Joe Rogan Experience #1933 - Jordan Peterson

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   (drumming music) Joe Rogan podcast.…

   1. NANarrator0:01

      (drumming music) Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

   2. JRJoe Rogan0:06

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music) Okay. Well, hello, Jordan Peterson.

   3. JPJordan Peterson0:14

      Hi, Mr. Rogan.

   4. JRJoe Rogan0:14

      I didn't even notice you have a, a two-toned suit going on. You're a wild man.

   5. JPJordan Peterson0:17

      Can I tell you about the suit?

   6. JRJoe Rogan0:18

      Please do.

   7. JPJordan Peterson0:19

      Okay. Well-

   8. JRJoe Rogan0:20

      What's happening with that?

   9. JPJordan Peterson0:21

      ... company made this for me, LGFG. They made me a dozen suits.

   10. JRJoe Rogan0:25

       Yeah?

   11. JPJordan Peterson0:25

       One for each rule from 12 Rules For Life.

   12. JRJoe Rogan0:27

       Ah.

   13. JPJordan Peterson0:27

       The rules are printed on the back of this-

   14. JRJoe Rogan0:29

       Ah.

   15. JPJordan Peterson0:29

       ... underneath the collar. This is a heaven and hell suit, so it's quite fun. So this is-

   16. JRJoe Rogan0:34

       Which one's hell?

   17. JPJordan Peterson0:35

       I'll show you in a sec. So this is ...

   18. JRJoe Rogan0:37

       (laughs)

   19. JPJordan Peterson0:37

       Hell's red, Joe. Come on. Jesus.

   20. JRJoe Rogan0:39

       But that's not really red.

   21. JPJordan Peterson0:40

       Well, you know-

   22. JRJoe Rogan0:40

       It's, like, a magenta, right?

   23. JPJordan Peterson0:41

       ... it's stylish. Yeah. It's ... Okay. Hell's magenta, you know?

   24. JRJoe Rogan0:44

       Okay. Hell's magenta.

   25. JPJordan Peterson0:44

       Yeah. It's designer hell.

   26. JRJoe Rogan0:46

       Ah, nice.

   27. JPJordan Peterson0:46

       You know? So this is made out of sheep's wool, and this is made out of goat's wool, so that's pretty funny. And then in here you've got your basic heaven lining and your basic hell lining.

   28. JRJoe Rogan0:57

       Oh. Okay.

   29. JPJordan Peterson0:58

       Yeah, so sheeps-

   30. JRJoe Rogan0:59

       I don't think I've ever seen a man walk around with a ... I think you're one up.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Mm-hmm. …

   1. JPJordan Peterson15:00

      So you know, you can screw somebody once and maybe twice, but then they figure it out and then word gets around and so in the real world two things happen. Psychopaths have to be itinerant so they can find new people to exploit and the other thing that happens is generally non-psychopathic males who are fairly aggressive keep the psychopaths under control. And so part of the reason that women like men who have some capacity for aggression but who are still productive and reciprocal is that men who are productive and reciprocal who have some capacity for aggression can keep the real monsters at bay. So it's hard on women, eh, because (laughs) they have to navigate that really thin line-

   2. JRJoe Rogan15:40

      Mm-hmm.

   3. JPJordan Peterson15:41

      ... between productive generosity and the capacity for aggression. That's a really tough thing to navigate. That's basically the story of Beauty and the Beast, the Disney movie, right? 'Cause Gaston is a narcissistic psychopath and The Beast is someone capable of aggression but he's not tamed into a reciprocal relationship. It's also the basis of the most fundamental female pornographic fantasy and the Google guys figured that out, you know, 15 years ago when they analyzed billions of sex fantasy searches by men and women. Men go for visual imagery, but women go for story and the story is the same. It's, you know, innocent young woman, uh, with a lot to offer but kind of hidden finds some male, five categories of men, vampire, werewolf, pirate, surgeon, billionaire and he's, you know, kind of an aggressive guy but he's capable of being tamed into an intimate relationship. That's the standard female pornographic fantasy and it's pretty much the standard fantasy of romance and so you can see, you know, what women are trying to do in that situation is they're trying to find some guy that's got the capacity for mayhem but that's under control but who can integrate that into a productive, generous reciprocal relationship and so, well...

   4. JRJoe Rogan16:57

      It's fascinating because the, the, the capacity for violence and the capacity for aggression is one of the things that's been actively muted-

   5. JPJordan Peterson17:07

      Yeah. Yeah.

   6. JRJoe Rogan17:07

      ... in our male population.

   7. JPJordan Peterson17:09

      Yeah, well it's a, it's ... There's a bunch of reasons for that and I, some of them turn into positive feedback loops like they're sort of self-fulfilling prophecies. So there's a lot of women out there who've never had a positive relationship with any male in their life, right? And maybe not only not a positive relationship but really a series of pretty negative relationships. And so women like that are very leery of any expression of male ability of any sort 'cause they can't distinguish productive competence from arbitrary power and because they're trying to defend themselves because they've been hurt repeatedly, maybe they come from broken families and catastrophically arranged neighborhoods, you know, one of the tactics that can be used in that situation is just to try to do everything you can to distance yourself as f- much as you can from any display of male ability because it can't be distinguished from psychopathy, can't be distinguished from the use of power. It takes a sophisticated woman to be able to make that distinction so the other thing you see too is that young women are much more likely to be seduced by psychopaths than older women-

   8. JRJoe Rogan18:14

      Mm-hmm.

