Joe Rogan Experience #2180 - Jordan Peterson

1. 0:00 – 3:22

   Peterson’s suits as symbolism: respect, hierarchy, and touring audiences dressing up

   1. JPJordan Peterson0:00

      (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

   2. JRJoe Rogan0:06

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music plays) You don't use headphones, huh?

   3. JPJordan Peterson0:16

      Messes up my hair.

   4. JRJoe Rogan0:17

      (laughs) Good to see you.

   5. JPJordan Peterson0:19

      Good to see you too, man.

   6. JRJoe Rogan0:20

      What's going on in your, uh, your coat today? Every day is a new one.

   7. JPJordan Peterson0:24

      Yeah, well, I've got this suit maker, LGFG, Dmitri, the crazy Russian, and he, you know, pays attention to what I'm doing and makes me the suits that he thinks are suitable and, uh, I wear them.

   8. JRJoe Rogan0:39

      You've gotten quite extravagant though, like sometimes like one half of the suit is one color-

   9. JPJordan Peterson0:43

      Yep.

   10. JRJoe Rogan0:43

       ... like, it looks like, like you're getting bored. You just wanna switch it up a lot.

   11. JPJordan Peterson0:47

       He sends me these damn things and I get them and I think, "There's no way I, I wear that. There's no way I'll wear that." And then I put it on, I think, "Huh, I like that."

   12. JRJoe Rogan0:57

       (laughs)

   13. JPJordan Peterson0:57

       Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Tammy puts up with it, so, you know.

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:00

       Is it everyday suits now with you? Is that-

   15. JPJordan Peterson1:02

       Pretty m- I'm in a suit pretty much all the time, you know, so...

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:04

       Is there a reason for that?

   17. JPJordan Peterson1:06

       Well, the original reason was because, um, probably because my father, he was a teacher and, uh, he always wore a suit, even in the '70s when that started to become, you know, like, 1950s thing. And, uh, I asked him one time why he did that and he said it was to show respect for his students. And then when I was a professor, well, i- when you start to be a professor, you're not that much difference in age from your students to begin with. It's a good way of laying out a demarcation.

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:35

       Mm.

   19. JPJordan Peterson1:36

       And that was helpful. That's useful. You know, people like to know how the hierarchies are delineated.

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:42

       Right.

   21. JPJordan Peterson1:42

       And professors like to think that they're everybody's buddy, but that's not the right relationship. And so that was helpful. And then when I went on tour in 2018, you know, I realized that I was gonna speak live in front of several hundred thousand people over the course of the tour and I thought, you got to think when you have an opportunity like that, that if you had the least amount of sense, you'd pull out all the stops. So I bought some expensive suits, and then one of the things that happened in, in consequence of that was that people started to come to the lectures in suits. And so about, I'd say about 40% of the audience dresses formally. And lots of the young guys who come, they tell me when I meet them afterwards, in the meet and greets for example, that they bought their first suit to come to the lectures.

   22. JRJoe Rogan2:27

       (laughs)

   23. JPJordan Peterson2:27

       And so, you know, I wouldn't have ever expected that. And then Dmitri showed up about two years ago with this portfolio of suits. He designed one for each of the rules for my first book, and he put the rule underneath the collar at the back and designed the lining, custom lining on all the suits as well. And so I gave him a crack at it because he put so much work into it, and, and that worked out real well. He's very, very creative. Yeah, that too, uh, color suit, there's lamb's wool on one side and goat's w- wool on the other and it's a heaven and hell suit, so...

   24. JRJoe Rogan3:01

       Oh.

   25. JPJordan Peterson3:02

       Uh-huh. Yeah, no kidding, eh?

   26. JRJoe Rogan3:05

       (laughs)

   27. JPJordan Peterson3:05

       And this is covered with iconography, um, Christian or, uh, Catholic and Orthodox. I've got one of each and, uh, that's because I was out on tour with my new book, for my new book, which is called We Who Wrestle With God, which we will talk about today, I hope. So that's the suit story, man.

2. 3:22 – 5:03

   “We Who Wrestle With God”: truth in speech, conscience, and the Logos

   1. JRJoe Rogan3:22

      How does one wrestle with God?

   2. JPJordan Peterson3:24

      Uh-

   3. JRJoe Rogan3:24

      Do you wrestle with God?

   4. JPJordan Peterson3:26

      With every word. So what does that mean? Well, look, man-

   5. JRJoe Rogan3:33

      (laughs)

   6. JPJordan Peterson3:33

      Well, you know, look, what, here ... Part of the reason that you're so successful in my opinion is because you actually say what you think, like you're not putting on a show. Actually, you have no reason to put on a show. You put on a whole bunch of shows and they've already been successful, you know, and you're actually asking the questions that are genuine questions and people can trust you because of that. And that means that you're letting the words emerge as they come to you, and each of... Doing that with each word, that's a decision, you know, 'cause you can use your language to manipulate and you can use your language to, for your own, say, hedonistic purposes or to gain power or you can just say what you think. Every, like all of those different choices are a decision. That's a wrestling, that's a moral decision and it, it shines in every word. And so it's, it's super important. That's part of the reason why in the Christian canon, the word is the basis of reality, right? It's the force that... it's the process that generates the order that's good out of possibility and chaos.

   7. JRJoe Rogan4:37

      Mm.

   8. JPJordan Peterson4:37

      Right? And so that's... And Israel, the word Israel means we are, we who are, we who wrestle with God, so that's the chosen people, right?

   9. JRJoe Rogan4:45

      Mm-hmm.

   10. JPJordan Peterson4:46

       And so what that means, at a deeper level even, is that if you're genuinely wrestling with your conscience, then you're someone who's chosen by God, and I think that's, that's right, that's accurate.

3. 5:03 – 14:22

   Words as reality-shapers: Genesis, meaning, Daoism, and Musk’s ‘existential crisis’

   1. JRJoe Rogan5:03

      It's interesting what you just said. You get, um... One of, uh, Terence McKenna's lectures, he talked about a, a very profound psychedelic experience that he had where he was given this revelation that the world is made out of words.

   2. JPJordan Peterson5:17

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   3. JRJoe Rogan5:18

      That everything is made out of words.

   4. JPJordan Peterson5:20

      Mm-hmm.

   5. JRJoe Rogan5:20

      He had just some sort of a profound understanding of what w- words really mean.

