Jordan Peterson Part 1 | Club Random with Bill Maher

Summary

Podcast Summary: Club Random with Bill Maher – Jordan Peterson Part 1

Episode Information:

• Title: Jordan Peterson Part 1 | Club Random with Bill Maher
• Host: Bill Maher
• Guest: Jordan Peterson
• Release Date: September 15, 2024

Bill Maher welcomes Jordan Peterson to Club Random, engaging in an in-depth conversation that traverses various subjects from mental health and education to religion, politics, and societal issues. This summary captures the essence of their dialogue, highlighting key points, notable quotes, and the overarching themes discussed throughout the episode.

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1. Health, Obesity, and Medical Advancements

Discussing the Impact of Ozempic on Obesity

• Bill Maher [03:31]: "What it means is obesity was always bad for everything, and now that people aren't so fat, all these other things are getting better too."
• Jordan Peterson [04:30]: Highlights the innovative use of the carnivore diet at McLean Hospital for treating severe mental disorders, emphasizing the intersection of diet and mental health.

Limitations of Modern Medicine

• Bill Maher [05:29]: "They're good at after, they're being very bad at preventative medicine."
• Jordan Peterson [05:31]: Discusses the challenges in incentivizing preventive healthcare and the complexities involved in rewarding long-term health outcomes.

2. Education and Peterson Academy

Launching an Online Education Platform

• Jordan Peterson [06:47]: "It's called Peterson Academy... we have 30,000 students in three weeks."
• Bill Maher [07:59]: Inquires about the production quality of online courses, to which Peterson explains the high standards akin to Hollywood-level production.

Critique of Traditional Universities

• Jordan Peterson [08:53]: Criticizes the low quality of many university courses, labeling them as "dull and often wrong" and "ideologically addled."
• Bill Maher [13:03]: Raises concerns about the Eurocentric bias in traditional curricula, prompting Peterson to acknowledge the need for comprehensive education.

3. Religion, Psychology, and the Human Condition

Role of Religion in Confronting Suffering

• Jordan Peterson [14:31]: "If you confront the tragedy and malevolence of life, it will transform you."
• Bill Maher [23:57]: References G. Gordon Liddy's fear confrontation technique, illustrating practical applications of exposure therapy.

Critique of Religious Texts and Racism

• Bill Maher [19:03]: Criticizes religious justifications for racism, referencing stories from the Bible that have been used to justify atrocities.
• Jordan Peterson [19:26]: Acknowledges the problematic aspects but emphasizes the importance of not dismissing the underlying principles of religion.

Suffering and Moral Order

• Jordan Peterson [31:17]: Discusses the necessity of maintaining faith in an intrinsic moral order to prevent societal decay.
• Bill Maher [30:53]: Argues against the notion of karma, emphasizing life's randomness and the lack of logical consequences for actions.

4. Politics, Social Media, and Ideological Shifts

The Far Left and Political Extremism

• Bill Maher [12:10]: Compares current leftist rhetoric to 1960s revolutionary movements, highlighting the persistent theme of eradicating established systems.
• Jordan Peterson [14:14]: Discusses the synthesis of ideas aiming to unify knowledge across domains, countering ideological fragmentation.

Impact of Social Media and Elon Musk's Twitter Acquisition

• Jordan Peterson [60:16]: Attributes the rise of psychopathic and narcissistic behavior on social media to the lack of governance and anonymity.
• Bill Maher [57:27]: Criticizes Elon Musk's handling of Twitter, noting the shift towards more extreme right-wing ideologies instead of fostering a centrist discourse.

5. Gender Dynamics and Relationship Psychology

Hypergamy and Relationship Stability

• Jordan Peterson [82:14]: Explains hypergamy, stating that women are naturally inclined to seek partners of higher status, which impacts relationship equality and stability.
• Bill Maher [84:14]: Queries the practical implications, leading Peterson to discuss increased divorce rates and domestic violence linked to income disparities.

Personal Relationships and Support Systems

• Bill Maher [53:26]: Describes his desire to be a hero to his audience, paralleling the supportive role his wife plays in his life.
• Jordan Peterson [54:10]: Details the strategic and combative support his wife provides, essential for maintaining personal resilience against public scrutiny.

6. Environmental Concerns and Resource Management

Overfishing and Oceanic Resource Depletion

• Jordan Peterson [87:02]: Highlights the catastrophic overfishing and mismanagement of oceanic resources, emphasizing the irreversible damage done to marine ecosystems.
• Bill Maher [89:05]: Draws parallels with historical environmental mismanagement, underscoring the necessity for sustainable practices.

Human Population and Sustainability

• Jordan Peterson [86:21]: Argues against the notion of finite resources, positing that advancements in energy and waste management can support a growing population.
• Bill Maher [87:01]: Challenges this perspective by questioning the sustainability of resources like fish populations, advocating for practical conservation measures.

7. Evolution of Sociopolitical Ideologies

From Religion to Power Structures

• Jordan Peterson [75:40]: Explores the shift from religious sovereignty to abstract principles of power, critiquing postmodernist substitutions of power for divine authority.
• Bill Maher [75:42]: Reinforces Peterson's point by equating modern power structures with historical tyrannies, such as Mao or Kim Jong Un.

Karma, Power, and Moral Governance

• Jordan Peterson [91:25]: Connects the concept of karma with psychological resilience, arguing for an intrinsic moral order as crucial for societal well-being.
• Bill Maher [91:46]: Emphasizes the detrimental replacement of religion with ideologies like QAnon and Wokeism, viewing them as equally harmful substitutes.

8. Closing Thoughts and Future Directions

Peterson Academy and Educational Reforms

• Jordan Peterson [62:14]: Discusses the vision for Peterson Academy to offer high-quality, progressive education at an affordable price, aiming to replace failing traditional institutions.
• Bill Maher [71:24]: Expresses support for the initiative, recognizing the niche it fills in providing a serious educational alternative.

Final Reflections on Society and Ideology

• Jordan Peterson [74:31]: Reflects on the necessity of unifying knowledge and the dangers of power-centric ideologies.
• Bill Maher [75:27]: Concludes with a commentary on the need for balanced sociopolitical discourse, advocating for centrist solutions over extremist polarizations.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• Bill Maher [03:31]: "What it means is obesity was always bad for everything, and now that people aren't so fat, all these other things are getting better too."
• Jordan Peterson [06:47]: "It's called Peterson Academy... we have 30,000 students in three weeks."
• Bill Maher [19:03]: "They use religion to justify one of the worst things: racism."
• Jordan Peterson [31:17]: "There has to be something like an intrinsic moral order."
• Bill Maher [57:27]: "He should have just gone halfway."
• Jordan Peterson [82:14]: "Women are hypergamous... they want men of higher status."
• Jordan Peterson [87:02]: "We have probably destroyed 95% of the oceanic resources already."

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This episode of Club Random delves deep into the complexities of modern society, blending psychological insights with cultural critiques. Jordan Peterson and Bill Maher explore the intersections of health, education, religion, and politics, offering a thought-provoking dialogue for listeners interested in understanding and navigating the challenges of contemporary life.

Transcript

[Jordan Peterson]

This episode is brought to you by.

[Bill Maher]

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[Jordan Peterson]

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[Bill Maher]

No, you're right. Oh yeah. It's gonna come back and get you. No. Sorry.

[Jordan Peterson]

Weaponized car.

[Bill Maher]

Weaponized karma. No life is random. Okay. Is he wearing a free pea suit?

[Jordan Peterson]

Tuxedo instead.

[Bill Maher]

Just a two piece suit.

[Jordan Peterson]

How are you doing?

[Bill Maher]

How you're doing?

[Jordan Peterson]

Good to see you. Thanks for the invitation.

[Bill Maher]

It looks so good. I can't tell you how much to me source. As we get older, of course means more. That is the lead story. Is that someone who I didn't know if we were going to have. You look so hale. You look like it might have been good for you. I knew someone once who. The house was burning and she ran in to get her kids and whatever the fire did, it's like her skin was perfect. I always get her about it.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Seems like a rough way to get good skin tone. Yeah, well, sometimes you can. Sometimes you can emerge, if not improved at least somewhat unscathed.

[Bill Maher]

I'm on substack now.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, I heard.

[Bill Maher]

Go to Bill Maher.

[Jordan Peterson]

Tell me about that.

[Bill Maher]

Thank you, ed. Go to billmar.substack.com Quentin Part 2 is our first exclusive episode. Oh yeah. This is extras and you'll get much more. Ah. And the Peterson Academy. If you want an actual education, join up. And if you just want an education like I do, because I want to hear somebody who's brilliant, you know, I don't have to tell you where you can get Jordan Peterson. And you feel good?

[Jordan Peterson]

Not bad.

[Bill Maher]

You feel like you're all over that?

[Jordan Peterson]

No, no, no, no. I have a lot of pain.

[Bill Maher]

You do?

[Jordan Peterson]

But not compared to what I did have. So, you know, there's that and my head's clear.

[Bill Maher]

I know a lot of people who are a pain, but. Yeah, where's your pain?

[Jordan Peterson]

Kind of everywhere. Like when if you have a flu, you know what it's like you ache?

[Bill Maher]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, it's like that.

[Bill Maher]

Why do you have that?

[Jordan Peterson]

I have no idea.

[Bill Maher]

And they don't know.

[Jordan Peterson]

Just good luck. Just good luck.

[Bill Maher]

No medical experts can.

[Jordan Peterson]

No, it's think it's probably immunological reaction.

[Bill Maher]

Yeah. I mean, not to get on my high horse about medicine, but I'm always on the wrong side of the woke on medicine. Or maybe, I don't know, you're on.

[Jordan Peterson]

The wrong side of the woke fairly.

[Bill Maher]

Frequently recently, but especially on that one they really hate. They hate it when I went after obesity. And, you know, not in a mean way, just in a way that's saying. And it's so funny now that Ozempic is getting everybody back into shape, I notice these articles saying, you know, it's not just good for weight loss, and they list like 20 other things it's good for. And I'm like, hey, you idiots. What it means is obesity was always bad for everything, and now that people aren't so fat, all these other things are getting better too. It's not the Ozempic.

[Jordan Peterson]

I interviewed this psychiatrist, Chris Palmer, who works at the McLean Hospital in Boston, and that's, I suppose, the premier psychiatric hospital maybe in the world. And they're using the carnivore diet to treat schizophrenia, manic depressive disorder and endogenous depression. So depression without a cause. It's all meat.

