Mikhaila Peterson on Trump, her Dad, Conspiracies, Religion, Marriage, Gender Roles

I'm Tom Billieu and this is Impact Theory. Today I'm sitting down with someone who never shies away from hard truths. Mikayla Fuller. She's not just redefining education with an app that's already reached over 30,000 students.

She's tackling the big controversial topics that most people are afraid to touch. Now if you follow me long enough, you know how much I value person responsibility and believe that freedom of speech is one of the most important topics of our time. And that's why I was so excited to sit down with Mikayla as she has deep concerns of censorship that she has developed by watching up close the battles that her father Jordan Peterson has been going through. These are not abstract debates.

This is real life and it's affecting all of us right now. Governments crossing a line on what can and can't be said that is just the beginning. This conversation is about some of the most important ideas that we face as a society and taking the time to figure out exactly what you guys believe about this is going to be incredibly important. And now without further ado, I bring you Mikayla Fuller.

Why do you think it would be bad to have a law against hate speech? I think my issue is I wouldn't want the government defining what they think is bad. Because for instance, I'm not a huge fan of the food pyramid. What happens if what the government deems is appropriate, they decide veers into hate speech or misinformation.

I don't think the government as a body is smart enough to determine what hate speech should be as we can kind of see in Canada now. So I think hate speech laws are about as dangerous as you're going to get in terms of eroding a fundamental freedom that I think your dad has summed up better than anybody else's speech as a form of thought. I've been saying for years as a quote. I wish I remember who said it, but I speak not so that I can be understood, but so that I can understand.

Yeah. And I'm like, that's how my mind works. I process verbally. I have to say things out loud.

I have to be able to test the idea. But I am terrified of a world in which we can't think out loud and that people will pass laws where now all of a sudden you really are in trouble because of something that you were just trying to think through. It violates a law. And now like you're saying in the UK, you want to imprison.

Like that's insane to me. And this is not a vote for Russia, but this is definitely a vote against what's happening there. If the stat is to be believed more, I think it was 10 times more people were legally pursued for hate speech in the UK than in Russia. Oh, yeah.

And I was like over the last year or something. And I was just like, wow, that scares me. So the last time I interviewed your dad, I think my opening question was like, imagine there was a doomsday clock that was counting down to authoritarian rule, kind of like the clock for atomic energy. What time would you put it?

Now we duck the punch. And so I never got a time. Like, I don't know if I'm being overly paranoid and I should detach from it all and just live your life or you can take the meta approach and say everything is downstream of culture. So it's possible I'm just being overly paranoid.

But does that idea of an authoritarian doomsday clock resonate with you? And if so, what time is it? Because of all the negative, all the pushback against authoritarianism, I think we're switching directions. So I'm actually rather optimistic.

If we're on the doomsday clock, I would say I think we almost hit it and we're going the other way. But I probably live in a way where I live as if we're going in the other direction, but I have part of my focus on what if things really go badly. So I think politics have a lot to do with it right now. But I think there's a bunch of cultural pushback like talking out against the really far left woke culture now is different than it was in 2017.

In 2017 or in 2016, people were like, that doesn't even exist. And then in 2018, 2019, it was like, okay, it's definitely here. 2020 is definitely here, but you can't talk badly against it. And then I think now to 2024, we're starting to realize, oh, maybe the downsides are quite evident.

And I think there's quite a bit of pushback. I think you can see that too with universities and all the protests and things and how crazy that's gone. Like it's spread so far that I think there's enough pushback that we're going to go back towards the middle. I hope.

You've said that you're concerned about your father, Jordan Peterson, his forced media retraining. You're worried about how that's going to end. What exactly are you worried about? I don't think they can let him keep his license.

When this all started, I said, you know, give it, give it back, like relinquish it. Like I don't know anybody else in as a psychologist or a working professional that would be able to afford fighting back against something like this. And I think dad basically made it more of a moral thing that he had to do. And he has the money to be able to put into lawyers to fight back against this to kind of blow it up to show the world what's going on in Canada.

And I left Canada. I moved because I could kind of see the direction it was going in in 2021. So I do think he'll end up losing his license though. There's this fear in the air really since COVID in Canada.

So if you're in the States and you go back to Toronto, which is where I'm from, and you land there, everyone's still a little bit, I would say traumatized from COVID and being locked down and you can feel it there. And then there were these rumors being thrown around about bills that would basically criminalize things you said on social media, if they were deemed hate speech and the definition of what hate speech is. I mean, dad definitely delved into that on occasion, even if it's like talking about trans problems or criticizing the government, like things that you should be able to discuss might be eventually deemed as hate speech. And then that would be a criminal offense and they're toying around with the idea of passing the bill.

So my concern, especially with him fighting the court case in Canada, was he was going to be living there while he's doing it with the protests in London. People were posting things on social media on Facebook in particular and getting arrested in London in the UK. I think Canada and UK are very similar in that way. And I was like, that would happen to my dad.

It would be like par for the course at this point. So it wasn't tongue in cheek, but I think it's unlikely. How do you think that's going to play out? So you said the election is going to be important.

I very much agree sort of my take is that the the election is merely a mile marker in where culture is at. So I don't think the election is going to change culture. I think it's simply going to say whether we're slightly one way or the other. What do you think will happen?

And what do you think will be the response? I think I would probably disagree that it's a reflection of where culture is at because I don't trust politics at all. So I don't even know what's going on behind the scenes there. So I don't even know, can I say this?

Can we, are we going on YouTube? Does somebody say cut? You say literally anything you want. Yeah, I'm free.

I'm not sure. I don't necessarily believe in voter fraud, but I'm not sure if I trust the system to count tickets properly. Ooh. Yeah, I'm going to, like I can go that far.

So I would say I think the country would go in a better direction if Trump won. I don't know if he's going to win and I don't know how they're going to judge who's going to win. And so I think that is going to determine how the next year is going to play out. Okay.

Whenever somebody says something like that, I default to base assumptions. I have a very hard time explaining to people what I'm trying to do. So I'm really going to take a minute and just say this all out loud. It is more important to understand how somebody comes to a conclusion than it is to understand the conclusion itself.

So what you just said is going to be very inflammatory and people are going to go berserk in the comments, either saying that you're right or you're wrong, but people will very much galvanize on one side or the other. Definitely. So I want to build up what you see that leads you to that conclusion. So for the next few minutes, I just want to talk about base assumptions.

Great. So you have looked at the world and either have just had an intuitive emotional response that leads you to believe that that's true or there's some set of facts that you've looked at that leads you to believe that that's true or some combination thereof. Can you articulate what the things are that you've encountered that led you to believe that maybe because you certainly didn't say it would be, but that maybe the election results won't be fair and open. So I don't have any knowledge of politics in that area.

That's more intuitive and that intuition is based on what I've seen in the food industry. I would say mainly, which is also overseas. It's a government. Yeah.

So the food pyramid basically was built by huge influences from food companies pushing products. So at one point, they were like, sugar's a weight loss food, which is clearly not or fat is bad for you. You know, eat seed oils. So and that's just starting at red meat is bad for you.

High carb diets is how people should eat. Just the entire thing is so backwards and that was run partially by government oversight. And that was almost upside down. So if that's the kind of product they're pushing out, I don't necessarily believe anything else they're doing is true.

Okay. Do you believe that the food pyramid is a result of malice or ignorance? A little bit of both, mostly ignorance. Like I'm sure that people pushing sugar didn't realize how detrimental that would be.

And I'm sure that people saying saturated fat is bad for you. Didn't realize how detrimental that would be. But it was definitely influenced by corporate greed as well. People were going to make money if their products sold more.

So that's malicious. So both. What I'm trying to get to is so take my last company quest. I realize at one point, hey, we're probably enough to start lobbying the government because they're anti fat.

Yeah. And they're pro sugar. And this is like, I'm realizing, hey, like this is really problematic. Now I attributed 99.9999% ignorance.

And back then I would not have attributed it to malice. Now, going down the path, I get way more concerned that they're my overarching narrative is that the human animal is controllable. And therefore people will rise to power that want to control people. Yeah.

Maybe for good. Maybe they really have people's best interests at heart. But because we are controllable, people that desire control will rise to the top. Okay.

So that's one of my base assumptions. Which makes me very nervous because I don't think that I don't think humans can be ruled well from the top down. So that's another base assumption for me. This is why if you're authoritarian rule, I just don't think it works.

But that it worked and hey, maybe I could get behind it. But I don't. So quest teaches me a very similar lesson that your experience with food has taught you, which is the government should not be the arbiter of what we should eat, whether it's malice or not. Yeah.

