Joe Rogan Experience #1933 - Jordan Peterson

Narrator 0:01 (drumming music) Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan 0:06 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music) Okay. Well, hello, Jordan Peterson.

Jordan Peterson 0:14 Hi, Mr. Rogan.

Joe Rogan 0:14 I didn't even notice you have a, a two-toned suit going on. You're a wild man.

Jordan Peterson 0:17 Can I tell you about the suit?

Joe Rogan 0:18 Please do.

Jordan Peterson 0:19 Okay. Well-

Joe Rogan 0:20 What's happening with that?

Jordan Peterson 0:21 ... company made this for me, LGFG. They made me a dozen suits.

Joe Rogan 0:25 Yeah?

Jordan Peterson 0:25 One for each rule from 12 Rules For Life.

Joe Rogan 0:27 Ah.

Jordan Peterson 0:27 The rules are printed on the back of this-

Joe Rogan 0:29 Ah.

Jordan Peterson 0:29 ... underneath the collar. This is a heaven and hell suit, so it's quite fun. So this is-

Joe Rogan 0:34 Which one's hell?

Jordan Peterson 0:35 I'll show you in a sec. So this is ...

Joe Rogan 0:37 (laughs)

Jordan Peterson 0:37 Hell's red, Joe. Come on. Jesus.

Joe Rogan 0:39 But that's not really red.

Jordan Peterson 0:40 Well, you know-

Joe Rogan 0:40 It's, like, a magenta, right?

Jordan Peterson 0:41 ... it's stylish. Yeah. It's ... Okay. Hell's magenta, you know?

Joe Rogan 0:44 Okay. Hell's magenta.

Jordan Peterson 0:44 Yeah. It's designer hell.

Joe Rogan 0:46 Ah, nice.

Jordan Peterson 0:46 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.

Joe Rogan 0:57 Oh. Okay.

Jordan Peterson 0:58 Yeah, so sheeps-

Joe Rogan 0:59 I don't think I've ever seen a man walk around with a ... I think you're one up.

Jordan Peterson 1:04 Am I one up?

Joe Rogan 1:04 Yeah, you're one up. Are you?

Jordan Peterson 1:06 No. That's 'cause it-

Joe Rogan 1:07 No, you're good? Oh.

Jordan Peterson 1:07 ... it's, uh, it's double-breasted.

Joe Rogan 1:09 Double-breasted.

Jordan Peterson 1:09 Yeah, yeah.

Narrator 1:10 Fancy.

Jordan Peterson 1:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11 Fancy.

Jordan Peterson 1:11 I've got one suit with you in the lining too.

Joe Rogan 1:13 Oh, no.

Jordan Peterson 1:14 I was gonna wear it today. I thought about wearing it. It's a, it's a black suit with platinum s- s- uh, wires in it, which is kinda cool. And inside it's got black and white images of, like, uh, really har- sharp, sharp/harsh graphic images of you and Bret Weinstein and Ben Shapiro and Russell Brand and, you know, just an assortment of the-

Joe Rogan 1:37 Oh, that whole intellectual dark web thing?

Jordan Peterson 1:39 Sam, Sam Harris too.

Joe Rogan 1:39 Sam's in there. (laughs)

Jordan Peterson 1:39 That's the guys, man. Sam's in there too, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:42 I still have hope for Sam Harris. (laughs)

Jordan Peterson 1:44 Yeah. Me too. Me too. Yeah. I hope he c- I hope he makes a comeback, so ...

Joe Rogan 1:49 He, I mean, he's not really going away. He's just got some weird opinions.

Jordan Peterson 1:52 Yeah. Well-

Joe Rogan 1:52 But you-

Jordan Peterson 1:53 There's, there's plenty of that floating around.

Joe Rogan 1:54 Well, you know, I think when you have, like, complex, fascinating brains, they go off in all kinds of different directions.

Jordan Peterson 2:01 Does-

Joe Rogan 2:01 Don't you think?

Jordan Peterson 2:02 This is, this is one of the dangers of being creative, right?

Joe Rogan 2:05 Hm.

Jordan Peterson 2:05 Most creative ideas are wrong, and a good section of those wrong ones are fatal.

Joe Rogan 2:10 Oof.

Jordan Peterson 2:10 But now and then you get one that's necessary, so ...

Joe Rogan 2:13 Yeah. We were talking about the Twitter files before-

Jordan Peterson 2:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:16 ... uh, we got rolling and, uh, what the new stuff is. So the, the new stuff has something to do with AI and, uh, some sort of content moderation?

Jordan Peterson 2:25 Oh, yeah. Well, Taibbi r- released some Twitter files today on, well, o- or on Twitter, obviously. And they're going through the code. Now, I don't understand the technical details, but, you know, you don't exactly know when you see the output of a, of a, of a code-generated system exactly what rules it's using to sort the information. I suppose that's the equivalent of shadow banning. And there's all sorts of, there was apparently all sorts of directives built into the code to amplify certain kinds of messages and, you know, de-amplify others. And so apparently Musk is doing what he can to, to, uh, clean that up. Uh, Rubin reported that the other day. Yeah. And then Taibbi today, he was talking more about the whole, uh, Russian collusion fabrication.

Joe Rogan 3:12 Mm. Yeah.

Jordan Peterson 3:13 So that's also real fun.

Joe Rogan 3:15 Well, how about the one guy that was going after Trump who it turned out was actually in collusion with the Russians?

Jordan Peterson 3:21 Oh, yeah. That's a rough one.

Joe Rogan 3:23 (laughs)

Jordan Peterson 3:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 3:25 You know? (laughs)

Jordan Peterson 3:26 Yeah. Yeah. Well, the best defense is a good offense, you know? And so-

Joe Rogan 3:30 I guess.

Jordan Peterson 3:30 ... I guess.

Joe Rogan 3:31 Yeah. I guess.

Jordan Peterson 3:32 Mm-hmm. I know. We're in a crazy world.

Joe Rogan 3:34 But it's just, like, why would anybody not think that that was gonna come around to get them?

Jordan Peterson 3:38 Uh, it's amazing how often people don't think that, you know, what they're doing isn't gonna, isn't gonna end up aimed squarely at them.