   6. JPJordan Peterson5:26

      Well, how much of the reality that surrounds you has been, what would you say? Uh, has emerged out of the realm of possibility because of what you've said? A lot, and you have this huge influence on the world. That's all a consequence, all, all, almost all a consequence of what you've said. And so there's an insistence in the Judeo-Christian canon that whatever... that the capacity that words have to shape possibility is akin or identical to the process that generates reality itself, and I think that's true. That's, that's why in the...... opening chapters of Genesis were described as formulated in the image of God, or like a microcosm of the process that gives rise to order itself. It's a very different view than the, than the bottom-up materialistic view, let's say, of the, of the enlightenment in the scientific world. It's a different way of looking at things. It's the notion that what is in front of you is a field of indeterminate possibility. It's got some implicit structure, as the scientists insist, but it's, it's open and you grapple with it like you grapple with your dawning conscience in the morning, consciousness in the morning. What confronts you in the morning is a field of possibility, and you approach that with a, a certain kind of orientation. And you use your words and your linguistic capacity to think, to shape that possibility. And if you do that properly, then you make, this is the Genesis 1 insistence again, you make the order that's good or very good, and that depends on your orientation. So in the Sermon on the Mount, for example, which is an instruction manual, Christ tells his listeners how to orient themselves in the world properly. So he says, first, "Aim with all your heart at the highest good you can imagine." Now, you'll get better at that as your vision clears, but that's the orientation, to do what's right. Now, you might say, like Pontius Pilate said, "Well, what is right? What is truth?" But most people know the difference between right and wrong. You know at least step by step what would move you forward and upward. So you orient yourself to the highest possible upward place. Then you make the assumption that other people have the same intrinsic value that you do. So that's your initial aim and presumption. And then you pay attention to the moment, and that's, well, that's, that's often the statement that gets Christ confused with the hippies, you know, to consider the lilies of the field who don't toil or spin. But that's not the instruction. The instruction is to aim up with everything and then having that firmly in mind to pay attention, as much attention you, as you can to each moment to allow the words to come to you that best suit that upward aim. Not to subordinate your language to your own machinations or manipulations or your own hedonistic desire, but towards what's right. And if you do that, then what emerges out of possibility is akin to the garden, to the original garden in, in Genesis 1, and it's the order that's good. Truth, truthful language brings about the order that's good. And that's, uh, well, I... That's a very accurate way of portraying the role consciousness plays in bringing about reality. So, and that's a ve- it's not... That, that viewpoint, by the way, isn't limited to the Judeo-Christian canon. You see the same thing in the Daoist representation, because in the Daoist world, you have a domain of order, that's the black serpent, and you have a domain of chaos... Sorry, I have it reversed. The domain of order is the white serpent and the domain of chaos or possibility is the black serpent in the Daoist image, the two snakes head to tail. And your job is to walk the line between them, and you can tell when you're walking that line because that's where things are maximally meaningful. And so that's another element of this vision, which is that if you orient yourself with upward aim and you straddle the line between order and chaos, then things become maximally meaningful around you. So, and Musk, you know, I, I just did a podcast with Elon Musk, and he talked about resolving his existential crisis, the existential crisis that he experienced when he was about 11 or 12. It was a crisis of faith, essentially. And h- the way that he resolved that and then motivated himself so intensely was by understanding that if he pursued the path of the, of the expansion of knowledge, that that would be intrinsically meaningful. That's the path of growth, that's the path of adventure, all of that, and it's aligned with what matures you and makes you more responsible and sets the world in order, and the, the, the instinct of meaning signifies all that. And so I've written a lot about that in, in this new book, We Who, We Who Wrestle with God, and th- that's what I've been lecturing about in 60 different cities, walking through these biblical stories, um, one by one. Partly because we have this wrestling match going on in our culture, let's say, between the nihilists and the atheists and the, and the true believers, you might say- Mm-hmm. ... and one of the faults of that war is that no one stops to elucidate or delineate exactly what it is that we're arguing about. So you have people like Dawkins, they parody the traditional conceptions of God, a superstitious being, nothing more than a defense against death, anxiety, or the opiate of the masses, the old man in the sky. The conceptualization of God in the Old Testament and the New Testament is unbelievably sophisticated, and to reduce it to that kind of parody is a stunning disservice. So- Dawkins is an odd duck. He's an odd duck because I think he knows also that there is some value in psychedelic experiences, but he's scared to have them. And- He won't look through Galileo's telescope, he- Yeah, but, uh, you know, he's had, uh, major health crisises, right? Didn't he have some sort of a stroke or something like that? I, I don't know. I don't know. I think he did. I believe he did. I believe he had some, uh, a major health crisis. It's like...

   7. JRJoe Rogan12:14

      ... how much time you have left, you know? Like, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna just not try it forever? You're just gonna dismiss everything forever? And I mean, I feel like people that dismiss things like that, this reductionist perspective, you're essentially saying you have the answers.

   8. JPJordan Peterson12:34

      Mm-hmm.

   9. JRJoe Rogan12:35

      And th- to d- dismiss the whole question of God or of, whatever you want to call it, higher power, a creator of the universe, the universe itself as a conscious entity, whatever it is, to dismiss it just because you're trying to decipher the writings of, uh, fairly comparatively unsophisticated people, because we're talking about people from many, many thousands of years ago without access to the information we have today. And then you're also dealing with the fact that many of these stories were of an oral tradition for over a thousand years before they were ever written down. So to just dismiss that as superstition and silliness without any curiosity about the root of these things, why they resonate with people, and to just say that this is superstitious nonsense that people choose to believe in, and this reductionist perspective of the known reality that we currently exist in, it- it- it's- it's a foolish way of interfacing with something. And it's shocking when a obviously brilliant man has a foolish way of interfacing with a very complex situation.

   10. JPJordan Peterson13:55

       Well, it's especially odd in his case because he's also the formulator of the idea of meme. And-

   11. JRJoe Rogan14:02

       Right.

   12. JPJordan Peterson14:02

       ... like, a religious story is a meme that's been selected by, by time and, and crowd. That's a good way of thinking about it. It, it strikes to the heart of the matter in ways that, that are sophisticated beyond conscious understanding. L- can I tell you a story?

   13. JRJoe Rogan14:22

       Sure.

4. 14:22 – 21:15

   Moses and the burning bush: calling, attention, and transformation (plus DMT hypotheses)

   1. JPJordan Peterson14:22

      Okay. This is a good story for the psychedelic experience, perhaps, at least as an analog. So in the story of Exodus, there's a number of circumstances under which Moses has an encounter with God. And they're very useful stories to understand because they point you to how that make- can make itself manifest in your own life. So the first real encounter that Moses has with God is in the story of the burning bush. And by this time, Moses is an adult. He's left his home. He's gone out and he's got married. He's apprenticed as a shepherd, which was a very, very hard job in those days because shepherds not only had to protect the weakest and serve them, but also keep the lions and the wolves at bay by themselves out in the wilderness. It was a very hard job and Moses has mastered this. So he's grown up and he's adopted a role that's like a standard social role, you know? He's, he's, he's a husband, he's a shepherd, he's an adult. Okay. And so kudos to him. But then one day he's out in the wilderness by the holy mountain, I think it's Horeb in that story, but the holy mountain is always the place where heaven and earth touch. And so there are all sorts of transformation stories that occur in the biblical accounts at, at Mount Horeb or at Mount Sinai where God and Earth meet. And he's out near the holy mountain and something attracts his attention and he goes off the beaten path to investigate. Okay, so that's the first thing, that's the first bit of wisdom to derive from the story. You'll have your role and you should have your role as a socialized adult, right? So you're kind of a type that way or maybe even a cookie cutter type but you've adopted this, th- this, this, uh, mature social role. It doesn't make you a full individual, but it's better than being immature and staying in your father's tent, for example, which is what Abraham does until he's very old. So something attracts Moses' attention and he goes off to investigate. Okay, so and then he sees that it's a burning bush and so what's a burning bush? Well, it's the tree of life and life is often represented as a branching tree and it's on fire because it's compelling, because fire is compelling and fire is alive and it's a symbol of life because everything that is alive burns. That's what metabolism is and so a burning bush is like life itself intensified to the ultimate degree and that's what attracts Moses' attention and he gets closer and closer to it which means he investigates more and more deeply. And as he investigates more deeply, he starts to understand that he's nearing the depths, he's on sacred ground. He takes off his shoes and that's an indication of his willingness to transform in identity and he continues to investigate and then the voice of being itself speaks to him from the depths and it tells him that, that it reveals itself to him as the ground of being itself and it transforms him into the leader who enti- invites his people away from slavery and who stands up against tyranny. And so that's the story of Moses' baptism. And so what does that mean for the ordinary person? Well, it means that you need to grow up and adopt a role, you need to mature, you need to become an adult, you need to be a good man in your time but then you have to pay attention to see what attracts your attention, what calls to you because there's an autonomy about that, right You don't get to pick what interests you, it picks you and you can respond to that call and investigate or reject it. Those are your options and if you reject it you stay in your box. But if you follow it, something will call to you and then if you investigate that, that will transform you and if you investigate it deeply enough, it'll transform you into the person who can stand up against tyranny and who can lead his people away from slavery and that's how God is defined in that story.... God is the thing that calls to you, to p- take you out of your role, that will shape the manner in which your psyche transforms itself as a consequence of your diligent investigation into what calls to you. And so, that's the God that's portrayed ... That's one image of the God that's portrayed in the Old Testament.