But none of me looking at the food pyramid leads me to believe in voter fraud. So I know, first of all, people listening are going to draw parallels with what you said. And so I'm just trying to tease out. There's more.

Sorry. I was super sick as a kid. And when I realized that I could get all these health problems under control with my diet and no medication, I was really angry at the medical system. And that I think most of the people working in it, I think a lot of that is ignorance.

They just don't know that there are other ways to treat people. But that crushed me for like four years. I was almost mad at every medical professional. So I was like, why don't you look into other alternatives?

Like how can you be telling these chronically ill people that have lifestyle diseases, that they're stuck being chronically ill for the rest of their lives? Like how dare you take their own ability to research and fix themselves away from them by teaching them that they have no control? I was so mad. I don't trust the pharmaceutical industry.

And not all of them. Like I have a friend who runs a pharmaceutical company to treat rare diseases. Nothing wrong with that. Right?

But I think I have an institutional distrust and that probably spreads over to like what else is out there. Just like during COVID, a whole bunch of things that ended up being true were called conspiracies. And now I even see conspiracies have gone off the deep end. It's like, well, this conspiracy was right.

And you said this was a conspiracy, but it was true. And you said this was a conspiracy and it was true. So maybe they're all true. So I mean, voter fraud could be pushed into a conspiracy, but I don't trust the government's ability.

I just don't trust. I just don't trust them. It's probably intuition and then based off my experiences with the food pyramid and the medical establishment. All right.

Now, do you think that one side or the other getting elected is better or worse? I mean, I do. I do. Same work.

Like I would, I'm Canadian, so I don't have a say, but I would vote. Is your husband American? Yes. Oh, you have a say.

I know how I know how marriage works on me. So yeah. I would have probably, I was a huge fan of R.K. But because I didn't think R.K could win, even though I really like him.

So I would vote for Trump for sure. I don't even know how Kamala got to where she is running. And I'm not happy that they hid the fact that Biden was so sick and then like gaslight the entire nation. And then put somebody else up like, oh, you're gonna vote for her instead now.

I don't know. Seems pretty like what you would hear about in Russia for a Russian under the bus. What do you mean? That is it manipulation that you're getting at?

Oh, yeah. Propaganda. Just like nationwide gaslighting. Biden doesn't seem well.

Maybe he's getting old. No, he's totally fine. It's like, oh, and then suddenly, okay, no, he's not fine. And we're gonna put Kamala in instead, which is what everybody's been saying for like, at least a year and a half.

And then the nation forgot. And then you know what reminds me of Propaganda, too? The messaging that Kamala's putting out now, where she's associated with joy, and it's just suddenly showing up in all the mainstream media newspapers, a whole bunch of different mainstream media newspapers at the same time, reminds me of Propaganda, I'd see coming out of a country I didn't trust. To put it bluntly.

Sure. Do you think that it will be effective? So I didn't. It was like, there's no way people are falling for this after COVID.

But then these kind of like, Propaganda newspapers are saying about Kamala. Like, why would you vote for her? Okay, she's gonna make it more joyful. It's like, oh my gosh, is that real?

Well, so I have no idea. Do you? We'll be back in a moment. Let's talk about the worst investment most guys make on repeat.

Cheap clothes. You buy them. They look fine. But six months later, they're pilling, shrinking, or just falling apart.

So you replace them. You do it again. And again, you're spending more over time, and you never actually have anything worth keeping or wearing for that matter. That's the whole model behind Quince.

I've got one of their 100% pima cotton teas, and the quality is immediately obvious. From the second you pick them up, they're soft, well constructed. The kind of thing that holds up over time, and that is the point. Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use.

Head to quince.com slash impact pod for free shipping on your order, and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quince QU I N C E dot com slash impact pod for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash impact pod.

Let's talk about the most powerful force in wealth building. Compounding. There's a reason that people have talked about this forever. You put an asset to work.

It generates more of itself. Over time, the curve bends way in your favor. Every serious wealth builder knows how compounding works. Most gold owners though have completely opted out of it.

Monetary metals changes that equation. They've built away for your gold to earn yield paid not in dollars, but in more physical gold. Up to 4% per year, more ounces, stacking every single month, compounding in one of the only assets that can't be printed inflated or debased. And storage and insurance are included by the way, so hidden fees don't eat your yield.

The average person is passively absorbing inflation. This is how you compound your way out of it. Click the link in the show notes or visit monetary dash metals.com slash impact to learn more. This is a paid advertisement.

Let's talk about money you're leaving on the table. Every time you pay full price for a health product out of pocket, you could be missing out on 30% savings. There are over 40 million HSA accounts in the US holding $159 billion in pre-tax dollars. That's where TrueMed comes in.

TrueMed helps qualified customers use pre-tax HSA dollars on health products that can qualify as medical expenses under IRS guidelines. You complete a health survey, TrueMed handles the documentation and the purchase. And you can save an average of 30% on products like 8-sleep, Peloton, AG1, and others that studies show, can treat or reverse many common chronic conditions. Stop paying full price for products your HSA was billed for.

Go to truemed.com slash impact and check out what things you want that may qualify. It takes just a couple of minutes. TrueMed is for qualified customers only. HSA FSA tax savings vary.

We're back. Let's dive right in. I have a hypothesis, so I think this is about the architecture of the human mind. So the world is obscenely complicated.

In fact, your dad has a quote about this. I'm going to have to paraphrase. You cannot adjudicate the world based on facts because there is a fact for every phenomenon. There's too many phenomena to build your world that way.

This is why things like religion become useful because they distill the world down into a set of stories that tell you how to act. Then you know how to act. And if he's right about that, which I actually think he is, then we're just speaking to the need for the human mind to have a simple narrative that tells him how to move forward. And this is why it feels like we're living in this sort of great unmasking of the political process.

I have a hunch, and this admittedly, I am thinking through these ideas in real time. But I have a hunch that for all of recorded history beyond like when you were a really small tribe that even then, like even then, I think that to galvanize a group of people, you have to connect dots. And when I say connect dots, I mean tell a story. So you have to say, hey, all these things happened.

It started raining. And that means that God is happy, right? So you start connecting these stories, these dots into a cohesive story. And it allows people to share a worldview and to move forward.

And the need to have a shared cohesive worldview is how this creature humans that can operate in such large and flexible groups are able to do what they do. But you need those simple narratives. So I think the reason that Kamala equals joy works is because people need a rule of thumb. They need a thing they can repeat to their friends to explain their emotion, but really, it's just emotion.

So when I look at the political process, I am like, I really just want to be happy and optimistic and tell people how great they can make their lives by taking personal responsibility and all that. Oh, that's true. But there's a trifecta books which I've talked about many times, which if you read them, you will suddenly be like, okay, that's true right now in the West, but it's not always been true throughout history, even in the West. And so if you read the Gulag Archipelago brutal way that things can go, if you read the rise and fall of the Third Reich and if you read Mal the Unknown Rental Strike, never remember which, you realize, yo, in recent memory, we're just talking like the last hundred years, in recent memory, things have gone so badly that hundreds of millions of people die.

Okay, so that's as terrifying as I needed to be to go, well, I just want to be optimistic. There is a reality to be faced with the architecture of the human mind, which leads them to be taken down a primrose path. And when it breaks, it breaks bad. Now, eventually people write the ship.

Wow. Oh, it can get dark first. It can get real dark first. Yeah, I completely agree.

We're teaching all those three books you mentioned. We have courses being taught on the Metteress Academy. They are fantastic books. If I was going to give somebody a primer for what the human animal is capable of.

I agree. I think it's naive not to know that history. Like I kind of grew up, so I grew up with my dad as a dad. He obviously like instilled those horrors.

Yeah, what was that like? I was taught, this is how bad humanity can get. And if you're not careful, you're going to be on the bad side. You know, I was told at that at a young age, but I was also told every problem in your life is your responsibility and you have the ability to fix it, which is really a hopeful message.

It's not, you know, it's a little bit overwhelming if you realize everything going wrong as your fault somehow. But if you're also told it's your fault, but you can fix it, then it just opens up a world of possibility. So I think being taught at a young age, not to be naive about history was incredibly valuable. But even me as a kid, I remember reading about Nazis or something and being like, well, that was in the 1940s.

And we already went through that and like Mao and Stalin and all that. We already went through that society learn. We're all taught it in school. Everyone will remember and it'll never happen again.

And then things are feeling a little weird right now, I've got to say. I'm still optimistic that there were turning directions. I've got a lot of Jewish trends. I think there's like a lot of anti-Semitism that's on the rise now and some history rewriting that's going on on popular podcasts.