[Bill Maher]

Yeah, that's what you used.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. And he's had remarkable success with it. And this is really something, right, because those are very intractable conditions, especially schizophrenia. And I never did think that they were like psychological in origin. They're so serious that it's very difficult to shake the suspicion that something has just gone seriously wrong, like physically, physiologically. And anyways, they're having. I think he has. I think he told me that they're running 50 different studies examining the effect of diet on these serious mental disorders. So that's very exciting to watch.

[Bill Maher]

And again, this is one of those things, meat, that really shouldn't even have a political dimension because it's just science and the science is out. This is more evidence to me that while we don't know a lot of shit, this is always my. One of my issues that they argue with me about medicine is that, you know, it's not an uncommon story to hear somebody say, yeah, I have some pain. They can't really figure out why. They can't figure out a lot. It's not an indictment. It's just that's the century we're living in where they just still can't figure out a lot.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, people turn out to be.

[Bill Maher]

Complicated, and medicine is very complicated.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes, that's for sure. And some things the medical profession do very well. They're very good at Joint replacements, for example.

[Bill Maher]

They're good at many things. They're very good at after. They're being very bad at. Preventative medicine. When you're right at the end of the line, swooping in at the last minute with heroic measures, it's hard to monetize preventive strategies. Correct.

[Jordan Peterson]

And it's also hard to get people credit for them.

[Bill Maher]

That's so true.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's like, here's a major problem. You didn't have that.

[Bill Maher]

That's a great point.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's really rough. I mean, so that's a real strategic and tactical problem. There have been attempts at times to pay doctors for how many people they keep healthy, you know, to give them a crew of people. But those are hard systems to set up economically.

[Bill Maher]

Well, it's a hard sell to the people who make money on ill health. That's what it is. But you're right, I have seen those studies. Let's incentivize keeping people. I think there was one in McLaren, Texas. They did the biggest one. And of course it works. You know, you set up the incentive structure.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Bill Maher]

You can incentivize anything.

[Jordan Peterson]

You can. Yes.

[Bill Maher]

But. Well, in any event, you look. I mean, I've had doctors who always say, you know, I can tell when someone walks in the office if they're healthy. Really? It's like, it's a look that you get right away, you know, I mean, this is part of Biden's problem with like, he just looked bad. You can't look. You can't look bad. And then of course, he sounded like a junkie when he talked at the end. But, you know, you look, look healthy, you look tail. And I know you have you starting your own college.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, it's well started. We have 30,000 students.

[Bill Maher]

Wow.

[Jordan Peterson]

In three weeks. Yeah. And it's, it's, it's going great.

[Bill Maher]

What's it called?

[Jordan Peterson]

It's called Peterson Academy, which wasn't a name I was particularly fond of. You know, there's. It's got that potential for physical or online. Online.

[Bill Maher]

Online, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. When we have. We have a stable of about 40 professors at the moment and they're top rate. And we launched with about 20 courses. We have another 30 already recorded. They're the best courses that have ever been offered publicly in terms of their quality of content and delivery. And also the production values are unparalleled. It's Hollywood level production quality.

[Bill Maher]

What does that mean? Production value for a course?

[Jordan Peterson]

Tight editing.

[Bill Maher]

Editing of what?

[Jordan Peterson]

The lecture camera shots. So a lot of.

[Bill Maher]

So when the students are watching online. It's not happening live?

[Jordan Peterson]

No, it's not live. It's recorded in front of a live audience.

[Bill Maher]

I see.

[Jordan Peterson]

And we film people against a white background and with no angles. And so we filled it all with imagery and text AI generated. They're beautiful, actually, the courses are beautiful.

[Bill Maher]

So you not only hear what the professor is saying about the shout of Turin, but then you see it because you've added that that's product about. Yeah, we certainly didn't have that when I was a kid. But on the other hand, you could raise your hand and ask the professor a question.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah. Well, that's an advantage if you're in a small course in a, you know, bricks and mortar university. But in many universities, the courses are immense. You know, you have 500 students in a course and there's no interpersonal interaction and there's no reason fundamentally to not to replace that with video, especially given the quality of our professors. Like I would say at the typical state university, let's say 10% of the courses are of high quality educationally and in terms of their capacity to grip interest. And all of our courses are high quality.

[Bill Maher]

What in your mind constitutes low quality? That it's more indoctrinated, Gold, Dull.

[Jordan Peterson]

Dull and often wrong. Ideologically addled. Taught by people who don't know how to teach. I mean, when you, when you, when you train as a professor, you're not trained to teach. And it's not like faculties of education know how to train people to teach, you say, in the K12 system. So being able to lecture is a rare gift. You know, Most people use PowerPoint, read it or they just read their notes, which is, you know, that's a terrible thing to do to people. You just give people the damn notes if you're going to read them. And PowerPoint. Reading off a PowerPoint is not lecturing. If you're a good lecturer, first of all, you know way more about the topic you're talking about than you actually have to deliver in the lecture. Like, your knowledge should be very expansive. And then what you should be doing is modeling because you have to realize one. You would realize this because you've done standup comedy and you know how to perform. It's called a lecture theater for a reason. It's a theater because it's a performance. And then you might say, well, what are you performing? And the answer is you're performing. You're modeling how you wrestle with ideas. You're modeling how you think. When I do my lectures in tour, I Never do the same lecture twice. It's always spontaneous. I have stories that I tell that are part of a set in a way, but I'm always trying to solve a problem or address a problem in real time. And if I'm fortunate and the lecture works out well, it has a narrative arc and it has a punchline. Now, that doesn't always happen because I don't necessarily know where it's going. But all the people we pick to lecture are expert lecturers. They're captivating and most of them, many of them are also revolutionary in their thinking. One two of my favorites. For example, conceptually, Jonathan Pageau is an orthodox icon carver from Quebec and he's probably the deepest religious thinker I've ever encountered. And his lectures are great. And he has done some work with a cognitive psychologist named John Vervaeke. He's also quite a revolutionary. He was a very popular professor at the University of Toronto. And they're putting forward a view of the world that's really new and exciting, I think, and meaningful to people. And so we're very interested and excited about this.

[Bill Maher]

It's funny because I think of part of the problem, what's going on in campus these days. And as we're taping this on September 11, the schools are newly back in session. And I remember when I was that age and heading off at this time of year, I couldn't wait to get back to my encampment.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[Bill Maher]

So I could protest for a terrorist organization. But apropos of that, I really.

[Jordan Peterson]

An Iran funded terrorist organization. Right. And the protests are Iran funded as well.

[Bill Maher]

What do you mean by that? Oh, Iran, Iran. Yeah. They meant the Rand Corporation.

[Jordan Peterson]

No, you never know about that either. No, no, it's really a part.

[Bill Maher]

Oh, yeah. But I feel like part of the problem with that kind of thinking with what has gone wrong with the very, very far left, which is absolutely embodied in academia, is that everything has to be a revolution.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, right.

[Bill Maher]

I saw this quote from the kids back at Columbia the other day. They had put out a manife and they use language now like, we need to eradicate America at its root.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, right.

[Bill Maher]

Like this is, by the way, something we heard in the late 60s from certain what they became sort of terrorist organizations like the Weathermen.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, definitely, you know, watch right out of the communist playbook. Eradicate the past and you know, all the people who lived in the past, you know, that's just a side effect.

[Bill Maher]

But I mean, to eradicate at its root, like what? So you're talking obviously about A different kind of revolution, definitely.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Well, this revolution is more grounded in tradition. Well, part of that is.

[Bill Maher]

Well, that's a more. More of a Renaissance then. No.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes. Yes, that's. That's right. That's a better way of thinking about it. Definitely, definitely. Because I think partly what we're struggling towards and partly with Peterson Academy is a. It's a more synthetic view of the world, like there is. I sent you my new book.

[Bill Maher]

I read it, and so I told you I gave you a book.

[Jordan Peterson]

I know you did. I know you did. And so you can see partly what I'm aiming at. And this is what many of the thinkers on Peterson Academy are aiming at, you know, insofar as they're aiming at anything other than trying to express what they believe to be the truth is a synthesis. And so I've been interested for a very long time on the. In the concordance between evolutionary biology and psychology and religious mythology, because there's a deep. There's a deep. There's a deep analogy. There's a deep concordance, which you'd expect if you. If knowledge unifies at the highest level, then there shouldn't be contradictions in the different domains of knowledge. And so. And I don't think there are. I think contradictions are apparent rather than real. They're a consequence of misunderstanding. So. And so I'm trying to. And have been for a very long time with this new book. I wrote this. We who Wrestle with God. The rule was that I wouldn't make any. I wouldn't formulate any proposition that I couldn't justify scientifically as well as from a narrative perspective. And so that was a fun exercise. You know, it's a rigorous exercise, and it's been very useful to me.

[Bill Maher]

And it's funny because, as I told you, it really brought me back, reading your book. Book. To being at Cornell.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, you mentioned that.

[Bill Maher]

The only good thing for me about Cornell was I did have intellectual epiphanies, and they did give me an amazing. This is the 1970s, so they were still teaching, like, horrible stuff like what white people did. You know, people, you know, I'm sorry that it had to be white people who came up with a few of the good things that. But they did, and we still teach them. And now in colleges, I feel like that has to go out the window because George Washington had slaves or some, you know, crazy shit like. But I got a great, I think, liberal arts education, and so that's kind of what your book reminded me of. But look, I mean, I'm in a different place than I was in the 70s. I've been an atheist and I felt like you were. I feel like you're a lapsed atheist. I feel like it's a paradox that someone of your extraordinary intellectual abilities is trying to reanimate this dead hooker called religion and bring it back to life in some way or find what's useful in it when. Why try to take these.

[Jordan Peterson]

Because you get. False substitutes emerge.

[Bill Maher]

I know what that. What does that mean?

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, imagine that things. Imagine that your systems of ideas imagine that they're either unified or not unified. Those are basically the options, right? And if they are unified, there's something under which they have to be unified. And if they're not unified, then they're in conflict. And that's not good. That makes you anxious. It makes you hopeless. It breeds social discord.