   9. JPJordan Peterson18:15

      ... 'cause the psychopaths mimic competence.... that's what a narcissist does too. They're a- they're confident, and women read confidence as a marker of competence, and that's reasonable, but that opens up the, what would you ... It opens up the space for exploitation. 'Cause if you can mimic confidence, that's false confidence, narcissistic false confidence, then you look competent, and that works particularly well on naive, young women.

   10. JRJoe Rogan18:42

       Mm.

   11. JPJordan Peterson18:42

       And, of course, they get exploited by people like that, and they think, "Well, that's what men are like."

   12. JRJoe Rogan18:46

       Right.

   13. JPJordan Peterson18:46

       Yeah. Then women like that, you know, they have boys, and then they're afraid of the boys whenever they express anything looking like masculine competence, and they basically emasculate the boys, and then the boys get bitter, and then they mistreat women, and the whole bloody thing just spirals outta control. And so ... And that's where we are-

   14. JRJoe Rogan19:04

       That's where we are (laughs) .

   15. JPJordan Peterson19:05

       ... in many ways, yeah (laughs) . Yeah, yeah.

   16. JRJoe Rogan19:06

       What a strange place to be, isn't it?

   17. JPJordan Peterson19:07

       Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah, well-

   18. JRJoe Rogan19:09

       Yeah.

   19. JPJordan Peterson19:09

       ... unintended consequence of familial breakdown, that's a huge part of it.

   20. JRJoe Rogan19:14

       So we decided to have this conversation because of what's going on with you in Canada.

   21. JPJordan Peterson19:18

       Oh, yeah.

   22. JRJoe Rogan19:19

       And that-

   23. JPJordan Peterson19:20

       That.

   24. JRJoe Rogan19:20

       ... your clinical psychology license is in jeopardy because you have opinions about politics that they disagree with, which is a very dangerous and bizarre turn of events.

   25. JPJordan Peterson19:36

       Well, it's your fault, actually. You know, I told you-

   26. JRJoe Rogan19:38

       Oh.

   27. JPJordan Peterson19:38

       ... I think a, a week or so ago when we talked about this, that ... Okay, so let me give you some background here.

   28. JRJoe Rogan19:43

       Okay.

   29. JPJordan Peterson19:44

       So.

   30. JRJoe Rogan19:44

       I wanna know how it's my fault (laughs) .
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Right, right. …

   1. JRJoe Rogan30:00

      up that we were close to losing all life on earth.

   2. JPJordan Peterson30:02

      Right, right.

   3. JRJoe Rogan30:03

      And then this can, this can happen.

   4. JPJordan Peterson30:04

      Yeah, well, see, the, the, the antithesis, uh, to that is to believe in something like the paradisal, the intrinsic paradisal stability of well-balanced mother nature.

   5. JRJoe Rogan30:15

      Right.

   6. JPJordan Peterson30:15

      It's like yeah, a bit, but no, not really. There's a lot of variability, a lot-

   7. JRJoe Rogan30:22

      A lot.

   8. JPJordan Peterson30:22

      ... and of course that kind of variability-... that's hard on people because you want a certain (laughs) amount of stability so you don't die. But-

   9. NANarrator30:29

      Right. But, and it doesn't deny that human beings have an impact on this either.

   10. JPJordan Peterson30:33

       Like, no, no. Well, this is why, like, this is why I really respect Bjorn Lomberg, you know, because Lo- Lo- Lomberg's hard to grasp because he forces you to think complexly, you know? He says-

   11. NANarrator30:43

       Yes.

   12. JPJordan Peterson30:43

       ... "Well, we don't have one problem, carbon dioxide," which is, you know, I don't even think it's clear that carbon dioxide is actually a problem, but we can leave that aside. That'll get me in trouble with the College of Psychologists again. But, you know, Lomberg says-

   13. NANarrator30:55

       It's a factor.

   14. JPJordan Peterson30:56

       ... "Look, you know..." Yeah. It's a fa- it's a factor. Yeah, yeah. But there's lots of factors and God only knows what the most pressing problems that confront us truly are. When I, I wandered through the ecological sustainability literature about 10 years ago and, you know, I concluded couple of things. One was that the best way forward to a sustainable planet is to make everyone who's poor rich as fast as you possibly can.

   15. NANarrator31:19

       And that's Lomberg's position too.

   16. JPJordan Peterson31:20

       Yeah, not to put limits to growth on, because-

   17. NANarrator31:22

       Right.

   18. JPJordan Peterson31:22

       ... turns out if you get people above about $5,000 a year in average GDP, they start taking long term view of the future instead of scrabbling around in the dirt trying to get lunch, you know? And you're gonna burn everything up around you to stay alive if you have to.

