The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

There's a new book which I would recommend by a man named Marion Toopey called *Super Abundance* and Toopey has tracked the positive relationship between population growth and planetary wealth.

That every baby born today will produce seven times as many resources as he or she will consume and that every person born is a net positive on the social and natural front.

I interviewed Marion Toopey, wrote the book Superabundance, that makes some claims that are contrary to yours.

Marion toopy from human progress dot orgies publish in a book in august called super abundance and he's redone the number of economic calculations showing for example documenting the extremely positive relationship between increased population and general prosperity.

that's right and he calculated that every child born today will produce seven times as many resources as he or she will consume

His books include False Alarm, How Climate Change Panic Costs As Trillions Hurts the Poor and Fails to Fix the Planet. The Skeptical Environmentalist, cool it.

He's also written The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cool It How to Spend $75 billion to make the world a better place, which is a fascinating read.

The Skeptical Environmentalist which I think really established your reputation and your notoriety for that matter

I don't know I read a book a while back called A Billion Wicked Thoughts it's a very very interesting book. It was written by Google engineers and one of the things they did was analyze pornography use between men and women and on and with billions of searches literally and they found which is not surprising that men preferred visual pornography but females preferred literary pornography and they found the classic literary pornography plot which was something like relatively innocent but undervalued and attracted to the people who are in the same way as the people who are in the same way.

It's not so attractive but not so obviously attractive young woman stumbles across this sort of commanding man who has many women at his disposal and over time despite his relatively high levels of aggression he finds himself attracted to this woman and then forms a sexual relationship with her.

I mean the beast plot essentially but one of the things that's so interesting about their analysis was they listed the top five occupations or characters for female sexual literature and they were pirate surgeon billionaire vampire and pilot.

so I read this book called billion wicked thoughts that the Google engineers had put together by analyzing patterns of pornography use among men and women and it's really quite a brilliant book

the google engineers mapped this when they were looking at pornography use online in a very good book called A Billion Wicked Thoughts

...and The War on the West 2022.

...you're trying to do that with your book The War on the West right it's like you see the assault on these values and you're attempting to resurrect those values.

The war as I do it bit by bit on Western history, a war on Western peoples, a war on Western culture, war on Western religion and philosophy.

This is a position that I argue that we've come to in the present age where everything is bad if it came from us, let me say, us in the West. And everything is good so long as it hasn't come from us.

I've just finished his latest book, which is not out yet. The War on the West.

And I try to show that I try to show for instance that the interpretation of say Thomas Jefferson or Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln, has actually become an assault based on the following premise that if we can take down Churchill we sort of can get to the roots of taking down British patriotism. If we get if we assault Abraham Lincoln we've essentially not and don't have Jefferson we've not just assaulted them we've actually assaulted something that is the absolute root of the American ideal.

There is a response to that just waiting to be said. So do you think do you think that the core values of the west are tenable and maintainable in the absence of the underlying religious substrate?

I wrote this book The War on the West which you and I discussed when it came out about 18 months ago.

Because I've covered all of this up close and got some pretty extraordinary camera footage of this, I wanted to present it to an audience to be able to show what I've seen and what I think of as the realities that I think a lot of people are running away from at the moment.

And since then there have been so many things that have happened, not least the 7th of October and the war that's followed.

I wrote this book The War on the West which you and I discussed when it came out about 18 months ago.

I wanted to present it to an audience to be able to show what I've seen and what I think of as the realities that I think a lot of people are running away from at the moment.

as our friend Douglas Murray wrote in in his last book...you know when he wrote his chapter on on the gaze the elves and the and the g's the lesbians and the gays he separated that from the teach after very effectively...these things have nothing to do with each other.

Bjorn wrote a book a while back called how to spend 75 billion dollars to make the world a better place which is an intelligent approach to I wouldn't say the poly crisis because that isn't how he frames it yeah you know if we were actually going to try to lift the help lift the remaining people in abject poverty out of poverty Lamberg is showing that there are ways that are far less expensive than the trillions of dollars that we will waste not fixing the climate

His books include False Alarm, How Climate Change Panic Costs As Trillions Hurts the Poor and Fails to Fix the Planet. The skeptical environmentalist, cool it. How does spend 75 billion to make the world a better place?

He's also written The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cool It How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, which is a fascinating read.

It's actually a pretty straightforward read and hey it's published and you can buy it so it's also not that difficult.

HIV how to spend 75 billion dollars to make the world a better place which I really liked I thought that was a great book like truly a great book.