[Bill Maher]

Ideas are in conflict, you're saying. Yes, yes, ideas are always in conflict.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, but if they're. Yeah, but if they're in conflict, too much people go to war and they fall apart. I mean, look, you want diversity and you want difference in opinion because you want to keep things churning.

[Bill Maher]

What has made people go to war more than anything? Belief in who's the real God. I mean, religion just. I could take any number of reasons why I think it's better to junk the whole thing. But start with religions are supremist just by their nature. If you're telling people what happens when you die, which nobody knows, and you're telling who the great master of the universe is, you kind of have to be in a place where you can't abide other thoughts on the subject. And certainly all religions are like that. Islam is super supremist in that way. And a lot of the people today who are speaking for it will tell you right to your face, why am I supporting this? Because Islam is the best, of course. Obviously, that's why we justify these things. And certainly the Bible, same thing. I mean, God is very supremist for the Jews. I find it very amusing that the thing that they are accusing the Jews of today of doing, colonizing ethnic cleansing, which is neither true are true in the Bible. That's exactly what God tells the Jews to do. Ethnically cleanse the Canaanites, commit genocide if you have to. God tells them, you know, kill all the men. This is in, you know, this in the Bible. You've written about it in there. Kill all the men. The Midianites, another number of people, kill all the men and the women who aren't virgins. Kids.

[Jordan Peterson]

I mean, standard pattern of human warfare.

[Bill Maher]

I know, but for people who take a book as the guide to morality, it's filled with terrible morality. But again, not to keep beating a dead horse about why religion is so horrible in any form, but if you read the teachings of the Mormon Church until recently, the things they say about black people are just horrendous. The worst kind of racist thing. And they justify it by talking about that Ham. Well, no, that's interesting. They get it. The black people in religion get it from two sources. The Mormons talk about Cain, that black people are a descendant of Cain, and because Cain is a murderer and he did a dark deed. I mean, they're very open about life. That's why they have dark skin, to remind us of the darkness in their past. I mean, it's just fucking ugly. Yes. The other thing that the southerners in this country used was Noah had three sons. Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham.

[Jordan Peterson]

Ham was the contemptuous son, also the.

[Bill Maher]

One who wanted to fuck his dad, I guess, or maybe both, I don't know. But Ham. Some think the black line runs from Ham.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right, right.

[Bill Maher]

And. But both of them, again, use religion to be justifying what we would today call one of the worst things racism.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, well, don't. Don't look right.

[Bill Maher]

Is it worth it to, like, resurrect that whole structure when it comes with that? It's what I call the one turd in the pool. Like, I mean, a book that contains, okay, we're okay with slavery. It's terrible on women. It's terrible on homosexuals. It's like if somebody said, yeah, but you know what? There's only one turd in the pool. Jump on in. I wouldn't jump in if there was even one turd in the pool. And I wouldn't want to, like, resurrect a book and a mythology that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, why do you. Why?

[Bill Maher]

Okay, okay, you get me.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's nothing incoherent about that argument, although I think it still leaves you in an awkward position because the postmodernist would say, take a look at your stance and say, well, you defend Western civilization, and there's plenty of turds floating in that pool. Well, but. Okay, right.

[Bill Maher]

All right, you win that one.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, it's rough because there are plenty.

[Bill Maher]

Of turds floating in that trip. But here's the thing. We can fish our turds out like we had slavery, but we fished that turd out of the pool. You can't do that. The Bible is the Bible. It's there. And it was written by God.

[Jordan Peterson]

It was the Protestant evangelists that did that.

[Bill Maher]

Did what?

[Jordan Peterson]

Took that particular bit of pollution out of the pool. Right. That was Wilberforce in the uk and.

[Bill Maher]

He was completely motivated by motivations who were for emancipation.

[Jordan Peterson]

He was the one who eradicated. He was the one who convinced the UK to put their navy against slavery.

[Bill Maher]

In 1776, when our country was declared independent, there were 24 people in this country who belonged to the Abolitionist Society. They were mostly Quakers. 24 people in the whole fucking country thought abolition of slaves was a good idea.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, Wilberforce in the UK started out kind of as one, but it gathered steam. Right, right, right.

[Bill Maher]

It gathered steam. And 87 years later, force growing, seven years later, we did something about it. That's the big argument against religion versus science. It's self correcting. We can be self correcting. Religion to a lot of people seems too rigid. I mean, its virtue is that it's set in stone. This is what we believe. That's what they're counting on, is that people want that sort of certainty about something. Okay, so it's not going to. That's what the Pope is always telling.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, so one of the criticisms that Christ levies against the Pharisees in particular is exactly that criticism. He says to them, this is one of the things that sets himself up for crucifixion because it's a very vicious insult. He tells the Pharisees that they worship their own doctrines as if they're religious truths and that they would have killed the prophets had they been around in the time of the prophets that they purport to worship. They would have killed them. Said that they walk across the graves of their own prophets. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They haunt the graves of their own prophets. That's a good way of thinking about it. So he accuses them of a very deep cynicism and he's trying to make the same point you're making, which is that you're not supposed to worship the static doctrines of men as if they're religious doctrines. And that there's something in the transformation process that isn't encapsulated in the, say in the letter of the law. So what would you say? You don't privilege the letter of the law over the spirit of the law. And part of the, I think part of what the genuine religious enterprise is is the attempt to identify what that spirit is, that dynamic spirit. And I think that can be done, I think. And it does. It. It has an Affinity, for example, with this idea that it's incumbent on you to voluntarily confront the tragedy and malevolence of life. And that if you do that, it will. It will transform you. And we know that clinically, like all the different schools of psychotherapy converged on a few realizations. One of them was that it was useful to get people to get their story straight, you know, to. To recount their story. Another was that if you expose people to the things that they're afraid of and that they're avoiding, that they get stronger. That works. That's how you help people overcome anxiety, for example, social anxiety. It's also the fundamental mechanism of learning, is to put yourself on the edge of disaster and dance there. And that expands you.

[Bill Maher]

G. Gordon Liddy once said that he was afraid of lightning, so he tied himself to a tree during a storm. I mean, that's an extreme version.

[Jordan Peterson]

And see, now we know there isn't a God, because if there was, and it was Gordon Liddy tied to a tree. Yeah, but look, you use exposure training and therapy all the time. And a lot of what you do when you're trying to help people heal is return to that idea of the snake on the staff. It's like, what are you afraid of that's stopping you from moving forward? That's what you try to find out in therapy. It's like, what is it that's paralyzing you? Okay, now can we break that down into manageable bites so that you can confront it? And people see it was a weird thing because the behaviors were the first people that figured this out. That you could expose people to what they were afraid of voluntarily, and that they would. That they would become less afraid. That was the theory. They'd become less afraid. The psychoanalysts said that's not going to work because maybe someone's afraid of an elevator, but they're not really afraid of the elevator. They're afraid of death. And if you get them to relax about the elevator, their fear will just pop up somewhere else. But that isn't what happened. What happened was that if you got people to face any one thing they were afraid of voluntarily, they started to learn that they were more capable than they thought. And that made their bravery generalize. And that's really what kids do when they go out into the world, right? They find a challenge and they overcome it. And they learn that they're the sort of creature that can find a challenge and overcome it. And that generalizes. And that happened in psychotherapy. And then there's a Radicalization of that idea in the Gospels and in this story of the Brazen Serpent. It's like there's no limit to that. You take the worst. And this is also part and parcel of hero myth because there's a. The most ancient story we have literally is a variant of the dragon treasure story. Right. That the quest is.

[Bill Maher]

I love that part in the book.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah. It's a very useful thing to know.

[Bill Maher]

Look, if you're a person who has been listening for this last half hour and doesn't know what the fuck we're talking about, that book isn't for you. But if you're a person who has even a little bit of understanding of the Bible, you don't even have to be religious. It's a historical document. I really found this book so fascinating. It's so great. It's like what you were describing about your lecture. It's like your lecture in a book form. You know, somebody who knows how to tell a story, make you think differently of things. Even in the blurb I gave you, and you're a friend, I'm trying to be supportive. I had to even say at the end, I didn't get all the way with him. He didn't convince me because I feel like you're more religious than you used to be or at least willing to give it a try. And maybe that has to do with you getting sick. I don't know.

[Jordan Peterson]

I don't think so.

[Bill Maher]

What a ride to go on.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, I'm glad to hear that.

[Bill Maher]

I love that book.

[Jordan Peterson]

I'm glad to hear that.

[Bill Maher]

And people will too. I mean, you don't have to. You just have to be interested in great stories. I mean, why does the Bible survive? A lot of it is good stories. It's a lot of stories.

[Jordan Peterson]

They're stories you need to know too.

[Bill Maher]

And it doesn't bother people that they're told by. Both Testaments are an anthology. It's funny that in the New Testament they write out, say this is four different versions and they're not even gonna match. And we don't care. The Old Testament, I think this is still the case, but certainly when I studied it in college, they identified four main writers of the Old Testament. They called them Jewish, E, D and P. And they would be like, Jay wrote this in 850 BC. And then obviously this is added. I mean, this is how scholars see it, but it's kind of the same thing.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's an aggregation.

[Bill Maher]

It's an aggregation of people over. Now the New Testament. It's much closer. Mark is about 70 A.D. and the last one, John, is about 1:10. So there's about 40 years. But all of them take place well after Jesus died. They never knew Jesus, the gospel writers. The only one who was close to Jesus time is St. Paul, who's writing in the 50s. Jesus dies in 33, and he knows nothing about Jesus. It's so weird that the people who wrote later know everything about him. Paul doesn't even conceive of Jesus as someone who lived on earth. He said if he had lived on earth, he wouldn't have been a priest. He wouldn't have even been a priest. That's in St. Paul. He doesn't know anything about Mary, Joseph, the virgin birth, the crucifixion, miracles, walking on water, you know, fishing with the guys. And then nothing. I find that kind of weird.

[Jordan Peterson]

There's no shortage of things that are incomprehensibly strange in the biblical library.

[Bill Maher]

So being sick had nothing to do with.

[Jordan Peterson]

Not much? No, I wouldn't say so. I mean, what did being sick do? Well, it made me more grateful, that's for sure.

[Bill Maher]

But isn't that wrapped up with religion?

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, that. That's partly why I'm bringing it up, you know, I mean, I was in excruciating pain for three years. And so now when I'm sitting here and I'm not on fire, I'm reasonably pleased about that when I have enough sense to remember.