Joe Rogan 3:46 Well, this Twitter thing, right? Like, they never suspected that someone like Elon was gonna come along and buy Twitter, and then, in an unheard of tactic, have a bunch of journalists review everything in all of their Slack meetings and all their emails, look under the code, look under the wiring under the machine and find out how it was actually running, and-

Jordan Peterson 4:08 Yep.

Joe Rogan 4:08 Why would ... I mean, th- the fact that anyone would ever think that any of this stuff is a good idea, that people don't understand, like, the dangers of censorship, they don't understand what, where this leads to.

Jordan Peterson 4:20 Yeah. Well, we're seeing a little bit of that emerge on the right now, you know? Which is kind of frightening to me. So I, I'm an admirer, in many ways, of what's going on in Florida, you know, with DeSantis. But him and Rufo, who I also think has got a bit of a clue, are trying to, what would you say, limit or even ban critical race theory. And the problem with that is you can't define it, right?

Joe Rogan 4:41 Right.

Jordan Peterson 4:42 So how do you, how do you control something you can't define? And th- the answer is you battle it out on the battleground of ideas, because as soon as you start to try to define it and then try to censor it, well, first of all, that's just gonna grow 'cause that's how those things work. You know? Like, where does, where does critical race theory shade into Marxism? Well, who the hell knows? Where does Marxism f- f- f- shade into socialism? Oh, that's an even harder question. Then where does socialism shade into, you know, just being on the side of the working class? Well, all that's fuzzy beyond belief. And so once you get to the point where the government has to step in and regulate, say, what education systems are doing, you're already in deep trouble. And, uh, 'cause it can't ... I don't see how it can really be done, 'cause I, I can't define critical race theory. You know? I mean, more or less you can get some sense of the cloud of ideas that's associated with it. But, but trying to draw the lines, how are you gonna do that? And then, of course, you enable, inevitably, no matter what your goal is to begin with, you're gonna control a certain form, let's say, of pathological communication, misinformation. That's just gonna play into the hands of people who like to censor, and that's just as likely on the right as it is on the left.

Joe Rogan 5:53 Hm.

Jordan Peterson 5:54 So no, it's a real dangerous game.

Joe Rogan 5:57 And i- is the problem, like, the term critical race theory, is-... it's open to interpretation.

Jordan Peterson 6:03 Yeah. Well, it's often even hard, except in retrospect, to understand a lot of what these things actually are, you know, 'cause new clouds of ideas emerge and they kinda have an animating spirit. And they ha- they have a set of associated, what would you say, presumptions, and you can often only see what that is in retrospect. You know, it took me a long time to understand e- whatever existentialism was, enough to sort of define it, phenomenology, these different schools of thought that occupied the thoughts of, uh, of psychological investigators over a couple of centuries, post-modernism, modernism, you know. It's, it's not an easy thing to, to extract out the gist of those and define them. Plus, plus, as I said, they have very fuzzy boundaries. So it's-

Joe Rogan 6:47 But what I saw with DeSantis was there was, uh, he had a concern that they, that it wasn't just Black history that they were putting into this critical race theory, but that he saw that there was queer theory, which was in this thing that they were teaching in school. And, like, what does that have any- how does that have anything to do with Black history?

Jordan Peterson 7:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 7:05 Like, why is queer theory inserted into that?

Jordan Peterson 7:07 Yeah. Well, I think, I think the way those are linked is essentially through what you might regard as ... Well, it's an implicit Marxism, but it's even deeper than Marxism. So if you're a Marxist, you basically ... You have a heuristic that simplifies the world, and that heuristic is that you can understand any social relationship from, well, from an intimate relationship all the way up to the state by just dividing the parties, let's call them the narrative partners in a discussion or an interaction, into those who are oppressed and victimized and those who are taking advantage of them and profiting. That's basic Marxist theory of economics. And there's obviously some truth in that, because when systems become corrupt, that's how they operate, right? It's exploitation and victimization. And every system tends towards corruption. And so ... And if your, if your eyes are opened a little bit or if you're, let's call it if you've moved from naivety to cynicism, then you can see every interaction has a power dynamic. And then that drives ... Soon as you have that established, that i- b- idea that the basic relationship is one of power, well then you can see, well, there's no difference between what's happened to queer people in relationship to those in power and what's happened to Black people in relationship to those in power.

Joe Rogan 8:23 Hmm.

Jordan Peterson 8:24 It's, but it's united by that underlying ... That's why I always make a case for the domination of something like post-modernism and Marxism. You know, I've been criticized for that, but I think it's an accurate association. The post-modernists figured out, and they were right about this, that we see the world through a story. Now, that turns out to be something unbelievably complicated. And I think all the top end neuroscientists like Carl Friston are, what would you call, converging on this presumption that you have to see the world through a story. And the post-modernists actually figured that out, the French post-modernists, you know, Foucault and Derrida and people like that. But then they did something that was a sleight of hand, and this was, this all happened in the 1970s. They said, "Well, we have to see the world through a story." And even if you're a scientist, you're not exactly objective, because there's a narrative driving your work that you might be unw- unaware of. That's your implicit narrative. That's what might be implicitly biasing you. But, um, they jumped to the conclusion that the underlying narrative was one of power, so basically that all human relationships are predicated on power. And, y- n- you know, there isn't a more cynical viewpoint than that. And it's easy to take apart, you know, i- if you think about it for a moment in a, in a practical sense. If your marriage is just based on power, first of all, it's an unpleasant place, 'cause it's tyr- it's tyrant and slave. And second, like, good luck with that, 'cause people aren't that easy to tyrannize, you know. Like, maybe you have a willing slave in your wife, but I doubt it. If you're just trying to play power games with her, she's gonna fight back with everything she's got. And then if you have friends, it's like r- that's a relationship of mutual exploitation, is it? Then you're just a bully with henchmen, and they're gonna stab you in the back the first chance they get. So-

Joe Rogan 10:08 You're a mob man.

Jordan Peterson 10:09 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 10:09 You're like a mob leader.

Jordan Peterson 10:10 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, worse than that, even. You know-

Joe Rogan 10:12 A dictator.