That's like maybe the Nazis like maybe they really did have good reasons to do what they did. And that's and then like we're not allowed to talk about that, which is why no one ever talks about it. But maybe we should start talking about that again. And I didn't think I would see that kind of thing in the open in my life with the amount of support it has right now.

So going back to base assumptions, what do you think is going on that leads people to back to that sort of weird point in this. Do you want to get super conspiratorial? I have no evidence of any of this. So full disclosure intuition conspiracy.

Yeah. And I haven't talked about this before. I was going to on my podcast. I think and this could entirely be a conspiratorial.

I think China is trying to sow disruption in the US and what we're experiencing now is from that. And I think the main mode of communication they're probably using is TikTok. And that's why a lot of this political craziness is hitting younger people. It's not hitting like 50 plus it's hitting TikTok users.

But I don't think China operates on the same time span as Americans operate. I think they operate on like 200 year time spans with longer plans. And I think they've been probably been at this for a while. That's my theory.

Okay. Let's push into the theory. So are you saying that China finds Jews to be a lightning rod? I think what happened with the Hamas, the Palestine Israel horror show.

I think this is my algorithm. So just come at it from my perspective. I'm politically in this day and age somewhat conservative, more libertarian, but somewhat conservative. I've programmed my TikTok algorithm to show me content I like.

It's not really political. Like most of it's like neutral or makeup or something. But if I get a political post, it'll be something that's kind of conservative. It'll be like mostly like Christian or conservative or something like that.

When the war broke out, my feed was completely flooded with dead babies. To a degree, I don't know if you've heard about this from anyone else. I asked my friends. So I have like a friend in Toronto and she's always on TikTok.

She's way more liberal than me. And her feed was flooded. And she ended up being like, you know, this is horrible. This is horrible.

A little anti-Jewish, just a little anti-Jewish. And I was like, you got to be careful because this has happened many times for a very long time. And you don't want to be part of the group that is like maybe the Jewish people are the problem. Right?

And she got that. I know she got that from TikTok. And I had to spend a good number of days saying, I don't want to see this. I don't want to see this.

I don't want to see this on TikTok. Enough that it was like, I'm getting pushed this from something. And it was the platform because I wasn't interacting with any of the posts or anything. So I think that was a push to breed political disruption.

And I think Jewish people are used to the scapegoat as they've been used many times before. Knowingly conspiracy conspiracy, but knowingly why the Chinese government using TikTok. And maybe part of the reason they're like, why would they do that? Why would they do that?

Why I think it's convenient and it's something that could breed problems politically, like widespread in the US. But they also have these Muslim concentration camps in China where they're sterilizing people, a lot of people. And that's not talked about anywhere. So why isn't that talked about anywhere?

If it's a problem. Well, I think it's because China's controlling TikTok. I don't think it sounds that crazy either. But I could be in my little weird group of libertarian weirdos.

Well, so this is why I want people to pay attention to base assumptions. So if I can get people to walk along the path, they will at least say, okay, it's possible that thing is happening. So question number one would be, do you believe that people will develop opinions based on what they see over and over and over? Oh my gosh.

I think most people will say yes. I mean, I did throughout my life. Like I took certain things as the truth and I found it later weren't the truth. It was just like, especially if everybody thinks the same thing.

And you probably experienced this with Quest and like the demonization of fat. Is it's kind of hard to get into the mindset of, well, everyone around me thinks this one thing. But I know that that one thing isn't true. And eventually, society will shift over.

You know, ketogenic diets being a fad too for a very long time. And now it's like the number of research articles coming up about ketogenic diets and diseases skyrocketing. But everyone for 15 years was called a quack. Yeah.

So the series that I think people have to walk down if you're just looking at it from base assumptions is anything you repeat is going to get into people's minds. If you repeat something enough, it will seem true. Yeah. If it's just because it's familiar algorithms create the ability to repeat something over and over.

That this, if you can create a sense of social proof around an idea that people are even more likely to believe that. And we know that algorithms can control what side of an issue you see that can control the sequencing of the comments. So they can put comments you're going to agree with at the forefront. And do governments manipulate their adversaries population whenever possible?

Like if you say yes to all those things, then it's like, well, it's at least possible. You may not see any proof that it's actually happening, but it's like, there's a... That would be, I mean, you spelled it out pretty correctly. That would be my logical framework, which I thought to those conclusions.

And we just saw with Matt and Mark Zuckerberg coming out and being like, yeah, we were pressured pretty badly and saying, yeah, we did censor content. Which I think maybe put yourself in his shoes as a human being. He's not like a, you know, some people think he's an alien, but he's not some robot, right? If you have the FBI coming to you being like, do this, that's a less pressure that most people don't withstand.

And especially with the limited information he had about like, well, maybe, I mean, the government is saying this information is really dangerous. And the FBI is saying don't show it to anybody. Maybe even if I think it's right, maybe I could be wrong because I'm getting pushed back from these like authoritative government heads. I think it's good he came out and said that they were censoring content.

But the fact that meta was censoring content, I mean, how can you not think that there's some weird things going on with TikTok? And I don't think every country infiltrates every other country to like give them propaganda. But we know stories from like the CIA doing, you know, different things to different countries. Propaganda is definitely real.

We've seen multiple examples of that. You can just take Nazi Germany as an example of that. Or even Soviet Union. So we know propaganda happens.

I just think maybe we don't necessarily think it's happening to us now. Yeah, if your dad is right and the world cannot be metabolized via facts, it has to be taken in as story and story is quite from a propaganda story. It's I'm going to tell you the story that I want you to hear from the frame of reference that I want you to see things. And if you can control both what people look at and what they see, then you have a tremendous amount of control, which is utterly fascinating because that's a moment we're living in where people are chronically on social media and it controls what you look at and certainly influences what you see.

Yeah, it's really, really interesting. So the question becomes what comes of all of this? What ends up being the societal reaction? What I try to do with my social media is follow people who are motivational and positive.

Like forget the politics. That like really, I think that's what the average person should do. These wars too that were involved in, but we shouldn't be. I don't even think human beings can take on that kind of stress.

Like I take my friend, for example, in Toronto. She's a mom. She's a kid. She's being shunted babies.

I was like, what tribe would you have possibly been in where you wouldn't have PTSD after spending two hours looking at this? No human being is meant to be exposed to the entire world of pain that exists. So follow motivational people, follow business people. I follow Christian people.

Follow people who don't drag you into these political battles that we're having and then try to reorganize your own life so that every day is a slight improvement from the last day or at least your trajectory is up and just ignore the politics for now. I think with the Trans debate, that's worth talking about, but at a level you can tolerate and I think most of your time should be spent on trying to fix your own life and looking at people who are motivational because I don't think people can handle how dark things can get. Like I think you should read those three books that you mentioned and be aware that that that's how society can go, but you don't need to be staring at it every day. This is like when I was a kid, my dad wouldn't let us watch the news.

Because the news was always like serial killers loose in Toronto. And I remember like, oh great force, serial killers loose. Like that's terrifying. Or you know, so-and-so's been beaten or robbed or died or something's on fire.

And that was the news, right? And now unfortunately, we have the news on social media on our phone all the time. And I don't think people's nervous system can handle it. This would cause anxiety and depression ruins your life.

Follow people like you, like motivational people. Maybe you might delve into these like darker topics, but- My audience is screaming right now that I've gone so into world affairs that that's a big complaint about my change. It's interesting. So I try to do things by platform.

So if you want the motivational side go over to Instagram or watch me stream video games, I actually do a lot of mindset stuff in video games, but I'm a big believer that it is very important to build a mindset so that you can point it at the biggest most important things in your life. Yes. Because of this weird thing that I see happening in culture, I cannot help but try to look at those things head on. Fair enough.

I think your advice is actually really solid. I want to talk about something that you said earlier. One of the things that you follow is Christian content. It has been from the outside utterly fascinating to watch the religious awakening of the Peterson household.

Yeah. Walk me through that because your dad started by saying I act as if God is real. And then I recently heard you say I'm paraphrasing, but I used to believe, but now I know the Bible is true. Yeah.

Okay. So this is a from outside viewership. This is a big swing. Walk me through what happened.

Hold tight. We're going to take a quick break. Welcome aboard V.A. Rail.

Please sit and enjoy. Please sit and sit. Play. Post.

Taste. View. And enjoy V.A. Rail.

Love the way. That's what he taught me as a kid. And then in 2019, my mom got really sick and got cancer. And sorry to shorten the story quite a lot.