[Bill Maher]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

You know, and so. And that. Is that a permanent change? I suspect so. Three years is a long time.

[Bill Maher]

I mean, it does sound like what God did to Job. I'm just saying it's very.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, I think that that happens to everybody to some degree, you know, I mean, every single person in the course of their life has to deal with the fact that somewhat random, extremely unpleasant things come along and to some degree, even independent of your moral conduct.

[Bill Maher]

Oh, totally.

[Jordan Peterson]

And then, well, it's just. Look, if you're a bad actor, the probability that horrible things are going to come your way is, all things considered, quite radically increased.

[Bill Maher]

But yes and no. I mean, nothing bad happened to Saddam Hussein until we captured his ass and hung him. But he had 65 years of being able to act like the most ridiculous tyrant in the world and get away with it. Other people, again, they don't do anything and something bad happens. I feel like when people connect their behavior with some sort of punishment or re. That's childish. That's what. When people go, karma. I did a whole thing on this on my show. Once. What a bunch of bullshit. Karma. Americans interpret karma to mean like, you took the last parking spot and now shit's gonna happen to you. That's schadenfreude. That's not karma. But that's how people think of it. Karma. Oh, yeah, it's gonna come back and get you. No karma. I'm sorry.

[Jordan Peterson]

Weaponized karma.

[Bill Maher]

Weaponized karma. No, life is random. Good people get punished for no reason and bad people go unpunished. You just, you know, you're right. I mean, if you're some sort of a petty criminal who's always committing crimes, you're probably going to wind up in jail, and that's not good. But not everything has a logical connection to it.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, and lots of times good people suffer terribly.

[Bill Maher]

Terribly.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. And that's partly what Job is trying to deal with.

[Bill Maher]

Exactly.

[Jordan Peterson]

You know, and part of what he does do is take. It's a strange thing because he takes refuge in his own ignorance. And I think there's some utility in that. There has to be, you know, because we have to. We have to. If we don't operate on the assumption that there's something like an intrinsic moral order, it's very difficult for us to conjure up the courage to continue to exist when things go seriously sideways. But it's worse than that. Like, it's worse than that because. And this is why I brought up the Cain story. The Cain story earlier. If you are tortured, even unjustly, and you lose faith in yourself and the structure of existence, it isn't only that you become demoralized, it's that you tilt towards malevolence. You start to work against things. And so, and this is why, for example, I'm not thrilled in the least with the antinatalist types. You know, they make this claim that existence is characterized by suffering that's so intense that it would be better if consciousness itself just ceased to exist. And you can make. That's Mephistopheles case, by the way.

[Bill Maher]

It's Silenus in Greek mythology.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, you can make a case for.

[Bill Maher]

It would be better to have never been born.

[Jordan Peterson]

Exactly. Exactly. Now, and you might say, okay, you know, fair enough. What you're doing essentially is saying that the suffering in existence invalidates its utility. But what if it is the case that if you believe that. That you become an agent that produces suffering? Well, that is what seems to happen is that, like, once you turn against life, I mean, look, everyone's going to have a time in their life when they think, oh, my God, like Really, is this worth it? Like, you watch someone you love suffer, or maybe you're in agony for doing something good, let's say, in the worst possible situation, you think, really? Like, really? And so then maybe you get cynical and you get bitter, but the problem is that that has a direction, too. What happens to Cain? Like, he starts out cynical and bitter, but he ends up murderous and his descendants are genocidal. Like, that's. That doesn't seem like a good alternative. And so what you see in Job is this insistence, and it's a terrifying insistence that you are required to maintain faith in your essential goodness despite your flaws, which is already a hard thing to do. And your faith in the fundamental benevolence of. What would you say of the created order? Because anything else hurts you, but it's worse than that. It produces a kind of malevolence that spreads. And I think that's like, you asked me what the relationship was between me being ill and this interest in religious belief. And I said that wasn't the primary mover. The primary mover for me has always been the study of atrocity. Because I spent a lot of time. I spent a lot of time as a psychopathologist studying the actions of the people who have done the worst things and they're unimaginably bad. I mean, there's a. Iris Chang's book, the Rape of Nanking. The Nazis are the good guys in that book.

[Bill Maher]

Well, right.

[Jordan Peterson]

I'm serious. That's how rough it was. Okay.

[Bill Maher]

For those who may not remember 1937, the Japanese are on the march, and they're about the world. Pearl harbor was 1941. So this is four years before Pearl harbor. And they were on the march in Asia, and they went into China, Manchuria, and what they did. I remember reading somebody's column recently. It was on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it went into great detail about what the Japanese did in. Not just in Manchurian.

[Jordan Peterson]

I was chained, committing suicide after writing that book.

[Bill Maher]

Boy, when it's so bad, even the book writer kills it.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, exactly.

[Bill Maher]

But I mean, this guy said, I know there's a lot of hand wringing in America about Nagasaki and Hiroshima, not in Asia. They were not upset at all that the Japanese regime was taken out as brutally as it was. Because what they did to your point about the Rape of Nanking was just like, we won't, like, see.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, and that's also the. That's also the conundrum at a relatively deep level that's being contended within The Old Testament, it's like, so the Canaanites in general, like, from a narrative perspective, the Canaanites are the evil descendants of Cain.

[Bill Maher]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. And so the people that are being fought against are the cynical, bitter, twisted, nihilistic, genocidally motivated, sadistic murderers, let's say. Well, then the question is, if that's the enemy that you're up against, what exactly is the moral thing to do? You know, when you just made a case, you know, painful it is to point it out is you made a case that there are patterns of behavior that are so despicable that what. What's justified in that situation? Was the atom bomb justified? Well, you know, we're arguing about that now. And people take the same tack with regards to the firebombing of Dresden. Right. And you think, well, you know, the Nazis, they were pretty bad. And so what do we do about that? And the answer is, well, you know, we don't exactly know. It's not like it's simple, you know, where. How do you limit your reprisals? Well, we're dealing with that right now with the situation in Israel.

[Bill Maher]

Did you see the guy on Tucker Carlson recently who was giving a revisionist history?

[Jordan Peterson]

Was it Cooper? Was that his name?

[Bill Maher]

I don't remember his name.

[Jordan Peterson]

I think so.

[Bill Maher]

They had never heard of him. Tucker Carlson introduced. And of course we're talking about Tucker Carlson, who I think is crazy, insane about a lot of things, but he introduced him as like the most important historian and blah, blah, blah. And this guy, I'm just paraphrasing like mad, but like, no, you got it all wrong. Hitler was the good guy and Churchill was the bad guy. Now, you would agree that's insane, right?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Bill Maher]

Okay. Because there are people in this world who think that that's who you are.

[Jordan Peterson]

Me?

[Bill Maher]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

I know.

[Bill Maher]

You know, I'm not one of those people. I do understand that when you're not fully on the woke train, you are somehow just thrown all the way across the field into that bin. That's what bothers me about the way people react to you. It's like.

[Jordan Peterson]

And me, I have some objections to it too.

[Bill Maher]

Yeah. And me, you know, it's like you, it's just. Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

How's that doing for you? It's like a childish. You've been.

[Bill Maher]

You've been so naive and childish, you've.

[Jordan Peterson]

Been standing up to the woke mob more and more. Yeah. And so what's been the consequence? Not, of course, not many people are doing that.

[Bill Maher]

No, you're right. Well, the Consequence is some people left the building. I can't give an estimate, and I don't care, and I don't miss them. Other people joined like, there's a lot of people in this country who are tired of the hate and the hating, and I am one of them. I don't want to hate. Hate half the country, and I don't hate half the country. I would never vote for Trump, and I think he's an abomination. And Kamala, do I have to love everything? No. And it's fine. And I thought she was great last night, and I can't be more thrilled that I would put my money on that she's gonna win the election. But I don't hold my tongue about what is insane about the other side, because it is. It's not nearly as threatening as not conceding elections, which Trump. Trump does not do. So that's where I am on that. But I also understand that Trump, I think, will go away after this. I think he's kind of finally reached his Joe McCarthy stage, where it's like people are tired of it. It just took longer. But Trumpism won't go away. And I would define Trumpism as a fear of the insanity of the far left, which is not completely unjustified. And therefore, anyone is better than that. And Trump proves it, because he is that anyone. If he's okay, if he, in all his monstrosity, is still better than what you fear about the left, that's a problem the left has to deal with. It would be so easy. This thing I just mentioned about Colombia, where they were saying, we want to eradicate the United States as it is. How about pick some Democratic politician, Pick that as your sister soldier moment. Remember sister soldier? That's what Clinton. He made a thing about a rapper who had said, we should take a week out and just kill white people. Now, no one was.

[Jordan Peterson]

It would take longer than a week.

[Bill Maher]

It would take. Exactly.

[Jordan Peterson]

But she said she's just not committed to the task.

[Bill Maher]

She wasn't reasonable. She said, just take a week. And nobody really took this seriously. He purposely picked on that, and someone could do that. Does anybody think most kids in America want to eradicate America? Of course not. But just pick out something to signal to the middle of this country we're not as crazy as the super crazies on the far left. Just pick it. That's a sister soldier moment. We don't want to eradicate America. Okay, so Trumpism will. They will find someone. They will find another Trump. It's not really just him. As long as there's things that scare them about the things you've gotten in trouble with gender and the hysterics about racism. Not that it isn't a real thing, but all this freedom of speech issues, parenting issues, all these things that really scare them. And again, not completely without justification.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, there's plenty of reason to be scared of the radical left.

[Bill Maher]

That's what I'm saying. Until you take care of that problem, they will always come up with a Trump.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's it. So I spent five years working with Democrats trying to pull them to the center. And I had a lot of behind the scenes conversations with people, virtually none of them public, because virtually no one would talk to me publicly.

[Bill Maher]

We're talking about politicians.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes, yes. And many of them. Many of them. And I asked them all on the Democrat side, I asked them all the same question purposefully. And I asked this to rfk, too. When does the left go too far? Because obviously the left can go too far and none of them would answer. And so really, not one, not one dead serious in private as well.

[Bill Maher]

Come on.

[Jordan Peterson]

No, I'm telling you the truth.