   19. NANarrator31:37

       Right.

   20. JPJordan Peterson31:37

       But if you, if you got a bit of wealth and now you can think over, you know, maybe a 20-year period, which is quite the damn luxury, then you actually start being concerned about, you know, the quality, the aesthetic quality of the local environment. And so, I was so excited when I found that data because I thought, "Oh, this is so cool." It means that we could have our cake and eat it too. We could work really hard to provide cheap, reliable energy, you know, at the lowest cost possible to the widest number of people worldwide. And the emergent consequence of that would be the whole planet would clean itself up. So that, wouldn't that be great? 'Cause we could make our goal the eradication of absolute poverty, which we actually done pretty good at eliminating over the last 15 years. But we could really make that a goal. And then one of the consequences of that, inevitable consequences would be a greener and, and healthier planet. And then you think, "Well, why aren't we doing that?" (laughs) And that's a question all right. And I think part of the reason is I've been trying to understand the driving ideas underneath this globalist utopian tyranny that seems to be developing from the top down. And I think it's driven at least in part by this religious vision that I already described, you know, that you have to construe culture itself, especially industrial culture as the tyrannical father raping and pillaging everything in its way, which is unbelievably dangerous way to think, too one-sided. And, uh, the, the, the idea that you have to impose limits to growth on people in order to have a sustainable planet, and that's allied with a view that probably stems all the way back to people like Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s who really believe, really believe, truly that maybe the planet should only have 500 million people on it, or a billion, you know, in relative poverty, or two billion barely scraping by because otherwise they're gonna be wrecking everything and, you know, controlled by some top-down authority that makes bloody well sure that no one's consuming too much. And so when I look at ideas like that, that first assumption, you know, the planet has too many people on it, it's like I don't like to hear people say that. 'Cause when I hear that, I think, "Okay, buddy, who exactly are you thinking about getting rid of?"

   21. NANarrator33:48

       Right.

   22. JPJordan Peterson33:48

       Oh, well, it's not like that. It's like, yeah, it's like that.

   23. NANarrator33:51

       It has to be like that.

   24. JPJordan Peterson33:51

       It, it is absolutely like that. So, you know, it's easy to get all paranoid conspiracy theorist about the WEF say, and (laughs) maybe there's some utility in that, but, you know, I don't think anybody's sitting at Davos going, "Well, we ag- we gotta scrap 7 billion people." But if the underlying narrative is the one I just described, you know, virginal planet, tyrannical patriarchy and rapacious individual, and you believe, well, we're overpopulated like Paul Ehrlich has believed since really literally the mid-1960s, then how is it not going to be that the policies that you craft stemming from that narrative are colored by the belief that there's far too many people? And like I've already felt that I'd been at war for the last six months, and I would say it's war because what I observed happening in Europe when I was there last was that, well, you can see this, you don't have to be in Europe to see it, but it's more direct if you're there, is that it's pretty damn clear that the globalist utopians are willing to sacrifice the poor for the sake of the planet, you know? And they're doing that by cranking energy prices up through the roof, and that means that people die. Lomberg has estimated that three, maybe you have turn your thermostat down by three degrees, right? Save the planet. We don't have enough energy. We'll pay you not to use your electricity between 5:00 and 6:00, which is what they're doing in the UK. You turn your damn thermostat down three degrees, that sounds like nothing, but if you're old, that radically increases the probability that you'll get a respiratory disease and die. You know, and if the Europeans would've had a cold winter, and that could still happen, Lomberg estimated it'd wipe out 135,000 people. It's like, well, you know, we're just making energy more expensive. It's like, what do you mean you're just doing that? So imagine the economic system. It's a pyramid. There's a bunch of people at the top. They have almost all the money. That's par for the course for any productive system. Any system that's productive ends up with a distribution like that. It's pretty, it's like a law of nature. And then you move farther down the pyramid till you get down to the bottom where most of the people are, and they're barely clinging on to the edge of reality, right? Doesn't take much of a crisis to tip them into, you know, death. And then you crank up energy prices. Well, what happens is you just take a bunch of those people at the bottom of the distribution, the poor that the left is so, you know, hypothetically concerned with, and you just, they're just done. They go from barely hanging on to not hanging on, and their kids go from having some ghost of a chance of opportunity to having none. And I could see this coming. You really see what happening in Germany and the UK, you know, where we have this absolute rat's nest of way more expensive energy, and, and this is where it gets extremely perverse, you know, you might say-Okay, look, we have to save the future poor, and so now, some of the present poor are gonna have to suffer. Well, that's convenient for you if you happen not to be one of those poor people. But let's give the devil his due and say, "Okay." It's like, that'd be fine with me, not really. That'd be fine with me if the consequence of your actions, raising energy prices, for example, actually pro- produced an improvement in those things you wanted to improve. So for example, energy's more expensive but now the air is cleaner. But that isn't what's happened in Germany.

   25. JRJoe Rogan37:07

       Right.