   2. JRJoe Rogan18:45

      Are you aware of, uh, the, some of the more recent, um, work that's been done by scholars in Israel? Where these guys have now come up with this hypothesis that the burning bush was actually, uh, the, it was a DMT experience.

   3. JPJordan Peterson19:01

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   4. JRJoe Rogan19:01

      And that the burning bush was most likely an acacia tree.

   5. JPJordan Peterson19:04

      Mm-hmm.

   6. JRJoe Rogan19:04

      That the acacia tree is apparently rich with DMT.

   7. JPJordan Peterson19:07

      Mm-hmm.

   8. JRJoe Rogan19:07

      And they think, you know, the way you get a DMT experience is you smoke it, right?

   9. JPJordan Peterson19:11

      Mm-hmm.

   10. JRJoe Rogan19:12

       And that they had some method of achieving psychedelic states through this.

   11. JPJordan Peterson19:17

       Mm-hmm.

   12. JRJoe Rogan19:17

       And this is where Moses is encountering God.

   13. JPJordan Peterson19:19

       Well, we have ... One of the things-

   14. JRJoe Rogan19:21

       Have you read any of that stuff?

   15. JPJordan Peterson19:22

       One of ... I know about the theorizing and-

   16. JRJoe Rogan19:24

       Yeah.

   17. JPJordan Peterson19:24

       ... it's certainly the case that people have been using psychedelic experiences for, we don't know how long.

   18. JRJoe Rogan19:30

       Right.

   19. JPJordan Peterson19:30

       Hundreds of thousands of years, no doubt, and they've had a profound cultural consequence. Um, one of the things that a psychedelic experience does is amplify that sense of intrinsic interest, right? So, it strips, it strips your perceptions of their inhibition by memory, that's a good way of thinking about it, so that you see what's there instead of your habits of perception. And so it's a way of amplifying, you could think of it, as a way of amplifying what's represented in the biblical corpus as a calling. And that, the thing that's odd about the calling ... Well, you know, when you're th- you can think about it this way, when you're, when you're laying out a podcast, when you're participating in a podcast, you're following a golden thread, right? You're following where your interest takes you and your curiosity takes you. And that's not something you can pre-plan, right? It's something that happens in the moment. So, imagine that you're focused on your goal of having the most interesting conversation possible and communicating what's derived to the broadest number of people. So, that's the overarching goal. Okay, now you focus on the moment and a spirit arises within you, that's a good way of thinking about it, that's the logos-

   20. JRJoe Rogan20:46

       Mm-hmm.

   21. JPJordan Peterson20:46

       The spirit arises within you that leads you on a pathway that's an investigation into the truth. That's part of that calling. The psychedelic chemicals, what would ... They, they heighten that, they heighten the manifestation of the underlying mystery, that's another way of thinking about it. They do that neurochemically. And so, now what's the association between that and religious revelation in the Bible? We don't know. We don't know.

5. 21:15 – 27:32

   Sacred Mushroom of the Cross & the problem of ancient languages, symbolism, and interpretation

   1. JRJoe Rogan21:15

      Have you read any of Marco, uh, Allegro stuff?

   2. JPJordan Peterson21:19

      Ale- no. No, no, I-

   3. JRJoe Rogan21:21

      Uh, John Marco Allegro, uh, wrote a book called The Sacred Mushroom-

   4. JPJordan Peterson21:24

      Oh, yes.

   5. JRJoe Rogan21:24

      ... of the Cross.

   6. JPJordan Peterson21:25

      Oh, yes.

   7. JRJoe Rogan21:25

      Yeah.

   8. JPJordan Peterson21:26

      Yeah, yeah, yeah. I read, I read that back, oh my God, 1974? That's a long, long time ago.

   9. JRJoe Rogan21:31

      Well, so you probably read it before it was bought up by the Catholic Church.

   10. JPJordan Peterson21:35

       Oh, I didn't even know about that.

   11. JRJoe Rogan21:36

       Yeah, it was bought up by the Ch- like you used to have to get old copies of it if you wanted to buy it, and then it was recently republished.

   12. JPJordan Peterson21:44

       Yeah, yeah, I- I read that a long, long time ago. I had no idea what to make of it. When I read it I thought, "Oh. Huh. I have no idea what to do with this."

   13. JRJoe Rogan21:51

       It's a problem because to really understand what he's saying, you would have to have a deep understanding of those ancient languages.

   14. JPJordan Peterson21:57

       Yeah, right.

   15. JRJoe Rogan21:58

       And, uh-

   16. JPJordan Peterson21:58

       Yeah, it's a very difficult book to evaluate.

   17. JRJoe Rogan22:00

       Because there's very few people that are even qualified to, uh, uh, b- like many people have disputed some of his like ... He has one claim that the word Christ can be traced etymologically, etym- how do you say that?

   18. JPJordan Peterson22:13

       Etymologically.

   19. JRJoe Rogan22:14

       Etymo- etymologically.

   20. JPJordan Peterson22:15

       Yeah.

   21. JRJoe Rogan22:15

       To, uh, an ancient Sumerian word that means a mushroom covered in God's semen.

   22. JPJordan Peterson22:20

       Mm-hmm.

   23. JRJoe Rogan22:21

       And so, it was his assertion that the idea was that they thought-

   24. JPJordan Peterson22:24

       That's the anointing.

   25. JRJoe Rogan22:25

       ... when it rained, that rain was the giver of life and it was literally God's semen that made things grow, and that these mushrooms, 'cause they would show up so quickly.

   26. JPJordan Peterson22:35

       Mm-hmm.

