Psychedelic Conversion Therapy, Part 2: From Counterculture to Culture War
Neşe and Russell examine the rise of modern right-wing influencers who simultaneously advocate for the dismantling of “woke” ideologies, express support for conversion therapy frameworks, and promote the use of psychedelic therapy. Focusing on figures like Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson, they explore how these seemingly contradictory positions intersect.
Both Musk and Peterson have had a notable influence within psychedelic culture, shaping conversations around mental health, identity, and the future of therapy. This video unpacks their broader ideologies, particularly how they approach questions of gender and sexuality, and how those views could inform the ways psychedelics are applied in therapeutic or cultural contexts.
As psychedelics move further into the mainstream, the frameworks guiding their use become increasingly important. Neşe and Russell examine the risks of these substances being deployed not for liberation or healing, but as tools to enforce conformity.
Chapters:
0:00:00 Intro
0:03:00 Jordan Peterson background
0:05:10 Jordan Peterson hypes psychedelics to Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro
0:08:35 Peterson's Double Standards on Evidence, Psychedelics vs. Gender Affirming Care
0:11:40 Peterson and Shapiro discuss conversion therapy
0:13:00 Right-wing focus on queerness as the "face" of "woke" ideology is a red herring
0:17:04 Peterson as the prototypical "psychedelic fascist"
0:19:15 Peterson and Peter Thiel's "Power Law"
0:21:00 Peterson and pathological framing of ideologies
0:23:20 Peterson's conversations with psychedelic researchers (Roland Griffiths, Robin Carhart-Harris)
0:44:00 Chloe Cole psychedelic detransition claims
0:47:00 Detrans rhetoric used for neurodivergence
0:51:00 Elon Musk's connections to the psychedelic industry
0:56:00 Elon Musk's war against the "Woke Mind Virus"
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Footnotes:
"Medical Association Statements in Support of Health Care for Transgender People and Youth" (GLAAD):
"Fact Sheet: Evidence-Based Health Care for Transgender People and Youth" (GLAAD):
https://glaad.org/factsheet-evidence-based-healthcare-transgender-people-and-youth/
"American Psychiatric Association Responds to Executive Order on Accelerating Medical Treatments for Serious Mental Illness" (APA):
https://www.psychiatry.org/news-room/news-releases/apa-responds-to-executive-order-on-psychedelics
"Jordan Peterson's Psychedelic Hierarchy, ft. Thought Slime" (Psymposia):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBejCu8MnfQ
Threads about Robin Carhart-Harris's conversation with Jordan Peterson:
https://x.com/NeseLSD/status/1603457980779081728
https://x.com/NeseLSD/status/1635067729555361792
https://x.com/brian_pace/status/1369462746790715399
"QAnon Shaman, Chloe Cole, and Laura Becker Promote LSD Use as Alternative to Transition" (Assigned Media):
https://assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/qanon-shaman-chloe-cole-laura-becker-promote-lsd/
"The Human Cost of DOGE’s War on U.S.A.I.D." (New Yorker):
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/the-human-cost-of-doges-war-on-usaid
"Researchers Estimate USAID Cuts Have Already Led to 700,000 Deaths Worldwide" (Latin Times):
"The Psychedelic Syndicate" (Psymposia):
"Elon Musk on Racism, Bailing Out Trump, Hate Speech, and More" (The Don Lemon Show):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhsfjBpKiTw&t=1s
Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically from YouTube's captions, then cleaned up by removing filler words, repeated words and background sounds. It may still contain errors.
[00:00] And I've been studying the psychedelic literature for 20 years. Every time I think I have some grasp on how important it is, I learn something else and I think, "Oh, it's way more important than I thought it was. It's of crucial significance." We can understand Jordan Peterson as essentially a prototype of the modern-day psychedelic fascist. He is someone who sees the legitimizations of patriarchy in western civilization through analogy interconnected with lobsters or you know the structure of stars in the cosmos that there is this universal patterning system that is based on the interconnectedness of all things that justifies his insistence on a patriarchal ordering of society. the real radicals on the left who are opposed to the patriarchy.