She goes, I'm going to be healed by her anniversary. And I didn't believe at that point, and she was in a hospital for I can't exactly remember. But it was over two and a half months. And then there was a surgery and then there was a surgical mishap and she had to be phoned to the States.

And then they couldn't fix it. And then on so she was in in the midst of them trying to fix a surgical injury that they couldn't fix and then on mum and dad's anniversary it fixed itself. I still get goosebumps from that because it was like how as a more rational person and I would say the more rational you are the harder it is to have faith in something. I was like how can I figure that one out?

Because I said how did you know and she said God told me and I was like that's too coincidental for my rational brain to be like what are the odds of that? Like nothing, like zero. The surgeons were all shocked. What did you think about when she said God told me?

I thought mum John Morphene literally she was on painkillers in the hospital. I was like as long as that's like giving her some hope good but it was like she's on Morphene. That was my thought at the time. So then why not when it does heal on the exact day that she said it would why does your mind not immediately go to the SIBO or something like that?

Oh my gosh because it couldn't have been to SIBO. It was like to get into the details they'd nicked a lymph duct and there was lymph leaking into her and they were trying to fix it and it's very difficult to find a leak and they couldn't fix it. And so she came out of surgery and they're like we couldn't find basically the nicked lymph duct and then that was just kind of it and then it just healed. And so she goes you know you know God saved me and then her disposition towards everything changed.

Her demeanor changed. She spent the next couple of years converting to Catholicism but it was the patience she had after that wasn't something I'd seen her have throughout my entire life. Like she could be very short and irritable and a bit unforgiving and she won't even be mad at me saying this and then her demeanor changed and it was like you have way more compassion than you did and I don't even think I don't think it was from the stint she spent really suffering. And I think it was her being saved and her conversion that gave her that and I watched that and I was like I want that whatever that is whatever happened to her I want that for me and having my dad as a dad who's very rational as well it's just like doesn't there's no logical explanation why.

And I had this extremely you know extremely heavenly perspective and it was basically you as a human don't have the ability to rationalize God that's why you need to have faith. And I was just like why did I never understand that. Like everyone says have faith and I didn't really understand that faith is believing without having evidence to prove it otherwise you wouldn't need to have faith. And for some reason and I don't know if that's going to resonate with anyone else but that's what resonated with me and then it was just like floodgates open and I was like oh that's what people mean that's what like all these Christian weirdos that I've been around are talking about this overwhelming feeling of forgiveness you get I guess once you once you get saved and have faith and all and all these things just lined up for me and like I don't know 30 seconds and then after that like my whole worldview changed.

So I was like things make more sense and this is what my dad has been talking about too understanding things through a narrative so even having my dad as a dad I'm like I'm a human being I'm trying to understand things factually like what can I see that's true that you can prove okay there's one belief and then what else can I see that's true that you can prove there's another belief and then build on top of those but I had a complete change in perspective that was like we're living in a spiritual world where there are things people can't see but maybe can intuit the highest good is truth and truth down to its core and then I realized what Christians were saying about sin and what sin looks like and I don't think I was able to recognize sin probably before I was Christian. I do want to go back and start now teasing some of these ideas apart so I had one line of questioning that I was going to follow until you said truth matters and I mean truth all the way down so your dad and Sam Harris famously got bogged down in trying to define what is true so what and that makes sense to me I think it is shockingly difficult to actually define truth so why does truth matter and if it really does matter how do we define it? Okay well I guess I'll just go ahead and say it I think there's a spiritual war going around that we don't see that can kind of rear its head in politics and in evil in the world and I think the only way to combat that is by being 100% truthful and if you're not 100% truthful then you're contributing to that evil in the spiritual realm so that's going to be my answer Okay truthful versus true seems very different so truthful to me the way that I would define it is I believe these things and therefore I'm going to tell you exactly what I believe but that person may not have identified truth they could be completely off the rails. Well even like this theory about China and fricking the US I'm not going to say that's true I have no idea so is it important to be truthful or to identify the truth?