   26. JPJordan Peterson37:07

       What's happened in Germany is energy is, like, five times as expensive and the coal plants are back on. So it's like, even by your own criteria for success, you failed, and you did it at the expense of the poor. And, you know, the World Bank estimated, I don't remember how many months ago, it's probably nine months ago, that we're putting 350 million people at- on the brink of starvation because we're cranking energy prices up. And so for me, it's like, th- that's 350 million people. That's three times as many as the communists killed, you know, in their six decades of trying. And if your, if your cure for the planet is, well, you know, we gotta put 350 million poor people in jeopardy just so that things are hypothetically better in 100 years, I think, yeah, I don't think so, buddy. And also, it's a little bit too convenient for me that your prescriptions to save the planet are accompanied by this assi- insistence that the only way forward to that is to give you all the power. It's like, there's a bit of a moral hazard in that, don't you think? It's like, "I'm just saving the planet, give me all the power." It's like, you want to save the planet or do you want the power? And let's, let's put the first, the second one first, because the probability that you're a saint or the Messiah is pretty damn low. So that's the danger of the Davos crowd.

   27. JRJoe Rogan38:26

       It's a very bizarre narrative that doesn't get challenged, and I d- I don't hear this very nuanced, complex perspective, like the one you're laying out right now. I don't hear it that often. No, I don't hear it at all. I hear it from you and maybe a couple other people-

   28. JPJordan Peterson38:40

       Yeah.

   29. JRJoe Rogan38:40

       ... that I, I actively seek out.

   30. JPJordan Peterson38:42

       Yeah.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Mm-hmm. …

   1. JPJordan Peterson45:00

      it's clear that you're manifesting this underlying tetrad of personality traits. Like, if you use a l-, odd acronym, and you're throwing out a, you know, a joke at someone, that, this is a habitual pattern of doing nothing but provoking people online and using deception and lies to do it to attract attention to yourself. You know, it has to be a very consistent pattern. But Paulhouse, first of all, and his crew of researchers and people who have been influenced by him, have laid out this four-dimensional structure of the dark side, let's say. And they've shown that hyper users of social media, Instagram for example, and, and people who do a lot of anonymous shit posting, are characterized by, you know, what, what would you call it? Uh, domination by those four traits. And part of the reason for that, and this is very, very dangerous to our whole society, I think, is that you gotta ask yourself what keeps the psychopaths under control in the normal population? And the answer seems to be, especially on the male side, is that narcissistic, aggressive men get put in their place by non-narcissistic aggressive men. And that usually has to do with something like the threat of physical intervention. You know how it is if you get a bunch of guys together. I can make a joke about you. You know, and I could even make a joke that was, uh, that sort of put you down. But, uh, the joke would have to be funny, you'd have to have the opportunity to reciprocate, and you'd have to believe that I was doing it in good spirit. 'Cause if I just used the opportunity to, you know, stick the knife in, we're not gonna get along with each other very long. And we know that, and men know that when they talk to each other. And so, part of what keeps dialogue among men civilized is the possibility that it won't be civilized if it goes too sideways. And everybody knows that. But there is none of that online, 'cause anybody can post anything about anyone, no matter how denigrating and derisive, especially if they do it anonymously. And there's zero consequence. In fact, quite the opposite. If they're good at it, they get a lot of attention, and the social media companies will monetize it. And so not (laughs) only is it not inhibited, it's actually facilitated. And this isn't a trivial problem, 'cause if the psychopaths multiply enough, they take the whole society out.

   2. JRJoe Rogan47:16

      Mm-hmm.

   3. JPJordan Peterson47:16

      So, I think virtualization enables psychopathy. And it's worse than just the trolling bit. That's bad enough, because it pollutes political dialogue, and it makes everyone think that everything is more unstable than it really is. But online criminality is actually a terrible, uh, plague. You know, I don't think there's an old person in North America who isn't being targeted by some gang of psychopaths who's, you know, documented all of their interests and their locale, and who knows how much money's in their bank account, and who's doing everything they possibly can at every second to leverage access to it. That's just happening continually. So-

   4. JRJoe Rogan47:53

      Well, that's certainly algorithms, right, for a lot of people that get t- trapped into these sort of situations, where people are constantly throwing at them things that are opportunities for them to either make money, or get this-

   5. JPJordan Peterson48:05

      Yeah.

   6. JRJoe Rogan48:05

      ... or avoid pain.

   7. JPJordan Peterson48:06

      Or get a refund or, yeah.

   8. JRJoe Rogan48:06

      Yeah, get a refund.

   9. JPJordan Peterson48:07

      You bet.

   10. JRJoe Rogan48:08

       Yeah.

   11. JPJordan Peterson48:08

       Or they befriend them.

   12. JRJoe Rogan48:09

       Mm-hmm.

   13. JPJordan Peterson48:09

       You know? They get, they get it in, and some lonely old character who's not c- functioning cognitively c- quite like he used to, you know, he gets sucked in by someone pretending to be his friend and offered a great investment opportunity.

   14. JRJoe Rogan48:21

       Yeah.

   15. JPJordan Peterson48:21

       And... Yeah, yeah.

   16. JRJoe Rogan48:21

       Yeah.