Jordan Peterson 10:13 Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're a dictator. You're a dictator, you know. Uh, and you, you know, people say, "Well, look at how successful dictator psychopaths can be." But I look at them and I think, "Well, if that's your definition of success, then-"

Joe Rogan 10:26 Yeah. What is success? I mean-

Jordan Peterson 10:27 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 10:27 ... how ... Are you spiritually fulfilled?

Jordan Peterson 10:28 You're the biggest devil in hell.

Joe Rogan 10:30 Yeah. Are you happy?

Jordan Peterson 10:31 Yeah. Right.

Joe Rogan 10:32 Yeah. I mean, what is-

Jordan Peterson 10:32 Well, the leader of a bad place might be the person who's worst off-

Joe Rogan 10:36 Yeah.

Jordan Peterson 10:36 ... in some fundamental sense, right? They're the most corrupt.

Joe Rogan 10:38 Isn't that funny, though, that the, the way we define success is power and, and money. Like, those are like ... Y- y- ... Look how successful they are-

Jordan Peterson 10:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 10:47 ... with power and money. Well, a complete absence of love and trust and respect and-

Jordan Peterson 10:51 Yeah. Well, it's-

Joe Rogan 10:52 ... and basic human dignity.

Jordan Peterson 10:53 You know, and it ... Well, it's also ... It i- it's also not really how people operate. So there's an anthropological literature on the formation of elders in, uh, in, say, uh, traditional societies, 'cause you might ask yourself, you know, "Who becomes an elder?" And if you were a Marxist cynic, you'd say, "Well, those who used exploitation to dominate, like the priestly class or something like that," and that goes along with the supposition that, you know, religion is the opiate of the masses. S- and some of that's obviously true, but a lot of it isn't. The elders aren't that at all. They're, they're the people who others go to spontaneously to ax- ask for counsel.

Joe Rogan 11:33 Yeah.

Jordan Peterson 11:34 And then you ask, "Well, who do people naturally gravitate towards for counsel?" And the answer is, well, productive, generous people who've managed their interpersonal relationships well, 'cause who the hell else would you go ask for advice if you had any sense? Like, you might go ask the local dictator and kowtow to him if you need a favor, to take somebody out, but if you're actually asking for counsel, you're gonna ask someone who's decent and who's generous and who plays a reciprocal game. And it's also the case ... This is worth knowing, too. The problem with a power game is that it's not playable, not in the final analysis. So Frans de Waal, the-... Dut- Dutch primatologist has showed even pretty clearly in chimpanzees, you know, you think the roughest, toughest chimpanzee rules the damn roost and he pounds everybody flat and he gets a- access to the females. And there's a little bit of truth to that 'cause female chimps aren't sexually choosy, but the male chimps will chase weaker males away from them. And so if you are more powerful physically as a male chimp, you do have preferential mating access. But the problem with being a brute, even if you're a chimp, is that you have an off day and two of the chimps that you oppressed band together and tear you into pieces. And so what de Waal foun- found was that in chimp troops, the stable alpha can sometimes even be the smallest male of the troop. He'll ally himself with some of the dominant females and makes networks that are essentially friendships, reciprocal friendships, and that gives him a stable position, not of power, but of authority.

Joe Rogan 13:04 Mm-hmm.

Jordan Peterson 13:05 And that's definitely the case in functional human societies. It's not based on power. Now, it's tricky, because if it degenerates, then it degenerates into a relationship of power, you know? And so that means the critics who make the claim that everything's about power are right in some sense when they're talking about nothing but corruption, but they're really 100% seriously wrong about the idea that it's power relation that constitutes the basis for the organization of any social interaction. You know, it doesn't work in your marriage, doesn't work with your friends, doesn't work with your children, doesn't work with your business partners, doesn't work with your customers, it doesn't work with politicians, although it's ... Here's another twist that's complicated. So imagine you have a population of people who basically cooperate reciprocally. So you know, I do you a favor, you do me one, and maybe we figure out how to advance each other across time. That's a good game, right? Fair trade plus advancement. That's a good definition for a good m- marriage. Okay, but now you have a community of people like that together. Okay, now it opens up an ecological niche, and the niche is psychopathy. And the psychopath comes in and pretends that he's a productive, generous reciprocator, but he's not. He's just an instrumental manipulator, but he can get away with it because there's enough wealth generated by the cooperators, you know, the honest cooperators, so that there's a space for someone to exploit the system and that stabilizes that 4% of the population. So you know, across the world, 4% are- of people are close enough to clinically diagnosable psychopaths. And that's probably better than being, you know, paralyzed by fear and anxiety and just staying in your bed. It's better in terms of reproductive success, let's say, and maybe even success in general. But it's not a good game because in the real world most psychopaths get found out pretty quickly. 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

Jordan Peterson 15:36 it's hard on women, eh, because (laughs) they have to navigate that really thin line-

Joe Rogan 15:40 Mm-hmm.

Jordan Peterson 15:41 ... 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...

Joe Rogan 16:57 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-

Jordan Peterson 17:07 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 17:07 ... in our male population.

Jordan Peterson 17:09 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-

Joe Rogan 18:14 Mm-hmm.

Jordan Peterson 18:15 ... '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.

Joe Rogan 18:42 Mm.

Jordan Peterson 18:42 And, of course, they get exploited by people like that, and they think, "Well, that's what men are like."

Joe Rogan 18:46 Right.

Jordan Peterson 18:46 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-

Joe Rogan 19:04 That's where we are (laughs) .

Jordan Peterson 19:05 ... in many ways, yeah (laughs) . Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 19:06 What a strange place to be, isn't it?

Jordan Peterson 19:07 Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah, well-

Joe Rogan 19:09 Yeah.

Jordan Peterson 19:09 ... unintended consequence of familial breakdown, that's a huge part of it.

Joe Rogan 19:14 So we decided to have this conversation because of what's going on with you in Canada.

Jordan Peterson 19:18 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 19:19 And that-

Jordan Peterson 19:20 That.

Joe Rogan 19:20 ... 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.

Jordan Peterson 19:36 Well, it's your fault, actually. You know, I told you-

Joe Rogan 19:38 Oh.