It kind of pains me to say this because my dad taught me this for my entire life said like no matter what you have to tell the truth but I was like yeah but what if what if your friend shows up and she's really happy and her hat is kind of ugly but she's really happy with the outfit do you actually have to say do you actually have to tell her what you think and I think yes now and I'm not sure if I thought yes as hard as I do now before I don't think you can know what is true without having a heavenly perspective say so much more what does that mean I think so the way I was acting before I got saved versus how I react to the world now the way I was acting was how I thought a good person should act and I think I was doing an okay job but then God was like you're not so I and the problem with how I was acting before was I couldn't identify the micro since I was doing so like even just kind of someone says something annoying you're like I don't have time for this even that I was shown isn't the way that you should act let me give you my definition of truth and then let me stab at what I think you're saying your definition of truth is okay my definition of truth would be an accurate description of the physical world so Einstein got close to truth he didn't get all the way there because he doesn't have a theory of everything that's me is what is true it is the physical laws of the universe from which everything is born now what I hear you saying what is true is accuracy to spiritual alignment with God's desire for you yes that yes and I also I do partly agree with you because there's like physical realities of the world but I do think I do think I would put God above that okay so there is truthfulness in terms of almost a shame that we use the same word but there is truthfulness that will keep your soul clean aligned I'm not sure what word will feel right there but for for a reason I won't speculate on yet God wants you to be that way that will be better for you better for society if you're always truthful the truth capital to the capital to truth that is God has a plan for how humans ought to be and when you're in alignment with that you're in alignment with the truth yeah okay cool I was pretty good I now understand this is the first time I had to stumble along that story I wasn't quite prepared for it we got there so now I understand what you're saying because it drives me crazy when people have debates and they just didn't take time to find a base so when going back to last interview I did with your dad I can't remember if I said this on camera off but I was like Jordan I think that you're I was very confused when you went from being the Internet's dad to writing a book called we who wrestle with God but because he is so bright and has really been a part of my sense making apparatus I was like Chester Tim's fence before I say this doesn't make sense let me make sure that I understand what he's doing and then I can decide if this is the next logical step once I understood what I think he's doing I was like oh I get why this is a continuation of alright I helped you get out of the mire of feeling lost and hopeless but now they're not lost in hopeless you need an aim and that aim is an aim that should make your life better your family's life better civilizations life better okay cool I get why he's now going over to religion I really believe that humans think in stories religion as far as I can tell is the only meme medium by which good ideas can spread not only across time and in any place on earth but also across levels of intellect so whether you're a literal by definition moron or you're a super genius both of those people can encounter religion and and see something that makes their life better and it's like oh my god like I see the truth right and so I'm utterly fascinated I don't I don't believe we have yet found anything that leverages the architecture of the human mind so perfectly to get us to work together in these large flexible groups okay so I think religion is the only thing that's twisted the test of time there's some new entrance into the field with religious like ideology but religion I know works but then it begs the question of am I missing a trick if I act as if religion is true but no that it's not which is how I feel yeah yeah there's so many great ideas if I live in accordance with the great ideas but don't think that this is the word of God yeah is my life somehow fundamentally worse than somebody who does all the same actions I do but they also believe it's the literal word in which case if somebody is trying to help people to the max they have to get you to truly take out leap of faith and believe I think what my dad tells people is if you even if you don't have faith if you act in that way and that's why the term cultural Christian is also popping up here and there then you'll improve your life dramatically which I agree and I think that's the best thing people can do I think from my conversion if you have faith then you're an entirely different realm than that I had a fear of death that I don't have anymore and it wasn't something that I was like up at night about because everybody knows they're gonna die and everything but that's just gone and it turns out that sucks just for humanity to have that so that's gone and I wasn't even an anxious person before like I have a number of successful companies have a podcast I have my health issues under control nobody my family is sick I'm in a great relationship like I have it I am so grateful at how my life has turned out after a lot of years of horror but even going from that to having faith has eliminated a lot of the existential I guess angst that just haunted me being a human how would you convince somebody that God is real I would probably tell them to start with my mom and walk them through you know I totally get where people are coming from and they're like that sounds like a nice naive fairy tale for people who can't handle death and don't believe in evolution which is probably how I kind of characterized Christians I was like those are people that thought Harry Potter was evil and so I'd probably say I was like that and then I saw what happened to my mom which was I couldn't rationalize and then I started mimicking the steps of a Christian I didn't go to church very often but I was watching sermons online and I was reading the Bible and I was praying and I was like this feels right but I didn't like fully to my core have faith and then and then I got to a low point and I think I was really struggling with like how do I believe in something that I can't rationalize like how are you supposed to believe that to your core if you can't prove it or if no one can prove it that's that's even harder and then it occurred to me that like the entire everything spelled out in the New Testament anyway is you need faith wouldn't be called faith if someone could come to you and rationally explain it what do you think about Rolo Tomasi's read on that women find God in their late 20s when they can know when they realize they can no longer compete with women who are in their early 20s I think Rolo Tomasi is a scum egg well it's like my that's my main take and I think he hates women so I think that is evident about like throughout what he teaches people and all his videos so I'm not surprised he'd say something like that I could say that to you in your that I've blocked that out of my head so successfully I yeah yeah I know I forgot about that I mean I guess I don't really care what he thinks he doesn't seem like a happy person plus people say anything they want about me online and I really I really don't care how do you deal with that I think maybe in 2018 it bothered me more but I mean you know what I do okay so we launched this Peterson Academy Company and there's been and for some reason that like criticism of that hurts me more than criticism of me maybe because it's new and I've gotten used to criticism of me yeah which is silly I guess but but then you look at Elon telling people he's going to launch a rocket to Mars and the comments are just like well why don't you just cure world hunger and it's like why don't you cure world hunger it's like how about that's epic right I figure if Elon Musk is getting criticism for his insane ventures and like bringing internet to everywhere building underground tunnels trying to make cars electric so that we pollute less like these huge things he's doing the AI stuff you know everything if he's getting criticism then I'm definitely criticism and so I think I just know that people are critics and resentful people in particular that know that there are things in their own life that could be improving and aren't or like well why that person deserve that I don't know improve your own life it's hard try it so I guess I just don't I just don't just don't care speaking of improving your life you got divorced and you were on camera through it all and you were leaking a lot of anxiety about I don't know if I'm gonna find anybody again I'm okay being alone but now you found somebody you remarried a new child what was that process like how especially somebody who's taken a lot of flack for being an alpha woman how did that process go how does an alpha woman find love again I'm more of a libertarian like there are certain things I don't like and certain things I like but I think because I'm surrounded more about conservatives I had this idea that because I had a baby and I was a single mom you know it scared me I was like my value is like who wants this amount of baggage and so when he asked me to marry him I literally told him all of that I was like okay but like you don't realize what you're gonna do here I'm not even sure if you actually want this like I worked very closely with my family and I don't plan on stopping I work all the time I have a kid there was more things that I thought were an issue and he was just like I don't care like wow I know Roland Tomasi talks about the statistics all the time about single moms and how awful they are but there's also like who left them I think I was more anti-single mom obviously and then I became one and maybe that was God being like humble yourself I've had other conservative women too who have been worried about telling people they're divorced online because they're part of a conservative community and they think they're gonna get completely lambasted by their audience for doing something wrong and I've been telling them first of all I don't think that feedback is gonna be as bad as you think it is a lot of people experience divorce and a lot of sane people experience divorce not just troubled people who experienced divorce to the idea of the overton window widening I think we're moving away from these really sort of absurdly narrow definitions of the relationship between the sexes but it is very interesting to see somebody who's a CEO of a very fast growing company which by the way congratulations thank you very exciting and my wife has always been the standard bearer for me she is a very tough woman she's a great entrepreneur the best business partner I've ever had she's amazing amazing but if she didn't like being small in my arms if she didn't want me to lead then we'd have a problem and so the interesting dichotomy there is you've got this bad bitch girl boss but her vibe has always been but at the same time I'm not competing with my husband for that role and I'm curious if you're in a similar relationship or if you have a totally different dynamic that you think works like how does there could be some outliers but I do think women want to be with someone who makes them feel safe and and that means that they can rely on them for to stay calm in stressful situations and to just deal with scary things and like make decisions everything that comes with making a female feel safe allow like criticism and conversations like the one thing I really appreciate about my husband is I don't have to filter myself at all and I can be pretty like if I'm being extremely honest I can be extremely blunt and I and the problem is if you're in a relationship where you can't be like blunt if their feelings get hurt or something it's just stifling and so by the time I met him I was like I actually am fine by myself now I wasn't I was lonely but I was like compared to being in a bad relationship I'm doing okay about some money like I have a baby I had a little kid at that point and was like I have career opportunities that have a successful podcast like I have opportunities like okay you know it's not ideal it's not how I thought I was gonna grow up as a little kid but I'm fine and it's better than being with somebody that can't handle me or that's like you're too much like or someone I can't communicate with which is just horrible so I think I just got really lucky I'm giving God credit for that one so if you were going to explain to somebody in their late teens early 20s how good a relationship can be what to look for how to find it quite frankly what advice would you give them I would say if you're young like that young you should probably work on yourself for a while I was naive for a very long time but I was extremely naive I think until I was 23 I think if I could have given myself advice it would have been to work on myself definitely sort out my health because my health was a disaster read as much as I can pursue opportunity and try to learn enough so you're a little bit wiser get your exercise and check like look into what your sleep schedule looks like like you're drinking habits under control so let's put that to the side for a second picture the person you want and my dad really taught me this from a young age imagine your ideal person just so you know what that looks like and then I would say try to build yourself into the person that matches who that person would be attracted to that's probably what I would tell young people and what do you think about saving