   27. JRJoe Rogan22:36

       You know, if it rains, now if you go to bed, you could look out at just your lawn and it's complete grass, not a mushroom in sight, and you can go to bed and then wake up in the morning and there'll be big mushrooms there.

   28. JPJordan Peterson22:45

       Mm-hmm.

   29. JRJoe Rogan22:45

       It's really weird.

   30. JPJordan Peterson22:46

       Mm-hmm.
6. 27:32 – 41:20

   Rogan’s case for psychedelics: civilization, the ‘stone ape’ theory, and the 1970 crackdown

   1. JRJoe Rogan27:32

      I think w- we are in a weird place in society where the term drug is a, is a blanket and it covers things that have vastly different effects. It covers caffeine, it covers nicotine, and it covers dimethyltryptamine, which is crazy. It's crazy that all those things are drugs. Adderall's a drug. Benzodiazepine is a drug. Xanax, l- uh... There's a million of them, they're all different, and they're all drugs. And the idea that psychedelics are a drug, uh, for lack of a better term, that's what we use, I don't think that's what they are, at all. I think they are probably why we became people, I think they are probably why society advanced, and I think every great ancient culture probably celebrated them and used them. It seems like there's so much evidence out of Egypt of the use of psilocybin, various different drugs, various different psychedelic experiences. The, the, the iconography of the pineal gland seems to be a big part of multiple cultures, not just Egyptian, but even Catholicism. If you go to the Vatican, there's this enormous pine cone that is, uh, a statue there, and I- I was very lucky when I went to the Vatican. We got a guide. We hired a private guide that was a, a scholar from France, and when he's not working in the summers, he gives these tours and they're very thorough. And he was r- a brilliant guy. I wish I could remember his name. I, I should probably find it out to give him credit. Brilliant guy. So, he takes us through, showing us all this artwork that's incredible, ex- explaining why they had little penises and that there, there's... He was explaining the whole thing, that big penises were thought to be barbaric and it was not representative of, like, someone of class and dignity and education.

   2. JPJordan Peterson29:35

      Mm-hmm.

   3. JRJoe Rogan29:35

      And so he gets to this pine cone and he says to me, he goes, "Do you know what this represents?" And I said, "Is it the pineal gland?" And he goes, "Yes." And then we start this conversation of what, why, why these Catholics would have this enormous representation of the pineal gland which they, they reference as the seat of the soul and that this, this gland, which is in the center of your brain, is, is thought to be literally a third eye. And in reptiles, it actually has a, a r- a cornea and a lens, this gland. Like, literally, it's exactly where the third eye of Eastern mysticism is and they've got a representation of it right here, and it's thought to be where dimethyltryptamine is produced.

   4. JPJordan Peterson30:20

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   5. JRJoe Rogan30:21

      And this, this whole, this whole connection to it is so old that, uh, it seems like you go back to the Jean-Marc Aurolegger stuff, you go back to the, the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are the oldest version of the Bible, the only version that... I believe the only version they have in Aramaic of all those stories, and-... if he's right, if Jean-Marc Olegro's right, it all m- kind of makes sense, that these people were having these experiences, much like the Greeks were with the Eleusinian Mysteries, much like m- multiple different cultures in the Amazon, all over the world, have experienced these profound ceremony experiences that lead to these journeys into the spirit world, these connections with higher consciousness, this ... Something that when you're experiencing it, it seems very, very real, but also very preposterous when you try to explain it to people that aren't experienced. You know, it's like Hendrix, like the g- are you experienced? Have you ever been experienced? Well, I have.

   6. JPJordan Peterson31:27

      Mm-hmm.

   7. JRJoe Rogan31:27

      Like, it's that.

   8. JPJordan Peterson31:28

      Mm-hmm.

   9. JRJoe Rogan31:28

      Like, with, with that d- uh, understanding that that's possible, the world changes, because now you know that that's possible. You could live your whole life and not know that the most shocking profound thing in existence is three hits away.

   10. JPJordan Peterson31:47

       Oh.

   11. JRJoe Rogan31:48

       Three hits away, and all the sudden, you're in a completely different universe in 20, 30 seconds. That's nuts. And the fact that that is dismissed?

   12. JPJordan Peterson32:00

       Mm-hmm.

   13. JRJoe Rogan32:00

       Uh, that people look at it as, like, "Oh, you're just escaping reality, and you're just-" Like, it, it might be the source of civilization itself.

   14. JPJordan Peterson32:10

       Mm-hmm.

   15. JRJoe Rogan32:10

       It might be the source of language. It might be the source of the expansion of the human mind over a period of two million years, the doubling of the human brain over a period of two million years, which Terence McKenna felt directly coincides with the shifting of the tropical rainforests turning into grasslands, which would force these primates to experiment with new food sources, and these ungulate cows that were everywhere that would shit, and then these psilocybin mushrooms would grow in their shit. Observed primates flipping over these cow patties looking for beetles and grubs and things to eat. They're ... It's everywhere. Like, you could see it all over Africa. If there's something on that, they're gonna try it out. And if these things are trying it out, and they're doing this over a period of two million years, and they develop language and culture and weapons, and they start thinking about things, and they become different than every animal around them. And this was McKenna's stone ape theory, which I'm sure you're familiar with.

   16. JPJordan Peterson33:08

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   17. JRJoe Rogan33:09

       And Dennis McKenna, who is, you know, a legitimate scientist, Dennis explains it even better, because he explains it with the actual mechanisms that your brain ... That what the, the things that fire up when you encounter high-dose psilocybin experiences that would lead you to the development of language. Glossolalia, the, the connection of sounds and, and objects, and, and bringing things together in a, in a manner of communication. Also, they, they've realized that in low doses, it increases visual acuity.

   18. JPJordan Peterson33:40

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   19. JRJoe Rogan33:41

       It makes people more, uh, amorous, makes people hornier. They're gonna have more sex. They're gonna be better hunters 'cause they could see better. They're gonna be a little m- more sensitive to, uh, the, the environment. They're gonna be more aware. Edge detection's different. There's, like, so many different things that happen that if you're, if you're thinking about what made people people, it's a mystery. We wanna pretend that we understand things because of the fossil record and this and that. Sure, we kinda understand, but every now and then, we find a new human that we didn't even know exist. Like Denis Ovens? What was that? Not even 20 years ago, I don't think? So now there's a whole other branch of human beings that they weren't even aware of 20 years ago. Whatever the fuck happened that took us from all the other primates that are still here, and made us this? It's pretty profound.

   20. JPJordan Peterson34:29

       Mm-hmm.