When I was reading this book by Georgia in 1984 it talks about the man like Winston with a lot of weeks and after that all the torture he became empty right like and a lot of people like me that blue as a fiction to them but for me that was my father.

Prior to this, Ramaswamy was the founder and CEO of the biopharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences. Leaving in 2021, he published "Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam."

I had written three books...

And I've written this is my fourth book I've written in the last three years. But this is different in that it's not actually an academic exposition of any kind.

i posted this video the other day and she's a defector from north korea and we went through her story and she wrote this book called uh um In Order to Live which is a harrowing book although i don't think it's as harrowing to read as it is harrowing to talk to her but in any case her book ends in 2016 so i asked her what did she do after 2016 and she went through high school and university in south korea high school and all the primary school in one year locked herself in a room basically and went through it all in one year and then went to a south korean university and they're hard to south korean universities and then after she wrote her book which was inspired by the way by george orwell's animal farm was very interesting she went to columbia to take humanities degree

And she wrote a book called "In Order to Live" which is an amazing book and the book ends in 2015 but after 2015 she enrolled in Columbia University which was a dream of hers

And she studied humanities at Columbia and I asked her what that was like and she said that it was a complete waste of time and money.

I'm privileged to be talking to Yon Mi Park born in 1993 in North Korea author of In Order to Live 2015 a book which I just finished reading today.

It's it makes for harrowing reading there's no doubt about that so you live through some of the harshest times I would say you and your family likely lived through some of the harshest times in North Korea in the 90s after...

In her viral talks viewed online nearly 350 million times and in her book park urges audiences to recognize think about and resist the oppression that exists in North Korea and around the world.

And you described the conditions that you grew up in so your first of all what stands out quite remarkably is the degree of hunger.

So you mentioned as well and so we can talk about your familial situation that in the 1990s the average wage in Korea was the equivalent of $2 a month.

I just did a seminar on Exodus in Miami we it was 16 two hour sessions they've been released on youtube and we did one eight day session and then we broke for six months and did another eight day session and one of the things we did we brought together nine people and we kind of knew each other but not that well and there was a wide range of opinions on the panel from moderate left to pretty socially conservative no real progressive types but certainly people on the moderate left and we found we were really attempted to be hospitable to all of our guests so in addition to having the seminar lay itself out for two hours each evening I hosted people continually at an Airbnb that I rented there and we barbecued together and I rented people some jet skis and we had some fun and like each night was a party and at the same time that that was happening it was also while we were walking through Exodus and through other elements of the Old Testament and I was struck by the immense emphasis in those texts on the absolute sacred nature of hospitality right as a duty and I came to understand thinking that through but also watching what was happening with this seminar was that if you're hospitable to people and this is partly speaks to the necessity of an actual localized community then they begin to trust each other at a fundamental level there's a core of consensus and trust there mutual regard for mutual well-being that then enables experimentation to take place at the cognitive fringes in an atmosphere of trust right and humor

I was fortunate enough to conduct a seminar in Exodus in Miami and one of the stories we evaluated in some depth was the story of the burning bush.

well the alternative to that is to attempt to practice finding what's good I suppose even in the darkest spots you know like when my wife a while back my wife was afflicted with with what she had been told would be a terminal cancer and in fact the cancer that she had had only been reported by 200 people and every single one of them died within 10 months so it was pretty damn dismal you know and I watched her nearly die daily for like nine months it was rough and then she had surgical complications that you know the surgery probably it was certainly one of the factors that saved her life but it also put her in great peril you know and she what did she do to cope with that well she turned to the things that she had in her life that were positive right she really opened herself up for example to the love of her children in a way that even though she had been a very good mother and had a very close relationship with her kids she found a dimension of love of of that maternal love that was fathomless I would say and that really helped her you know and she also decided when her father her father had to cope with the long-term neurological degeneration of his wife she had prefrontal dementia and she deteriorated from the age of about 55 to about 70 you know in the way that neurological diseases take you out piece by piece and he did that he was stellar man he took care of her like a champ and like he was a real man about time but he's he just reoriented himself in a selfless manner that was something to behold and he was also willing to accept help and that's another thing that happened to Tammy when she was ill is that she abandoned the law of her pretensions and she allowed people into her life to support her and that was also part of that practice of being grateful even under dreadful circumstances and Jordan this is where suffering is not ever something that we should go out and seek but if suffering finds us if we if we react rightly to it it it is in its own way or it can be at least in its own way enobling and I'm thinking of a good friend of mine whose wife ultimately died of dementia for four or five years she didn't know him but he went every day even so and you could say well why did he bother? Well just in case she did know and because that was the duty of a husband for a wife in extremists and we can say well let's try to you know baptize the suffering let's try to make the most of this or we can say it's all too hard and we can euthanize people we can institutionalize people and I just think it's important that we choose the better way as far as we humanly can we should choose the better way and again if we go back to the to the teachings of holy mother church I mean it's best if you get something out of the sacraments but even if you don't you should keep going because you just never know and maybe even if you don't think you're getting anything out of it you might actually be getting something out of it which is beyond your comprehension but is nevertheless making a difference.