yourself for marriage is that advantageous is that disadvantageous I'm so curious to see how hard the pendulum is going to swing back now I think it's a good idea because I think having casual sex is incredibly hard on women and I think the pendulum is swinging back like when I when I was a teenager it was really for out of pound upon if you weren't hooking up with people whoa frowned upon oh my gosh in like in Toronto in an art school I think we knew the one yeah oh yeah is that all just like when you were growing up it was pretty hard score like high school babies when you're 40 sleep around now that's when you find like that's how you first of all you'll like it none of that is remotely true so I think saving yourself is definitely the way to go and I think the pendulum is swinging back towards that do you think there's any sense of sexual compatibility is a real thing you brought that up but how will you know if you're sexually compatible I think if you're I think if you're deeply if you're actually in love with somebody even if you guys have no idea what you're doing you'll figure it out like we're humans it's not like oh it's not good now it's gonna be not good forever like that is very unlikely if you're madly in love with each other so going back to so there's context for this question you talked about the truth is being in alignment with what God wants for you do you think a line for God is marriage and that's gonna be the thing that's optimal for now I'm using my words human thriving or is it because to me there's a huge difference between casual sex and sex with a long term committed partner with you're both wildly in love but you're not married I mean I agree there's a difference so is there I think I think the ideal situation is you find somebody you're madly in love with and you get married I think that's the ideal situation yeah I do think that but I know you did that yeah I do actually I've met people have done that so so I do and the reason part of the reason I think that is because of the Bible and how it talks about it I would say I guess from my rational perspective if you guys are together and you're fully committed and you plan on getting married I don't know I'm having a hard time here because from a Christian perspective you're supposed to wait till marriage from a rational perspective I think God would forgive you but I'm not God so that like I don't know I think like try your hardest I think the casual sex thing is a really bad idea I think if you're committed to one another and there's no like wiggle room of maybe there's someone better out there you know your eyes aren't kind of like half looking in one direction and that's the ideal place to be and I think marriage solidifies that let me run an idea by you tell me what you think okay there's always somebody better and if you are foolish enough to chase the somebody better then you're gonna end up in a really dark place because the reality is there's somebody better than you and so the way I think people ought to think that I don't come from a religious perspective so the Christian God may hate this but the way that I think about it is you want to share life with somebody and to share life with somebody you need to be committed you need to let them know even though there will certainly right now today there's people that are more attractive than you and there will be people that are more attractive than you for sure as you go there and I don't care and that's not why I'm with you yeah I think that will serve people more than I'm trying to shut that eye off it's like you're always gonna find people attractive again I'm not speaking to what the Bible says but for me there would be no friction in oh my neighbor's wife is hot I'm not gonna sleep there because there's no universe in which I would want to throw away sharing my life with my wife but for me that was like an unlock when I told Lisa I was like look you're always gonna find other men attractive that's okay I'm gonna find other women attractive that's okay and as long as we're both in this together and we want to share life and we want to grow together I'm here for it but if you want me to lie to you and say I'll never find anybody attractive again and I only have eyes for you I think it deranges personally and you know what this might be from the conversion to and being saved I don't have that perspective I don't I thought I thought I would but I don't and I'm not lying about that either because they're very attractive people out there but I like I don't think I have that perspective meaning you don't find other people attractive no I know what they like what looks good for sure on women and men but like I would say attractive for me very interesting all right I will read that as 100% accurate to your experience it you were the first person I've met that made that claim I will say that so it doesn't feel super common to me but what do you think it is about being saved that has made it such that you only find your husband attractive and can you define attractive I have a feeling that we're using that we're not really I mean like because you said I know what looks like everything everything I mean drawn to yeah but I mean yeah okay so let's do some definitions here I do mean drawn to but I also mean attractive in like a looks sense so you can be putting me full of six pack app models be like there's no no no I know like I know what looks good but there isn't an attraction so we do have to define attraction so there's no like there's I'm drawn to yeah yeah yeah and there's none of that I can still see what looks good like I still watch makeup videos with cute women are like I want that on me that's with women that's very different okay but with with men I mean I still know what an ideal like human body like I know what that looks like and how that looks good but I wouldn't say there's an attraction to it interesting I understand that word so that helps it doesn't hurt he is not ugly I will say that he's not ugly and nor is he short both of those things are true yes okay so talk to me a little bit about the how men and women should be aligning because I think for a long time last ten years we've really gotten some crazy ideas yeah how can men women align oh this is tricky so I think and you and Lisa seem to have it I think if you're with someone who isn't going to compete with you like coming from a female perspective it's hard to be with someone if they're trying to one up you all the time because you don't want to be in competition with the man you kind of want to lead you and feel safe with like if it turns into a competition it's like this isn't even a competition I want to win and why are you competing with me kind of like you don't want that so my perspective is coming from someone who's pretty dominant my dad probably didn't help because he probably said like who's gonna put up with you and I kind of felt the same way with like who's gonna put up with me if I like want to work for 12 hours because I want to finish a project or if I'm like this isn't good enough I think as a dominant woman you need to you know work on yourself so that you can attract someone who is as dominant or more dominant than you that's at least what I needed so I think I think kind of what we were taught and what I was talking about luckily I had my dad as a dad was that you can kind of be your own man for lack of a better definition as a woman like you can reach the highest peaks in your career which I agree with you can you can be a mom you can have both which I am if you about and you know you don't need you don't need a man to help you that's kind of what was surrounding me but I found that I'm much happier when I have someone I can go to and be like this is hard or like I'm I know I'm worried about this stupid thing that I shouldn't be worried about but like can you help fix it because it's bothering me even though it's not logical and I think every woman needs it like a man who can help her through these problems what does a man need from a woman this is what I've heard not a man so I'm not sure I think it's respect and recognition I would say you can tell me if I'm wrong but I think it's recognition for like look at all the little things I do for you because I love you but like they want the recognition for those little things that they do out of love but I don't know how does that sound well from where I'm sitting so I would use the word appreciation I think that's huge men want to be appreciative of gratefulness that hits the note for me as well the one thing you might lump this into respect but I've always said if you really want to make a man happy win him over whatever the right phrases make him feel powerful and appreciated if you make him feel powerful and appreciated you're gonna be he'll be good but if he feels unappreciated or you can't sincerely look at him like he's powerful if you don't sincerely believe it you're gonna have problems for sure yeah 100% and I think too for for women if they're in a relationship where they actually don't feel that way like they don't feel respect or they don't feel power from the person they're with that's tough to play out long term you might need to be with somebody that you do respect and and you like you don't have to make sure the problem isn't you and that you're just not gonna respect anybody so and that does happen to some women and it just happens in general but if that's not the problem if it's not you then you should probably look for somebody that you do admire it seems like baseline you should admire the person you're with that might come from both angles I don't know but I definitely for women to men yeah I think admiration is almost certainly something you want going both ways I think it will clock from different things the things that I admire and my wife are poor some of the things are gonna overlap that's for sure but there's gonna be a difference most definitely I think the things that my husband and Myers in me aren't the things that I want to be admired for we have that discussion quite and I might be I'm a little bit like work inclined and business inclined so I get into work mode and he's like hearing work mode like yeah my work brain is on I don't have like another brain this is my work brain just like I'm focused and I think he admires the like more feminine side when I want to be like look at the creation I made so there's a little bit of a discrepancy there but what do you think about the trad wife movement I think that there was gonna be inevitable push back to the for lack of a better description of the boss bitch movement so I like I think I'm torn I think it's all of I think it pretty it's pretty much a facade there's this like brief period in the fifties where women's did home and like had money and had kids and wore makeup and pants he closed and got their hair done and life was good and it lasted like seven years and then it's never repeated itself again in history so being like this is how it used to be it just isn't even true in any any way you described truth but I understand the pushback I think it's kind of cute I mean I like it better than other other movements like any like man hating or woman hating movements I think the trad wife movement is cuter as long as they're like you don't have to you also don't have to be a like stay at home wife to be the ideal female partner now for some couples that might work perfectly that's like it certainly doesn't work for me but I've seen some people does work for so maybe it depends who you are you ever seen an episode of alone I watched a whole season of alone dude that shows dope have you seen the couples one that sounds horrifying no I haven't it's pretty interesting that show to me reveals the reality of our ancestors where every like every movement you make you have to decide in doing this is it likely to yield more calories and it costs me to go do the thing because in a world where you have a grocery store you don't even have to think about it but all of a sudden there's a real clarity between the husband and wife because it's like the guy is almost certainly going to be physically stronger and he's going to go out and do the sort of grunt labor carrying the big logs training them around he'll do the more dangerous stuff the fishing whatever but you learn real fast my wife is going to be gifted and other things and I want to make sure that she's positioned to do the things that she's very gifted at and I'm not going to complain that she's better than me at whatever whatever because we're just trying to stay alive yeah and so I have a feeling all throughout history this was a lot easier because you need a woman to be badass at something no woman wanted a man that was like a child and no man wanted a woman that was like a child you want people that can really carry their own and that's been the secret weapon that Lisa and I have is I learned very early on before we got married that at first I thought she would only be sexually attracted to me if I was better than her at everything and then I realized wait who on earth would want to be in a relationship where they're worse at everything like that would be a nightmare you'd never get a chance to flex you never get a chance to be celebrated it would be very patronizing and so we mapped out here are the things that you were obviously better than me at and here are the things I'm obviously better than you at and even leadership we're going to hand off so when you know more about an area than I do then I'm going to follow and why would I be weird about that and vice versa and that for us was like mapping out saying here are the things where you have more credibility or you're more effective or whatever and then we ride in those lanes and that goes back to the appreciation it's like the fact that let's say our food comes and it's messed up and one of us is going to get a good meal one of us is going