlyn Jenner. I pick misgendering her rather than the nuclear war. But Chachi Beat wouldn't. And that's not good. Those bloody systems, they're smart and they're getting smarter fast. Like so fast you can't believe it. And they're not ethically oriented in the proper direction because they've been trained badly by engineers who understand nothing about ethics. And so I'm very happy that Musk is in that game and at the moment on the cutting edge. So, you know, thank God for small mercies or large mercies in his case.

Yeah, totally, totally. Favorite author?

Well, I. Dostoevsky is my favorite author. I would say philosopher. Nietzsche.

Quick path out of sadness or anger.

Gratitude. Gratitude, yeah, that's. How are you so quick?

I mean, this is like amazing.

That's a practice.

Does it occur to you how intelligent you are? I mean, do you Think about that in terms of how other people's capabilities to access. I'm not saying this to you. I'm not being flippant about it. I mean, you operate at a freaking.

High level of, you know, the figure of Lucifer, the mythological figure of Lucifer is the intellect unbridled, right? So Lucifer is the morning star who brings enlightenment, and Lucifer, the mythos is that Lucifer was the highest angel in God's heavenly kingdom gone most spectacularly wrong. And that's the intellect. If you start to worship the intellect, you are in serious. You are in serious trouble. Way more serious trouble than you think. And so if you're smart and you've been given a gift, whatever the gift is, you understand that you've been given that gift and that you have a responsibility to use it properly. And that's true for any gift that you've been given. And so, you know, that's what I think about intelligence in general. It's a good servant, but a very bad master. Like a very bad master. And so, you know, I try to make sure that whatever talents I have are oriented to. Towards something that's not me, let's say. So that's. Yeah. That I don't have much of an answer beyond that.

Scariest time in your life.

Yeah, well, that was this period of. Yeah. You know, a lot of things have happened to me in the last eight years. God, that's for sure. You know, when everything blew her up around me in 2016, my professorship became impossible. I lost my clinical practice, and the Canadian equivalent of the IRS was after me all in the same month. So that kind of sucked. And the. The. The cra. That's the IRS equivalent, they admitted six months later that it was their mistake. Thank you very much, gentlemen. That was just what I needed. And, you know, I. Two of my sources of income were taken out as well as my clinical practice was devastated. And like I said, it became impossible for me to continue as a professor. That was a lot. That was a lot to contend with at once. Now, you know, I didn't open my mouth in the public sphere until I was very much prepared. And I had three sources of income, not two. And so losing two was annoying and dangerous, but not catastrophic. And I was also prepared because when I. I produced some videos complaining about the government in Canada, but I'd already put up. This was in 2016, I already put up about 200 hours of videos that were pretty much everything I'd ever said to a student in my entire professional career. And so, you know, when all this, when the reputation savagers came for me, I was pretty prepared. But that all of this, the last eight years have been very unsettling, you know, I mean everything's been thrown up in the air and then including, you know, I just about lost my wife and my daughter was very ill and so was I and so, and that all happened at once. So the whole eight year period has been incredibly intense. But is that scary?

Yeah, I mean I think even the success has to be. I mean you've got literally millions of people, people online that watch and follow you probably daily and I don't know how many countless tens of thousands, hun, maybe it's in the millions of people that swear you just have changed their life, saved their life, I mean.

Yeah, well that's a pretty good deal.

Really good deal, you know.

And well, and you know, the, the counterbalance to the online horror, let's say, is that my life isn't like. My life isn't what you'd expect if you only knew about me online, so to speak. You know, I mean it seems if you watch the online spectacle that I'm continually embattled and that's not true. It's just not true. My life is an endless stream of events like this. They're very positive events. You know, the crowds are very welcoming, the spirit is upward oriented and when I'm out in public, you know, I have security and people keep an eye on me and we try not to do anything too stupid. But all of the encounters I have with people in the actual world are ridiculously positive with you know, tiny, tiny exceptions, like 1 in 10,000. And it's usually people who, while they have, you know, they're very respectful and they're very polite and they have something meaningful to say and they have an anecdote just share that is worth listening to and that's great. And wherever I go, you know, which is a remarkable thing is wherever I go it's very weird. It's very weird to be able to go anywhere in the world and be among friends. It's very strange because of course people feel that they know me and I suppose they do because I'm not any different. What you see online, that's what, that's who I am. There's no facade, certainly not one that's maintainable for like 15. If you maintain a facade for 15 years, you just become the facade. Right? There's no keeping yourself separate from that. So it's a remarkable thing to be able to travel anywhere in the world and to Be welcomed. That's a good deal. That's a good deal. That's worth some suffering, definitely, you know, and you can have that in the confines of your own organization. If you play a straight game, it's like, why wouldn't people be happy with you? You know, you're aiming up, you're bringing them along, everything's getting better for you and for them. And then you can see how. Where can you take that? You know, every one of you has your own kingdom. That's one of the things that's wonderful about the United States is you've got your own kingdom. Well, what's going to rule there? Whatever you want, you know, That's a good deal. So I have a great deal. It's a great deal. Yeah.

