Joe Rogan Experience #2308 - Jordan Peterson

Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day. Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. No. No. I'm too vain. That's exactly right. I look back and I think, "Oh, that those headphones are pushing up my hair." Isn't that sad? Shave your head. That's sad. You never look back if you do. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's the greatest thing in the world. It's freedom. I have a I have a big dent here from when a meteorite landed on me when I was a kid. A meteorite? Oh, funny story. I've got plenty of cuts on my head. I got them all over the place. Well, you're looking pretty unscarred. Oh, the back of my head. I have uh one when I was a little kid. It's pretty big. That uh these one of these cranes that lifts up sewer pipes. Those big concrete pipes. Bang me off the back of the head. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's not good. Grayed out. Went to the hospital. Were you a different person before that experience? I don't know. I You have to talk to my mom. I was always a little wild. This could be of autobiographical significance here. Oh, there's definitely a lot of head trauma. Were you knocked out personality? No. No. I stayed conscious, but I got close. That's the big predictor. I got gray. Everything I grayed out that I came back to. I didn't completely go unconscious. So, uh Jamie went golfing this weekend with OJ Simpson's golf clubs. Uh oh. Not not with OJ. He's not here. Exercise. I think that that would be the next step. Jamie bought OJ Simpson's golf clubs after he This is like a childhood dream. No, they were just for sale. I saw them for sale. I said, "Why not?" They came in. I wanted some big grips. Yeah. A couple of our friends. What did uh Shane get? Shane got a bunch of stuff. I talked him into buying some stuff. Yeah. He got like scarfves and ties. He bought a bunch of ties, I think. Scarfves, too. Okay. He bought a trophy. A trophy and a Bill Clinton signed photo. And he spent thousands of dollars. What was this? Was this some sort of OJ Simpson auction? Sounds like an estate sale. Yeah. Yeah. I see. You know, he's dead now, so you can get his stuff right for nothing. Pennies on the dollar. Well, it's I mean, only people like Jamie and J are dumb enough to buy. It's like it's like for a goof. It's one of those things like you're either getting it for a goof or you're a very dark person. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. I wouldn't want to own it even for a goof. Like if I found a OJ played pool, I wouldn't want his clue his queue. There was there cues? No, there wasn't. There was a weird notebook that Robert Kardashian had like handwritten stuff to him. Blood splatter. I was like, whoa, that might be interesting. But it's taking a vicious turn, Joe, already. Yeah, that's a dark story. It is. Yeah. Yeah. And you only know the surface of it. Well, it's dark in both ways. It's also dark and planted evidence. You know, there was blood at the scene of the CL the crime that had preservative in it. Allegedly, supposedly, according to Robert Kardashian, and according to, I believe the forensic scientists when they analyzed it, it matched OJ's blood, but they had to draw blood from OJ in order to determine whether or not it was his blood that was at the scene of the crime. And some of the blood found at the scene of the crime had that preservative in it that they use. They were sloppy in the 90s, you know, compared to now. Well, there was no DNA evidence back then. You know, people were cops were there. There's always going to be a certain percentage of cops that just want to convict somebody regardless of the evidence. And if there's, you know, in their mind, if they believe someone's guilty, they'll do whatever they they can, including planting evidence. I guess at least that's allegedly. I don't not that I don't think he did it. I definitely think he did it. But I also think the cops planted evidence, which is probably at least partially why he got off, you know. I think the big reason why he got off was Rodney King. Right. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Have you gone into the whole George Floyd story at all? Have you ever like looked at like what they actually did to him for It's a combination of things. Like what the cop did was horrible, but also he was dying. Mhm. You know, like most people probably like if they did that to you, you probably would have lived. You know, that guy had an enlarged car. He was up. But that cop did lean on his neck, which is always interesting to see people try to minimize that, you know. I'm I'm always like, you got to be able to just say what it is. Well, a situation can be ugly in a multitude of ways. Yes. Right. That's when things get well. That's when it's very difficult to pick your moral pathway forward. All your choices are not good. Yes. Which is oftentimes the case when it comes to conflicts, right? Yes. Conflicts are very complicated and there and people want it to be binary. They want there to be a good guy and a bad guy and that's often times not really the case. Well, it's hard hard to organize yourself for combat unless you are quite convinced that you're the good guy. So, there's a default to that dichotomy that's a necessary part of well, even standing your own ground, right? because otherwise you get demoralized. And so I suppose people well when they're threatened they default to a simple narrative and because that's you can't defend yourself in some ways. It's it's very hard to defend yourself especially physically or militarily without a pretty cut and dried narrative. Well, especially like military operatives, you know, you have to have a very your your life and the people that you're with, their life depends on you not having any confusion about whether or not it's morally correct to be doing what you're doing. That's why they like to break it down to kill bad dudes. You know, kill bad dudes, right? Real simple. Let's go. They tell us what to do, we do it, which is what you want to stay alive, you want your teammates to stay alive, that's what you have to do. Yeah. Well, you never know when doubt will cause a fraction of a second difference in reaction time. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's always the thing with physical altercations with people, too. You know, often times people get sucked into these things where they're not sure whether to act or not act, and that's when they get in trouble, right? You know, right? That's probably true in life. You don't want to oversimplify things, too. But once you've made a decision, well, that's when it's necessary to put doubts behind you because otherwise you just act in half measures. Yeah. And often times you have to have done the wrong thing before like like failed to act or hesitated to act and it cost you and then you have to learn that lesson. It's very difficult to like know that without experiencing mistakes, you know, you have to you have to have failed to act and then realize, oh, I should have done something there. Yeah. Well, that's I think that's partly too one of the things that I often faced in my clinical practice and with the students that I mentored was this confusion about acting. I don't know what to do. So, what should I do? Well, nothing. I'll wait around until I figure out what to do. It's like no, you should put together a bad plan and you should implement it because even if you fail in the implementation, you'll gather information and then you can rectify the plan. And so staying in that malaise until you know what to do makes you get older and more miserable and you gather no information along the way. A bad plan is a good idea. best. You know, any plan is better than none. That's a good rule of thumb. And a bad plan, a bad plan can be incrementally improved. Yeah. Right. With experience. Right. He who hesitates is lost. Yeah. Yeah. That's really difficult for young people. I think more so today than ever at any time in history because the distractions are so many and they're