[Bill Maher]

I know some people, I know some people who would answer that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, look, it's also, I stopped doing a fair bit of that about a year and a half ago and things have changed. There are more people on the moderate Democrat side who are willing to draw a line with regard to the radical leftists, but they're still not very good at defining it. So they'd reverse the question and ask me, like, when do you think they go too far? And I thought that was simple. It's like equity, equality of outcome. And the universal response to that was always the same. Oh, they don't really mean that. It's like, yeah, they do.

[Bill Maher]

To be fair, it is more complicated than just that. Equality, meaning equality of outcome. I believe in that, too. Equity is what they changed it to. A lot of people on the far left and Biden went along with all of it means no. Some people started out not from the same place, so we should make an effort to redress that. I believe in some of that theoretically, and some of it in how you would put it into practice. You can't just say, okay, let's. Some people weren't even at the starting gate for the first 350 years and now go. Of course there's going to be remedial, I think, things that we can do and we're doing many of them, we're doing some of them anyway. But do I Think it means we should like, like make it that medical school is not something that you can only get into completely by merit. No. Because no one wants a doctor who got there by affirmative action.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes.

[Bill Maher]

Right. But you would count what I said to be valid, right? That you can't say if you started 300 years late, we expect you to be.

[Jordan Peterson]

I guess, I guess this is one of the things that probably tilts me in the more conservative direction and partly as a social scientist, is that well meaning interventions seldom have the outcome that's designed.

[Bill Maher]

Correct.

[Jordan Peterson]

So even. And it's really a radical problem. Okay, so the historical solution to the problem of unequal distribution of say even of opportunity is that everyone is treated the same under the law, regardless of their, regardless of anything, regardless of wealth, regardless of race, age, status. It's the same. Now obviously there's elements of that that appear unjust. So if you make a million dollars a year and you get $1,000 fine for speeding, that's a lot different than a thousand dollar fine for someone who makes $12,000 a year. And so then you might say, well, maybe your fine should be income adjusted. Okay, but the problem with that is like, like, okay, you're differentially privileged with regards to your wealth. Well, how many dimensions of differential privilege are there? And the answer to that is, well, there's as many dimensions as there are differences between people and that's an infinite number of differential advantages and disadvantages. And so I'll give you an example that I think is quite germane. So there's obviously disparity in wealth. Well, one of the best predictors of wealth is age. Older people are richer. Well, why? Well, obviously because they've had their whole life to work race.

[Bill Maher]

So yeah, yeah, even more.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, but let me make the case with this for a minute. Okay, so then you might say, well, it's very unfair that the old people have the money. It's like, yeah, fair enough, buddy, but the young people have the youth. And if I'm serious, and if you took the old person and said, look, you give me all your money, I'm 18, you give me all your money and I'll be 65 and you get to be 18 and broke.

[Bill Maher]

But would you actually take that bargain? Because I wouldn't. Even though I'm punching 70 in the mouth, I still wouldn't do it because my head would still be my 18 year old head and I just couldn't take any more of that. Your stupidity, or at least my stupidity at that age, caused so much pain, unnecessary Pain in my life that I would rather be this age.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, that. That's another sign of differential advantage, is you've got the disadvantages of being old, but now you're not quite as stupid. So, you know, that's.

[Bill Maher]

It's awesome not being stupid.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, right.

[Bill Maher]

It's just, it's awesome. There's like that old commercial. Priceless. It's priceless not being.

[Jordan Peterson]

What do you think? What do you think is better about you now than. Than when you were young?

[Bill Maher]

I'm not fucking stupid. I don't make stupid mistakes. I don't make that. I mean, I'm sure people would say, oh, Bill, you said this the other week, and I meant it. And it wasn't hard.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, frequency and intensity also matter.

[Bill Maher]

Also, I'm mixing dangerous chemicals every week. Okay, I'm playing third base in. Okay, I'm gonna get more hard hit grounders. But just not just. But personally, much more in my personal life. I mean, men take a very long time to mature. I mean, when a woman says, like, boy, you know, you need a 40 year head start. Yeah, you do. You need like a 40 year head start to be on the same level. It's just, at least I. It's crazy how immature as they would. As society would define immature you can be. Or I was late into life because the immature things are the fun ones. I still don't want to give them up. You know, people are different. We talked about this the last time you were here. You know, we could not be more different in that way. I mean, you're so much more a woman's dream, and I'm like a woman's nightmare in many ways. Like, never committed, never got married, never wanted to. I never understood how people could. And I see so many people who talk about it like married couples and they talk very finely about like, oh, remember when we were in love? And they're reminiscing about this time in their life that lasted like maybe two years, and they're living off that for the rest of their life. For the rest of their life. They're kind of remembering, oh, yeah, that time when you were crazy in love and you'd have sex all the time and it was hot and it's like, yeah. And I had that and went, can we just keep this going forever? Would that really be the worst thing? But you probably have both.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, it's something that, that it's something that you can practice really. Well, the way I look at it is. And I guess this is biological and theological at the Same time is that this. We can start with. We can start with the way that you perceive children. So you don't see your own child the same way you see someone else's child. And so then the question is, well, are you deluded about your own child or are you deluded about other people's children? And I would say, and I'm trying to think about this scientifically, is that you're kind of blind to other people's children. And there's a lot of reasons for that. You see them, in a sense, you see them generically. Like, most people show their best side to children. So I'm not trying to make a blanket condemnation of people, but I think that when you have your own child, then that's a child that you actually see. And so there's a depth of love there. And it's because your perceptions aren't inhibited. You actually see what's there, and so you fall in love, and then you make this commitment to the child. Now, I think the same thing happens to you when you fall in love with someone is that you actually see. You see into them much more deeply than you ever see into anyone else. And that's something that you're given. It's like a grace. Or you could think about it as the action of an instinct. I don't really care which of those particular pathways of interpretation you take. But it's. It's something that's offered to you, and I think that you can practice maintaining that. It's hard. It takes work.

[Bill Maher]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's an art.

[Bill Maher]

That's always the one that gets me off the trail.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, people aren't trained to do this. Like, it's hard.

[Bill Maher]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

You know, so, like, one of the things. One of the things that I do with my wife is I try to remember that I love her. Like, I try to remember that. And I don't mean I bring the idea I love her to mind. That isn't what I mean.

[Bill Maher]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

I try to remember what it was like to see her when I. When I was deeply in love with her. And then to have that happen again. And you can practice that. It works. It's hard, but it's. It's like, ridiculously worthwhile. And I think my wife and I learned that more deeply in the last three or four years because I just about died, and she just about died. And it was like, it was damn close in both situations. And so then, wow, then we didn't die. It was like, hmm. It's very strange because she thought she was dead, and I was sure that I was gone. I thought, there's no way I'm coming back from this.

[Bill Maher]

So when you're going through, like, some shit where people are attacking you for something, is she, like, right by you? Always, like, saying, like, look at what these assholes are saying. You're so right. And, like, making you feel. Because I know the feeling, as you do, of, like, being in the glare because you said something or did something that they hate and they're screaming and. You know, I always think of tennis matches. You ever watch a tennis match?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yep.

[Bill Maher]

And the player's girlfriend is always in the audience and they cut to her, and she's just, like, bleeding along with him on every point, you know, like, it's almost like she's in the match too. Is that what she.

[Jordan Peterson]

I would say my wife is definitely in the match too, but she's not exactly the bleeding along with you type. Well, seriously, my wife isn't my wife. As far as women go, she's not particularly agreeable. She's fairly combative. And so. Well, I like that about her. I like that.

[Bill Maher]

Really?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Yeah. I like that about her because she's a rough player, but she's fundamentally on my side. And so how does she stand beside me? It's not so much exactly with empathy. It's more. It's more like. It's more like. It's more like strategic. Strategic play, you know? So if an attack comes, and I do this with my kids, too, because we're quite tightly unified in that way. It's like we take it on as a war. It's like, okay, you're after us.

[Bill Maher]

Right. I feel like it's stronger with the kids then. And that's why maybe a great reason to have kids is because, you know, even Eric Trump is like, hey, dad.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well. Well, that is definitely an advantage of having kids. There's no doubt about it. But my wife is like, we're pretty allied. We're pretty. Now, she's. She's also quite. She's just. She's discriminating. Like, the reason that I wouldn't characterize her affiliation with me exactly as empathic is because she's quite judgmental. Like, she's expecting me to do things the right way, and if I don't do them, she's not happy about that. But that's actually helpful because in these situations where.

[Bill Maher]

When was the last time you needed to be righted?

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, God, all the time.

[Bill Maher]

Really?

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, God, absolutely.

[Bill Maher]

Really? You. You need the woman to sit There and go, hey, you're really off the mark there.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, it's the.

[Bill Maher]

Sit.

[Jordan Peterson]

You know what it's like. The situations that you're in, let's say politically, they're complicated.

[Bill Maher]

When was the last time she. Tell me. The last time she corrected something in you and you. And you were like, oh, thank you for telling me that, because I was about to be such a fucking asshole. And then you.

[Jordan Peterson]

I guess it's probably more subtle than that in some ways. I mean, so, for example, she's watching me in public all the time, and the way that I'm interacting with people, and we discuss that to make sure that I'm treating people properly when I'm out in public, in general, when people come up to me or when we're in restaurants or anything like that.

[Bill Maher]

If she wasn't there, you'd fucking give them. No, but.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, but, you know, like, if people. I don't know. When you're met by people in public, what's your philosophy of conduct when people meet you in public?

[Bill Maher]

Be awesome. Be awesome. Because performers will never stop. Maybe at a certain level you would, but I have never gotten to that level. And that's fine. I love the level I'm on. But I am insecure about, Like, I do not want to alienate one single fan. I feel like. I mean, I still have the insecurity from when I was 22 years old.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, is that insecurity or is that a moral obligation?

[Bill Maher]

No, I think it is. It's both.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay.

[Bill Maher]

I want to do it because more than anything, to my audience, I always want to be a hero. When I do the show on Friday night, I want to be their hero. When I do a standup show, I want to be their hero. And when I meet them in person, like, I've had the experience of meeting someone who I liked from afar, and then they disappointed me.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Bill Maher]

And I never forget. I want to be the. You don't.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's right. You never forget. And then you'll tell everyone.

[Bill Maher]

I want to be the opposite. I want to be the. Wow, he really engaged. You know, not for long. We're not. We're. We mean, you don't know me like that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, right.

[Bill Maher]

But, like, I don't ignore you either. Or I don't take for granted that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes.