   21. JRJoe Rogan34:30

       And I have a feeling that psychedelics were at least involved in that process. That's my belief. And my belief is that The Sweeping Psychedelics Act of 1970 that they passed essentially to target civil rights activists and anti-war activists, that's what they did. They wanted to go after the hippies, and they went after the hippies with MKUltra, with Tom O'Neil so brilliantly, uh, outlines in his book Chaos. They went after it, and they created the Manson Family. They created that family. They, they taught that guy how to do that so that that guy would kill people, and he would be a psychopath, and now hippies would be psychopaths. And then all this anti-war shit would just get stopped by sensible people. Then Schedule I'd everything, everything. Uh, psilocybin, marijuana, all down the board, everything becomes Schedule I, the most illegal of illegal things. So all these people who are experi- all these Ken Kesey people and, you know, the, all the LSD people of the '60s, all those people become criminals instantly. And they just threw water on the whole movement, and it worked. It really worked. It was Nixon and, and all the people that were in charge back then. If you look at what happened from 1960 to 1980, this confusing era of the '70s where the effects are wearing off, and then you get into the '80s, and everybody's doing coke, and they have makeup on and they have big hair, and the music sucks. It's like something happened. Something happened. And what happened was they completely remu- removed the very thing that had changed culture so radically from the '50s to the '60s. Like, I'm a gigantic fan of 1960s automobiles. I love them. There's something about the shapes of them, the way they sound. I mean, part of it is that I grew up in the '80s, and those were the cars we all wanted. When we were kids, you know, if a guy drove by in a 1969 Camaro, we would all be like, "Whoa, look at it. Look at that thing." It was ... But there's something about those shapes, there's something about the designs of those cars that resonate so strongly today. A 1990 car ain't worth shit. Nobody wants your fucking 1990 car. 1990 Camaro, get the fuck out of here with that thing. But if you have a 1968 Camaro, people will stop in a parking lot and stare at it. "What is that?" "A-... I think those guys were on drugs. I think all those guys were on drugs. I think the guy who c- created a Corvette had to be on drugs. These guys were ... They, they, they f- felt something the same way Hendrix felt something when he was on stage playing guitar in a way nobody had ever heard before. That guy came out of nowhere and everybody was like, "What the fuck is he doing?" It was so different that Eric Clapton watched him for the first time and was like, "I should probably quit playing guitar. Like, what the fuck am I doing compared to this guy?" Like, Jesus Christ, everybody was like humbled and confused by it. Psychedelic-inspired, 100%. 100%. And there's something about throwing water on that in the 1970s that I think has done a massive disservice to our civilization. A massive disservice, because it's equated these things with people that have poor discipline and bad social skills and ne'er-do-wells who fail in society, and that's not true.

   22. JPJordan Peterson38:01

       So s-

   23. JRJoe Rogan38:01

       And all these people that I know that are billionaires, I know people that are like super rich people that run these, uh, financial institutions, and I know a lot of, like, brilliant venture capitalist guys and brilliant tech guys, and almost all of them are enthusiasts.

   24. JPJordan Peterson38:20

       Mm-hmm.

   25. JRJoe Rogan38:20

       Almost all of them have had these experiences, and they're all kinda quiet about it.

   26. JPJordan Peterson38:24

       Mm-hmm.

   27. JRJoe Rogan38:24

       And it's very unfortunate. It's very unfortunate, because of these stupid laws that were passed 50 years ago, we've gotten ourselves in this weird crunch where we've made things illegal that could massively help people progress in life and sort things out if we could figure out how to manage them correctly, if we could run proper studies about what is the correct dose. Is there a person that has a certain sort of biological, uh, you know, makeup that makes these drugs problematic? Should we find out? Who's a ... Maybe someone's allergic to them. There's many medications and many different compounds and many plants and natural things that people are, are allergic to. Let's avoid that. Let's try to figure out what works for some people, what work- what doesn't work. Let's have legitimate counselors that could guide people through experiences, people that have experienced it themselves and can understand how to do this with intent and possibly aid your life. They have been shown to be hugely beneficial for soldiers, for our military men coming ... And women coming back from overseas experiencing horrific trauma, to help them get past that. And yet they're illegal still. By ... And h- we're both middle-aged men, right? So who is telling us what we can and can't do? This is preposterous. This is other men our age that haven't had these experiences maintaining this control on them in an i- completely ignorant way. They don't even know what they are. They don't know what these things are, they don't know what the experience is, and yet they want it to be kept out of the hands of kids. We gotta keep it off the streets. We've gotta keep drugs away from our society. And you don't know what you're talking about. It might be why we're here, and it also ... The absence of it might be why we're so fucked up. It might be why we're so disconnected, why we're so disjointed, and our society is so hypocritical. I mean, the most pro-life people are also pro-death penalty. It's like across the board, everything. The people that, you know, want no crime but don't want to stop the emergence of crime by funding programs to try to fix the inner cities, and they wanna ... E- there's ... Our whole thing is disconnected. And I have a feeling that a big part of that is that we have not been given access to tools that have helped people literally become what we are today. And if y- i- if they're t- You know, if you l- read Brian Muir rescue's work and if he's correct, and these people that are studying the Eleusinian mysteries and the, the literal emergence of democracy as we know it, probably all of it came out of psychedelic experiences.

7. 41:20 – 46:46

   Peterson’s caution: nonconformity, ‘tune in… grow up,’ and religion as a stabilizer of revelation

   1. JPJordan Peterson41:20

      So I had Timothy Leary's old job at Harvard.

   2. JRJoe Rogan41:25

      That comes with a lot of weight.

   3. JPJordan Peterson41:27

      (laughs)

   4. JRJoe Rogan41:28

      (laughs)

   5. JPJordan Peterson41:28

      Yeah, and I knew some of the people that knew him, and so you could say that what happened in the 1960s, and this is relevant to the psychedelic experience, let's say, is that the emergence of mushrooms in particular and then LSD indicated to a swath of the population, like Leary and like Ken Kesey, that our perceptions were locked in kind of a box, in a, in a box that we didn't even really ... that we weren't even conscious of. I suppose that's the box of conformity. And the psychedelics released a wave of non-conformity, and Leary crystallized that with his tune in, turn on, and drop out.

   6. JRJoe Rogan42:11

      Mm.

   7. JPJordan Peterson42:12

      Now, there was a major problem with that, and that was partly what led to the kick-back. So you might say that the first stage of something approximating a religious revelation is the understanding that your perceptions have been, um, constrained by forms of conformity that h- that were so extensive that you didn't even understand them. You didn't even know they were there, and so you're freed from that. And then maybe the first response to that is the celebration of an unlimited hedonistic freedom. But the problem with that is that freedom from constraint and hedonism is not freedom. It's just, it's just subjugation to a kind of instinctive chaos, and that emerged with the hippie culture. And-... uh, Leary, in particular, made a huge mistake when he said, "Tune in, turn on, and drop out." He should've said, "Tune in, turn on, and grow up."

   8. JRJoe Rogan43:12

      (laughs)

   9. JPJordan Peterson43:12

      I'm dead serious about that, because there's, there's a different form of responsibility that emerges once you realize that you were constrained by a conformist box, let's say like Moses when he was being a normal shepherd, that you can step outside of that. But you don't step outside of that into worship of the golden calf, like in hedonistic orgies. You step outside of that with a more conscious upward aim. And if the use of transformative technologies, like psychedelics, isn't accompanied by that framework of enhanced responsibility, then it can degenerate into a kind of hedonistic chaos.

   10. JRJoe Rogan43:55

       Right.

   11. JPJordan Peterson43:55

       And that's what the Nixon types were reacting to. They were terrified by it, and they had their reasons to be terrified, because as you're intimating, these technologies are unbelievably, unbelievably potent and destabilizing. Now, that destabilization can be used for bet- let's say for better or for worse.