   17. JPJordan Peterson48:22

       And it's very, very, very difficult to track this sort of thing online. So, you get the real enabling of the criminals, because how the hell, if they're anonymous, how the hell do you keep them? You know, how do you hold them to, to account? But, and then the secondary derivation of that is something like trolling. And that's really not so good either, because...... if the psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian sadists are dominating the political discourse, then ordinary people look at that and think, "Oh my God, everything's going to hell. Everyone's really extreme and really ..." It's a non-random sample. And so, you know ... Y- I can really see this in my own life, you know, because if you just looked at me virtually, you'd think, like, I was the world's most embattled person in some way, you know. Maybe not the world's most, but I'm up in the top 10 maybe. But in my real life, then that ... Like, I don't have any problems, you know. I go around from town to town or from city to city, and every interaction I have with people on the street is positive. They either don't know me, which is fine, or they do and then we have a positive interaction. And I've only had, like, three negative interactions with people in real life in the last six years. Like, they stand out 'cause they're not fun, but they're extremely rare. But online it's like, "Well, 50% of the people oppose Jordan Peterson." It's like, no they don't. (laughs) It's not, it's not even 1%. So, it's a w- we're building a virtual world that doesn't sample the real world very well and that's not much different from building a delusion. So, not good. Very, very un- very unsettling. So-

   18. JRJoe Rogan49:57

       That's Twitter.

   19. JPJordan Peterson49:58

       Yeah. Yeah.

   20. JRJoe Rogan49:59

       Well, certainly Twitter before Elon Musk came along.

   21. JPJordan Peterson50:00

       Yeah, well Twitter's better, but it's still quite the snake pit.

   22. JRJoe Rogan50:03

       Yeah.

   23. JPJordan Peterson50:03

       You know, I- I ... What I ... One of the things I- I think might be done about that ... See, I don't think that ... I've- I've made this claim on Twitter, that- that, uh, there's something cowardly about anonymous posting. And I'm not gonna retract that, 'cause I believe that in 99% of the cases, that's true. Now, people say, "Well, you know, if you're a whistleblower you have to be anonymous, and what about people in totalitarian states and-

   24. JRJoe Rogan50:29

       Yeah.

   25. JPJordan Peterson50:29

       ... or in- in a company?" Well same, that's the whistleblowing problem, I think. Yeah, 1% of anonymous posters are heroes but n- 80% of them are Machiavellians. And so-

   26. JRJoe Rogan50:40

       Well m- m- b- there's also the fact there are people that don't wanna get in trouble at work.

   27. JPJordan Peterson50:43

       Yeah, I know, I know.

   28. JRJoe Rogan50:44

       You know?

   29. JPJordan Peterson50:44

       Well that's p- kind of the whistleblower problem. It's that-

   30. JRJoe Rogan50:46

       But not even whistleblowers. I mean, people that just have opinions that vary-
5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

   Yeah. …

   1. JRJoe Rogan1:00:00

      and isn't-

   2. JPJordan Peterson1:00:00

      Yeah.

   3. JRJoe Rogan1:00:00

      ... really making enough money to have-

   4. JPJordan Peterson1:00:02

      Yeah.

   5. JRJoe Rogan1:00:02

      ... a nest egg saved away.

   6. JPJordan Peterson1:00:04

      Yeah, you bet. Yeah, maybe a single m-

   7. JRJoe Rogan1:00:05

      First thing's first.

   8. JPJordan Peterson1:00:06

      ... is it single mother? And-

   9. JRJoe Rogan1:00:07

      Right.

   10. JPJordan Peterson1:00:07

       Yeah, absolutely. Well, there's a woman in, in Canada right now, a nurse who's name unfortunately I forget, who's being hauled over the coals by her college for, uh, you know, making the radical claim that there are only two sexes, and so I know. And, and, you know, part of the reason I'm pursuing this action with regard to the Ontario College of Psychologists, well, there's two reasons really. One, three. One is, you know, leave me the hell alone guys. You've been on my case non-stop for seven years, not once before that in 20 years of practice. There's no complaints ever levied against me.It wasn't until I started to become, you know, relatively well known publicly that the college came after me. And seven years of that gets to be a bit much, especially now that there's 13 lawsuits compiled up and all of them are for political opinions and half of them have been put forward on false grounds. But, but even that's not enough for me to engage in the battle. The reason I'm engaging in the battle is, well first of all, you want me to do social media retraining so I communicate better according to your experts? It's like, experts by what criteria exactly? What's a social media communication expert? You got any documentation that that even exists as a field? And how do you know that if you have that social media expert train me, that I'm gonna be a better therapist? There's no body of data that suggests that in the least. So I'm not going down that route, that's for sure.

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:01:29

       We should, we should explain that because-

   12. JPJordan Peterson1:01:30

       Oh yeah, well so I've already been sentenced, right?

   13. JRJoe Rogan1:01:32

       ... that is one of the things, yeah.