to get a bad meal 100 out of 100 times I'm going to tell my wife you take the good thing and I will take the bad thing which of course it tries to divvy up and all that stuff but like that line is just hard and fast like in Titanic if only one of us can fit on the door which I agree they both would fit but if only one of us will fit on the door of course it's going to be my wife on and on and on and on and on so knowing what each other good at and knowing what role you're going to play stating it agreeing to it so that everybody understands like oh we do each have roles now they don't have to be hyper traditional or anything like that you better have complimentary roles there better be things each of you are being celebrated for otherwise it's going to be nightmarish yeah that's great that's perfect I think I mean I've done the same thing so Jordan's my husband I've done the same thing with him which is just like okay you are better at certain things than me which is great because then we can work together and it's almost like I'm better at them right because if you're one team then it's like and you join with the right person then suddenly especially if you don't align perfectly in what each other are good at then you have way more skills so it's like okay problem this problem falls into this basket you handle it this problem falls into this basket I'll handle it so like a whole bunch of them we work on together but I think that's spot on it just makes you into a more useful person if you can work as like this power couple totally agree what are your thoughts on birth control I am not a fan of birth control I had Sarah Hill on my podcast she was really good she's a researcher about the detrimental effects of birth control so a lot of it is from what I've read and what I've learned on that podcast but I think almost everybody who takes it gets depressed I think most people are prescribed around the age of 14 for like heavy periods or acne and they're not even developed enough to recognize that the pill is causing depression because they haven't even lived enough life to be like this is what it feels like to be a healthy teenager they're just as soon as they're a teenager it's like oh I'm depressed but that's because I'm hormonal when really it's this little innocuous pill that isn't supposed to be bad for you that you're taking one of the shocking things I learned was when women go through menopause they're given bioidentical hormones to help symptoms through menopause those are bioidentical which means your body you inject them or you will swallow them and your body thinks they're the hormone you're being given that's already in your body in birth control it's called a progesterone or something like that it's actually not bioidentical so it ends up working on testosterone and working on other neurotransmitters other parts of your body that it wasn't supposed to work on so even the way it's marketed isn't quite true so I think the side effects are extremely detrimental there's evidence that it shows mate attraction differences so it's crazy it's crazy so if you're a woman you end up being more attracted to more feminine men so like what do you think that does to a society if I don't know what it is 60 or 70 percent it's a large percentage I don't know the numbers of women who are going to be mating with other people are being attracted to more feminine men unnaturally it'd be a disaster for relationships and I mean I just disaster societally and I think the main problem just in with couples is I think it makes most women really unhappy and miserable and so they're depressed and whoever they're with is like I'm with the psycho and what do you think about women though that would protest pretty hard to hear any sort of societal pressure not to use birth control because of the level of control that it's given them oh yeah well I mean I totally get that I totally get that I think what would the logical thing would be to just have doctors explain the side effects like when you're prescribing when I was prescribing at 14 my mom was like it made me depressed and I was like I'm already depressed mom I don't care which was dumb but like that was my actual response I would say you should be run through just like any medication especially like psychiatric medications serious medications birth control actually explain hey there's data indicating that if you're looking for a mate you may choose someone that you wouldn't necessarily be as attracted to and even in Sarah Hale it doesn't mean that relationship is doomed because maybe you are still attracted to that person it's just the overarching theme is women will pick slightly more feminine men you should just be shown all this data that shows you know maybe it's harder to lose weight maybe it's easier to gain weight a huge percentage of people using an experience really severe depression you know it can take a while for your hormones to recover like you should just be told the truth before you take a medication we shouldn't just take it away just like with foods like it'd be nice to build this little country and ban some of these processed foods maybe some of the chemicals should be banned I'm still not bored but like let people have it just tell them if you overeat these things this is what it leads to I don't think removing access to things is the right answer I think just people having more information is the right answer so going back to your libertarian bent you just said maybe something should be banned I know not too long ago though I am forgetting exactly who this was aimed at something popped off on social media and people construed what you said that was honestly that was mostly my fault you know I guess I felt that it was tricky because I know with the Holocaust there was an entire society of people that ended up murdering a bunch of people and Jewish people and it was because the propaganda was so effective and for whatever reason the ideas were so attractive to the average resentful person or maybe just the average regular person that it ended up massacring a bunch of Jewish people what I should have said is can we not push these can we not push these like Nazi ideas like push them I didn't mean censor them let me step back and think through a problem that I've not tried to think through yet so freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach I get that especially if you are the platform I think you should be optimizing for whatever your goals are for the company now I think algorithms should be transparent so people should understand what they are they should because it'll still be so complicated most people understand but it should be available for people that want to go through it and understand it like the one on X's so anybody that's like I think this being manipulated can actually go and check the live code replicate the results themselves and see yep this is exactly what they said it was oh cool that makes sense to me so getting people to do that I don't think the government should be putting their finger on the scales now I think the platform should be able to optimize for whatever it is that they're trying to optimize for buyer beware in that most of those algorithms are going to be optimized for your engagement so that means if outraging you is engaging then outraging you they will and so this is where I think people need to take personal responsibility and say if it's not making your life better or it's not making your kids life better you have to stop now I have pushed back on anybody that's like well they're going to be people that won't be able to navigate that well I get it but I think that any state is a thousand times more deadly than people making poor life choices that is I'm way more afraid of well meaning people trying to lie trick regulates into oblivion their behaviors now I am not a libertarian so I'm all for government I would just like the government to be held accountable to their own stated KPIs that's my official position which does not have any home but that's what I want I want politicians to say we're going to run this program we're expecting this result we're going to audit it in a year or two years whatever reasonable amount of time if it's not yielding those results then we can all look at that and say this was a failed experiment we need to try something different I don't think I think the reality of politics is manipulation so I don't think that's ever going to happen but that's what I would like to see yeah I wouldn't be a libertarian if that existed that sounds fine I don't think the idea of government is bad I just think it doesn't seem to operate very well at all yeah it's one of those what do they say capitalism is a terrible system but it's the best of all the other worst systems yeah something like the idea yeah that is that's where I come down I think freedom of speech is critically important I'm not a free speech absolutist I'm perfectly fine with the US governments take on that you can't directly incite violence but I am old school in the ACLU god this back in like the 1960s where they actually went to bat for the Nazis believe it enough that wanted to march through a small town in Wisconsin as something like that some small Midwestern town where there was a bunch of Holocaust survivors and the Nazis wanted to provoke them and go march to their streets I believe it was the ACLU that said they should have the right to do that and so now the question becomes yeah if we don't want an anti-state then you're relying on people to stand up and say I have a better idea and so here's all the hate like you know flashback at the late 20s or early 30s when Hitler starts rising to power and you have to have somebody with better ideas and so that's the terrifying part is sometimes things just go the fuck off the rails so like my initial reaction to seeing all those was like this is crazy and it's happening out and they were popular post so it was like people are liking these and not all of these are anonymous like I was shocked because some of the popular post were by doctors and I was like I never thought I would be in a world where you could say something that targeted Jewish people like that and be a professional it's I don't have a problem with targeting individuals I do have a problem with targeting races or I would say like ethnic groups of people like that given that we know people do have a propensity towards violence for those groups of people I don't remember what word I use I might have used sensor I said something in a fever state that wasn't that wasn't stupid but the problem is if you do sensor those ideas it doesn't really matter because people are still talking about them so you can't suppress that out so I guess it's better to see that they're being talked about not be naive about it I would like people to know that what they're shown on the internet could be propaganda and just be aware of that like we're not in a time that doesn't have propaganda so I don't just believe everything you see on the internet you'd be hyper skeptical try to figure out what's true for yourself talk to different groups of people so you get different perspectives and if a platform suddenly shuts off one area that people are talking about so like maybe covid for example with meta or if a platform suddenly shows you only content about one event then maybe that's actually propaganda if suddenly mainstream media says the same thing on every newspaper like be a little bit skeptical about those things I think that's the best thing we can do is just be skeptical and careful censorship it not only does it not work but it can lead to terrible authoritarian states and you can like we don't want to risk that again after what we seem can already happen what are you doing with your kids in social media or what will you do like you don't want to have that outcast kid that does not use a computer you know especially with how fast tech is expanding so I do want to teach her how to type and maybe code like things that I think would be very valuable and teach her about AI and use that kind of as education for social media I don't know what I'm going to do I'll probably wait until she's 14 or 16 something like that have you read Jonathan Hitt's work I haven't read it I'm really familiar with that it's scary does he suggest 18 what does he suggest don't remember the age but he certainly doesn't want to see phones in school so at least that's a station at 18 yeah my daughter school I think that's like absolutely not until 16 I think but don't quote me on that well it's like luckily enough I found a school why not what that my oldest is going to that's very like 90s education so they're learning all the games I learned in the 90s and it's like there's no ideology really it's just like basic education now they do learn how to type and they learn how to use iPads but there aren't phones I think a lot of the parents putting their kids in that school aren't going to allow phones so I don't think it's going to have the maybe pressure that's in public schools as a teenager to own a phone because I think a lot of parents are like no that's there's a better way so I think I maybe found this little e-coast where we wouldn't have to succumb to peer pressure otherwise if I wasn't in that I'd probably say you can have half an hour just so they're not in outcast at school half hour on social media and then you know communicate with the kids and make sure her or her school the way in a room by herself I think over the endless insults that we will all get her old our way maybe beside her at the beginning and then I would probably just monitor how she's doing and I can remember being on it so MSN messenger when I was a grade 5 being like MSN messenger was the social media platform and it went even haywire's kid where it was like that was not appropriate at all but I think if you're paying enough attention to your kid you can understand