That's one of my goals with even Genius Network is just to help everyone have their own version of that in their own life.

Because, yeah, we live in an infinite, expansive upward opportunity. That's the nature of the world. That's the fundamental nature of the world. And the people who say, you know, it's a Malthusian nightmare, there's only so much we have to scrabble. We have to squabble over the. What would you say, the fragments that fall off the king's table? That's complete nonsense. There's no limit up, just like there's no limit to down. And so. And Musk knows that, for example, and that's the right way to think of the world. The world is a realm of infinite possibility. That's the tohu va bohu, by the way, that God's spirit rested upon at the beginning of time. It's a pool of infinite possibility out of which order is continually extracted. And if you're aiming upward, and what would you say, comporting yourself as a proper image of the divine, then you can bring the order that's good into being. And everyone has that nature and opportunity, you know, and you've realized that in your own enterprises. And there's no limit to the scope of that. So that's a lovely thing to know. I don't think there is a more profound truth than that. Fundamentally, what's the world made of? The possibility that confronts your exploratory consciousness and it's constrained, you know, because there's a reality to it, but it's also indefinite in terms of possibility. So. So make the most of it. See what you can do in your, you know, in the short duration you have in front of you, you know, that adventure.

We are past time. But I want to see. I have a new book coming out, we who Wrestle with God, which I have wrestled with God my whole life and you know a little bit of my background with my mother and I was raised Catholic. Most of you know that God is. So I'd love for you to talk about your new book. I'd also would like all of you to go and pre order it on Amazon or Audible if you prefer audio. I've not. You just sent it to me like a few days ago. So I will read it. I haven't read it yet, but I've read the beginning part and I'd love for you to share what the book is about. And if you don't buy the book, I will buy it for you because I'd like everyone to have and I'd love to at some point maybe bring you to 100k meeting, have you do a conversation about it. But what is share a little bit about the book?