so engrossing. You know, if you get out of high school, you don't know what to do, and then you start playing video games and you're on social media, a day can slip by like that. Yeah. A day becomes a week, becomes a month, becomes a year, and before you know it, you're 30 and you haven't done And that's really common. That's really common today. And I don't think we can ignore those factors, the factors of just engrossing distractions. Yeah. Well, in the algorithms optimized for short-term attention. Mhm. So, you know, it's a weird thing a because you could imagine that you would want a machine that offers you what you want, right? Because you want ads that are targeted to you because you want to see a bunch of ads that aren't relevant to you now and then because maybe you'll learn something and content. Well, why not have a machine shovel the same sort of things that you are interested in at you? That's a kind of curation. The problem comes and we haven't figured this out at all technically and probably not psychologically. The problem comes in time frame, right? Because there's a big difference between what you might be interested in if you were diligently striving towards a long-term goal that required conscientiousness and what's going to attract your attention right now, this moment. And the thing about the algorithms is that they maximize for short-term attention. And that's a so basically they're ma they're actually optimizing for hedonism. Yeah. And and and then you might say, well, so what? Because you're getting what you want. Well, the problem with short-term impulsive hedenism is it doesn't play out well over any reasonable time span. Yeah. So that's why you have to mature, which is painful and annoying, but absolutely necessary and much better than the alternative. The alternative is exactly what that's Peter Pan, right? Yeah. 30-year-old. I still haven't grown up. And yeah, I'm a little past my uh shelf life now, too. I think people are afraid of losing fun. They think that when you grow up, you lose fun. But it's silly. It's not true. You can grow up and still have fun. You know, you just have to you have to have discipline and prioritize your time. Like, well, that's why Christ says to people that they have to become as little children, not stay, right? You have to rediscover that, right? Rediscover the joy of it. Yeah. But also, well, kids are good for that, too, aren't they? Because they teach you that again. You look at the world through eyes of memory by the time you're an adult. So, the world loses its freshness. That's part of the world loses its freshness because you see your memories instead of the world. And then kids come along and you think, "Oh, oh yeah, that's really actually quite interesting." And they're so compelled by everything because their perceptions are so fresh that they share that with you and that can help reawaken that spirit of childhood play, let's say. I've been thinking a lot about play in the last year or so. Yeah. Well, I spent a lot of time trying to take apart the causes of like truly pathological degeneration, right? on the sadistic side, on the criminal side, on the totalitarian side, very curious about tyranny. And I I I it was very difficult for me to conceptualize the opposite of that as cleanly as I could characterize its presence. Like what's the opposite of tyranny? It's not freedom, by the way. It's certainly not anarchctic freedom. It's not hedonistic freedom. Benevolence. I think it's play. Play. I think it's play. Right. Yeah. Well, that makes sense. Well, the the developmental psychologist Jean Pia, one of the things he pointed out was that play, so let's say play is the foundation of micro community, right? When you're a little kid, you you play a game with another kid and then if that works well, you inhabit a little diatic community. You're both in it together. And then if it really works, you replicate that across time and that gives you a friend. But there's play is a very interesting it's very interesting psychologically and psychobbiologically because it has to be entered involuntarily. You can't force someone to play and it's also motivationally fragile. So mammals have a play circuit and it can be disrupted by pretty much any other motivational or emotional circuit. So the circumstances have to be set up properly. like the walled garden, you know that idea. The walled garden is a place that play can take place like eternally so to speak. And and because it has to be undertaken voluntarily, it's the opposite of tyranny. And I like my wife and I have really started to apply this in our marriage more consciously. you know, once once I'd figured out this relationship because I've been lecturing to people for a long time about how to conduct themselves in life so they don't become a tyrant or a handmaidaden to the tyrants, right? A silent handmaiden to the tyrants, let's say. And aiming at play, you know, when we walked in here today, one of the things we said was, "Let's have some fun." You know, and I've been thinking this this morning, too, about what attitude I should take coming in to talk to you. And there isn't a better attitude. There isn't a better attitude than play. And so, and I think it is because it's the antithesis. It's the antithesis of tyranny in particular. And then you were talked more about mature play. And that's that good. You know, that also makes sense. This is the issue with the idea that adulthood isn't any fun. It's like, well, do you want to play a simple game or do you want to play a really sophisticated game really well? Now, you that's going to require some discipline and some training and some maturation, but the payoff is much higher. That's good way to conceptualize marriage. The highs are higher when you're successful. Well, and and also the the people who have the most sex now are religious married couples. Really? Yeah. I know. Isn't that funny? Which religion? like, "Yeah, good good question, Joe. Good question." Well, I guess in the West that would obviously be Christianity. But but but it's an but it's an interesting case example of the sorts of things we're talking about because you can imagine at the dawn of the sexual revolution when the birth control pill became prevalent that the last hypothesis anyone would have possibly generated was that the cascading consequences of that over 50 years would be well radical increase in pornography use because sex has been made less dangerous by the pill and that the people who are having the most sex would be religious married couples. Right. But is that true? Because like pornography essentially was very difficult to acquire before the birth control pill was invented. True. True. You used to have to go somewhere to get the pornography. Isn't part of the excess use of pornography just the access is so instantaneous now? Oh, definitely. But you could imagine too that you might have hypothesized that if the birth control pill took the threat out of sex that pornography would be less necessary, but that didn't seem to work out, right? So it's certainly the availability is Yeah. We would never know though because the the the birth control was when was it 1960 something? That's really when it started somewhere around. Yeah. When it started to to to ramp up, let's say. It's so crazy because it completely changed the the dynamic. women could have sex for recreation with people that they didn't even know and not have any consequences in terms of like having to carry that person's child. Whereas that was always a giant fear. If you're a woman in the back of your head, every time you have sex, you possibly could be taking care of a child for the next 18 plus years. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that every time. Right. took this thing. This is a consequential thing where with a guy, it's like you have this biological imperative to spread your seed, but you're not thinking about making babies, right? You're thinking about sexual activity. When a guy's having sex, he's not thinking, "I can't wait to make a baby." You're just thinking, "Boy, sex is going to be great. I'm excited. Oh, boy, that's fun." You're not thinking, "I'm making a kid." Because that would make you hesitant. And nature is not interested in hesitation. Nature is like, "No, no, no, no, no, no. Let's just make you dumb as for about 20 minutes and focus on one goal." So, why did you get married? Well, I love my wife. She wanted to get married. We had a a child. It seemed like a good thing to do. It's like at a certain point in time, making a baby is more of a commitment than getting married. You made a life, you know, like the commitment of getting married seemed Right. Right. Of course. But it's also But why did you stay committed then before the marriage once you had a child? I just said I do. I love her. It's a thing to do. It's a life and raising a child became everything. It it becomes it becomes a very different thing, right? I think I have a lot of friends who don't have kids and I don't I'm not the type of person that thinks everyone should have a kid. You know, I know a lot of people with kids that do say that. I don't think everyone should have a kid. I think you should do whatever you want. I don't know how your brain works. I assume your brain works along similar lines with me. But there's a thing that happens when you Scary thought, Joel. Well, similar lines. Similar. I think we all share similar similar lines. There's an empathy that comes from having a child that's so different and an understanding that we are all babies that grew up. We all start off as these bundles of potential and genetics and then we're influenced by so many different things or so many different factors. But I used to think of people as being grown up all the time. And then when I had kids, I was like, we're all just babies. We're all just babies that have just been alive for a long time. You know, everyone started out as a baby. And it just profoundly changed the way I interact with people. The amount of compassion I have for people, the amount of charity that I have for people, the charitable way in which I think about them when they do something or they say something, I give people the benefit of the doubt way more. And Dave Chappelle said this to me once at the comedy store and it was very profound. He said, "Having children didn't just change the amount of love I have. It changed my capacity for love." And I was like, "Oo, that's it. You just nailed it. You just nailed it." You know, cuz there's Well, there's private moments when you talk to people about their children, about having children, and what that's like. It's a very psychedelic experience. That would be another reason why the family with children is the foundation of the community. Has to be the foundation of the community. I mean, it's kind of obvious from a biological perspective. Let's say no children, no community. But there's no reason to assume that you wouldn't get radically better at something with necessity and practice. And if you're practicing loving your infant and your child, well, why wouldn't that generalize? Why would that capacity develop? I want it's not like a practice. It's like an overwhelming desire that comes about like the love you have for your your child is like it's not like anything else. It's very different. It's very My friend Jim Brewer said this once. He said uh when I had a child, that's when I really understood murder. I really understood like my capacity to defend my child is like I never understood like how could somebody kill somebody before? story was like, "Oh, now I get it. Now I get it." And you know that's real too. And that's also tribal, right? So it's not just your child. It's the child of everyone around you in your ch in your tribe. And then you think that you're being invaded by an oncoming tribe. And genetics and history dictates you have to be insanely ruthless to fight off that tribe. There's no other way for survival, which is really wild, right? Because those people have that same feeling towards their children. It's like that sting line. If the Russians love their children, too. This episode is brought to you by Paleo Valley. Are you looking for a great tasting snack that is absolutely proteinpacked? Paleo Valley's meat sticks are what you're after. Made with 100% grass-fed beef, pasture-raised chicken, pork, and venison. 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So that that that love that you talk about with regard to your wife, you know, I I I'd asked I asked you a little bit about that. It's like I've talked to people who have they can't understand how someone could be with the same woman indefinitely. Let's say these are people who usually haven't been able to establish that within their own life. And of course the price you pay assuming it's a price for forgoing all others is that well that that that's exactly it. It's a major sacrifice. And so what do you think what role do you think that love plays? Like how do you conceptualize the relationship between that love that you described and that willingness to stay in a permanent relationship and that and the willingness also to not pursue any other women? H how do you how do you understand how does that make itself manifest in your life? I mean I I presume that you I'm I presume that you know you had opportunities of all sorts. I presume you do as well in principle. I suppose they don't seem to come to me professor type character. Back in the day guys like you would be banging their grad students. Not guys like you but guys in your position. Wasn't that always a thing? This is fascinating aspect of they seem to shut that off pretty much at the beginning. Well, they they seem to have completely stopped that. Like if you go back to Fineman and Oppenheimer and famous famous scientists were notoriously playboys, which is really interesting because it's like these wild innovative people were essentially like intellectual rock stars, right? And then somehow or another that just got stopped. Like if you were a professor in the 1960s, like the the girls would be wooing the professor. They would be excited. These 22-year-old graduate students would be so excited to be talking to this like incredibly famous intellectual and they all, you know, were ladies men. Like Fineman was like famous for chasing skirts. That was like part of the thing. He does a lot of math and chases skirts, you know. that is a a giant distraction to people that are trying to get things done in life. Um, and it's also a distraction from your own personal development, I think. I think you could be with the wrong person and want to be with other people and that makes sense. But really what that is is you should not be with that person anymore, which is unfortunately the case. Like there's a lot of guys who wind up with really hot women who are out of their mind and a lot of women who wind up with really hot men who are not what they thought they were going to be, you know? And if you find yourself in this situation where you're this with this pathological person and you're trying to make it work and you realize at a certain point in time like I'm not going to make it work like this is you have to be able to just like jump ship. That's why people are hesitant to get married. That's what what really dangerous about marriage. It's not like being with one person you really love being with. Like I really love being with my wife. She's fun. Like we go we have date nights all the time. We have a lot of fun, you know? We really do. It's enjoyable. How did you decide to set up date nights? How did you go about that? I mean, I know that's personal, but and I don't want all the gory details. Let's say I know it's really simple. We just enjoy hanging out together. We have a lot of laughs. And so we just said like it's kind of important because I'm so busy that we schedule time that's just unavoidable like like this is what we're doing. We're going to do this and then we do it with Tammy too. Yeah. We've done that for like 30 years. I think most most married couples will tell you that that's