[Bill Maher]

That I think a certain way in this world and I speak a certain way, and I have a certain type of audience. Apropos to your point before, about what have I lost? Yeah, I have lost some audience. I have the super woke Left the building. And again, I don't miss them. People who are indoctrinated into one way of thinking and never really hear anything that gets into that bubble. That's not what I'm. I don't find that interesting or getting to reality. So I do have a. Somewhat of a different audience anyway. So when I meet people who are across the board, you know, I mean, I still meet the old super liberal folks who love it and I still. And now I meet like. Yeah, more. But I always met certain conservatives, always were respectful of my show. They felt like this is a guy who is a liberal, but he is not afraid to criticize his own side. It just got more exponential because the left got CRAZIER since about 2015 is when Jonathan Haidt says it began with this.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, that seems about right.

[Bill Maher]

That's when trigger warnings and you know, what happened was we switched generations and the people.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, and we had the social media technology and the cell phones come along.

[Bill Maher]

Yes, yes. That was a big part of that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah. It enabled the psychopaths fundamentally.

[Bill Maher]

Yes. I mean, look, Elon Musk has definitely changed. You can't tell me he hasn't changed. Do I think he's evil? I don't, but I do think he's changed and it's because of what he calls the woke mind virus. He thinks he lost his son. He talked to you about it, as I definitely. Yes. Okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. And that's also something you don't forget.

[Bill Maher]

Well, you know, I can't endorse where he's gone. I can't endorse voting for Trump in any possible way. And he's for Trump. And I think he did a great thing in taking over Twitter because.

[Jordan Peterson]

And so you think that the moderate left is recoverable.

[Bill Maher]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

You think the universities are recoverable?

[Bill Maher]

No.

[Jordan Peterson]

Why not? Okay, so how do you go in.

[Bill Maher]

There with a flamethrower? There's a big difference. I mentioned this on my show at the end of it last week. There is a big difference between Democratic politicians who generally are a sane crop. They're too timid. Yes. About calling out their far left, but they are generally a sane crop. They're not for and would not get on the page with legislatively, for example, defunding the police.

[Jordan Peterson]

They've been pretty useless on the trans butchery side of things.

[Bill Maher]

Like I say, not standing up against that stuff. Exactly. You're right. Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

8,000. That's 8,000 double mastectomies of minors so.

[Bill Maher]

Far compared to the worst Republican politicians. It's not Even close. The Republican politicians are way worse, you could say, and I would agree with you if you did that. There are crazies on each side. I would add to that. And in the Republican side, they have found a place for them. Unfortunately, it's in elective politics. But the people, not just the politicians on the far left, they're the ones who are so obnoxious, the ones who control culture, the ones in the media, the ones on what used to be on Twitter. That's what I was saying about Elon. He did a good thing. He drove the woke out of Twitter the way St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland. But then instead of creating what would have been like the Internet version of what I think, I'm doing a place where you have a kind of a centrist view, where you have maybe, you know, generally center left, but not afraid to call out the left, but also realistic about how dangerous the right is. But he didn't. He went full bore and just switched it all over to the super right. So now we just have Twitter's image.

[Jordan Peterson]

Let me ask you about that.

[Bill Maher]

And it should have been Twitter the middle place.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, some of this is a technical problem. And what I mean by that is that these new social communication technologies are landscapes that lack governance, and no one knows exactly how to do it. Right. It's not like Mark Zuckerberg knows how to regulate Facebook. No, I'm serious. It's really cocaine. But there's some reasons for that, too.

[Bill Maher]

You're right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So the anonymity, the. That the social media platforms allow allows the psychopathic narcissist types that are a real danger to civilization. It allows them free reign. And they're amplified because they. They what, what you say, they parasitize negative emotion, and they're amplified. And now it's. It's the case that throughout history, when the psychopathic minority, which is about 4% of the population, gets the upper hand, that all hell breaks loose. This happens all the time. Time. And what I see happening in the social media world is the rise of exactly those sorts of people. They'll say anything they can possibly imagine, regardless of political orientation, because they're just using that as a weapon to draw power and resources to themselves. And there's plenty of them. And they have come out in staggering numbers on the far right in the aftermath of October 7th. And it's a seriously ugly thing to see. But it's also. So we're trying to solve that. So tell me what you think about this. We tried to solve that with Peterson Academy. So we built a social media network into it. Now, there's a couple of differences between it and Twitter. And the first difference, and I really want to know what you think about this, is there's a price of entry. You have to pay $40 a month. So here's a hypothesis. To be part of Peterson Academy and.

[Bill Maher]

To participate in the social media network, $40 a month. Well, that's nothing.

[Jordan Peterson]

I know, I know, I know. We have the most progressive university in the world. High quality education for everyone.

[Bill Maher]

It's so Canadian.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah. So.

[Bill Maher]

So, so $40. Well, so you can't get a Mai Tai for $40 in this town.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. We think we can get people a bachelor's level at equivalent education for $2,000. That's the plan. And I think we can do it. We have the capital.

[Bill Maher]

So you're teaching like the old school curriculum? Please say yes. Yes. Like what I learned, and I mean, European history, it's not evil just because it happened in Europe, right?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Bill Maher]

Okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

We're teaching. It's going to be a classic liberal.

[Bill Maher]

Curriculum, fundamentally, that's not to say tilted.

[Jordan Peterson]

I suppose, to some degree towards the conservative side.

[Bill Maher]

Do I think that in my fabulous Cornell education, they gave short shrift to Asia and Africa? I do. I think I probably should know more about Asian and African history.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, but at least you know something.

[Bill Maher]

Well, I don't know.

[Jordan Peterson]

You gotta start somewhere.

[Bill Maher]

I don't know much, but there. I'm sorry, but there is less that's relevant to the modern world because, again, the ideas.

[Jordan Peterson]

Still a Eurocentric bigot.

[Bill Maher]

I'm not a bigot. I know you're joking, but. No, I'm just saying, if the ideas that came through, as I mentioned before, Athens and Rome and Jerusalem and London and Paris and Philadelphia, if they had come through Dakar and, I don't know, Timbuktu, and I would be. I'm sorry, but they didn't. So should I study these civilizations more? Yes, but you then have to prove to me that, you know, now you've.

[Jordan Peterson]

Just lost, like, another hundred thousand WOKE fans. You know, they're already gone.

[Bill Maher]

They're already gone, brother. They're already gone. And it's okay. Maybe they'll come back. But, you know, I mean, it's very hard to reach the indoctrinated on either side. I mean, I saw you got in trouble because you said Kamala Harris fans. She talks to them like.

[Jordan Peterson]

Like retarded children.

[Bill Maher]

Okay. Did you see the debate last night?

[Jordan Peterson]

I did.

[Bill Maher]

I mean, what could be more retarded than it was rough than saying the immigrants are eating the cats and the dogs. I mean, come on, man. I mean. I mean, come on. It's kind of asking for trouble when you position the one person. And again, people are binary in their thinking. But when you use that word. About which I agree.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so let me ask you a question about that. So I think Trump made a mistake last night showing up in not making more of the nature of his team. So let me walk you through that and tell me what you think about it. So you already admitted, for example, or agreed that. But the universities are in dire shape.

[Bill Maher]

Horrible.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, okay, okay. So now the question is.

[Bill Maher]

I call it the source of the problem.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes. Okay.

[Bill Maher]

The mouth of the river from which all the woke nonsense flows. The mouth of the river is what I would say. Academia.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes, and I agree with that sentiment. I think it's true. And we know perfectly well that the university faculties are tilted radically to the left, that there's far fewer classic liberals than there were, say, 30 years ago, and there's virtually no conservatives. So it's very.

[Bill Maher]

And the phrase ivory tower, you know, sometimes something becomes such a cliche, you don't hear it anymore. But that's perfect. It's really what it is. The Ivy League ivory towers. They're living in towers. They don't understand.

[Jordan Peterson]

Towers of Babel, as it turns out.

[Bill Maher]

Really?

[Jordan Peterson]

Definitely.

[Bill Maher]

Which is kind of the Eve story retold, you know, you cannot know what God is like. Yes. Don't eat the apple. Don't try to climb up to me.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, that's right, that's right, that's right, that's right. It's a story of pride.

[Bill Maher]

Again, all those themes recapitulate. I mean, I'm getting this from your book. I mean, I knew it before, but the way you get at that. Again, it's just. It was.

[Jordan Peterson]

I have the next one written, too.

[Bill Maher]

Such a pleasure.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

[Bill Maher]

No, really. I mean, there's so few things left for adults. Everything is geared.

[Jordan Peterson]

And look, it's that impulsive gratification that we were talking about earlier. A society that's tilted towards that. Well, you talked about immaturity, you know, and it. And that immediate. That requirement for immediate gratification is like the definition of immaturity.

[Bill Maher]

The problem is parents used to go see movies, and now they give kids their money to go see the movies they want to see. That's what happened in the movie industry.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right, right, right.

[Bill Maher]

But, you know, I mean, I'm not a parent I probably shouldn't comment on it.

[Jordan Peterson]

So the Twitter issue. So I think part of the problem. You tell me what you think about this. Is that part of the problem with the social media networks is that they're free because.

[Bill Maher]

No, it's just that Elon is constantly, you know, just writing true about some insanity. It's the thing that happened last night at the debate with the immigrant. I know for a fact the immigrants are. And like the human mind, you know this better than me because this is your life's work. But it's just such an amazing place that you can be so brilliant as to be able to figure out electric cars and how to relaunch a rocket from Mars back to Earth. But, like, the stupidest thing someone puts up on Twitter, he will retweet and.

[Jordan Peterson]

Say, I know that the far right mob that emerged after October 7, I know for a fact that they're attempting to manipulate Musk and draw him into a web that amplifies their views.

[Bill Maher]

Well, it's working.

[Jordan Peterson]

I know that. I understand that.

[Bill Maher]

But he should. Like I said, he had the chance to take Twitter and twist it away from the far lefties who had made it a ridiculous place. My line about Twitter. My line about Twitter was always, anything I want to say on Twitter, I can't say on Twitter. That was the problem with Twitter. Because the school moms were pointing their finger at you.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes.

[Bill Maher]

And he completely switched it around, but he should have just gone halfway.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so let me ask you a question. So I have some friends who've been looking into the rise of the far right antisemitic, psychopathic types on Twitter and elsewhere, and they've done very deep analysis, tracing the sources of funding as well.