[00:52] I mean, the patriarchy is western civilization. Make no mistake about it. And governed by their neo-Marxist dogma, they believe that it needs to be retoled right from the bottom up. The focus on gender ideologies and queerness as this face of what they deem wokeness is a bit of a red herring. Their ultimate goals for conversion go far beyond people's sexuality and get at a deeper root of what they view as a direct threat to western civilization in wokeness. I mean you have talked about this woke mind virus. Yes. In really apocalyptic terms things like it's pushing civilization towards suicide. I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that and we're making some progress. Join the club. Yeah. also disturbing like genuinely for someone who is the richest person on the planet to commit so openly to destroying the woke mind virus and then to see how his circle has been advancing psychedelic medicine to do precisely
[01:53] That is a signal of very dark times. Welcome back for part two of our psychedelic conversion therapy series. In episode one, we took a look at the general harms of conversion therapy and where it's appeared in the history of the psychedelic research scene. Today, we're going to be looking at two case studies of prominent right-wing thought leaders who are also waging a war on what they would describe as wokeness. The two individuals we'll be talking about today are Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson. While many people have noticed their interest in both of these topics, there hasn't been discussion about how those two topics are actually connected.
[02:40] Both of these figures describe wokeness as a kind of mind virus infecting society. And what they mean by wokeness is really just a rallying cry for civil rights, LGBTQ rights, racial studies, and generally progressive values. They both pathize this as a kind of civilizational threat in search of a cure. If you pay close attention to how both figures discuss wokeness and psychedelics, it implies that what they pathize as issues under the umbrella of wokeness might one day be cured by psychedelics. And since these figures are so influential within the present-day psychedelic industry, this connection is potentially very dangerous and important to keep an eye on. Both Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson have influence in the psychedelic space, whether that's financial or intellectual influence.
[03:31] Peterson himself has acknowledged being in contact with Roland Griffiths for years and being a part of Bob Jesse's council on spiritual practices. Both Griffiths and Jesse were instrumental in reviving the field of psychedelic research through their psilocybin studies at John's Hopkins University. And Elon Musk has long been lauded as a booster and promoter of psychedelics on the right wing. Jordan Peterson's podcast has featured multiple psychedelic researchers and for several years was a major vehicle for communicating about psychedelic research to the wider public. We've been covering Jordan Peterson's interest in psychedelics for a number of years now, including back to this earlier conversation we had with Thought Slime, which you can take a look if you're interested.
[04:17] And all of these researchers who were going on Jordan Peterson's show were going on around the same time that he was developing and sort of perfecting his ideas about the woke mind virus. As we dive into some clips of Jordan Peterson, do you want to give us a quick background on how Jordan Peterson kind of came about in this right-wing intellectual influencer space? Jordan Peterson essentially got his name grifting off of a bad faith interpretation of a Canadian law that was misinterpreting respecting people's pronouns as compelled speech. He fell further and further down this reactionary right-wing hole to the point where he ended up leaving his job at university and eventually becoming a host on Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire network. The clips that we're going to show illustrate how these figures are building an ideology that could very realistically justify psychedelic conversion therapy in the future.
[05:11] So, we'll jump in here with Jordan Peterson. And I think maybe one place to start with is just him discussing his views on psychedelics in general. The first clip we're going to show is a conversation from Dave Rubin's The Reuben Report, where Jordan Peterson is speaking to Reuben along with Ben Shapiro. And this is a clip from 2018, which is eight years ago. And that emphasizes how long Jordan Peterson has been really boosting or hyping psychedelic medicine. 85% success rate with one mystical experience on psilocybin produces 85% sessation rate in smoking. Three treatments with MDMA, that's what the current research indicates, produces a 72% cure rate for intractable post-traumatic stress disorder.