Jordan Peterson 19:38 ... I think a, a week or so ago when we talked about this, that ... Okay, so let me give you some background here.

Joe Rogan 19:43 Okay.

Jordan Peterson 19:44 So.

Joe Rogan 19:44 I wanna know how it's my fault (laughs) .

Jordan Peterson 19:45 I will, I'll tell you, tell you. A lot of things are your fault, as it turns out, so-

Joe Rogan 19:48 Oh, no.

Jordan Peterson 19:49 Yeah, yeah. So the, the College of Psychologists has basically levied what are equivalent to about 13 lawsuits against me simultaneously. Now, the reason I call them lawsuits is because they are actions undertaken on behalf of a complainant. Now, the complainant can be any one anywhere in the world who complains about me for any reason. They don't have to be former clients. They don't even have to be anybody I've ever met. They don't even have to have met anybody I've ever met. So, you know, it's, it's a-

Joe Rogan 20:19 So it could be someone online?

Jordan Peterson 20:20 It is. All this is pretty much ... All these complaints are someone online. None of them are my clients, although half of them claim to be, falsely, and the College didn't throw out their complaints despite that. So, which is really quite interesting, so-

Joe Rogan 20:32 And what are the complaints?

Jordan Peterson 20:33 Well, okay, le- let's see. Uh, the one complaint is about the tweet I made about Ellen or Elliot Page, and when I said that a criminal physician cut off her breasts and that pride was a sin, so now I'm in trouble again 'cause I just said the same thing. One was about a Sports Illustrated cover, where they-

Joe Rogan 20:53 Yeah.

Jordan Peterson 20:53 ... featured that overweight model, and I tweeted out, "Not beautiful," and, um, I guess that was something like fat shaming. I don't remember exactly what the, what the, what the charge was. And then I criticized Justin Trudeau and a former staff member of Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern. I made a joke about her. Coming ... I was going to New Zealand, and-

Joe Rogan 21:13 Mm-hmm.

Jordan Peterson 21:13 ... the New Zealand leftist press was freaking out, and I made this joke about bringing my alt-right trolls to New Zealand, and, and then I put in parentheses, "Or maybe they're just, you know, ordinary people who are trying to clean up their rooms." So apparently, that was casting the profession into disgrace, and then they submitted ... One complainant from the US c- submitted the entire transcript of our last discussion. So, you know, I don't know how to defend myself against that, because apparently everything I say, and apparently everything you say too, is bringing the profession of psychology into disgrace. And I think they are most upset in that case about, uh, my comments about the inadequacy of climate models. And so, you know, what that has to do with my clinical practice is questionable, to say the least, and so ... Anyways, does that cover it?

Joe Rogan 22:01 Yeah.

Jordan Peterson 22:01 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 22:01 It seems like this climate thing is a very rigid ideology that one must subscribe to wholesale.

Jordan Peterson 22:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 22:08 You, you can't have any nuanced opinions on it. You can't have any-

Jordan Peterson 22:12 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 22:12 There's no, no variation.

Jordan Peterson 22:14 Well, it's a religion. It's a religion.

Joe Rogan 22:15 Yeah.

Jordan Peterson 22:15 It's a, actually it's a, it's a pseudo, it's a partial pseudo-religion, and, and, and I, I mean that technically. I'm gonna write about this to some degree in ... I'm writing a new book which'll come out in November called We Who Wrestle with God, and I'll cover that in this. But Alex Epstein, who wrote Fossil Fuel Future recently, comments about this a bit. So the basic structure of the quasi-religious belief, and so this is the set of initial presumptions. That's a way of thinking about it. You know, we were talking about how ideas are structured earlier. The Marxists believe that everything's about power. There's a narrative at the base of any belief system, and the climate s- uh, the climate pseudo-religion is based on characterization of nature as something like a hapless, uh, what would you call? Hapless, defenseless, fragile virgin. The, uh, the industrial activity of mankind is, is characterized as something like a rapacious, uh, power-mad, uh, r- yeah, yeah, yeah, uh, demolisher of natural virginity and beauty, and then the human being is, the individual, is characterized as nothing but a, you know, a devouring mouth whose activity runs contrary to the, to the untrammelled beauty of the planet and that supports the activity of the tyrannical patriarchy. That's basically it. And so the reason that narrative has force is because it draws on underlying religious archetypes. And so, uh, to characterize the world properly, you do need to characterize the positive aspect of nature. Because you have to live in something approximating a reciprocal harmony with nature. 'Cause if you just eat everything and, you know, devour everything in your local landscape, well, then you die. So that's a bad idea. So you have to have some sense of the value of nature. Now, you also have some ... Have to have some sense of the fact that if you were dropped in the jungle naked in the Amazon, you'd be dead in about 48 hours. So you also need a figure to characterize the negative element of nature, and that's completely absent from the environmental myth. That's part of what makes it pathological. And then with regard to the rapacious tyranny, let's say, well-... you know, any industrial system or any human organization can exploit the natural world to the point where that's not sustainable and it can become oppressive and tyrannical. That's the evil king, ancient part of religious mythology going back as far back as we can chase it. So, you need a representation of the negative aspect of society because, you know, you go to s- you send your kids to school and they kinda get turned into these cookie cutter kids and that crushes their innate, uh, what would you say, difference and beauty, and it's all the pain of having to be socialized and... You have to understand that there is this oppressive element of culture and so... But then, you know, you should also wake up and, and notice that you've got the wise king too, and that means you put, you plug in your damn toaster in the morning and the electricity works and you go out on the street and everyone isn't rioting and, you know, there's workmen who are neep deep, knee-deep in the sludge trying to keep everything going and you're not starving to death like everybody on the planet was in 1860. And so, a little gratitude for the positive end of the patriarchy is in order too and that's completely absent in the environmental view. And then with regard to the individual, it's like, well, of course you can be a selfish, impulsive, hedonistic consumer and you can facilitate the rapacious tyranny as a consequence of that rape the planet, but by the same token, you know, we're not a cancer on the face of the earth, we're not a m- virus that's mutating and taking out the planet, you know, and we're not trapped in a Malthusian nightmare and you gotta give credit where it's due and, you know, there's an element of people, of everyone that's noble and, and generous and kind and productive and capable of living in an well-ordered state in something like sustainable and productive harmony with nature. You only get half that story. Now, if you have no comprehensive underlying cultural narrative, which is increasingly the case in our society, and someone offers you when you're attaining age your half the religious story, that'll just snap you up in a second 'cause it helps you order your relationship with the world.