   12. JRJoe Rogan44:15

       Right.

   13. JPJordan Peterson44:16

       And it should be used for better. That's complex. It's a very complex thing to manage. And so, Carl Jung said that the, one of the main functions of religion was to stop people from having religious experiences. And what he meant by that was that a direct experience of the transcendent is enough to shake you to the foundation and to destabilize not only you, but your culture. This is why for ... There's another scene in the story of Exodus-

   14. JRJoe Rogan44:45

       But could you explain further, like expand on what he was meaning by that? About the keep you from having religious experiences.

   15. JPJordan Peterson44:53

       Well, if everybody goes their own enlightened way, let's say, there's no, there's no social cohesion, there's no unity of purpose, there's nothing but fragmentation. And part of the danger of the hippie movement in the 1960s was a counter social fragmentation.

   16. JRJoe Rogan45:10

       Right.

   17. JPJordan Peterson45:11

       Now, so you can imagine, you know, things get so constrained that everybody's exactly the same, and that's a complete totalitarian catastrophe. But you can imagine the opposite catastrophe, which is that, well, everyone's letting it all hang out and doing their own thing, and that's equally dangerous.

   18. JRJoe Rogan45:26

       Right.

   19. JPJordan Peterson45:26

       And so there's some balance in the middle. Well, that's that balance between chaos and order that we were referring to earlier.

   20. JRJoe Rogan45:31

       It's also d- an ignorance of the structure that's involved in ma- maintaining a society.

   21. JPJordan Peterson45:36

       Definitely.

   22. JRJoe Rogan45:37

       And that you need discipline and people need to work to maintain the society that you enjoy to be so free, and to be a hippie.

   23. JPJordan Peterson45:43

       Yeah, well, uh, you can imagine that that complex social order can be maintained by something like mindless obedience.

   24. JRJoe Rogan45:52

       Right.

   25. JPJordan Peterson45:53

       That's suboptimal. What you'd really want is enlightened responsibility.

   26. JRJoe Rogan45:57

       Right.

   27. JPJordan Peterson45:58

       Right, right. Now-

   28. JRJoe Rogan45:58

       Right, that's a great way to put it.

   29. JPJordan Peterson45:59

       Right, that's a very hard thing to pull off though, because it means that you have to leap out of the, the box of social constraint, and you have to take the responsibility onto yourself. Now, that's a hell of a lot better if you can manage it, but that is definitely not what Kesey, or-

   30. JRJoe Rogan46:18

       Right.
8. 46:46 – 1:13:28

   Abraham’s covenant as the ‘call to adventure’: meaning, sacrifice, and dynastic responsibility

   1. JPJordan Peterson46:46

      Yeah. Yeah, yeah, well, uh ... So, in the story of Abraham, Abraham is a, um, he's an old man when the story starts.

   2. JRJoe Rogan46:56

      As soon as you started talking about Abraham, it started flickering again. (laughs) It's going now. See?

   3. JPJordan Peterson47:00

      It's one of my tricks, man.

   4. JRJoe Rogan47:01

      I'm telling you, dude.

   5. JPJordan Peterson47:01

      Yes.

   6. JRJoe Rogan47:01

      It's never happened before. This is wild.

   7. JPJordan Peterson47:05

      So, Abraham is like 70 years old when the story starts, and we don't know anything about him. He's completely nondescript. He's a case of failure to launch. So he has rich parents and he has everything he needs at hand, so he can live the life of a satiated infant.

   8. JRJoe Rogan47:18

      Ah.

   9. JPJordan Peterson47:19

      He, like, like, he's in the throws of, of what would you sell? Materialistic plenty.

   10. JRJoe Rogan47:24

       Mm-hmm.

   11. JPJordan Peterson47:24

       Okay, and the voice of God comes to him. Now, but it's characterized in a very particular manner. So, God comes to Abraham as the call to adventure, and that's a very useful thing to know. So in the Moses story, God comes to Moses as that which attracts his interest and takes him off the beaten path. In the story of Abraham, God comes as the spirit of adventure. And God makes Abraham a deal. It's a very specific deal, and it's the best possible deal. This is the covenant, by the way. This is the covenant. So, God tells Abraham, "If you leave your zone of comfort, if you remove yourself from your father's tent, if you move away from infantile, materialistic satiation and go out into the terrible world, and you do that voluntarily, you have the adventure of your life, this is what'll happen. You'll be a blessing to yourself that's genuine. So instead of being wracked with self-doubt and being self-conscious and taking yourself apart with guilt and shame, you'll ride the wave of adventure and you'll feel that your life is a blessing. Not only will you feel that, it will be a blessing. That's the first thing that will happen. The second thing will happen is that other people will notice and your name will become renowned, and that will be valid. You'll be a blessing to other people in that regard. Y- your name will be upheld. So you'll stand out among your peers, but in a justifiable manner that's a consequence of your own intrinsic merit. The third thing that'll happen is that you'll have the opportunity to establish something permanent." For Abraham, it's a dynasty, right? He's offered the possibility of being the father of nations. "And the fourth thing that happens is you'll do it in a way that's of cardinal benefit to everyone. And so what happens in that story, this is so cool, it's so remarkable..."It's the answer to the selfish gene, by the way, as well. So what this story does is it takes the call to adventure, which is the instinct that makes children move out into the world, it's the spirit that you encourage if you're a good father, it lines that up and it says, "If you follow that and let it pull you out of your zone of comfort, your life will be a blessing to you. Your reputation will grow. You'll establish something permanent, and you'll do that in a way that's good for everyone." Right? So that's a hell of a good deal. And that's, that's the story of Abraham. Okay, so why is that relevant to the psychedelic debate? Because if you're going to move into the ro- zone of the transcendent, you have to take on the requisite responsibility or the process of transcendence turns into something like a descent into unstructured chaos. And that's not an improvement. It's just a movement from tyranny into the desert. That's a good way of thinking about it symbolically. So in... what happens in, in the Exodus story, 'cause it also details out how this should be structured, is that Moses has a vision of individual responsibility and social organization that's maximally responsibility-based. So Moses tells the Pharaoh to let his people go, but that's not the phrase. The phrase is, God said, tells Moses to say this is, "Let my people go, so they may worship me in the desert." And so you move out of the tyranny, that's what happens, let's say, in the throes of a psychedelic experience is that the preconceptions are shattered. Now you're somewhere unstructured. Okay, well, you can't worship what's unstructured. You have to find the proper structuring for your new freedom. The vision that's put forward in the book of Exodus is a vision of multi-dimensional responsible identity. So you take on responsibility for your own life, you take on responsibility for the life of your wife or your husband, you take on responsibility for your family, you're a model for your community, you serve your state, you do what you can for your nation, and that's all united under your highest upward orientation, and that's ordered freedom. That's ordered freedom. It's not the same as the hedonistic freedom that the people like Nixon and the sort of right-wing conservatives of the 1960s were terrified by, that kind of hedonistic anarchy. It's not freedom.

   12. JRJoe Rogan51:36

       Well, because it, it had erupted-

   13. JPJordan Peterson51:38

       Hm!