[05:57] It's like those are miracle cures and no one and they have to be accompanied by the mystical experience. I'm pointing out that there are undeniable realms of human experience that involve a sense of the infinite transcendent that you cannot deny. And I've done a lot of those things that you just mentioned and virtually always had good experiences on them. Now, as someone that I'm pretty sure has never smoked weed, you haven't eaten mushrooms. You haven't Okay. You haven't done MDMA and all that stuff. Fairly take a drink. I did them in college. I had a couple of those type of transcendent feeling. I was just part of something, whatever. But so when you hear all this, as someone that doesn't partake in any of this stuff, what do you make of that that people can perhaps use some substances that you're not down with on a personal level to get to a place that I think you actually think is a good place?
[06:45] Yeah. I mean, I think the answer is that it depends on, you know, the level of expertise of the person using it is what I would suggest. You know, the idea like I'm not against prescription medication. And so if you're talking about, you know, an actual program that was going to better somebody's life, that's one thing. But if it's somebody who's just, I want to have a religious experience, let me pop some LSC, then there's some serious downsides to drugs. So, having watched that clip, you can see that Jordan Peterson is acting as this kind of conduit for an intellectual justification of psychedelics to a right-wing crowd, giving them the talking points and information that they need, the kind of permission structure that the right-wing would need to accept these treatments and these drugs into their ideologies. Yeah, that that phrase permission structure is really important here.
[07:31] As Psymposia's Brian Pace and I wrote in a 2021 paper called right-wing psychedelia, the framing of psychedelic medicine is enabling interest among more far-right actors in the topic of psychedelics. Whereas, you know, while it was considered to be this countercultural thing, there was, you know, it was associated with lawlessness and kind of going against established authorities. But now there is this permission structure where more conservative elements of society are receptive to psychedelics as a medicine, as this conversation shows. We'll be returning to Jordan Peterson's views on psychedelics in general. But before we get to those clips, let's take a look at how Jordan Peterson talks about the threat of wokeness because that'll provide important context for why his views on psychedelic medicine are so concerning.
[08:21] So, you'll notice in that last clip that Jordan Peterson is very enthusiastic about psychedelic medicine on the basis of very limited data. Those are miracle cures. much of which was collected especially at that time using pretty sketchy methodologies that you know a lot more science is needed to actually support the confident claims that he's making there. And we're going to contrast that clip with a different clip where he's discussing the evidence base for gender affirming care and the double standard between his position on these different evidence bases highlights the ideological nature of his positions. the high openness people, they're the ones that are more likely to have green hair and red hair and lots of piercings and lots of tattoos and they have trouble catalyzing a single identity. And then if you throw in categorical confusion, which is exactly what you're doing when you declare that there's, you know, an endless number of gender identities, then people who are prone to identity dissociation and to psychoggenic contagion, you're going to demolish them.
[09:21] Abigail Shrier has documented that quite nicely and in her book, Irreversible Damage. So you think, well perhaps a few people who are transgender benefited from this new reality, but for everyone who's benefited, and you know, I'd like to see the data just showing how much they actually benefited, but that'll take a long time to acrue. There's a thousand people who've been just demolished by this. The bar for convincing evidence I just find fascinating in conjunction with Reuben clip. It's such a double standard. the book he references in this clip, Irreversible Damage, has been compared to Nazi propaganda posters by reviewers, and that the sourcing and information within this book is highly problematic.
[10:08] According to GLAAD, every major medical association supports health care for transgender people and youth as safe and life-saving. They then provide an extensive list of agencies who have issued their own statements in support of trans healthcare. In contrast to this widespread support for the evidence base for gender affirming care, the American Psychiatric Association put out a statement about psychedelic medicine shortly after Trump's recent executive order in support of psychedelic medicines. And while they acknowledge that there is potential in psychedelic medicine, they emphasize that additional research is still essential, stating that there's currently inadequate scientific evidence for endorsing the use of psychedelics to treat any psychiatric disorder except within the context of approved investigational studies.