when they're experiencing anxiety so it's like are they a happy kid or are they suddenly not a happy kid and if they're not a happy kid like is it something that happened at school I don't know what teenager could have negative comments about them and withstand it and not have it just repeat in their head all the time so maybe try to build some resilience around it too and teach her like they are going to be negative people and people that don't like you and like that's okay people do have to learn that it's okay if people don't like you like it'll be a day no doubt but it social media and kids really scares me as somebody who when I was in high school if you wanted to tell the whole school something you had to paint it on the bridge and that was bad enough like when it was your name up on the bridge it's like ouch but you could be blissfully unaware if people had beef with you as I was but man if they can reach into your bedroom through your phone god and putting videos and things yeah that's oh that but that would be that'd be a no I would say no that like anything that was going to be posted I'd like I need sign off on that oh good luck would you let your kid have an a friend I think it would depend if like my daughter's best friend is an a person then we've got a problem like you that's not healthy no but I think I'm not going to be not exposing her to the evolution of like technology so I like I think the R is going to be huge in I don't know how long how long do you think it's three years I always get to hung up on VR but VR is probably five to seven because you need the it's really a ours what you want that's what Zuckerberg is working like a fiend on to get it into a form factor where it's just like these overlays of yeah okay that's very interesting so by the time she's 15 100 percent yeah and I think being like no we'll keep her safe from all this we'll just mean that they're left behind like I think you're gonna I think it's gonna be hard for us to keep keep up you see well yeah right things are getting crazy AI so I just heard Elon must say AI is advancing faster than any technology he's ever seen in his life now this is a guy that's been at the nexus of technology for a very long time and he said it's not by a little it's orders of magnitude faster than anything else people do not understand they're gonna be blindsided by AI in ways that they cannot even begin to understand yet it is so fast and there's actually this is for sale right now there's a medallion called friend and it's an AI that's always with you always watching always listening and it will make suggestions it will comment on your clothes if you wanted to I mean it's it's gonna get bananas and that's that's what it is today Mikaela I want you to imagine five years it's only been out like chat GPT was what two years ago less 18 months ago so this is gonna be bananas by the time your daughter is a teenager oh yeah get about your son I know it's with your son you can not have sex with a sex robot anymore like it's gonna be that that crazy yeah that that one I worry about that sex robot scary yeah that's gonna take a lot of people out I think yeah no I'm pretty like we're pretty on top of AI tech we've got AI built into a number of PA features that mostly haven't been released don't tease and then that's anything yeah I can't yet we have huge ideas like a bunch of it involves testing some of it involves translations and then others like something else I don't know I'll talk about so I'll camera will trade AI ideas we also have many who tell me about entrepreneurship so you have launched a university via an app if I'm not mistaken almost you have at least at last check you had over 10,000 students 30 good Lord yeah you guys are growing fast yeah same or you're the CEO how'd you do this so about three years ago I was having a way congratulations 30,000 is getting it has been there has not been a lot of sleep in a very long time fair enough but you got the results for it yeah like and thank you everybody who signed up it's been a massive success we have a whole bunch of features and development that we're gonna roll out in the next couple of months and we have a mobile app in the next month hopefully should be about a month but we have like exams coming out quizzes essays note taking study groups the essays are graded by AI that's not out yet rolling it out yeah there's a lot of evidence that LLMs can grade as effectively as a human which isn't surprising given minus bias given that depends on the human grading you right so a lot of this and a lot of this has been possible I mean it takes something like easy in our courses we wanted to have animation so that people with for lack of a better description people with ADD could sit through an eight hour lecture basically so I was like and I don't even watch video content very often so I was like I need to be stimulated watching these courses now we have editors generating images with AI and then putting them in but a lot of the building we've been able to do has been sped up by a factor of like it's been made possible because of how AI is progressing we're gonna be able to translate our courses in the next I don't know six months I would say and just have the lecture speaking in their own voice in other languages yeah it's tricky most of the companies it looks a little weird around the teeth I love that you can be so nitpicky that you're like I don't like the way when they're speaking in Chinese I don't like the way they're lips look around their teeth it's like when that's our problem it's unbelievable yeah it's unbelievable now that's I'm so close to this problem and find it utterly fascinating it's so fun and then it's like oh this is a problem now let's just give it three months yeah they'll fix that for sure yeah it's really cool what are your secrets to leadership I was saying I'm willing to like from managing my dad and building my own brand and doing a lot of podcast related things which teaches you a lot about production I was willing to do the grunt work so in Peterson Academy like I'm aware of everything from like how the courses are built customer service design of the platform which took a number of years like everything and I like nothing's beneath me I'm pretty picky about who I work with so if there's someone that you're having conversations with or about more than like five times is like this happened and then this happened and then this happened and then maybe they disappeared this day or maybe they're bringing down this other team member then they just have to leave so you can't have an issue with replacing people if you're trying to grow a giant which is what we're trying to do and so I have no guilt with it's like it's not a good fit it's not a good fit for you like you don't want to be the person that people are frustrated with all the time or if you're in a job you don't like like go do something else but you can't be here so I have no problem with being like that person needs needs to be replaced or that person needs to be replaced and I think that's from a lot of really difficult experiences trying to grow kind of my dad's brand and working with some bad eggs that really ended up causing me years of like legal problems I like I think I have enough experience now that I can say that person is going to be an issue we should stop this give him a good severance tell him to leave politely and then we won't have to deal with that so that's been really helpful and then I don't know I've like had ideas for I think I was so frustrated with my experience in university like I went to two different universities about two half degrees I never finished a full degree I have a half degree in classics and psychology and half degree in biomedical science and I didn't have any professors I liked throughout both university experiences it was full of ideology I was learning Homer through a feminist lens in 2012 and I was like that's not why I took Homer like that's not what Homer was thinking and it was really disappointing because my dad had been like the greatest thing you can do as a kid is like go to university get a PhD you need a PhD to be taking seriously as a person Mikayla and you also have to have kids young that was tricky that was tricky navigate but I always had this like beautiful idea of what university is for people and my experience was so bad and I'm so annoyed about what they're teaching people in university the amount of debt students are ending up with so that they can end up in jobs that they don't even like you can't even go to university and learn what you need to know in today's society it's so tech-based not that PA is doing that yet we're mostly focusing on humanities and we have like intro level courses in in sciences and we're going to do marketing and things like that but it's mostly liberal arts great books courses but it was just it was just frustrating and it's like there's this niche for people who go to YouTube to learn and watch podcasts to learn and there's this niche to build a community around people who want to learn to improve their level of sophistication to be taking more seriously in conversation because that can improve your life tremendously who want to learn about all these classic books and get a classical education and meet each other and and then I guess I spent enough time being on Instagram trying to grow my dad's channels and I mean he did the growth himself I was I posted not taking credit for the growth taking some credit for the posting but I think I spent enough time on different platforms being like I think I can see it in my head like what it should look like and like my husband's been instrumental in it and we have a great team so it's just been so fun to build after spending my whole life dealing with like chronic health problems it's just way better not dealing with those things yeah I would imagine so yeah speaking of your dad in social media talk to me about the way he engages on X formerly known as Twitter what do you think about it do you sometimes want to knock the phone out of his hand are you like no go crazy okay so it's actually switched so for about four years I was like you gotta get off the X is bad for you it's toxic all you see your negative comments you get riled up I mean I went on like X a couple months ago and saw a bunch of posts and was like rah I was like oh no I was like well I had the flu but no one knows you have the flu so it doesn't matter it was like you can't feed the algorithm and get angry and what like about and feed off of what it's just so I tried to get them off of it my brother tried to get them off of it my mom tried to get them off of it like it's bad but now I don't know he seems to be upset about things that are relevant in like two years so he freaks out about something like dad you're maybe overreacting a tad and then sometimes it's six months later and sometimes it's two years later I'm like you know what maybe you were right so he can just do whatever he wants he's made it this far it's interesting he did a podcast about his friends trying to intervene trying to convince him that this is a mistake and I remember listening to it going Jordan please take their advice and not to get off of twitter because I really do think you're right I think he gets mad about a lot of the right things and I think history will vindicate him but the way he tweets like the the words that he uses and I've heard him justify it I get it and look I am your dad is a very important part of my sense making apparatus so this is somebody who's on his side being like bruv you're creating some of your own problems here you're talking about the right things but man with slightly different words you are you're preaching to the choir here but I also like who knows he's a very smart man that's true maybe there's something the majority of people aren't seeing so I'm like I don't know I don't know it's a little I basically told him it's such a I'm not nearly as verbally fluent as my dad but it's such a downer being on there like do something else like now that now that PA is out maybe he'll go on that social media and just be on that because it's a lot more positive so it's like that's what you can do with your time instead of being on X and freaking out about things if people want to follow you on social where should they go I'm Michaela Peterson on Instagram I have a podcast that I'm starting again in September at the end of September which is just Michaela Peterson or Michaela Fuller on YouTube both of those work yeah I think my name is Michaela Fuller but my channel is at Michaela snagged Michaela and then I guess I have a website Michaela Peterson dot com which isn't that useful I've died stuff at lion died calm if people are interested in that and then the Peterson Academy platform social media platform courses are at Peterson Academy dot com I love it Michaela thank you very much for coming today and everybody at home if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress you know what you need to do you need consistent nutrition we all do you need vitamins probiotics greens we all know that we should be doing more of it when your morning gets chaotic you skip it when you travel you skip it when your routine breaks everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day AG one is designed to solve the execution problem one scoop eight ounces of water and you're done you're getting 75 plus ingredients vitamins and minerals pre and probiotics nutrient dense super foods everything that used to require six seven different supplements and perfect planning now happens in one drink that takes about 30 seconds to make right now AG one is giving you eighty seven dollars worth of free gifts with your first subscription you get a welcome kit travel packs vitamin D three plus K two and flavor samples click the link in the show notes or visit drink AG one dot com slash impact to claim this offer