   14. JRJoe Rogan51:38

       ... out of nowhere. I mean, we're, we're right now in 2024. I want you to imagine 2014. It's the same. It's the same. There's nothing different other than the threat of AI and war and... socially. The world's the same. You go from 1956 to 1966, you have a completely different world, completely different world. Everyone's going crazy. The, the, uh, opposition to the Vietnam War has got people in the streets. Ken Kesey, Tim Leary, Tune In, Drop Out, all that. This, this world is changing in this radical way. Th- there had been nothing like it. And, and a lot of what you're saying about these experiences happening and people just disconnecting and, and not having discipline and structure, and just experiencing these things and just disconnecting completely from society was the problem.

   15. JPJordan Peterson52:34

       Hm.

   16. JRJoe Rogan52:35

       That was the problem.

   17. JPJordan Peterson52:36

       Hm. It's a major problem. Well, it's still a problem now to some degree because people who are pursuing, let's say, non-conformist freedom don't understand that the replacement for freedom isn't hedonistic anarchy. And that's partly 'cause it's self-defeating. It's also pointless. It's also pointless and meaningless, and it's partly pointless and meaningless because imagine, and this is part of the implication of the story of Abraham, is that the instinct of meaning comes to you when you pursue a pathway that specifies, w- what would you say, the limitless development of your integrated psyche. But it's not just the psyche, it's the integration of the psyche with all the different levels of society. Like, for example, insofar as you're well put together, you're gonna be a highly functional husband to your wife, right? Like, your own psychological organization, integration cannot be divorced from the union that you make with your wife. They're the same thing. And then you can extend that to your kids. For you to get your act together means simultaneously that you establish the proper relationship with your wife and with your children. Those are the same thing. And then if you can manage that, you do the same thing with the broader community. It all stacks up musically. And so then mental health doesn't become how your psyche is organized internally, which is what the clinical psychologists misled people into believing. It, it's more like the harmony that obtains from the psyche upward through society when everything is stacked up properly to the, up to the highest level possible of being. And that, that's another definition of God. So one of the things I tried to do in this book is to actually define what it is that we're arguing about, because the old man in the sky superstition doesn't cover the territory. So for example, if you look at God in the story of Abraham and you say, "Do you believe in that God?" What you're asking, even though you might not know it is, "Do you believe that there is a call to adventure and that following that call will not only integrate you but serve society in the highest possible manner?" And that's a very... that's a pretty straightforward question. It has very little to do with anything that's even vaguely superstitious. Like, is that call there? You're certainly rewarded in your children if you have the least bit of sense. And so I've been trying to define what it is that we're arguing about. And so there's another definition too that you see this in the story of Adam and Eve.So, in the story of Adam and Eve, one of the ways God is characterized is as the spirit that calls you on your pride and presumption. So then you ask yourself, "Well, do you believe that exists?" It's like, how often in your own life has pride gone before a fall? Is there some ... Spirit, that's operative in being, that shows you the error of your ways when you get ahead of yourself, or not? And if the answer to that is no, you say, "Well, you have no conscience? Nothing calls you on your moral impropriety, your overreaching?" No one wants to be near you if you're one of those people, that's for sure. And is that real? So one of the ways God is presented in the Old Testament is this dynamic between calling and conscience, right? So there's the calling that is indicated in the story of Abraham and Moses that pulls you forward to the adventure of your life. And the other side of that is the constraint of conscience that tells you when you're wandering off the straight and narrow path. Right? So that's more the voice of negative emotion and threat detection. And calling is more like the voice of positive emotion that pulls you forward and invites you, but you need the dynamic between those two. That's the pillar of light and the pillar of darkness that guides the Israelites across the desert. Jonathan Pageau helped me figure that out, just flattened me when I, when he laid it out, because I could see the Daoist view of the world and the ancient Jewish view of the world stack on top of each other and the implication of the story is very straight. It's like, you leave the tyranny and you're lost. What guides you when you're lost? The interaction between what calls you forward and upward, and the constraints o- of your own conscience that warn you when you're deviating from the straight and narrow path. That's the definition of God that emerges from Exodus.

   18. JRJoe Rogan57:09

       And the balance of the mind to be able to figure out which is which, and how to apply them. And the balance of the mind, this is why you have to have the least amount of problems in your life, and keep your body as healthy as possible, so you don't have all these other things that are influencing the way you interact with the world. You gotta have a balance of everything. All of it has to be kind of balanced together in order for you to have a-

   19. JPJordan Peterson57:34

       The judgment.

   20. JRJoe Rogan57:35

       Yes.

   21. JPJordan Peterson57:35

       Mm-hmm. Otherwise you can't see.

   22. JRJoe Rogan57:37

       Right. Y- y-

   23. JPJordan Peterson57:38

       Right?

   24. JRJoe Rogan57:38

       Yeah. Yeah, you have to be able to see it, and it's hard.

   25. JPJordan Peterson57:41

       And you have to want to see it.

   26. JRJoe Rogan57:42

       Yeah.

   27. JPJordan Peterson57:43

       So why do you want to see it?

   28. JRJoe Rogan57:45

       Me?

   29. JPJordan Peterson57:45

       Yeah.

   30. JRJoe Rogan57:46

       It's just my instinct. That's just, I follow my instincts with everything. I always have.
9. 1:13:28 – 1:18:58

   The cross and archetypal tragedy: the psychology of voluntary burden and ‘harrowing hell’

   1. JRJoe Rogan1:13:28

      So do you think that that's what people think of when they think of the cross?

   2. JPJordan Peterson1:13:33

      ... it's very hard to think about... It's hard- very hard to know what people think about. I would say it depends on their level-

   3. JRJoe Rogan1:13:38

      Because I- I-

   4. JPJordan Peterson1:13:38

      ... sophistication.

   5. JRJoe Rogan1:13:39

      Right. That's what I'm getting at.

   6. JPJordan Peterson1:13:40

      Yeah?

   7. JRJoe Rogan1:13:40

      I don't think it's ever been explained to me that way, and I don't think most people think about it that way. When they think about it, they think, "Jesus died for our sins."

   8. JPJordan Peterson1:13:50

      Yeah.

   9. JRJoe Rogan1:13:50

      "There he is. Praise Jesus."

   10. JPJordan Peterson1:13:52

       Right. Right. Right.

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:13:53

       That's... It's a very-

   12. JPJordan Peterson1:13:54

       Formulaic.

   13. JRJoe Rogan1:13:55

       ... surface l- formulaic-

   14. JPJordan Peterson1:13:56

       Yeah.

   15. JRJoe Rogan1:13:56

       ... surface-level understanding-

   16. JPJordan Peterson1:13:58

       Well, I think it's partly-

   17. JRJoe Rogan1:13:59

       ... of what it is we're talking about.