[10:53] And if you'd like to hear more about Trump's executive order, we made a full video on that that you can watch. So in this clip, Jordan Peterson is presenting so-called gender ideology as a pathogenic threat that is taking advantage of vulnerable people and leading them astray. So causing harm to people who need to be protected. We were already concerned as we were hearing Jordan Peterson talking about so-called gender ideology in this way and over time he more and more openly discussed the alternative which is more in the conversion therapy direction where instead of gender affirming care, you're supporting the use of therapy to protect those vulnerable people from being steered astray.
[11:40] This next clip provides an example of his more overt move into embracing that alternative direction. Yeah. I think the fundamental good of humanity relies on basic acknowledgements of biological truth, especially when it comes to gender in Canada because they banned conversion therapy. It's now all affirmation therapy. Right? This is there's no such thing as affirmation It's insane. the semantic game that was used in order to say, "Well, conversion therapy," which was at one time, using electric shock to treat homosexuals and saying that that's the same thing as you have a gender confused 12-y old. Look, I had a 14-year-old kid who was a client of mine. Now, this idea is you come to me with an axiomatic claim, whatever it is about your identity, and my job is to rubber stamp it. It's like that's not I'm not a therapist then. So, this is not only insane, this insistence, the notion that therapists affirm is an anti-truth.
[12:31] Yeah. You can see the two of them almost pining for the time of conversion therapy in that clip and getting much more comfortable sort of trotting along the edge of saying, "We need to bring conversion therapy back." or when Ben Shapiro begins discussing the old forms of conversion therapy like electric shock, he gets cut off by Jordan Peterson there, but it almost seems that he's about to say there are more humane ways of doing conversion therapy. Definitely. And this was some of the steps towards attempting to dismantle these laws protecting against conversion therapy that we've started to see play out in the Supreme Court recently. The focus on gender ideologies and queerness as this face of what they deem wokeness is a bit of a red herring.
[13:20] Their ultimate goals for conversion go far beyond people's sexuality and get at a deeper root of what they view as a direct threat to Western civilization in wokeness. The clips we've showed so far don't reveal the real driving forces behind this fixation on gender and sexuality, but Jordan Peterson does reveal his hand in two clips that we have coming up. The first one is a conversation with Charlie Kirk and the second is a conversation with Mark Stein. When you pair these two clips together, it gives the game away about why they see wokeness as being such a threat. as I started to pursue the scriptures more and take it seriously. Remember back to our timeline simultaneously the woke stuff all of a sudden reared its head which is a manifestation of the spiritual.
[14:09] Yeah. Yeah. So almost I was in this place in 2018 2019 when it was almost peak woke. We weren't there yet. 2020 was peak woke where I was starting to understand what was really going on here. That this was a manifestation of a spiritual struggle. Yeah. That Yeah. It's foundational. Well, the postmodernists made that claim. So did the Marxists. It's like, no, we're going all the way to the bottom and uprooting everything. They want to go back to what happened in the garden. Did God really say that? Is that really what God says? To question, debase, and to challenge every truism of the West. The alliance between the social justice warrior, the PC authoritarian types, and the Islamists is really something mind-boggling to behold.
[14:54] And the only thing that I can think about that makes sense of that is that well the really the real radicals on the left who are opposed to the patriarchy I mean the patriarchy is western civilization make no mistake about it the patriarchy is just a code word for that and governed by their neoarxist dogma and their postmodern dogma they believe that it needs to be retoled right from the bottom up and that's exactly what they're doing and that makes them natural allies, I would say, of any other system that opposes our system. Those two together, it's like you can really see what's going on in their framework. Paired together, it's like clear what they're getting at where you've got Charlie Kirk and Jordan Peterson saying that wokeness is trying to like excavate the roots of Western civilization and like remake it.