important. Most married couples tell you that that's that's kind of the secret. And it's the secret is like it's also the best thing as well as being the secret. Yeah. It's fun. It's fun. Like if the person that you're with is fun. That's the real problem is is that sometimes people just they pick people that are hot. That's it. You know, hot and willing and nice enough. Nice enough to be around. Then you deal with all the other crazy nonsense. And you're you're setting yourself up with I've had many friends ruin their lives and then they go through divorces. And you've said this best that one of the things that women are very good at is reputation destruction. I have seen that happen. So imagine you are legally entangled with someone who at one point in time you loved intimately and now that person is trying to destroy every aspect of your life and you have to pay for their lawyers. So you have to pay for the general of the army that's trying to destroy your kingdom. And I've seen this happen to many of my friends and that is why people are afraid of marriage. That's why people are afraid of commitment because the disastrous implications of like what can happen if it goes sideways like what can happen if you wind up hating each other and what can happen if you just lie to yourself and you trick you like well some of the hesit hesitation that I had um for getting married is most of my friends that got married when I was young all went through horrible divorces when I was on news radio Dave Foley Steven Root and um Phil Hartman were all going through it. All going through it in different levels of psychosis. Obviously, Phil Hartman's being the worst cuz his wife shot him when he was leaving her. By the way, he decided to leave her and he had tried to leave her a few times and she shot him in his sleep and then she shot herself. Is a horrible, horrible story. But Steven Root went through it and they, you know, they'd confide in me. I'd be like, "Oh, Jesus Christ. the amount of money these women were trying to get from them when they knew that they couldn't afford this. So, one of the dirty tricks that will happen uh with uh divorce lawyers, with um people that are on sitcoms is when you get on a sitcom, if you're an actor and you get on a sitcom, it is the most stable job, the greatest job in show business for a lot of them because you're going to get a steady check. You're gonna do 24, maybe 26 episodes a year. You're making more money than you've ever made in your whole life. But then you get divorced. So what happens is it gets set up where your ex-wife wants a percentage of what you're making at this very unrealistic level where you're never going to achieve this again. And for Dave Foley, it was so bad that at one point in time, I don't believe he was allowed to go back to Canada. I don't know if that's changed, but the the judge literally told him when he told the judge like, "I don't have that kind of money anymore. I don't have the potential for earning." I was on a hit sitcom, like not even a hit sitcom, but I was on a sitcom on NBC, paid a lot of money, and that was the only time I made that kind of money. The judge said to him, "Your obligation to pay has no relation to your ability to pay." That's Canadian judges for you. Just insane. And you know he those are words you never those are words you never want to hear even once in your life. I love him. So I was going through this pain not like he was but just like oh my god oh my god. So these three people that I was very close to. And then most of the other people that I knew you know I knew so many people. Fortunately my mother and my stepfather have a great relationship and they have for a long time. So I had that modeled like they were always very close and they didn't fight which is really nice. It was really nice to have that as a model you know like that where I realized okay it's not everybody's not at each other's throats all the time and some people actually do enjoy spending time together. you know, Tammy and I on on the tour, she started to introduce me um two years ago and to talk about some of the things we're doing uh in the family, some of our family business, talk about Peterson Academy, talk about essay and so she'd go out on the stage and was that the first time she had ever gone on stage in front of you do enormous crowds. Yeah. Well, so so first of all, she did that and then we replaced the the business discussion because we were just doing an update about the family, you know, and so she'd do that. We replaced that with ads and then she started to talk. She she'd talked about the rules, say in 12 rules for life or some of the religious things I've been dealing with lately. And she'd relate that to something in her own life. And then she does the Q&A at the end of the lecture. And and part of that was just she was along with me. And part of that was Michaela was introducing me for a while and then had to go back to her work. And so we slotted Tammy in because it seemed like a good business decision. But one of the things we figured out very quickly that was really a shock to us was that people really liked especially the Q&As's when because what people will offer their questions electronically on this platform called Slido which is a very good platform for such things and then Tammy would they could upvote the questions and then Tammy would sort them and ask me questions kind of from the top down that were thematically relevant to the lecture that I had given. But we found very quickly that people really liked that because they hadn't seen a couple engage in civilized discussion ever. Seriously, like it was really out there. It was really shocking, Joe. Like, you know, I was shocked when I first started touring by how demoralized people were. Like that really that was really striking and painful to see that on such a mass scale. And then also to see how little encouragement it took to have a really major effect. I mean there's a positive aspect to that too, but there's also a tragic aspect. It's like you mean you just need to have some encouragement and that was enough and you never got that like even once. That's rough when you see that in thousands of people, right? And it was the same thing. We found it was the same thing with regards to seeing a functional couple at least even that model because you know Tammy asks me questions and she thinks about the questions and then sometimes she comments but not that much but she actually listens to the answers and she wants to hear the answer and so and that dynamic is being played out on stage and people found that very heartening and well that shows you well you said you know yourself and this is why I brought it up because you had the example from your from your stepfather and your mom of this long-term relationship that worked. I mean, how the hell do you orient yourself if you you haven't seen that anywhere, right? You and then you you consider relationships just like all the bad ones and like you're going to be burdened and locked into that. Did you ever see that video where Alec Baldwin and his wife are on the camp on uh red carpet and they're being interviewed and they're asking them questions and the wife starts talking and Alex chimes in about something and she said, "You're not talking. I'm talking. When I'm talking, you're not talking on camera." And you watch this, you're like, "Yo, that's what everyone's scared of, right? That's what every tyranny the tyranny of being trapped in a relationship like that. It's like and sometimes one person is so overbearing that the other person just sort of submits to it, right? And then you're just like, I don't even want to I don't want to fight. I don't want to deal with this. I don't want to deal with this. And so then you're just trapped and this person's insulting you and humiliating you publicly. That was the case with Phil Hartman. I got to see that. We would uh all go like we went to a party once and I remember she was talking about exboyfriends that she loves pickup trucks because her ex-boyfriends