The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

Well that's why Dante outlined levels of hell

Well exactly that and I mean that that book was an investigation into the structure of malevolence right he put betrayal at the bottom which I think is right I think that's right because people who develop post-traumatic stress disorder for example which almost only accompanies and encounter with malevolence rather than tragic circumstances they are often betrayed sometimes by other people but often by themselves and yes there are levels of hell you know and you outlined a couple there

He's the author of Own Your Past, Change Your Future.

You talk in your book about changing your past, owning your past, and it's useful to define that, you're likely to overcome a trauma let's say, and no longer in some sense store it psychophysiologically if you've generated a causal story about the reason that the trauma emerged, and then reconfigured the way that you're conducting your life so that the probability that a similar thing will happen to you is reduced to close to zero.

It's not catharsis, it's understanding, yeah.

I think there's something about owning your past. I look at it more in terms of can I think through what I remember to have it have happened?

And by the way we know that memory is a disastrous narrative storyteller, so I care less about what actually happened and more, in my 40s I'm telling myself this story that happened. Can I tell that story? Can I really live that story? And my body doesn't take off on me. It doesn't rush to solve the problem for me because it knows I'm driving now.

You could tell you know I say in my book mastery that by a person's style by how they write a book by the how they put language together or the music they create reveal something very very deep about their character about who they are and so a lot of rap kind of comes across as sort of faults like someone is trying really hard to have that kind of thug persona and it's not real but it really smelled authentic with him and the fact that he'd been shot nearly died you know just kind of added to that aura but there was something very real about and very authentic in a culture where so much isn't real I think that was the deep deep appeal in a primal sense of 50s music and when I was writing the war book I was trying to get myself in a martial mood to write it I would actually listen to his music to kind of put me in the mood to write some of the chapters that in beta that in Beethoven

I've old enough to have listened to C.S. Lewis by the way when I was younger and C.S. Lewis in the 1940s saw exactly what was going to happen if a group of human beings took it into their heads to determine and redefine all future generations through genetic experimentation and so on. And in two books, the abolition of man, that had his strength he spelled that out and he made the point that if that happens it is not good to liberate human beings. In fact, it's good to abolish them because what will be created by, say, playing around with the germline is not human beings but artifacts. And so he writes the final triumph of humanity, scientists will be the abolition of man. And it's that that I fear is really permeating our culture. I mean the Caesars in Rome and the Babylonian emperors who thought of themselves as gods, looks pretty trivial stuff compared with this insidious teaching that's around in particularly the Western world today that we are actually all gods and we ought to rise to this and the only way to rise to it is to reject the transcendent completely. There is nothing above us.

And you contrast citizens with pre-citizens, the book by the way is called The Dying Citizen, how progressive elites, tribalism and globalism are destroying the idea of America

I read the Art of the Deal, his book, about four times before I went out there and displayed it tough and hard and to win, which I knew would be all traits he would find impossible to say were not good things

I recommend people just want to read it, it's quite fun, remember he's a real estate tycoon in Manhattan, his whole persona for 50 years before became president was to was to show off in belish and exaggerate everything

It's a really entertaining read, and actually has a lot of good business stuff in it

You might have heard of Orphan X or the book of Henry.

The book we delved into most deeply today was The Elegant Universe, Super Strings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory that was originally published in 1999, but he's offering an updated version as of 2024.

And I guess that's part of the occasion for our discussion.

So, I want to go through The Elegant Universe in some detail.

Well, I tell you what we're doing, Dr. Jordan Peterson, what you said is very similar to what Richard Dawkins said in an debate with the Archbishop of the then Archbishop of Canterbury.

And he said that well, if you have and he said this debate, he made this argument in Oxford.

And he said that if you look at the universe, well, if you're saying that God has made the universe in this way, then your God who's more complicated than he would add this layer of complexity.

This your God is more complicated would require it even greater. He would require even greater explanation.

the problem with debating people like Richard Dawkins about the existence of God is that he will formulate the argument in propositional terms and then force the person so to speak.

it's a book I'm now working on called The Genetic Book of the Dead which is all about the idea that the animal is a model of not the present for the past but it's a whole of the ancestral yes

Today I'm speaking with primatologist, neuroendocrinology researcher, an author of multiple books including the upcoming "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will", Dr. Robert Sapolsky.

You know, in the Truth and Beauty, I write a chapter on Frankenstein, in which I make the argument that Frankenstein, the Dr. Frankenstein who creates this monster has not violated, as Mary Shelley did, has not violated God's prerogative. He's violated a woman's prerogative. He's created a being, which we all do. Anyone who has a child has created a living being, but he creates it without a mother. And if you read Frankenstein in that way, by immoral action.