Joe Rogan 26:44 Mm-hmm.

Jordan Peterson 26:44 Gives you a pathway too, eh? So, Jean Piaget, great developmental psychologist, he called the last stage of adolescence the messianic period, the messianic stage. Now, most people don't talk much about that I think because they're, they don't know what to make of Piaget's claim, but he was a real genius, Jean Piaget. And he said, you know, when, when you're making that transition from, from the group identity that you're chasing as a teenager to becoming an individual, now, and that's not a journey everyone takes 'cause lots of people just get lost in group identity, you're gonna be looking for a pathway that's essentially heroic. And what that pathway should be is that you identify with your culture, uh, deeply, you are socialized deeply into the traditions of your culture but you're also capable of transcending it, you know? So then you become a culture creator as well as a, as, as a disciplined member of culture. But young people need to be offered something like a, well, a vision of destiny in order to catalyze their identity and we're very, very bad at that except on the ideological front. And so the woke types come along and say, "You know, the planet's a virgin. The Great Father's a tyrant. You could be a hero if you just stood up to that." And the kids think, "Well, I'd like to do something important with my life." And so they're just caught into that immediately, but because it's a one-sided story it's, well, it's an i- a one-sided s- a one-sided religious story is an ideology, so.

Joe Rogan 28:15 And a great representation of that is what they've done with Greta Thunberg.

Jordan Peterson 28:19 Yeah, exactly, exactly. (laughs) It's so funny, you know, 'cause I thought, 10 years ago I thought, "We live in the delusion of a, of a disturbed 13-year-old girl. How did that happen?" And then, you know, Greta Thunberg showed up and I thought, "Oh, well, there we go. Now we've got the, we've got the, the 13-year-old." I feel sorry for her, you know, because she was chased into this apocalyptic terror that we're trying to enforce on all our kids and then you think about her position, you know? So now she's all afraid and her mother's facilitating that like mad and then, you know, w- she announces her fear, her neurotic fear essentially, it's driven by negative emotion, and you know, Macron says to her, "Oh my god, Greta, you're absolutely right," and bows. It's like what the hell is a girl to think, you know? Because what she-

Joe Rogan 29:04 Right.

Jordan Peterson 29:04 ... really wants is to freak out a bit and for someone calm and reasonable to say, "Hey look, kid, you know, the apocalypse has always been honest." It's always the case that the future has the possibility of being dreadful but, you know, we've conquered terrible things in the past and overcome massive obstacles and there's no reason at all not to assume that we can do the same thing.

Joe Rogan 29:25 That's a very important point.

Jordan Peterson 29:26 Well, (laughs) yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:27 It's, uh, it's such an important point because there's never been a time ever where everything was perfect.

Jordan Peterson 29:32 Well, that's for sure.

Joe Rogan 29:33 There's never been a time ever environmentally where the earth was stable.

Jordan Peterson 29:37 No.

Joe Rogan 29:37 If, if you go, I mean, stable, y- you know, currently and kind of like guess what the weather's gonna be but if you look at like models of like thousands of years, it's never been flat, it's always been up and down-

Jordan Peterson 29:47 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:48 ... and heats up, it freezes.

Jordan Peterson 29:48 Well, the earth was an ice ball many times.

Joe Rogan 29:50 Yeah, many times.

Jordan Peterson 29:51 Yeah. So, yeah, yeah, well...

Joe Rogan 29:52 Randall Carlson was saying there's been times in our, uh, like distant past where the CO2 levels and the oxygen levels were so fucked up that we were close to losing all life on earth.

Jordan Peterson 30:02 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 30:03 And then this can, this can happen.

Jordan Peterson 30:04 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.

Joe Rogan 30:15 Right.

Jordan Peterson 30:15 It's like yeah, a bit, but no, not really. There's a lot of variability, a lot-

Joe Rogan 30:22 A lot.

Jordan Peterson 30:22 ... 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-

Narrator 30:29 Right. But, and it doesn't deny that human beings have an impact on this either.

Jordan Peterson 30:33 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-

Narrator 30:43 Yes.

Jordan Peterson 30:43 ... "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-

Narrator 30:55 It's a factor.

Jordan Peterson 30:56 ... "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.

Narrator 31:19 And that's Lomberg's position too.

Jordan Peterson 31:20 Yeah, not to put limits to growth on, because-

Narrator 31:22 Right.

Jordan Peterson 31:22 ... 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.

Narrator 31:37 Right.

Jordan Peterson 31:37 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?"

Narrator 33:48 Right.

Jordan Peterson 33:48 Oh, well, it's not like that. It's like, yeah, it's like that.

Narrator 33:51 It has to be like that.

Jordan Peterson 33:51 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.

Joe Rogan 37:07 Right.

Jordan Peterson 37:07 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.

Joe Rogan 38:26 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-

Jordan Peterson 38:40 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 38:40 ... that I, I actively seek out.

Jordan Peterson 38:42 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 38:42 But you would think that when you're dealing with such a complex issue that you would want to see the most brilliant minds think out, how does this play out?

Jordan Peterson 38:54 Yeah, yeah. Like, and, and, well, okay, so-

Joe Rogan 38:56 What are the consequences?

Jordan Peterson 38:56 Well, so let's say, let's think about what, what mitigates against that. Okay, so first of all, young people are looking for a, you know, a productive and, and visionary pathway forward. We already covered that a bit.

Joe Rogan 39:10 Right.

Jordan Peterson 39:10 But then there's the, there's a dark side of that too, and the dark side of that for everyone is that our reputations are very important to us. They're our most crucial currency, you know? And what that means is that w- we are tempted to elevate our reputations in an undeserved manner, and we do that to gain social status with very little work. And, and so we're tilted towards being tempted by theories that provide us with an easy way forward to that. And so one is, "Well, I'm a good person." "Well, how do I know that?" "Well, I'm concerned about the planet." Well, the- that's a complex problem, (laughs) the planet, right? That's a trillion problems-

Joe Rogan 39:51 Yeah.