had pickup trucks and they would climb into the back of these pickup trucks and I was like what the But she was doing it on purpose to like make him squirm and make him uncomfortable. And she would say things like talk about how he's old. Oh, he's old. He doesn't, you know, he doesn't like to do any. It was just it was just public humiliation in front of friends where you're in this like arena where you he can't say anything. He can't just go what the are you talking about? Like why are you talking to me like that? Like why are we doing this? He can't do that because he's public and he's out with us. Maybe he should do it anyways. Probably should do it anyways. Yeah. we're all out and you know Phil was all about like appearances, how things one of the things that he was afraid of with getting married was that he was just starting to break into films and a lot of the films that he was doing were very like familyfriendly films and it was it helped that he was a family man you know if he was right so he had he had an act he had to sustain too he had an image right and this was critical in Hollywood like they had ideas of who you were okay you're a family man. Okay. Good, good, good. And you're the So, if you have this radical change in your life where no longer you a family man, and if you want to be honest about it and you want to say, I I was in a toxic relationship and some of it was me and some of it was her and this is what happened. Like, whoa, now you're opening up the world to this big can of worms. Better to keep that can sealed. Yeah. Well, it's generally better not to have your your fights in public. And it's certainly better. You know, I've been I've been thinking about this commandment to honor your mother and father. And I've been thinking about what that means. I read this book called Angelus Ashes by Frank McCort. And Frank had a really alcoholic father. Like like an Irish alcoholic father back in the 40s. Oh yeah. He drank every scent the family had. And they they lived in terrible poverty and his sister died and like it was rough. But he said his father was often sober in the morning and and he established a relationship with like good morning sober father and kind of put alcoholic drunken nighttime father in a different bin and he could he could get the benefit of having a father in consequence of that. And that honoring that's also something that you want to do within a marriage, right? Because your wife is your friend and your lover, but she's also your wife and and you're her husband. And that means that a part of keeping that marriage working is honor. And part of the honor is that you don't do that sort of thing in public, right? Humiliate fight. Well, that's also in some ways independent. In a way, it's independent of who your wife or husband is. It's like, you know, you could imagine two people fighting in public and one of them or both of them really deserving to have that fight as people. But then to keep the marriage intact, you have to remember, well, this is my wife. She's not just my friend. She's not just someone I know. She's my wife. And we shouldn't be doing primate dominance hierarchy maneuvering in public. We shouldn't be competing for power because that's going to destroy the marriage. Yeah. And so that's that that's that's part of that honoring I think is to to remember the role and to keep it well sacred is really sacrosanked. Here's another one. Don't ever insult each other even though you want to like you you want to like be mean sometimes like people get mean to you, you want to be mean back. I don't do that with my friends so I don't do that with anyone else. I don't want to do that. That's why I don't do it online. I don't get involved in these like hissy pissy fits online, particularly on Twitter. I just don't think the prime place for such things. That's all it is. First of all, again, as someone who looks at everyone like a child or like a baby, I I don't I'm not angry that people do that. I understand the appeal of it. If I was 15 and Twitter was around, I would be tweeting at every celebrity saying, "You're a loser. Jump in front of a bus." I would say things just to try to get a reaction out of them. I think a lot of kids do. Um I think a lot of people don't feel like they have a voice and one way to be heard is to be insulting and one way to hurt is to be negative. If you look at the majority of discourse on social media in regards to hot button issues, it's disrespectful. It's contentious. It's shitty and insulting. And I've decided like over time in my life to not do that. I don't want to do that. I'm not interested. I'm not interested in that. I'm not interested in that kind of conflict. Like I see real conflict all the time as a an MMA commentator. You know, I see the most violent legal conflict other than war all the time. It's a that's conflict. That's like real conflict and resolution and you know purposeful agreed upon conflict like regular like back and forth and sol. Wouldn't it be better to figure out what you agree and disagree on and why and and talk? Like why can't we all figure out how to do that? That should be a discipline you learn at an early age. Most of the issues that people have, if the person comes at you insulting and aggressive, either that person is ignorant or they're playing a game, okay? And the game is to get your emotions up, to get you reactive and to be reacting to them instead of acting. The game is like if someone's hyperaggressive in a fight, the game is to put you on the defensive so that they don't like the best defense is a good offense. You learn that early on in fighting. So you learn that you can be very offensive and then the person never has a chance to get their game going. That's the case with conversations too. So this is like there's a gamesmanship to this kind of communication where it's not just communicating. It's communicating but it's essentially intellectual oneupsmanship and sparring. You're sparring. You're scoring points. You're trying to dunk on each other. And I get that. I've done that before. I've engaged in it. It's never satisfying. It always feels gross. Even if you win, it's gross. Like I've said this before, like even like publicly things that I've I felt like I had to do like the Carlos Menia conflict that I had way back in 2007 where accused him of stealing material and it became this viral video and then a bunch of other comedians jumped in and we all agreed there was a real problem. It was a real problem because he was very famous and he was being protected by these agencies who were profiting off of him being famous and they didn't want that train to stop. I still to this day wonder if I would ever do that again because the negativity that came my way from people that were fans of his was so it's so overwhelming if you're paying attention to it's like what did I open up like gh even though I knew it was necessary like what and that is also why people are negative because they want they want to stop you from engaging in conflict that's going to hurt them you know so they try to hurt you as much as possible so you're like hesitant to do it I don't want to wait into those waters It's dangerous, filled with sharks. Um, well, you could imagine maybe I think and I think this is worth delving into in some depth. You could imagine that there are there's various ways of attaining status, renown, reputation. Status isn't exactly the right word because reputation is better because you can have a reputation that you deserve, right? And so people do work for reputation and all things considered that's a good thing. Earned reputation. Earned reputation. Earned reputation. Earn truly unique where they Jordan that guy that's a unique human being and that's a real reputation. Right. Right. Okay. That's what people want. Right. Right. And and it's also there isn't anything more valuable that you can have than that. Not even close. This is why by the way this is very cool. Uh it's a bit of an aside, but it makes it's worth bringing up. In the gospels, Christ tells