And so Hamlet is an abstraction, like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Did Raskolnikov exist? It's like Raskolnikov existed in the soul of every Russian from like 1850 to 1990. And so is it real? It's like, it's hyper real.

If you read "Crime and Punishment" for example, one of the things you see that emerges when risk-rescalded cove gets away with murder and it's a brutal murder and he gets away with it, it's completely clear and he has a justification for it and what happens as a consequence is that that disturbs his own relationship with himself so profoundly that he can't stand it such that when a just punishment is finally meted out to him it's a relief and that's not rare and that is like there isn't anything more terrifying this is why "Crime and Punishment" is such a great novel there isn't anything more terrifying than breaking a moral rule that you thought you had the ability to break and finding out that you're somewhere now that you really don't want to be and then that you know you know there's nothing worse in your own life than waiting for the other shoe to drop if you've transgressed against the moral rule and now you're an outsider because of that you live in no man's land the fact that you have just retribution coming to you that can be a precondition for your atonement and your integration back into society

because like what's the alternative people have no intrinsic worth then you're in Dostoevsky in territory it's like his book Crime and Punishment because Ryszkall Nikoaw the protagonist decides

I read a book by Steven Pinker once. Pinker's an Enlightenment rationalist from Harvard. A good guy and very smart and much of what he says is extraordinarily useful.

But he believes, for example, that our proclivity to enjoy and tell stories is like a side effect of something more fundamental cognitively.

you see the same thing and Stephen Pinkers work like The Blank Slate if I'm sure I hope I've got this right because I've read a couple of Pinkers books

So I was quite taken by my studies of JJ Gibson. So Gibson wrote a great book called The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.

One of the most influential books I ever read was an ecological approach to visual perception and it's a classic text on perception and a very sophisticated one and I don't think it what it has no pretensions to mysticism of any sort.

and these are the most serious psychologists that I've read of people like an ecological approach to perception is that the book I can't quite remember the title always escapes me Gibson you know Gibson no Gibson Gibson Gibson a visual approach I can't remember the book Eric maybe you can just look that up briefly it's Gibson perception.

Gibson was quite convinced that we perceive meaning not objective reality and he didn't mean that he wasn't a religious thinker that was his conclusion from studying the visual system in depth and it's is the case we see the world through the lens of value where do we derive from where do we derive our values

Have you read the Red Book? I've read parts of it. Because what you're talking about is quite reminiscent of what... of the sorts of exercises that Jung undertook.

a lot of the insights that he laid out in his more explicit books were first captured in books like The Red Book or the black books which were basically yeah they were basically what would you say transcriptions of these quasi hypnotic

Was that before or after The Red Book do you know? I think The Red Book came out of that.

Who? Carl Jung because he knew things. He knows things that you just can't believe anybody could know. We know he spends a year in TOS. I have a house in TOS and that year is not documented but he was experimenting with the mind altering substances.

What about Jung? Do you think he do you think that he experimented with hallucinogens?

I haven't read your book, but I've heard that you know, it's well written and I must have a look at it.

Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

I had a YouTube video taken off my channel yesterday an interview with Helen Joyce who wrote who wrote a book on on the Trans minor surgery phenomenon

Trans, when ideology meets reality was a Times of London bestseller in 2021.