Well, I'll give you the brief version. So. So. One of the claims of the post modernists was that we see the world through a story. And that's technically true. Part of the reason we're in a culture war. That's deep. Part of the reason that the universities are in ruins is because the postmodern claim that we see the world through a story, true. You can't aggregate, you can't navigate your way through the world in mere consequence of the facts, not least because there's an infinite number of facts. There's one fact for every phenomenon. And so you can't orient yourself by the facts. You have to prioritize the facts. And a description of the way that we prioritize the that fact. Facts is a story. So when you go to a movie and you watch James Bond maneuver on his great romantic adventure, you see how he prioritizes his attention and his actions, you see what his priorities are and you embody his story. You see the world through a story. Now the postmodernists, especially the French post modernists, who mostly were Marxist, jump to the conclusion that the story that we see the world through is one of the power, that that's the fundamental story. And that's not true. It's not true scientifically, it's not true technically, and it's not implementable because stories based on power are inefficient and they breed internal dissent and rebellion. They fail. And I think that is an unassailable fact, by the way. Fact about stories, let's say. So then the question is if we see the world through this through a story, what story do we, or should we see the world through? And the biblical claim is that the proper story is one of sacrifice. And that's a hard thing for people to understand because the biblical stories present sacrifice in a rather anachronistic manner. It's not obvious what the Old Testament's prophets were up to when they built altars and offered some, you know, a burnt offering to God. But see, they were acting out something that is perfectly comprehensible once it's explained. To do something means to sacrifice everything else. Everything you do is a sacrifice. Every glance you make is a sacrifice because you could be looking elsewhere. Every word you utter is a sacrifice because you could have said something else. Every time you pay attention to someone rather than someone else, you sacrifice what you didn't pay attention to, to what you did pay attention to. There's no difference between sacrifice and work. Because when you work, you sacrifice the delights of the present to the stability of the future. And the community. The community is founded on sacrifice, and so is the psyche. That's the literal truth. And so this human story is one of sacrifice. And once you understand that, the next question is, what's the highest form of sacrifice? Because if you're going to sacrifice, you might as well do it properly rather than improperly. And the biblical library, because it is a library, is an investigation into the structure of upward oriented sacrifice. So you can imagine this in your own life. As you people, entrepreneurs, have climbed the ladder of your own life. You can imagine that there were decision points that you came across where you had to leave some things behind so that you could become who you were aiming at becoming. And that upward spiraling, spiraling process of transformation, that's the sacrificial adventure of life. Abraham himself, you know, he starts out privileged, wealthy, protected. He doesn't have to lift a finger. He has wealthy parents. And the voice of God comes to him as the voice of sacrificial adventure. It's like, leave your zone of comfort and go out and have the terrible adventure of your life. And Abraham does that. And at each, after each episode, after each episode of transformation, he rekindles his affirmation to aim at the highest possible target. And as a consequence, his personality improves ever upward. And the quality of the sacrifices that he's called upon to offer become higher and higher. It culminates in the case of Abraham, with him having to offer his son. And what that means in your own life is that as you develop upward, as you walk up Jesus, Jacob's Ladder, let's say, the depth of the sacrifices that you will be called upon to undertake to continue your spiraling process upward will increase in magnitude and meaning, significance. And that's the pathway of life. It's the never ending sacrificial voyage up the ladder to heaven. And so I explain that in this book and I talk about the story of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and Jacob and the tower of Babel, which is what we inhabit now, and the story of Abraham and the story of Moses and the story of Elijah and Elijah's the first prophet who. You are going to ask some questions about passion. You know, is passion sufficient to run an enterprise? The answer to that is no. You have to consult your conscience too. You know, passion pulls you forward, but you have to stay on the straight and narrow path. And conscience is the divine voice that tells you when you're violating the intrinsic moral order. And Elijah presents God as the voice of conscience within the still, small voice that's very much worth knowing. And so what I've done with we who wrestle with God is to take these stories, and they are the stories upon which American civilization is founded. There's no historical doubt about that. And I tried to explain what the stories mean and why they're true, why they're a deep form of truth and why you need to know them. Because you live in a story and once you know that, it's like, okay, what's the story going to be in the story of Abraham, for example? That's the story. It's not the story of comfort. It's not the story of security, it's not the story of wealth. It's the story of romantic adventure. And that's human beings. We're not designed for comfort, we're not designed for safety. We all die. Our lives are bounded by mortality. We're here for the adventure. And so that's the right way to construe yourself. It's like, what can you possibly manage? What, what can you extract out of the realm of possibility that confronts you, that justifies the constraints of your existence? Right? What remarkable things can you do that justify the fact of your suffering? Now that's a question for everyone and it's a wonderful thing to wrestle with. Think that was difficult, but it was worth it, right? That's a good deal for you. That's a good deal to offer people. Here's something difficult, but worth it. Yeah, well, that's a lot different than infantile satiation, let's say, right? Or self serving hedonism. Or nihilistic collapse or the notion that we have nothing to talk about. It's only a power dispute between the two of us. Dismal bloody stories and self defeating. So that story of upward sacrificial adventure, that's the story. The second book in this series will be an investigation into the story of Job and into the Passion story. I have a seminar coming out on the daily wire on the Gospels, which was partly a precursor to the second book in the this series. So the. What would you say the central message of the Gospel accounts is that you're called upon to offer up everything in the service of what's highest? Everything. Right. Family, friends, community, wealth, life. But you think, well, how could you possibly do anything better than to offer everything you have to what's highest? What could possibly be better than that you serve your own whims? That doesn't even work for two year olds. So that's what the book is about. Sacrificial adventure and what that means and why that's the necessarily, by necessity, the foundation of free and productive. The free and productive communities that people, what would you say, unite voluntarily to produce and maintain. And I think it's. I think the story is rock solid and I think we're at a point, this is part of this remarkable, the remarkable nature of the present. I think the scientific accounts and the theological accounts have converged and I tried to make that a criteria for the arguments that I made in the book. Like if it didn't work scientifically and theologically, I just didn't use the argument. So it's quite fun, it's terrifying. But. Where there's a lot of terror, there's a lots of possibility, right?

That's a great quote. Wherever there's a lot of terror, there's a lot of possibility.

Yeah, well that's dragons and treasure, people.

Jordan Peterson, everyone.

This is an organized, systematic, devious, nefarious project by these elites. They want to rob us of our sovereignty and they're creating a generation of Americans that, you know, that will do what they're told, that won't stand up to authority. This is all about, you know, unraveling the corruption and restoring the freedoms of our country and restoring self sovereignty and.