people to store up treasure in heaven where it doesn't rust, where the thieves can't steal it. That's reputational treasure, right? So if you So the idea is that if you conduct yourself impeccably, you'll develop a storehouse of reputation that will withstand all catastrophe. M nothing can it nothing there's no place you can put your wealth that's more effective than that it's the least violatable place and that's right it's it's right right and so but the problem is and this is a really tricky problem and you're touching on it is that the reputation game can be gamed okay so when your reputation rise rises your serotonin levels rise and that makes you less sensitive to negative emotion and more sensitive to positive emotion So that's a really good deal. And what that also means is that there's a high psychological benefit to status increase, reputational increase, and a real cost to reputational decrease. That's partly why people don't like losing face for example because their emotions disregulate. Okay. So now the best way to play that game is to establish a genuine reputation. And the best way to do that, you've done this by the way. I figured out this year on my lectures that I'm always trying to answer a question on stage. So that's a quest and I'm bringing the audience along on a quest and it's a real quest because I'm actually trying to figure something out and I do that in real time and that's a very different game. That's a very different conversational game than the status battle game. Right? Because I could come on here. I don't know if it would work, but I could come on here and I could try to show that I was smarter than Joe Rogan. Now, I've watched you and that's a very difficult thing to pull off. But hypothetically, that could be my aim and I could play gotcha questions and I could lead you into the problem. The problem is that wouldn't work because I'm willing to accept that you're smarter than me. First of all, like I talk to a lot of people that are smarter than me and I like it. It's enjoyable. I don't ever feel uncomfortable talking to people that are smarter than me. I want to know some things that they can tell me on certain thing. I want to educate myself. I want to be I want to see how their mind works. I want to be blown away. I don't want to compete with them intellectually. There's times in my life where I would have fallen into that trap. I think it's Well, I think that's also what's made you popular and a force for good is that you are on a quest and that quest the consequence of that quest if undertaken properly is reputational enhancement. And people who can't or won't do that, they default to power games. And the part of the And that's a very that's that's the default to power. But it's worsened with social media. Absolutely. Because if you're if if if you meet someone and they're playing a power game with you, you can just decide not to have anything to do with them anymore or you can put a stop to it if you need to. But on social media, you can't because they're distant from you. And they're often also anonymous. And so they can play power games to enhance their reputational status falsely with no consequences. And the social media is rife with that. And it's really a problem. Like I think that virtualization has enabled the psychopaths. Without a doubt. Yeah. Well, without a doubt. That's a terrible thing because the psychopathic types, they're always the death of everything. Like I'm seeing this come up on the right now. So imagine imagine this. I've been working on a new a new theory of political psychopathology and I like it quite a lot. Is this where the term the woke right comes in? Yeah. Well, Lindsay is pointing at that, but he hasn't got he hasn't got the diagnosis exactly right. He So it isn't woke. That's not the issue. It's not exactly one level. What they're talking about is like similar types of behavior. He is talking about that. Yeah. No point. woke just lets you clarify in your head. Oh, it's like that. Yeah. But the problem is it's like Antifa. Yeah. Ex. Absolutely. But the problem is is that that argument is predicated on the claim that the ideas are the problem. Like the woke ideas, for example, on the right or the left. But that's not the problem. The problem is that four to 5% of the population something like that is cluster B that's the DSM5 terms histrionic narcissistic antisocial psychopathic or they have and they have dark tetrad traits they're machavelian they're sadistic that's about 4% okay so the question is how do these people maneuver and the answer is they go to where the power is and they adopt those ideas and they put themselves even on the forefront of that. But the ideas are completely irrelevant. All they're doing is they're the Pharisees. They're the modern version of the Pharisees. They're the people who use God's name in vain, right? Is they proclaim moral virtue. Doesn't matter whether it's right or left or Christian or Jewish or Islam. They invade the idea space and then they use that those ideas as false weapons to advance their narcissistic advantage. Yes. And so then you have the problem and the right's going to face this more and more particularly because the left had to face it when they were in powers. Yes. How do you identify the psychopathic parasites 4% of the population who are clothed in your clothing and waving your flags but who are who are only in it for narcissistic benefit. You know the people who studied the dark triad. These were people who originally studied psychopaths and they moved into ordinary personality so to speak on the fringes. They showed that the noncriminal psychopaths, so the fringe cases are machavelian. They use their language to manipulate. They're narcissistic. They want unearned reputation. That's what a narcissist wants. And they're psychopathic, which makes them predators or parasites. Okay, that's pretty bad, those three things. But they had to expand the nomenclature after a while because they found that they were also sadistic, which implied that if you're Machavelian and narcissistic and psychopathic, you develop a sufficiently bad view of your fellow man that their undeserved pain is a source of pleasure to you. And that's that's what's being enabled online. Yes. See, because we've evolved real specific mechanisms to keep such things under control in face-to-face interaction. Lack of anonymity, for example, within a community. Psychopaths in the real world, they wander. They have to move from place to place because people who figure out who they are and they're held responsible. They're particularly held responsible by men. But online, they escape from that. They escape from that protective they escape from that con system of constraints and they have free reign and they can find other people like them very rapidly and they can gang together and so this is like I can really see this starting to happen on the right like I've been tracking psychopathic behavior on the right for probably four years something like that especially on the anti-semitic side because that's really where it reared its head first and why is that there's Nothing more annoying than a successful minority. Right. Now, that's part of it. I I'm going to here. I might as well get myself in trouble right away, too. Yeah, for sure. Well, this is a very real subject. Well, so yeah, it's a Yeah, it's a real terrible subject. It's interesting because if you don't criticize it enough, you're compromised. If you if you criticize, you know, it's like when it comes to anti-semitism, like it's one of those things where you can't separate a a it's a religion and it's also a race and it's also a government. That's where things get weird. Right. Right. And and then there's also the concept of intelligence agencies and compromise that also gets attached to it. the manipulation of world markets and money and there's a lot to unpack. And then there's regular Jewish people have nothing to do with that. Well, the Jews too are they're very successful. Yeah. And so what you would expect from a purely statistical point of view is you'd expect them to be over represented at the extreme. They're also a walled garden, right? Meaning meaning it's very difficult to join. They don't proitize. They don't try to get you to join. And they're all very tightly knit. They call themselves the clan. They're all like locked in the, you know, Jewish clan. Not not KKK. The problem with that term has been compromised by the K cuc clan, you know, but I mean it as terms of tribe, community. Yeah. Community. They're very tight-knit in that regard. You know, they stick together. And if you understand the history obviously of Nazi Germany and of persecution in Eastern Europe, like Yeah. You have to. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Well, all these complex things are multi-dimensional. I mean, you're you're I I watched your whole conversation with Douglas and I thought you guys did a very credible job, all three of you, of navigating unbelievably choppy waters. So, that's the first thing I'd like to say because one of the things I was trying to figure out when I was watching that is do I think I could have done a better job of than of any of you? And I certainly didn't walk away from it with that idea in mind. But then underneath all that, I thought there's really a there's a really unbelievably tricky problem here. And I think that's why it's made it it it poked up into well, you also set that conversation up, but it it poked up and made itself manifest in that conversation. And the issue is how do you identify the psychopathic pretenders? And it's even worse now. And and then make a barrier right now. The right was calling for the left to do that for decades and they didn't and they couldn't. And the left is not good at drawing barriers, partly temperamentally. The right is somewhat better, but there's no shortage of monstrosity there. And and so then the question is how do you how do you draw the line? And that's kind of what I was because I've been watching these right-wing, they're not right-wing, these psychopathic types manipulate the edge of the conservative movement for their own gain. And a lot of that's cloaked in anti-semitic guys. There's plenty of anti-semitism on the left, too, by the way. So, it's not unique to the right, but particularly now. Yes. Yes. Yes. Particularly now. And so, you know, you've let your curiosity guide you. Your curiosity and your desire for knowledge, this quest, you've you've let that guide you as a podcaster. And I'm, by the way, I'm trying to work through exactly the same sort of thing. Um, how do you know given your rap radical increase in stature over the last 10 years? How do you know when your curiosity and even your skepticism about the fact that things aren't the way that people say they are? Because that's certainly been demonstrated in the last 10 years. How do you how should anyone decide what guard rails to put up? Like what do you look for? Do you do do you have a a conceptual system worked out for that? Like in what what do you mean in what way? Well, how do I look for in terms of people to talk to? Yeah. Yeah. Because you have this insanely immense platform and you're inviting people onto it and you know, you said to Douglas and I know this to be true that you're not really thinking about the outcome exactly. You're thinking about this is an interesting person to talk to and I'd like to go on that quest. But then you have the additional conundrum. We're trying to work this out in the Daily Wire side of things too. Not to say that that's exactly the same situation. It's like once you gain in reach and authority then how do you know that? How do you take great care that the people you're talking to aren't what would you say? eliciting or feeding a subculture. Yeah, that's right. That that hasn't got the proper aims. Like I guess the legacy media probably worked that out by having people mediators, right, and guests. And that was also back when we could rely on the structures of authority in some sense to filter. And now we're in this helter skelter world where everything is the legacy media is the worst at that now. Yeah, I know. They're the worst at that which is fascinating. You know, it really is. It's really fascinating when you lose faith in uh a New York Times piece, you know, it's like you you go like, "Well, this is I know this is I know what they're doing. I know they're just this is editorial bullshit." And that didn't used to be the case, I don't think. No, they didn't. But then I go back to like what I learned about the Woodward, Bernstein, Nixon thing at Watergate that was all essentially an intelligence operation. Have you ever looked into that? Bill Murray on the podcast and Bill Murray said one of the wildest things. He read the first five pages of Bob Bob Woodward's biography on John Belalushi, Wired. He read the first five pages like he goes, "Oh my god, they framed Nixon." Oh, really? Wow. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Nothing. What they wrote about my friend was so not true. It was so wildly off. He said John Belalushi was a lightweight. John Belalooi should have a couple of drinks and he'd be up. He wasn't like a big partyier. That time he did that speedball. Probably the only time he ever did it in his life. But Woodward had him painted as this maniacal off the rails just drug addled monster. And he knew that to not be true. He was very close to Belushi for a long time. And so he was like, "Oh my god, they framed Nixon." Then when I told him the whole story, you know, what Tucker Carlson had told me about Woodward being an intelligence asset and then that was his first job ever as a journalist was Watergate and that there's FBI guys that were involved in it and the breakin and the whole thing was tried they tried to get Nixon out of there. The most popular president in the history of the country in terms of the vote and they were successful. They got him out of there and it's probably or likely because Nixon was very concerned with who killed Kennedy and he wanted to find out and he wanted to get that information out and apparently he had been talking about it. I know who did it and he was, you know, he didn't want it happening to him obviously and he knew it could. If you're a president, you know, a couple of guys ago, you know, just most one of the most popular presidents, at least postumously popular presidents, I know he's very polarizing while he was in office, but was shot in the head in the middle of Dallas. And you think that the government might have had something to do with it? Like that could that could with your head obviously, you know? Yeah. Well, there and there's many things like that. I mean, you saw the government website that came up two days ago about CO. Yes. Okay. Wild. Wild to see that. That's for sure. What are you supposed to do with that? All the things that have would have gotten you fired if you were a professor and you said them four years ago, you would have 100% got fired for espousing any of these ideas that turned out to be true. You would have gotten kicked off of YouTube. you would have gotten, you know, there was a lot there was a lot going on there, you know, which is like I feel so fortunate that right at the height of COVID was also when I had gone over to Spotify. Spotify is a Swedish company. They're it's different. They're different. They don't they're much more rational and they're not overwhelmed by this identity politics and they they aren't overwhelmed by our weird political binary system of good guy bad guy depending on which side you're on. And they were like like what are you talking about? Like this is we don't we don't censor our rappers. Also didn't lock down. Yes, they didn't lock down. They were also like we don't censor our rappers. Like we don't tell like the rap lyrics, some of my favorite rap lyrics are horrendous, but it's just like my d my favorite movies are Tarantino movies. The dialogue is horrendous. It doesn't mean that these are horrendous people that are putting together this. Tarantino is a wonderful guy. He's fun