[Bill Maher]

From the left?

[Jordan Peterson]

The people who are doing this from the left? No, the right wingers.

[Bill Maher]

The right wing Jew haters.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Bill Maher]

Because there's ones on both sides.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, definitely, definitely. Yeah, that's for sure. That's true. There's plenty of them. And which is worse?

[Bill Maher]

It's like I'm much more afraid of the left Jew haters.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, I think that's right at the moment.

[Bill Maher]

I mean, the right ones were always there.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah. They're more there now than they were, though.

[Bill Maher]

That's the tiki torch, Jews will not replace us crowd. They were always there. That's a problem. We should keep an eye on it. It's bad. It's real bad. But what's new?

[Jordan Peterson]

Globalize the intifada. That sort of antisemitism.

[Bill Maher]

Hamas will save us. Hamas is coming I mean, just read their signs. Hamas is coming. Like that's a good thing.

[Jordan Peterson]

You know that women between the ages of 18 and 35 get almost all of their news from TikTok.

[Bill Maher]

Oh, I'm sure.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Yeah. So that TikTok and TikTok, I think the stats we have is it's 60 to 1, Hamas versus Israel. In terms of messaging.

[Bill Maher]

Well, women between 18 and 35 get most of their news from TikTok, but also from what I tell them. Okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

What's the demography of your fan group? Yeah, right.

[Bill Maher]

It's not that.

[Jordan Peterson]

No, definitely not.

[Bill Maher]

No, it's. Can you imagine?

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so we.

[Bill Maher]

Anyone 18 listening to this conversation, I mean, they would have to be just. And there's always those 18 year olds out there. There's always that 1% of kids. No matter how bad the system gets, you can't stop them from being smart. You can't stop them from knowing shit.

[Jordan Peterson]

Even if you send them to university, you mean?

[Bill Maher]

Exactly. They're intellectually curious. And especially with the Internet and everything else, that what gets on their radar, what sticks in their head, is just enormous. And it's always impressive to me to meet somebody young like that who knows so many things, but the vast majority of them, you know, I could go on and on about the educational system and I'm sure you could too, but I mean, we've passed.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's why we're trying to replace it.

[Bill Maher]

Yes. And I'm glad you are. And you know, Bari Weiss, I'm sure, you know, this started a university and I say the more the merrier.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Bill Maher]

Because I mean, obviously we can't just have one.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Bill Maher]

You know, and I think it'll be successful because, you know, success in any market is finding a niche that is not being exploited. Something where the market goes. We need that. Or else you have to invent a need. You know, people did that. Nobody thought they needed $5 coffee.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Bill Maher]

And nobody thought they needed an iPhone. But people have always, I think, thought, I want my kids to actually get a real education. I mean, isn't that the success of Catholic schools in this country? People go to Catholic schools in greater numbers than ever who are not Catholic.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Bill Maher]

Because it's one of the last places you can get a serious education where there's no.

[Jordan Peterson]

They're so careful. You're starting to sound like someone who's pro religious. If you.

[Bill Maher]

I am not pro religious. I'm an atheist. And I have tremendous bitterness against the Catholic who personally made me an unhappy child.

[Jordan Peterson]

What happened?

[Bill Maher]

I was what happened? I was raised Catholic is what happened. And catechism and nuns who fucking pit you with a ruler and anxiety about I have to memorize a hundred questions like where do I come from? God made me like I still have. I saved it, the mimeograph sheet. I can still smell it. Where? I had to know a hundred questions like where is God? God is everywhere. I mean some of them you could just guess, but when you're seven, it's traumatizing. Make a seven year old memorize a hundred questions about the fucking world.

[Jordan Peterson]

And again, a lot of people who tilt towards atheism aren't doing it only for reasons of rationality. They're also doing it because they were hurt by bad religious actors.

[Bill Maher]

Oh, I'm completely open to admitting that. Fuck them. And I love to put them out of business. But I also rationally believe it's the right thing to do. I believe that future historians will say that humans actually exited their medieval period when theism died. We think we exited our medieval period with the advent of the scientific revolution. And when science became a thing around 1500 or whenever, you know, Da Vinci and Copernicus and okay, I think they will say it's when we stopped as a general thing there was always be pockets of resistance, but generally stopped being theists. I think they will say that's when humanity entered their post medieval period. So for me, throw the glove down, sir.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, the problem I have with that and have had for a long time is that there's always going to be something that tries to rise up to occupy the highest possible place, always. Because there's a drive towards unity socially and psychologically.

[Bill Maher]

And so you're saying better religion than what replaces.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, no, not necessarily.

[Bill Maher]

That's not a ridiculous theory because I've seen religion replaced by this kind of QAnon thing. Yeah, QAnon is kind of a religion.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, so is Wokeism.

[Bill Maher]

So is Wokeism.

[Jordan Peterson]

Absolutely.

[Bill Maher]

And they're both very deleterious.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, right.

[Bill Maher]

So I mean, do I think QAnon, which is quasi Christian nationalism, is worse than old school Christianity? Yeah, I do.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so why, why is it worse?

[Bill Maher]

Because QAnon is wrapped up with, with dumb ideas like if the guy you want to win the presidency doesn't win, ignore it and install your guy anyway. Because they believe, getting back to the other conversation about Trumpism, they believe that the other side is such an existential threat and again, the other side gives them so much ammunition to believe this that they think anything is justifiable. In Vietnam they used to say we had to destroy the village to save it.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Bill Maher]

This is like if you destroy democracy to save America, you are destroying the village to save.

[Jordan Peterson]

See, you asked me earlier why I'm trying to say revitalize a corpse. And my answer to that is that, well, that's a very old idea. That idea. And the reason for that is, which.

[Bill Maher]

Is something religion does. Does.

[Jordan Peterson]

It does that repeatedly? It does that repeatedly.

[Bill Maher]

Lazarus.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right, right. Well, it's a motif, right. The raising of the dead. And there's reasons for that, and that's one of them. I'm trying to separate the wheat from the chaff. Like, I became convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt when I was 20 something, early 20s, 21, that evil existed. And. And that raises the specter that good exists, at least as the opposite of whatever evil is. And so my religious pursuit, such as it is, and this is why I was interested in psychology as well, and biology for that matter, is because I wanted to contend with that particular problem. And what I'm trying to do is to separate the wheat from the chaff because I see that there is a drive towards unity in knowledge and something will strive to take the highest possible place. And what you see with the postmodernists, for example, the postmodern Marxists, because they tend to be the same bunch, is that they dispense with God, but they substitute power. And like, of all the gods you could worship, power might be the worst.

[Bill Maher]

Yeah, Power is another way of saying what I was saying before. They substitute God for Mao. Stop.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, right.

[Bill Maher]

Kim Jong Un.

[Jordan Peterson]

Exactly.

[Bill Maher]

It is the same thing.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. And then there's an issue there. Well, so if you had. Imagine you had to pick two. Two dictators even, and one believed that he was God himself, and the other believed that despite the fact that he had almost unlimited temporal power, there was something sovereign above him that he was beholden to. Which of the two would you pick? And there's a technical reason, I'm actually asking that, because thousands of years ago this happened in Mesopotamia. The Mesopotamians realized that the sovereign had to be subordinate to some abstract set of principles. He had to be the embodiment of something that was beyond him, or he wasn't valid as a sovereignty sovereign. And it was a real shift in viewpoint because you could imagine a situation where it's North Korea, what I say goes. And that means. And I'm saying that deeply, I'm saying whatever I say is right by definition. Right. That's a rough situation.

[Bill Maher]

Holes in one.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. While inventing hamburgers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so as civilization progressed, there was this, this abstraction of the idea of sovereignty as a principle itself and that the leader should be subordinate to that. And that seems to be one of the applications of religious thought that's extreme. It's like rule of law. Right. It's a similar idea if you think there's a body of law, but there's a spirit that characterizes that body of law. Right. Because it rotates, it's coherent. It rotates around the central axis. Well, the idea in the west is that if you're the king, if you're the president, you're subordinate to that body of law. You're not. Not sovereignty itself. You're subject to something that's beyond you. Well then the question becomes, well, you want that obviously, because otherwise you're the guy. And then if you want that, it's like, well, what is that principle of ultimate sovereignty? And that's what I was trying to discover when I went through the biblical stories. It's like, what's the principle of ultimate sovereignty that unites these stories?

[Bill Maher]

So you said before you had a follow up book.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Bill Maher]

What is it about?

[Jordan Peterson]

It's about Job and about the gospels some more.

[Bill Maher]

Because I was going to say, if you want to keep on this thread, I mean, as a history major, I would love to see a book about all the same things that you're talking about, but get more into like the influences from the surrounding civilizations. Plainly in the beginning it's a lot about Egypt.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, definitely.

[Bill Maher]

I mean, Abraham, I did this in.

[Jordan Peterson]

The first book I wrote in Maps of Meaning.

[Bill Maher]

Oh, okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

I talked a lot about Egypt and Mesopotamia in particular.

[Bill Maher]

Yeah, I mean like Abraham, he winds up in Egypt. Right, right. Because again, not to be always shitting on religion, how bad it is, but they're not really great about women. And among the terrible things they think about women is that if you're barren, it's really the worst thing it can be. I mean, a lot of the patriarchs chicks were barren. Abraham is with Sarah, she's barren. So he fucks.

[Jordan Peterson]

He stays with her though.

[Bill Maher]

Stays with her. But he, the Egyptian maid, Hagar. Hagar Jacob. I mean, he does have Joseph with the wife, but then he gets with Leah because she's the maid. Where was I going with this?

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, you were talking about the. What, what, what, what would you say? The, the. The lack of respect accorded. Accorded to women in the patriarchal story. Sarah's a pretty good character. Sarah is a pretty good character. She has her Own adventure, you know, and one of the things you have to say about Genesis, the story of Genesis that I really think is quite miraculous is that there's an insistence right from the beginning that both men and women are made in the image of God. And that's a hell of a thing for a document that's 5,000 years old. That's a radical thing to say.

[Bill Maher]

She's made out of his rib.

[Jordan Peterson]

What are you talking about? Yeah, but that makes her an eternal equal. She's taken from his side. She's not taken from his head. She's not taken from his feet. She's taken from his side.