Jordan Peterson 39:51 ... not one. I'm concerned about the planet, therefore I'm good. But that's complicated, you gotta take it apart. No, you don't. You just say, "Well, the planet only has one problem." Well, what's that? Untrammeled industrial activity and the rapacious nature of the consumer. Okay. What's the output? Too much carbon dioxide. Okay, I'm against carbon dioxide. Well, bang, you're the Messiah, you know, with no work. And then someone li- Lomborg comes along and says, "Hold on there, guys. We got, like, 30 problems, not one, and we need to rank order the problems and we need to do a differentiated analysis, and your idiot interventions are gonna cause nothing but unintended consequences," and no one wants to hear that because number one, it's complicated, you gotta read the damn book and you gotta think through his arguments, and number two, well now where are you gonna get your cheap moral virtue? You can't just be the Messiah by waving a ban- you know, waving a banner that says, "I don't like carbon dioxide." And so that, that runs against a very, very deep narcissism, and so that's part of what stands in opposition to people, especially people like Lomborg.

Joe Rogan 40:57 And that's accentuated-

Jordan Peterson 40:59 He's a good, kind, moral, reasonable person.

Joe Rogan 40:59 ... by social media.

Jordan Peterson 41:00 Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Joe Rogan 41:01 Like, gra- greatly.

Jordan Peterson 41:03 Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, social media is a great place to garner unearned social reputation.

Joe Rogan 41:10 Yeah.

Jordan Peterson 41:11 I mean, and, and s- it can be gamed, and it is gamed, and we also even know the nature of the people who game it. There's a whole emergent psychological literature concentrating on dark tetrad traits, so we could walk through that a little bit. So the standard personality models that produced the big five, extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness, they were derived sort of with a primitive AI, that's a way of thinking about it, that looked for patterns of description across huge corpuses of linguistic data. How do people talk about each other? It turns out they talk about each other using five dimensions, and those are the dimensions I just described. But the people who derived the big five didn't use evaluative descriptors. They threw anything out that looked like a value judgment. So for example, you might say of someone, "He's a good person," and you might say of someone else, "He's a malevolent person." Those descriptors weren't included in the big five corpus because they were trying to derive a model of normative personality. Okay, so, but that meant that the pathological personality wasn't encapsulated or well-defined. Now, this guy Robert Hare, who worked at University of British Columbia, is world's leading authority on psychopathy, and he interviewed hundreds and hundreds of psychopaths and was always fooled by them, by the way. And then he had a student, Dale Polis, who works at UBC, and Polis developed a model of personality that base, was based on pathology, like, on the dark side. And, uh...... he called that the dark triad. Machiavellianism, that means, uh, Machiavelli is someone who... So let's say, if I was Machiavellian in our discussions, what I would have done was think, before I came here, I thought, "Well, you know, uh, what can Joe offer me?" And then I'd think, "Well, how can I play Joe with my language so I'm most likely to get what I'm, you know, the narrow, impulsive, selfish thing that I'm aiming at right now?" So, that's how a Machiavellian operates. A narcissist, that's the next part of the dark triad, is someone who wants social status without doing any of the work. They want all the attention. If you're dating a narcissist, or in a relationship with a narcissist, they'll alienate all your family members and your-

Joe Rogan 43:22 Mm-hmm.

Jordan Peterson 43:23 ... friends so that they get all the attention. And that'll (laughs) just be the first of the games they play with you.

Joe Rogan 43:27 Yeah.

Jordan Peterson 43:28 Then you have psychopathy. And the psychopaths are parasitical predators. And so, the predator will take whatever you've got, and the parasite will live off you. And then here's a parasitical ideological statement: property is theft. A classic Marxist trope. Why would you say that? Well, if I wanna live off you, the way I'm gonna justify that ethically is by claiming, "Well, you know, Joe, look how privileged you are. You've got all this money. You just, you just took that from the oppressed. And if I'm manipulating you so that I get some of your money, that's only just." Because first of all, it's, uh, it's exactly what you did, and second of all, well, why not spread some of that wealth around? So, that's Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy, dark triad. They've expanded that recently to add another dimension that was missing, sadism. And the sadist takes positive delight in causing pain to others. And the lulz culture, L-U-L-Z, the lulz culture online is a culture of sadistic, Machiavellian, narcissistic psychopaths. And the-

Joe Rogan 44:31 Lulz, meaning-

Jordan Peterson 44:32 Lulz. It's the-

Joe Rogan 44:33 ... like people are joking around and shit posting?

Jordan Peterson 44:34 Yeah, yeah. Well, I did it-

Joe Rogan 44:35 Yeah.

Jordan Peterson 44:35 ... for the lulz. And it's-

Joe Rogan 44:37 Right, right.

Jordan Peterson 44:37 ... the plural of LOL, laugh out loud.

Joe Rogan 44:39 Right, right.

Jordan Peterson 44:39 But, like, if you look at the Urban Dictionary, for example, the definition of lulz is, "Positive delight in the suffering of others." It's like, yeah, it's sadistic. And, and-

Joe Rogan 44:47 Oh.

Jordan Peterson 44:47 ... bloody well social media just facilitates, like, the-

Joe Rogan 44:50 I never thought of lulz as being sadistic, though.

Jordan Peterson 44:52 It's, it's, in and of itself, it's not a sufficient marker, right? You, you have to have, like, six or seven things going on before 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.

Joe Rogan 47:16 Mm-hmm.

Jordan Peterson 47:16 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-

Joe Rogan 47:53 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-

Jordan Peterson 48:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:05 ... or avoid pain.

Jordan Peterson 48:06 Or get a refund or, yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:06 Yeah, get a refund.

Jordan Peterson 48:07 You bet.

Joe Rogan 48:08 Yeah.

Jordan Peterson 48:08 Or they befriend them.

Joe Rogan 48:09 Mm-hmm.

Jordan Peterson 48:09 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.

Joe Rogan 48:21 Yeah.

Jordan Peterson 48:21 And... Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:21 Yeah.