to be around. He's great. I've had dinner with him, brought him to the comedy club. He's great. He's not a bad person, but he is an artist and he's creating this thing. And this thing is gonna show you aspects of humanity that you know to be true but are horrific. It's the same with rap lyrics. It's the same with a lot of things. And Spotify's position was we're not censoring. That's not what we're in the business of like promoting art. Like we sell art and we're not interested in censoring art essentially. And turns out luckily we were all right. We were all correct, you know, and now the government shows it on their website, which is crazy. Have you seen it, Jamie? Yeah. Pull it up because it's bananas. And look at this lab leak. I know. I know. I know. By the way, um, you know, I I know that he would bring up the vaccines when he was on his rallies and people would boo when he was on the campaign trail. People would boo. And I I think he was like confused by that. I think he's a little I don't want to say he's out of touch, but there's too many things for him to be thinking about for him to be paying attention to what people really think about the vaccines and vaccine injuries and mandates and just the psychological warfare that was played on the American people. You remember that very famous White House post that they made? For the vaccinated, you've done your job. But for the unvaccinated, you're looking forward to a winter of severe illness and death and the hospitals that you will overwhelm. Like that was the White House telling you something when it was in omnicron by that point, which was like a cold. Like it was crazy. The deaths had dropped off radically. But they were so in bed with the pharmaceutical companies that they were like, "You got to do it. You got to get vaccinated. If you don't, you're you're looking forward to death and severe illness. Like, imagine this is you're not basing this on real statistics. You're not basing this on science. You're just basing this on this control, this fear element that you're trying to impose upon people. So, okay. So, that's that's an interesting point there, too, that issue of control and fear. You know, I started this I I was part of a group that started this organization in the UK called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. We had our second convention in November, which went very nicely, by the way. So, you're doing like a positive counter to the World Economic. Yeah. Well, we have some rules and one rule is you don't use force or fear, right? Use invitation. So, can I tell you a story about that? Please do. Please do. Okay. So, I've been touring about this new book of mine, right? We We Who Wrestle with God, and it's uh I've been lecturing about lots of the things I know, but I've been using biblical stories mostly to provide an analytical frame because that's what stories do. They provide a frame. And there's a great story in the continuing Exodus story, the story of Moses and the Israelites where Moses has led the his people away from the tyrant and away from their own slavery because there's a dynamic in that story between those two things. No tyrants without slaves or you might say no tyrants without willing slaves. And so the Israelites have to get away from the tyrant, but then it's across the Red Sea of chaos and blood and into the desert for 40 years. You don't escape from the tyrant if you're a slave without paying a price and maybe for three generations. It's rough. So Moses is trying to get these people to stop being slaves and to take responsibility. So they don't need a tyrant. And so he's kind of got there and they're on the edge of the promised land, right? And so they're almost at the end of their voyage and uh they run out of water. They're still in the desert. They run out of water and they get all whiny and about the fact that they had to go across the desert and that it was way better under the tyrant and that Moses is nothing but a corrupt patriarch and he's only power mad and they fment some rebellion and anyways it's it's a pretty ugly situation. And the Israelites go to Moses and they say, "Look, we're really starving. We're we're thirsting for water. We're going to die. Do you think you can have a chat with God? See if he'll do something about this. And God tells Moses to go to some rocks in the desert and to ask them to bring water forth. And so he goes with his people to these rocks and instead of asking, he takes this staff of his. The staff is a really important thing. It's like your staff if you have an organization. Same derivation, but it's also the magic wand of Gandalf. It's the flag you plant in new territory. It's the tree of life. It's the living tradition that has uh a spirit inside it and that's a serpent and that's the serpent that's eats all the serpents of the Egyptian tyrants magic magicians. That's the staff. It's his rod of his authority. And he instead of asking the rocks, he hits them twice with the with the staff. So he forces them. And God tells him that in consequence of that, number one, he's going to die and number two, he's not going to get to the promised land. Right. Right. Right. So there's this insistence. It's really interesting. Well, it's it's a crucial insistence, and it's very important in this time, I think, to to understand what this means. So Moses is a leader. He's the archetypal leader, and he realizes his responsibility in the encounter with the burning bush, which is something that attracts his attention, that he takes with great seriousness. And that transforms him. And so then he becomes the leader who stands up against the tyrant and frees the slaves and takes them through chaos into the desert. And his temptation as leader is to use force. So when he's a young man, for example, he kills a Egyptian aristocrat who was tormenting a Hebrew slave and that's why he has to leave Egypt. He's tempted by power because he's a leader. And then at the end, even though he's done all these things, he's he's been an upstanding man and done gone beyond his call of duty and he's right at the point where he attains victory, right, to enter the promised land. And he uses force once when God tells him to use invitation, to use his words, the logos, to use words, to use invitation. And that's enough so that he's he's dead. So is his brother Aaron. That's his political arm. And he doesn't enter the promised land. And then in the gospels of course Christ foregoes power altogether. The temptation in the desert one of the three temptations is the temptation for use of power. So one of the things that maybe we could conclude from all this given the context of what you said is that you can tell the tyrants they use fear and compulsion and they don't use invitation. So one of the rules we put together for ark was invitation only play. We're going to do this playfully. Yeah. And we're not going to use force or fear ever. You have to use invitation. And so I I don't know what you think about that is a distinguish imagine it's a distinguishing it's the distinguishing characteristic between the wannabe tyrants and the true leaders. The true leaders say here's an offer. Would you accept this of your own free will? And the tyrants say the apocalypse is coming and everything and we we are allowed to do everything to forestall it. Right. Right. including control you and everything that you do. That's the problem. Yeah. Right. And that's how they get people to fall in line. They fall in line through fear. Yeah. Well, fear and force. It's like also, you know, you have to do this because the apocalypse is looming, which is always in a way true. Always. There's always Well, there's always an apocalypse of one form or another looming. The question is, what do you do about it? And terrifying people anywhere in the world right now, right? You you might be experiencing the apocalypse right now if you live in Gaza. Yeah. You might be experiencing the apocalypse right now if you're in Yemen, if you're a Houthi, right? The the end of the world is always coming, right? And f