[Bill Maher]

Why does that mean anything? What? The side. Why?

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, it's neither up nor down. It's in the middle.

[Bill Maher]

And we're.

[Jordan Peterson]

And they're. And they're. They're both of the same. There's a variety of meanings. They're both of the same essence. And there's more to it than that, too, because.

[Bill Maher]

But she's from Him. Him. Yeah, but, I mean, she doesn't exist before him.

[Jordan Peterson]

But women are also cultural creatures, right? So one of the common characterizations of culture is patriarchal culture, let's say. And women are creatures of patriarchal culture. They're derived from. They're derived from Adam in that manner. And that's part of the deep structural meaning of that story.

[Bill Maher]

Because what does that mean, to be a patriarchal creature, a cultural creature?

[Jordan Peterson]

You're a socialize. You're socialized. You're not merely a biological entity.

[Bill Maher]

But should you be. Should be. Should be socialized. I mean, again, not to pile on with the religion, but like the Baptists, a number of denominations in this country follow quite seriously the writings in the New Testament. Women should be subservient to the husband. Things that are very out of step with. I mean, even Harrison Butler, I don't think, is on the page with all of this, but really out of step with where we are today. I mean, a woman should gracefully submit, I think, are words in the New Testament. I mean, gracefully submit, that is.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, let me throw two spoke sticks in the spokes, just for the sake of argument. All right, so this will probably get me in trouble, so we might as well do it. So women are hypergamous. So for maximum sexual arousal, they want.

[Bill Maher]

Excuse me, Professor Egghead, but could you explain that term for us regular New Jersey denizens who only went seven semesters?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the average age gap between men and women worldwide for maximal attraction is four years. Boys are.

[Bill Maher]

The men are older yeah, completely blown past the limit here. Okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. Women like men of higher status than they. Okay, so. So. And that's the. The thing that predicts male sexual success best is his comparative status. Yeah, it's, it's, it's an immense predictor. And it's not the same with regard to women. So what that means. What it appears to mean is that I'm not making a case for women's female subservience, by the way, but what it does appear to mean that for women to find a man sexually attractive, he has to be of higher status than she is. So what does that imply about their relationship? Does that mean that that's a relationship of equality? Like, I don't think it does.

[Bill Maher]

I mean. Yes. You are going to get in trouble for the biggest people who are. Who, you know are. Guys work for women. The women.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Bill Maher]

Or they're married to someone who makes more money than them. Are you saying that that's going to fuck up their sex life?

[Jordan Peterson]

It does. The evidence for that's clear. And it increases the divorce rate.

[Bill Maher]

There's actual evidence for that. What is the evidence?

[Jordan Peterson]

One of the predictors of domestic violence is disproportionate earnings of the wife in comparison to the husband.

[Bill Maher]

You're saying that when the woman makes more money, the guy loses it and clocks her?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, that is exactly what I'm saying. Yeah.

[Bill Maher]

And we have.

[Jordan Peterson]

Or maybe she provokes him because she's contemptuous.

[Bill Maher]

Oh, Lord.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, either of those are going to get us in trouble.

[Bill Maher]

It's worse than I thought. I'm so glad I never got married and have a good salary. But, you know, I mean, this kind of stuff.

[Jordan Peterson]

And then. Well, we could add another twist to this too, with regard to our treatment of women in the West. So you know that half of women now at the age of 30 have no children? Half. And half of them will never have a child. And 90% of them will regret it. So that's involuntary childlessness.

[Bill Maher]

How do we know they regret it?

[Jordan Peterson]

Because there's enough data now to show what happens.

[Bill Maher]

At what age do they regret it?

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, they start to regret it. Generally around 30.

[Bill Maher]

30.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, because. So by the time you're 30, one couple in three has trouble conceiving, and that's defined as trying for a year with no success. So already at 30.

[Bill Maher]

Well, let's get that couple help. No, I'm kidding.

[Jordan Peterson]

There's lots of technologies to help, but they're not that helpful. And they're very expensive.

[Bill Maher]

No, I mean. I mean, I find it always very amusing that the people who desperately want to have a kid very often can't and the people who are desperately trying not to.

[Jordan Peterson]

15 year olds in the back of a car. Yeah, yeah, no kidding.

[Bill Maher]

It's like.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, but arbitrary fate.

[Bill Maher]

I mean, I think we're on different sides of the population debate. I mean I've always been on the page let's have less people on Earth. And I think you're on the side of let's have more babies. I never understand that because I mean the resources of Earth are finite.

[Jordan Peterson]

I don't think so.

[Bill Maher]

How could they not be?

[Jordan Peterson]

Because we get better and better at making more from less. Yes.

[Bill Maher]

So we're depending on actually figuring that out before this.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes, that's right. Well we've always, it's always been that way with people. That is what we do. That's our niche in a way. We're very good at that. We're very good at it. And we've, we've been spectacularly successful at that.

[Bill Maher]

There's 8 billion since the 1960s. 8 billion people on Earth.

[Jordan Peterson]

We're going to peak at 9, by the way.

[Bill Maher]

What, what do you think we could support unlimited? I mean space wise, we could have a lot more. Of course there's, most of of the land is empty.

[Jordan Peterson]

There's no obvious limits. The limit is energy and there's no obvious limit to energy and getting rid of waste. You can bury waste pretty effectively. We're not going to run out of holes.

[Bill Maher]

Bury waste.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, what kind of waste are you talking about?

[Bill Maher]

All kinds. Pollution. What's ruining.

[Jordan Peterson]

People are pretty good at making landfills.

[Bill Maher]

What's ruining the ocean?

[Jordan Peterson]

Overfishing mostly.

[Bill Maher]

Overfishing?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Bill Maher]

Well, mostly it's overfishing to feed people who you say there will be more of. How could there be enough fish?

[Jordan Peterson]

Fish? Well, we could stop managing the resource, stupid.

[Bill Maher]

If there's not, if there's not now enough fish. How could there be?

[Jordan Peterson]

There's no real limit to agricultural production. It's energy's the limit.

[Bill Maher]

But fish.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, we just mismanaged. Look, we mismanaged the ocean, the oceanic resources. Terrible.

[Bill Maher]

Just give up on fish.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, we probably destroyed 95% of the oceanic resources already and you can probably recover.

[Bill Maher]

Say that in such a cavalier.

[Jordan Peterson]

No, it's terrible. It's terrible. It's a terrible thing. And like I did a deep dive into.

[Bill Maher]

Well, you can't survive without the ocean.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, it's a terrible thing. It really is. I think the worst thing we've done ecologically is to decimate the fisheries. It's stupid, too, because it was unnecessary. It was unnecessary. Like, there's some evidence that already by the dawn of the 20th century, that 95% of the oceanic resources were gone and that we've depleted another 95% since then. I mean, the accounts of how much fish there was in the ocean before, you know, when the Europeans first came to North America, they're just. It's just stunning. Like schools of cod that were hundreds of feet deep and hundreds of miles long, with the average fish being something approximating 3ft in length and so thick that you could lower, well, buckets into the water and lift them up. And sea turtles that were so plentiful around the Caribbean islands that you could hear them dozens of miles away. Way. Like there was so much plenitude that it was a. It was. It's. You just can't believe it when you read it.

[Bill Maher]

Yeah. Like the buffalo.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, at Cape ann in Boston 300 years ago, when there was a nor'easter, the beach, Crane beach, seven miles long, would be covered across its entire length with. With shellfish three feet deep. And now if you go after nor'easter, there's like. Because I've walked that beach, like, you know, three starfish and a. And a. And a.

[Bill Maher]

You know where there's no cod? Cape Cod.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. There's no cod in Canada either.

[Bill Maher]

Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, but I don't think.

[Jordan Peterson]

There is a limit on. There's no obvious limit on human population sustainability except energy.

[Bill Maher]

You know who we need is Jesus, because didn't he create. Ate, like fish out of nothing.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Bill Maher]

Isn't that one of his miracles?

[Jordan Peterson]

It is.

[Bill Maher]

And that's reported by St. Paul and his wife, Mrs. Paul, who was into fish. But. Yeah, we need a modern day. Well, you know what I find interesting about Jesus?

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, the meaning of that story, in part is that if we treated each other properly, there'd be more than enough to go around.

[Bill Maher]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[Bill Maher]

Now, the Jesus story is a beautiful philosophy. I mean, if you take the religion out of it, which Thomas Jefferson tried to do, he wrote a Bible and took out all the miracles and the bells and the whistles, But, I mean, that was a revolutionary idea. I'm not sure if it's a great idea because of what I was bringing up before about losing the desire to fix things on earth. But the idea that it gets good in the afterlife, that was pretty new. I mean, that's not really.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's also something like. It's a strange thing, Bill, because part of that is an extension of the idea of delay of gratification, which is a necessary. It's a necessary. What would you say? It's a necessary advancement for civilization. It's like defer your reward. That's the definition of maturity. Well, the limit to reward deferral is an afterlife life. And so I think, at least in part psychologically, that the notion of an afterlife, the notion of something like a deferred eternal reward is the logical consequence of deferred gratification. So now your criticism is still right. I mean, if you defer everything to the afterlife and you see this with say more pathological forms of Islamic fundamentalism, it's like, well, nothing on earth matters at all because everything accrues to in the afterlife. Like obviously that idea can be pathologized. And I would say there might also even be a rule. Like it might be. I don't know if this is true, but it might be that the best idea, the best ideas are the ones that can be used by the most evil people for the worst possible purposes.

[Bill Maher]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

You know, and that's part of that religious hypocrisy problem.

[Bill Maher]

Well, you are not one of those evil people. I hope that whole thing you said.

[Jordan Peterson]

About the oceans, Ontario College of Psychologists would beg to get that.

[Bill Maher]

Whatever you said about the oceans, you know, I hope they show that in left wing media because like I did.

[Jordan Peterson]

A whole series on oceanic mismanagement.

[Bill Maher]

Yeah, but they, but they don't watched it. They don't want to talk about that because it just doesn't get clicks. Anyway. No, I could talk to you all night, but I got to let you back.

[Jordan Peterson]

Hey, thanks Bill. It's always a pleasure talking to you.

[Bill Maher]

Such a pleasure.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah. And I appreciate the comments on my book and the blurb. Thank you for that Club Random.

[Bill Maher]

That was the first book I've ever read completely on a tablet. I'm an old school book club.