Jordan Peterson 48:22 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-

Joe Rogan 49:57 That's Twitter.

Jordan Peterson 49:58 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 49:59 Well, certainly Twitter before Elon Musk came along.

Jordan Peterson 50:00 Yeah, well Twitter's better, but it's still quite the snake pit.

Joe Rogan 50:03 Yeah.

Jordan Peterson 50:03 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-

Joe Rogan 50:29 Yeah.

Jordan Peterson 50:29 ... 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-

Joe Rogan 50:40 Well m- m- b- there's also the fact there are people that don't wanna get in trouble at work.

Jordan Peterson 50:43 Yeah, I know, I know.

Joe Rogan 50:44 You know?

Jordan Peterson 50:44 Well that's p- kind of the whistleblower problem. It's that-

Joe Rogan 50:46 But not even whistleblowers. I mean, people that just have opinions that vary-

Jordan Peterson 50:50 Oh. You mean that might get them in trouble-

Joe Rogan 50:52 Yeah.

Jordan Peterson 50:52 ... with the College of Psychologists in Ontario, for example?

Joe Rogan 50:54 Yes. Yes.

Jordan Peterson 50:55 Yeah, I know. And-

Joe Rogan 50:56 Yes.

Jordan Peterson 50:56 So, well, I think one of the ways they're handling that technically, what I'd like to see happen at Twitter for example, n- you know, not that I'm in a position to know because I know it's complicated, is I think the anonymous types should be separated from the real people. So you could go visit them and see what they have to say but the verified people, you know, their comments are either at the top or in a different place.

Joe Rogan 51:16 Mm-hmm.

Jordan Peterson 51:16 Because I don't think that you can ... I don't think that we can set up a playable game online when the anonymous trolls have the same rights as the verified, responsible people. And I also think, and I don't know what you think about this, Joe, but you know, let's say you wanna be a whistleblower or you wanna say something that's gonna get you in trouble at work, so you wanna do it anonymously. It's like, maybe you're shirking your responsibility, 'cause maybe you have a responsibility. You know, and I could be persuaded alternatively, but maybe you have a responsibility if you have something to say, to say it in your own voice and to put yourself behind it.

Joe Rogan 51:53 Hmm.

Jordan Peterson 51:53 You know? And maybe take- maybe you're taking the easy way out by not doing that. I d- you know, I don't wanna say that about every single person who posts anonymously, but you know, tyranny emerges when normal, honest people are now afraid to say what they think. And when the tyranny's complete, in a totalitarian state, no one ever says what they think about anything. Everyone lies all the time. And I see part of the pathway to that, the unwillingness of ordinary people to take the consequences of their truthful speech. You know, and I also think that's detrimental to them, because I think that you find the adventure in your life. I think this is certainly true of you. You find the adventure in your life by standing behind your words. Like, that's you, right? Those are your words, if you're telling the truth. That's actually you. And there's gonna be consequences, and sometimes they're gonna be negative. But do you really think that the consequences of telling the truth in your own voice are negative? You think the world's structured like that? Jesus, that's a dismal view, man.

Joe Rogan 52:58 Well, it depends on the amount of autonomy you have. It depends on the amount of p- uh, th- the amount of resources you have.

Jordan Peterson 53:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 53:04 I mean, like, let's take for example, uh, nurses. Nurses who had contracted COVID during the pandemic and had developed natural immunity. There was already studies that showed that that natural immunity was superior to the immunity that was imparted by the vaccine, but yet they were being mandated to take this vaccine.

Jordan Peterson 53:25 Yep.

Joe Rogan 53:25 And a lot of them had some serious apprehensions about it-

Jordan Peterson 53:29 Yep.

Joe Rogan 53:29 ... that were logical, based on people that they knew that had adverse reactions. And now we're finding out more and more how common those adverse reactions were. Now, if these women stepped up, or these men who are nurses stepped up and- and said something about it publicly, they would be fired.

Jordan Peterson 53:45 Yeah, well, look, when- when I was working as a clinician, I had lots of clients who were in that position. You know, they were ... They're at work and they're being tyrannized by some ... Well, sometimes it was DEI types and sometimes it was just-

Joe Rogan 53:57 DEI?

Jordan Peterson 53:57 Yeah, diversity, ex- inclusivity, and equity.

Joe Rogan 54:00 Oh.

Jordan Peterson 54:01 You know, the- the woke- the woke ideologues who were coming for them and not letting them say what they wanted to say politically. And sometimes they were just being tyrannized by garden variety narcissists. You know, their bosses were that sort.

Joe Rogan 54:11 Yeah.

Jordan Peterson 54:11 And, uh, it was crushing them. And you know, it's easy to say to people like that, "Well, just stand up to your boss," but they often were rather constrained in their employment opportunities and they had families. And so you can't tell people, "Well, just go shoot off your mouth stupidly, get fired, and taken out and mobbed, and let your family starve." That's a pretty dumb strategy. But what we would always do in- in the therapeutic endeavor i-... with someone in a situation like that was to situate themselves in their life so that they could afford to abide by their own truth. And so that might mean, if you're in a job, let's say, where you, you don't have freedom of expression, you know, you get your s- your resume or your CV polished up so that, if necessary, you could make a lateral move relatively quickly. Maybe you send out some job applications just to test the market, and if you're not marketable, maybe you pop up your skills, and then maybe if you're in a position where you're vulnerable because someone else has got control over your tongue, maybe you work real hard to put some other ground under your feet so that you can't be taken out so easily. You know, like when I opposed the, the, uh, Bill C-16 in Canada, the mandatory pronoun bill, look, I knew ... first of all, I knew that that would cause a psychological epidemic. I told the senate that back in 2000 and- 2017. I said, "You guys don't know what you're doing here. You're gonna confuse a lot of (laughs) adolescent young women, and for every girl you hypothetically save who has body dysmorphia, and that'll be a vanishingly small number of people who are actually saved, you're gonna doom, like, 300." Of course, that's exactly what's happened. That's why the Tavistock Clinic shut down in the UK, you know, and so there was that. But, but I also had set myself up, you know? 'Cause I had three streams of income: I had my university salary, I had a clinical practice, and I had a business. And that wasn't accidental. You know, I knew from my clinical practice that if you wanted to say what you had to say, you had to put yourself in a position where you couldn't be easily taken out by the mob or the tyrant. And then I would say, "Well, if you're not in a position where you can afford to say what you have to say, then that's an indication that you haven't positioned yourself optimally, existentially, you haven't positioned yourself optimally in life. You're too ... your, your fundamental f- your foundation is too weak. And so, you know, maybe it'll take you three years to fix that, you know, so that now you've, you're grounded firmly, so that a casual objection from your boss or even being fired isn't gonna take you out." It's not like that's easy, but I mean, abiding by the truth isn't easy. The only thing ... (laughs) but it's a lot more preferable than abiding by falsehood, that's the problem, right? Of course abiding by the truth isn't easy, p- obviously, but, you know, what sort of devil do you let into your head if you abide by falsehood? And some of that might be just not saying what you have to say, and that's not just, you know. Mostly we regard sins of commission as more egregious than sins of omission, you know, an outright lie is worse than just failure to say what you know to be the truth. But enough people, uh, when enough people are silent about things they know they have something to say about, something to say something about, then you have a tyranny. And so, well, we haven't resorted through all this, you know, very well in our society, but I think it's morally incumbent on all of us to set up our lives so that we can afford to tell the truth.