[15:45] Not even excavate because excavate is more like gentle I feel like cuz it's kind of like we can recover in a positive sense. This is more like ripping out the roots to kill the plant, you know. Right. Right. The Mark Stein clip, it's like he's clearly saying like western civilization is patriarchy and Yes. Yeah. And that's why this transgender issue is such a lightning rod for them because they need to maintain like their sense of that natural distinction between the genders that undergurs that order. From these clips, you can see that Jordan Peterson's earlier grift about compelled speech was essentially a fig leaf over the real threat that he sees of wokeness. What's really going on here is that these people see all of Western civilization as dependent on the system of patriarchy.
[16:36] They see people who are pro-LGBT as dismantling that so-called natural distinction between the sexes as they see it that underlies all of their western culture. So, it's an inherently very fascist orientation and that is what is driving this. It's important to understand it is not about oh well I feel like I should be able to say things in this other way. This is what's driving it. We can understand Jordan Peterson as essentially a prototype of the modern-day psychedelic fascist. He is someone who sees the legitimizations of patriarchy in western civilization through analogy interconnected with lobsters or you know the structure of stars in the cosmos that there is this universal patterning system that is based on the interconnectedness of all things that justifies his insistence on
[17:38] A patriarchal ordering of society. And this feeling of interconnectedness with everything that is represented through Jordan Peterson's ideologies is radically different than the kind of leftist interconnected worldview that people think will come from psychedelics and introducing psychedelics to right-wing spaces and things like that. There's been kind of a long tradition of people saying, "Give fascists psychedelics and they'll become more pro-social. will give people psychedelics and they'll become more pro- environmental. And that's something that we have pushed back on for a long time and said that's not exactly the case. If you give these people who minds are flooded in these more fascistleaning ideologies, psychedelics, they may have experiences of interconnection.
[18:25] They may have universal cosmic thoughts, but their conclusions might be radically different than what you would expect. Well, not even might be. I mean, it's like any fascist that takes psychedelics and remains fascist will interpret definitionally psychedelic interconnection not as a we're all connected and equal in an empathetic way, but as interconnection to hierarchy, identifying with the hierarchy, which includes the scapegoating and marginalization of out groups. That's definitionally the case and we see it all the time. Yeah. And the next clip we have of Jordan Peterson is him discussing some of these cosmic realizations that he believes in the context of Peter Teal's power law theory.
[19:11] Peter Teal being another major psychedelic investor who has pioneered a number of modern-day fascist surveillance and military projects throughout the world. Did you last night of the 100,000 most recently printed books only a thousand have sold more than a million? Yeah, something like that. It's something like power laws all the way down. Yeah. Everywhere. Everywhere. Power law. That's, you know, a tiny minority of people do all the work. A tiny minority of people get all the benefit. Tiny minority of athletes score all the goals. A tiny minority of men get all the women, etc. A tiny minority of stars have all the mass. A tiny minority of rivers have all the water. A tiny minority of cities have all the people, etc., etc., etc., everywhere. Always. you know, and we're so clueless in our culture that we blame that on capitalism.
[19:59] It's like how does that account for the massive stars people, he is very explicitly identifying inequality as a constitutive feature of the universe as a whole. And so whereas leftists for example are trying to reduce inequality so that workers are not just subjected to the whims of the oppressor class but for Jordan Peterson there are more capable people that are supposed to be kind of like leading the show up at the top and then any attempt to have the people at the bottom have more power is going to destabilize that whole cosmic structure. And you can see his views on power and inequality extrapolate all the way out to the stars in the universe when he talks about it.
[20:46] In this same interview that Jordan Peterson does with Chris Williamson where he's discussing Peter Teal's power law in the context of sort of these cosmic designs. He also sets up a kind of leftist straw man as the self-hating population who believes that humanity and growth is a virus or cancer on the planet. This clip shows his awareness of the serious implications of the very framing he's using to describe wokeness. This idea that the planet has too many people on it. There's no sentiment more implicitly genocidal. What do you propose to do about that? Exactly. Mass abortion. Is that your answer? Or should we do something a little more dramatic? It's associated with a deeply rooted existential self-hatred.