   14. JPJordan Peterson1:01:33

       This, this isn't a threat by the college. This is what, what the situation already is. I haven't been hauled in front of their disciplinary board yet, but they've already convicted me of disgracing the profession and sentenced me to an indefinite period of reeducation. And that's the second most serious punishment that they can levy against a professional. The first is to take away the license. The second is to undergo this retraining and to publicly announce the necessity for that, which they've already done in my case. And so now I have to sit down with these experts, at my expense, for an indefinite period of time until I'm trained properly, whatever the hell that means, by the criteria of the so-called experts and the college. And that isn't pending an investigation. That's already in place.

   15. JRJoe Rogan1:02:23

       It's such a wild request too.

   16. JPJordan Peterson1:02:25

       It's, it-

   17. JRJoe Rogan1:02:25

       Retraining? Just even the way they phrase it, it's so bizarre, so Orwellian.

   18. JPJordan Peterson1:02:31

       Yeah. Yeah well, like I said, it's your fault, you know-

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:02:33

       Social media. (laughs)

   20. JPJordan Peterson1:02:34

       ... 'cause it's, the whole transcript of our last conversation, I don't imagine they'll be that happy with this one. So, but the other reason I'm pursuing it, and to the degree that I'm able to keep my head clear during this process, 'cause it definitely makes me angry and really made me angry over Christmas when I was spending Christmas going through the minutia of all these bloody lawsuits, trying to figure out what the hell they were up to instead of, you know, taking a bit of a break and having some time with my family. And so I was very upset about that, but to the degree that I'm upset about it, I'm not doing it right, hey?

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:03:04

       Yep.

   22. JPJordan Peterson1:03:04

       Because this can't be personal. It can't be about me. Part of the reason that I wanna pursue this and part of the reason we're pursuing an objection to what they're doing on charter of rights grounds in Canada is because they're interfering with my freedom of conscience and speech. And again, it isn't even the case that the reason that that's a problem is because it's about me. The reason it's a problem is 'cause the colleges in general, like the regulatory boards of professionals, are doing this to everyone. Lawyers, physicians, teachers, massage therapists. There's all these licensed professions and if you're, if you're a licensed profession, the government establishes a board of your peers to regulate conduct of the professionals. Now in, in a functional time, all that happens then is that generally the people who get in trouble get in trouble with their own clients, right? With the people they've been de- dealing with directly. And then the board steps in on the side of the person who's been injured by a, you know, a pathologically practicing professional. And fair enough, but now it's been weaponized and it's (laughs) now it's being weaponized as a political tool too, and it's not like activists don't know that. You know, and it's so preposterous because I have 20 million people following me on social media, you know, and God only knows how many views of my videos, for example, or the interviews you and I have done, it's tens of millions, and it, like they, they... What? How many people complained? 20 out of millions? And then the college didn't have to pursue those complaints. They can inve- they have to investigate them, so I don't know what they're doing now because of course they've been inundated by thousands of complaints about their own behavior, so I have no idea what they're gonna do about that. But they didn't have to investigate. They chose to investigate, and as I said, they did that despite the fact that half the complainants claimed to be my clients and weren't. So what we have here is we have 13 people who complained about me hypothetically doing harm to someone they didn't know to someone who they didn't know anyone who knew on, as a consequence of things I said on social media. And that all of them, not only were they fourth hand claims of harm, which, you know, no psychologist would ever claim that a fourth hand account of harm constituted a valid measurement, so the bloody college is violating its own measurement standards by even pursuing this. But, so not only are the based on fourth hand information and then an outright lie, which is, they were clients of mine, they're, they're also predicated on the assumption that it's okay to go after a professional for expressing political criticism. 'Cause like, literally half of them are, well I said something about Trudeau. I said something about one of his top aides. I said something about Jacinda Ardern. I said something about a, an Ottawa city councilor in relationship to the trucker convoy. You know? I said something about climate. Every single one of the complaints is political. And so why is that a problem? Well, see if you can figure it out for yourself. That'd be the first answer, and the second is I have a friend in Canada, very well known physician, international reputation, and a reasonably decent secondary income stream. And when this all hit, I reached out to him. He's a very brave guy. He's done a lot of writing that could easily get him in trouble.... I said, "Look, maybe I could get you and Bruce Party," this lawyer at, uh, Queen's University who's going after the, essentially the college that functions for lawyers. I said, "We should do three letters, same time, saying, you know, that the colleges are chilling free speech in Canada with psychologists, with s- with physicians and with lawyers." And he said he didn't have his house in order enough to dare to take on the college. And the problem with that is that I don't know anybody in Canada who's a physician that's more well-situated than him, or braver. And even he was loath to do it. He'll do it eventually, but not now. And so here's the situation we're in, for all you who are listening. If you go to see a professional when you have a crisis, psychologist or a physician or a lawyer, let's say, you bloody well better hope those people are telling you the truth. So here's an example. Let's say you got a 13-year-old girl and she has body dysmorphia. That's very common among 13-year-old girls, especially if they hit puberty early. Because when women hit puberty there are levels of negative emotion go up. That's very well-established clinical finding. And the reason for that, likely, is that when women hit puberty the world becomes more dangerous to them, right? 'Cause they're sexually vulnerable, and that's also when you get body dimorphism develops, so men get bigger than women. And so you know, women should be more intimidated in relationship to physical combat, 'cause they're not strong enough to prevail, so they should be a little more anxious about that. And so they're sexually vulnerable, so they should be a little more anxious about that. And then also, they should be a little more anxious 'cause they have to take care of infants. And if you're gonna take care of an infant you should be a little more sensitive to threat, 'cause the infant is extremely vulnerable. So anyways, that kicks into w- in women when they hit puberty. It's very well-documented. This is why women have three to five times the rates of anxiety and depression worldwide, it's 'cause their baseline levels of negative emotion are higher. Okay, so, so now ... But that also translates into something very specific for women. So anxiety and depression, shame, guilt, the all those negative emotions, they make you self-conscious and self-consciousness takes the form of bodily- bodily shame in women, much more than in men. So if you're a girl and you hit puberty early, so you're dealing with the complexities of all that when you're still pretty immature, and you get ... and your negative emotion goes up, the probability that you're going to negatively evaluate your body is virtually 100%. There's no difference, especially in women, between feeling bad about their bodies and being high in negative emotion. It's the same thing. So I just interviewed this Chloe Cole who's de-transitioning and suing her medical, so-called medical professionals who rushed her into a double mastectomy at 15, and w- the wounds have never properly healed, by the way, and so that's her life. You know, and I basically ran her through a clinical interview. I said, "Hey kiddo, you know, when you were 12 and miserable about your body, what the hell was going on?" She said, "Well, you know, I- I- I thought more like a boy." She's a little autistic so she's more thing-oriented than people-oriented, and so sh- she didn't get along with girls that well. And then she was dreaming that she'd turn out like Kim Kardashian but she turned out to have kind of a boyish figure, and then she thought, "Well, I'll never really be a good, you know, full woman, so maybe I should be a boy." And she started to toy with that, and then she went to her medical professionals with this body dysmorphia. And instead of sitting her down and saying, "Look kid, you hit puberty kinda early. You got a partially autistic personality style that- that makes you a little more comfortable with boys than girls, and every girl there is f- suffers body dysmorphia at your age, so just, you know, tap her cool, you know? The fact that you're embarrassed about yourself and feeling inadequate, it's like, that doesn't mean you're marked out as pathological. It certainly doesn't mean you're a boy." No one ever told her that. That's like basic information, man. They just rushed her along the pathway. Puberty blockers at 13, and then a double mastectomy at 15.