Joe Rogan 57:36 Mm-hmm.

Jordan Peterson 57:37 And if you can't, well then you think, no, your, your-

Joe Rogan 57:39 (clears throat)

Jordan Peterson 57:40 ... you haven't got the hat- the hatches battened down, right? The walls of your towers, your fort aren't high enough, you're not properly armed, and you should be, 'cause you know the mob's coming for you, and so is the chaos of nature, and you bloody well better be prepared. And so I think if you're anonymous, you're, you're depriving yourself of the necessity to, to put yourself in a position where you can, you can tell the truth. Now, think about what happened to you. Now, you tell me, you tell me what you think about this. I mean, I've been watching you for a long time and it's quite remarkable seeing the impact that you've had that keeps increasing across time, you know? But my, my experience with you is that, you know, you have your opinions, your perspective, and you'll put them forward, but mostly what you do is you ask people questions that you actually have as questions, right? Far as I can tell, you're mostly trying to figure out what the hell's going on, and so that's honest. It is honest exposition. It's an honest ... it's honestly exposes your own ignorance as well, and you know you can take the audience along as a consequence of that, and for you, the consequences being, you know, you've gone from just doing this podcast sort of a side thing for you, at least when it started, to being ... I don't know if there's anybody who has more impact as a single individual on the media environment worldwide than you do, and that's all a consequence of actually truthfully admitting your own ignorance and saying what you had to say. And I know you were set up to do that 'cause you had multiple streams of income, you know, and you couldn't easily be taken out. You'd already accomplished things in a multitude of spheres, but think of the consequence of that. You think, "Well, would that happen to anybody who did everything they could to ask stupid questions and tell the truth?" And the answer is, maybe. You know? So you don't do that, you hide, and you have your reasons, you know, your family's at risk. It's like, fair enough man, but you, you deprive yourself of the great adventure of your life and you contribute by remaining silent to patho- pathologization of the whole society. So, yeah, well, that doesn't seem like a very good route to me.

Joe Rogan 59:47 You're making sense, but it's a very, very complex situation for someone who has put all their eggs in one basket, like particularly someone who's a nurse who-

Jordan Peterson 59:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:57 ... has to work long hours, doesn't have another stream of income, and isn't-

Jordan Peterson 1:00:00 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:00:00 ... really making enough money to have-

Jordan Peterson 1:00:02 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:00:02 ... a nest egg saved away.

Jordan Peterson 1:00:04 Yeah, you bet. Yeah, maybe a single m-

Joe Rogan 1:00:05 First thing's first.

Jordan Peterson 1:00:06 ... is it single mother? And-

Joe Rogan 1:00:07 Right.

Jordan Peterson 1:00:07 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.

Joe Rogan 1:01:29 We should, we should explain that because-

Jordan Peterson 1:01:30 Oh yeah, well so I've already been sentenced, right?

Joe Rogan 1:01:32 ... that is one of the things, yeah.

Jordan Peterson 1:01:33 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.

Joe Rogan 1:02:23 It's such a wild request too.

Jordan Peterson 1:02:25 It's, it-

Joe Rogan 1:02:25 Retraining? Just even the way they phrase it, it's so bizarre, so Orwellian.

Jordan Peterson 1:02:31 Yeah. Yeah well, like I said, it's your fault, you know-

Joe Rogan 1:02:33 Social media. (laughs)

Jordan Peterson 1:02:34 ... '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?

Joe Rogan 1:03:04 Yep.

Jordan Peterson 1:03:04 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

Jordan Peterson 1:07:06 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.

Narrator 1:10:50 W- what is causing this rush to that? Like, wha- how did this happen and how did this happen so quickly?

Jordan Peterson 1:10:57 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 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.

Joe Rogan 1:16:13 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.

Jordan Peterson 1:16:24 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.

Joe Rogan 1:17:51 Yeah.

Jordan Peterson 1:17:51 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.

Joe Rogan 1:18:19 How, how was that closed down? What happened?

Jordan Peterson 1:18:20 The government closed it down.

Joe Rogan 1:18:23 So the govern-

Jordan Peterson 1:18:23 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.

Joe Rogan 1:18:40 What a-

Jordan Peterson 1:18:40 There's a thousand lawsuits out against the Tavistock in the UK now.

Joe Rogan 1:18:43 Wow.

Jordan Peterson 1:18:43 A thousand.... uh, yeah, out of, I think, 30,000, uh, transition processes.

Joe Rogan 1:18:50 So, what is the difference between the way the UK is processing this versus the way we are?

Jordan Peterson 1:18:55 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.

Joe Rogan 1:19:07 Lawsuits?

Jordan Peterson 1:19:08 Lawsuits, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Or jail sentences.

Joe Rogan 1:19:11 (sighs)

Jordan Peterson 1:19:13 So, like, it's absolutely appalling. This is part of the reason that I've ...