   18. JPJordan Peterson1:14:00

       ... because it's partly... And there's a merciful element of it, and this is what Jung was referring to when he said that religion helps protect people against religious experience. The full revelation of the significance, let's say, of the imitation of Christ, which is supposed to be the foundation of Christian belief, is in fact the demand that you walk the same pathway. And that's a terr- It's the most terrifying demand, because... So Jung described the Christian passion as an archetypal tragedy. Now, there was a reason for that. So you can... Think about it this way, think about it technically. So imagine that 100 great storytellers told the most painful possible story, and then imagine that you aggregated all those stories and you distilled them into one story where all the terrible elements were present. Okay, so now you have a representation... You have a representation of the worst life can throw at you. Okay, so let's take that apart a bit. So the first thing that makes a tragedy tragic is that the tragedy befalls a good person. 'Cause if a tragedy befalls a villain, it's just justice, it's not a tragedy. So it has to be a good person. So then, to amplify that, you would not only have the tragedy befall a good person, you'd have it befall a good person that everyone knew was good, but was not only good, was the best, and that was persecuted because he was good. So that sorta limits it out in that direction. Then you might say, "Well, what does he have to face?" Well then, the answer would be, "Well, the worst life has to offer." Okay. Early death. Early painful death. Early, painful, humiliating, unjust death at the hands of his friends, at the hands of the mob, under the thumb of a tyrant. Right. Brought about by people who knew that he was not only good, but the best of men. That's an archetypal tragedy. And then it doesn't limit out, so then you have the death that occurs in consequence of that and its voluntary acceptance. But that's not where it ends because the mythology surrounding the crucifixion story insists that Christ harrowed hell after the crucifixion, which meant that he confronted not only death but malevolence itself, and in consequence transcended both. And so what's the underlying psychological message? It's something like the calling and the voice of conscience informing people that in order to thrive properly in life and to become who you could be, if you could be everything you could be, you have to voluntarily take on the weight of the worst life has to offer, including the depths of malevolence itself. And you think, "Well obviously, Joe, you know this." Like, how are you gonna adapt to a situation you won't even admit to?

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:17:02

       Right.

   20. JPJordan Peterson1:17:02

       Well, so how could it be otherwise than for you to become everything that you could be, you have to embrace all of the catastrophes that life has to offer?

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:17:12

       Mm-hmm.

   22. JPJordan Peterson1:17:12

       Like how could it al- how could it be other than that? You're gonna hide? You're gonna pretend?

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:17:17

       Right.

   24. JPJordan Peterson1:17:18

       How is that gonna work? No one thinks that'll work.

   25. JRJoe Rogan1:17:20

       Right.

   26. JPJordan Peterson1:17:21

       And so... And you're right. There i- there is this defensive element to the... Particularly the Protestant religious tradition, although I don't want to single out the Protestants specifically, that insists that, you know, the work has already been done, but there's a lot of ambivalence about that in the Christian canon because there's an equal insistence that, no, you're supposed to, uh... You're supposed to take all this on voluntarily. And that not only that, not only that, but that's... It's such an interesting idea because it makes so much sense psychologically. So imagine that as your courage grows so that you can confront more and more of the horror of life, that a spirit begins to develop within you that gives you a strength that's commensurate with your daring. That's walking with God. That's the same thing. So the promise is that if you had the courage, something would be with you to allow you to bear up nobly under the burden. And I... All the clinical evidence supports that proclamation because what you see in people in the therapeutic transformation is that insofar as they're willing to confront what terrifies them voluntarily, they get stronger.

   27. JRJoe Rogan1:18:34

       Hmm.

   28. JPJordan Peterson1:18:35

       And then imagine that there's no... There's nothing but a metaphysical limit to that. And I think that's right. I- I can't see how it cannot be right.

   29. JRJoe Rogan1:18:45

       It makes sense and it, it, it resonates with how we know people that have overcome great things in their life and become these very unusual and unique people.

   30. JPJordan Peterson1:18:53

       Yeah.
10. 1:18:58 – 1:28:18

    Peterson Academy launch: online ‘university equivalent’ and a paid community to avoid ‘parasites’

    1. JRJoe Rogan1:18:58

       Where were we?

    2. JPJordan Peterson1:18:59

       Well, we were kind of bringing We Who Wrestle with God to a close, I would say.

    3. JRJoe Rogan1:19:04

       Yeah.

    4. JPJordan Peterson1:19:04

       We've got other projects I wanna talk to you about.

    5. JRJoe Rogan1:19:06

       Okay.

    6. JPJordan Peterson1:19:06

       All right?

    7. JRJoe Rogan1:19:07

       Sure.

    8. JPJordan Peterson1:19:07

       We're launching Peterson Academy today, so online university, we hope. We'll see. We've got... We're launching with 20 courses, best lecturers in the world, very, very high-quality production. We invited the best lecturers I could find down to Miami, eight-hour courses on the topic they really want, highest possible production quality, and, uh-... we're hoping we'll make a high level, university level, university-equivalent education available to everyone for approximately 1/20 the cost.

    9. JRJoe Rogan1:19:47

       Mm-hmm.

    10. JPJordan Peterson1:19:47

        So that's the plan. You want to see the opening, the opening salvo?

    11. JRJoe Rogan1:19:52

        Sure. Yeah. Put s it up. Put it up, Jamie.

    12. JPJordan Peterson1:19:54

        Yeah, yeah.

    13. JRJoe Rogan1:19:55

        Why did I decide to build an o-

    14. JPJordan Peterson1:19:55

        Let's take a look. I, I ran this before my lectures th- this last tour.

    15. JRJoe Rogan1:19:59

        You gotta put the headphones on if you want to hear it.

    16. JPJordan Peterson1:20:01

        Yeah, yeah. Okay. Why did I decide to build an online university? Well... (dramatic music plays)

    17. NANarrator1:20:08

        There is a crisis now in higher education.

    18. JPJordan Peterson1:20:11

        The president of Harvard University resigned today, weeks after-

    19. NANarrator1:20:14

        Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate PEN's code of conduct? We have a problem with affordability and cost, spiraling student loans. We have a group think emerging, and that warps the entire academic enterprise.

    20. JPJordan Peterson1:20:29

        I experimented with putting my lectures online and found that I could teach far more people at very low cost than I could at the university. And I thought, "Well, why not scale that?" What I'm hoping to do is to find the best lecturers in the world and to bring them to as wide as possible an audience.

    21. NANarrator1:20:53

        He came to me and he basically said, "I want you to do the best course that you've always wanted to do."

    22. JPJordan Peterson1:20:58

        We wanna bring you the highest quality education possible at the lowest possible price.

    23. NANarrator1:21:03

        It's extremely high-level content that anybody can use to educate themselves, and it's available to everybody.

    24. JPJordan Peterson1:21:08

        Well, that would be good. I think it's funny, as I got canceled at the university, so I can try to return the favor.

    25. JRJoe Rogan1:21:17

        (laughs) I think they're doing that to themselves, right?

    26. JPJordan Peterson1:21:23

        Yeah, well, we couldn't have a better marketing campaign than the universities themselves.

    27. JRJoe Rogan1:21:28

        It's, uh, similar to what's going on with mainstream media.

    28. JPJordan Peterson1:21:31

        Yeah?

    29. JRJoe Rogan1:21:31

        It really is kind of the same thing. They're kinda canceling themselves.

    30. JPJordan Peterson1:21:33

        Yeah, well, it all derives from the same source, right, is the capture of higher education by this godforsaken ideology that's-

Episode duration: 2:36:25