   23. NANarrator1:10:50

       W- what is causing this rush to that? Like, wha- how did this happen and how did this happen so quickly?

   24. JPJordan Peterson1:10:57

       Well, this is partly tied up with this issue of the college. So, so here's one way into it. So now professionals are bound by law to offer gender-affirming advice. They're bound by law. Okay, so this is what this means. If you bring your 13-year-old in to be evaluated by a physician or a psychologist who ... and maybe she has high levels of neuroticism tilting towards depression and anxiety, and then that's making itself manifest in bodily discomfort. Now that's being shaped by this cultural fad that insists that if you feel uncomfortable in your body it's because you're of the opposite gender. That's the psychological epidemic part of it, and we can talk about that in a little bit more detail. But now you're duty-bound by law, if you're a professional, to say, "Oh, you think you're a boy? Yeah. Absolutely. You e- absolutely 100% you are. What can we do to facilitate that move forward?" And that all got, what would you call? What? Pushed into the law under the guise of the elimination of conversion therapy. So unbeliev- ... Now the problem with that is, you see, if you're a therapist or a physician you don't affirm someone's identity. That's not your job, and your job is not to deny their identity either. Your job is to help them explore their identity and hopefully to develop it. And so someone comes to you, maybe they have body dysmorphia, and so maybe they're anorexic, that's a form of body dysmorphia. And so the first thing you do, if you have any sense, is you note that that's stemming out of an underlying more global proclivity to suffer from depression and anxiety, so that's the big elephant in the room.... depression and anxiety. So, if the transactivist types say, "Well, the body dysmorphic types are more likely to have suicidal thoughts," it's not because they have body dysmorphia, it's because they're prone to depression and anxiety, and depressed and anxious people are more likely to have suicidal thoughts. And maybe body dysmorphia adds a bit to that, but nobody really knows. It probably adds some, but the fundamental issue is one of depression and anxiety. So now, you're suffering from, you know, unspecified self-consciousness, and the culture twists around to offer you a narrative. And the narrative is, "Oh, well, you're in the wrong body." And then that carrot is, and this is part of it gets extraordinarily pathological is, a lot of these kids who are suffering from this alienation are unpopular. And so ... And now they're being enticed, like, "Yeah, well, you're not unpopular. You're interestingly special." So if you just take this carrot, you know, you're the opposite sex, all of a sudden you're not a victim, you're a brave ... what would you call? You're a brave seeker after your redemptive identity, and now you can be elevated and you can be treated specially. And my God, you know, if you're an unpopular teenager, how could anything be possibly more attractive than that? And then you also think, "Well, why are teenagers gullible in that way?" You know? "Why do they go along with the crowd?" And the answer to that is, that's what you're supposed to do when you're a teenager. That's your job, right? 'Cause first of all, you're with your parents and you're not yet a fully fledged individual, and so what you have to do is you have to become part of the group. And if you're not part of the group, well, maybe you're a stellar, you know, creative genius and you're exceptional in that manner, but more likely you're just a loser who couldn't fit in. And that sucks. That's for sure. So your job when you're a teenager is to fit in, as every teenager knows. You know? And maybe not just to fit in, but, you know, to fit in in a positive way that elevates the community. But let ... we could just settle for fitting in. And so t- teenagers are wired to go along with the crowd, and then if the crowd is offering something pathological, and that happens