I've been reading your book over the last couple of days and found it what would you call it unfortunately compelling that might be the right term and this issue of the Transsexual rights and all of the furor and upheaval around them seems in some odd way key to the malaise that is central to our times and so people have asked me like they've asked you why I've bothered dealing with it at all since it's hypothetically doesn't affect me personally but maybe we can start with that because at the beginning of your book you pointed out that while writing this wasn't exactly good for your reputation let's say certainly exposed you to the mad affections of the mob let's say but on the other hand as we noted in your biography you are a journalist after all so maybe we could start with your thoughts on why this book was necessary and timely.

unfortunately compelling as perhaps the the best two-word description of my book I've heard yet

I think that one of the reasons that the vitriol is so intense on this subject is that it's so linguistic you know when you say that men can become women by saying that they're women or vice versa you're making a statement about language not about reality and in the post the postmodernist turn is precisely that turn in which the language takes precedent over the bedrock material it's ittness of things and so when somebody like me insists on talking about the reality that they see and refuses to use the words that are mandated we're destroying the reality that people are trying to create and since they see the reality that they're trying to create as something that is socially just that they're trying to bring around bring about a new Jerusalem someone like me is doing a very bad thing and should be silenced by any means necessary including by lying about me or you know threatening me or trying to get me out of my job and so on.

we are not made of meat lego

do you know of that book I believe that's the title well it's another book you read and you think well I have no idea what it's a study of mushroom symbolism in Christianity and it's another book that you know it claims that Christianity was heavily influenced by psilocybin use and it was published in the 1960s it's an amazing book but it's another book you read and you think I have no idea what to do with that I have no place to put that book

I read the sacred mushroom in the cross years ago and I thought he's a linguist and he claims to have gathered an immense amount of linguistic data suggesting that early Christianity was a mushroom cult.

I think people read that book and they think oh it's like John Allegro's the sacred the mushroom in the sacred cross do you know of that book I believe that's the title it's another book you read and you think well I have no idea what it it's a study of mushroom symbolism in Christianity and it's another book that you know it it claims that Christianity was heavily influenced by psilocybin use and it was published in the 1960s it's an amazing book but it's another book you read and you think I have no idea what to do with that I have no place to put that book

dorsdewski also explores that in The Idiot because that's Prince Michigan right it's a Christ analog for all of us purposes right but dorsdewski because he uses narrative rather than philosophy is able to produce an embodied figure who exemplifies virtue even though the propositional grounds for his moral pronouncements are relatively and I what undeveloped

his most ethical characters can lose every argument with rationalists and still be better men and you see that in the book because the book allows them to be embodied rather than mirror carriers of propositional arguments and beauty is non-propositional and so it goes under our our our narcissistic and blind rational intellect that overvalues its ability that's the spirit of lucifer that milton warned everyone about it goes under that and grabs you and if you pay attention to that then it's a it's a pointer to what is beyond your understanding

...But Epstein has pointed out in his new book Fossil Fuel Future...

I've just been reading Alex Epstein's book Fossil Future and in that book he details out, first of all his belief that in the foreseeable future that not only should we, not only will we have to use Fossil Fools but we should use them and he explains why I would say on ethical and practical grounds.

But he also says something that struck me is very interesting which is that the view that's being put forward to young people of the role of human beings on the planet in relationship to the environment is essentially predicated on an implicit religious metaphor and I want to lay out the metaphor and I want to lay out why I think his claim that it's a religious metaphor is technically correct.

Epstein's book Fawcett's Future he cites some of these the more radical environmentalist types who say things like I think it was McKibben he quoted who said something like as far as I'm concerned the vista of an unspoiled river so any natural environment that's completely untouched by human beings is so valuable that it would that one person or a billion isn't worth that it's something very close to that.

Well, I think one thing that's relevant I'm not sure if you know this but there's a new book 2022 called Fossil Future which is the successor or replacement to the moral case for fossil fuels.

So I talk a bunch in that about what how the moral case for fossil fuels has fared and I think in terms of a predictive book it's not primarily a predictive book but it has been extremely accurate because if you look at what people have said in the last eight or so years.

I point out I was born in 1980 since 1980 we've gone from more than four and ten people living on less than two dollars a day and this is adjusted for inflation to one intent so as you said this is the greatest alleviation of poverty in human history.

I do think a lot of it is the modern anti-human environmental movement because what they've done is they've taught us that our impact ruins the planet and so we just assume that because the world used a lot more fossil fuels particularly China and India did which drive with which drove much of the increase in prosperity they just assume that the world is worse and and what I call I don't use this term in moral case but I use it in Fossil Future our knowledge system so the institutions we rely on for expert knowledge and guidance they've done a totally failed at educating us about how much the world has improved from a human perspective.

Why global human flourishing requires more oil, coal, and natural gas--Not Less.

They're much more tilted towards the imagistic and technically religious side and become symbolic and narrative in some way that's akin to say Nietzsche's thus speaks their athustra.