6. 1:15:00 – 1:19:19

   But the difference between…

   1. JPJordan Peterson1:15:00

      all the time, you get a psychological epidemic. And I knew that. I told you, I- I told the Senate this in 2017. And why did I know? Well, I knew the literature. The- we've tracked psychological epidemics going back 300 years. 300 years. Here are some of them: multiple personality disorder, its cycles in society. It disappears, then there's one case, then it spreads like mad. Then there's multiple personality disorder everywhere, teenage girls mostly. Then people get skeptical about it, and it dies, and maybe it disappears for a whole generation or two. Then a case pops up. It just does this. That's happened for 300 years. Um, cutting was a psychological epidemic. Bulimia was a psychological epidemic. Anorexia was a psychological epidemic. The satanic daycare ritual abuse accusations that came out in the 1980s, that was a psychological epidemic. And the, the rule basically is, is that if you, if you confuse people about a fundamental element of their identity, then those who are already so confused they're barely hanging on are gonna fall prey to that and all hell's gonna break loose. And that's exactly what's happened in the, you know, in the trans, in the trans situation. It's just unbelievable.

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:16:13

      But the difference between this one as opposed to the other ones like multiple personality disorder is that this one is being reinforced culturally. Like, y- you, you are rewarded.

   3. JPJordan Peterson1:16:24

      Yeah, well the multiple personality disorder, that happened there too because you'd get a lot of attention from media, especially the early ... the people who, who are the first, who display the first symptoms of multiple personality disorder. You know, you get a psychologist or a psychiatrist or an alienist, if you go back far enough, who reports this fascinating case of multiple personality. And, you know, there are people who are dissociative, so they kind of have multiple personalities. They're united by memory. They're usually creative people, 'cause creative people have multiple personalities. That's what makes them creative. They're not the same from day to day. You could even say they have fluid identities. You know, and so the claims of the gender types that some people have fluid identities, it's like, yeah, creative people do. They're the purple-haired types with, like, nose rings and tattoos. That's all part of trait openness. You combine that with high neuroticism, negative emotion, then you get people who are fluid in their identity who are also prone to depression and anxiety. So y- that's, that's also crystal clear. And so ... Well, so ... Look, if you're an outsider, will you wanna be a dull and contemptible outsider, or do you wanna be an interesting and compelling and nouveau, exciting outsider? Well, you know, if you're a teenage girl and you've been unpopular, that's brutal, eh? 'Cause, you know, you get tied up with those mean girls.

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:17:51

      Yeah.

   5. JPJordan Peterson1:17:51

      And they shun you and exclude you. It's absolutely brutal. You know, you're just living a peripheral existence. You got no friends, everyone's contemptuous of you, you know, and maybe that's partly ... 'cause you have some, something that marks you out from the norm, like a tilt towards autism. 'Cause a lot of the people, it was just released with the Tavistock staff, you know, the Tavistock closed down in the UK, that was the big gender surgery performing institute in the UK which they closed it down.

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:18:19

      How, how was that closed down? What happened?

   7. JPJordan Peterson1:18:20

      The government closed it down.

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:18:23

      So the govern-

   9. JPJordan Peterson1:18:23

      Yeah, because they knew that they, they figured out in the UK that, wow, the rates of transgender transformation requests were skyrocketing. And even the people at the clinic knew that they were rushing people along the transformation pipeline way faster than they should have, without proper clinical evaluation.

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:18:40

       What a-

   11. JPJordan Peterson1:18:40

       There's a thousand lawsuits out against the Tavistock in the UK now.

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:18:43

       Wow.

   13. JPJordan Peterson1:18:43

       A thousand.... uh, yeah, out of, I think, 30,000, uh, transition processes.

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:18:50

       So, what is the difference between the way the UK is processing this versus the way we are?

   15. JPJordan Peterson1:18:55

       Well, we're still where the UK was three or four years ago. We haven't woken up to the fact that, you know, all hell's going to break loose on this front with people like Chloe Cole, you know, launching- launching lawsuits. That's the only thing that's ever gonna stop this.

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:19:07

       Lawsuits?

   17. JPJordan Peterson1:19:08

       Lawsuits, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Or jail sentences.

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:19:11

       (sighs)

   19. JPJordan Peterson1:19:13

       So, like, it's absolutely appalling. This is part of the reason that I've ... also part of the reason that I've felt like I've been at war for, like, six months. This- this is just too much.

Episode duration: 3:03:37