[21:35] Humanity is like a cancer on the planet. You know, unchecked growth just like a cancer. A cancer. It's okay. We know where your heart is located because what's the implications for a doctrine like that? What do you do with a cancer? Cut it out. Yeah, that's for sure. Poison it or whatever. There's nothing you don't do to a cancer. So, you're going to use a metaphor like that. You're going to use a metaphor like that. And then you're going to also decide that you're virtuous while you're using it because you're on the side of the planet, whatever the hell that means. And again, just to orient there, he's discussing this straw man kind of madeup leftist image that he's created for this conversation when he's discussing these viewpoints. But it does reveal how he's aware that when he describes the cancerous viral threat of wokeness, there's nothing that you wouldn't do to prevent that kind of a corrosive force from being able to have an effect, right?
[22:35] It's like he is saying it is appropriate to quash this sort of cancerous force and he just doesn't like it when what he perceives as his enemy the other side is using it in ways that are unjust. But he believes I would argue that wokeness actually does align with this sort of dangerous threat right which he has described in the clips we've already watched as a contagion of sorts. All of the clips that we have shown thus far give you a peak behind the curtain of how this ideology is structured and what the implications of some of their operating assumptions are. And with that in mind, we can now turn to some of Jordan Peterson's conversations with psychedelic researchers.
[23:22] The first clip we're going to take a look at of Jordan Peterson with psychedelic researchers is his discussion with Roland Griffiths who we mentioned at the onset of this episode was someone he'd been in contact for a long time and who kind of helped revive the modern field of psychedelic research through his research at Johns Hopkins. There's this sense of the interconnectedness of all people, all things, the unity. Yeah. the meaningful interconnectedness, not just connected, but also that the entire pattern of connection has some transcendent or ultimate significance. What's more important than this, Jordan? I actually can't believe how important this is. And I've been studying the psychedelic literature for 20 years in as deep a manner as I can possibly manage. And every time I think I have some grasp on how important it is, I learn something else and I think, "Oh, it's way more important than I thought it was."
[24:13] It's of crucial significance. It's of central. It's literally of central significance. It It's literally of central significance. Our life is dependent on death. Our cells are constantly dying and if death isn't regulated properly within us, we get cancer. So the fact of our healthy existence is actually dependent on death itself. The proper amount of death keeps us healthy. That's also true psychologically. You have to let old concepts die. And they don't like to die. It's a painful experience to have the old you die in the light of new experience. It's painful enough so that people will resist it, but there's this benevolent death that's a reparative mechanism. When I've allowed my intuitions to extend themselves as far as possible, I think, well, that's true of being itself in a manner that we can't comprehend.
[25:00] Death plays a restorative role. And a glimpse of that shows you that there's more going on than you think. Yeah. And it's like there's something innocuous to that conversation on its face, but I think viewed in context of his deeper ideologies, it becomes quite disturbing. There's something kind of ironic in his discussion of letting old ideas go as he has actually quite latched on to some fairly regressive viewpoints himself. What really strikes me about that conversation is how jazzed and activated Jordan Peterson is about psychedelics where he says this is you know one of the most important things right now. He is someone who has read for 20 years into the research and 20 years that was deep into the before times with psychedelics before it was a popular subject that that was during the period where psychedelics were still very highly taboo and stigmatized when
[26:02] Not a lot of people were paying attention to them. So he's saying since back then he has been following this for someone who has read that deeply to be that enthusiastic about psychedelics it makes you know kind of pause and ask like why is he so excited about this? And I think if you connect the dots between the clips that we showed earlier and the sorts of things that he says psychedelics reveals, I think that it's pretty clear that when he's talking about it, it doesn't just reveal interconnectedness but the meaningful interconnectedness. He's talking about the root structure underlying not just western civilization but also cosmic order as we showed. And so for him, psychedelics reveals that principle of inequality that structures everything that he believes is essential for goodness to exist in the universe.
[26:52] Yeah. Psychedelics as a way of revealing this kind of predetermined order to the universe. Yeah. And it connects to conversion therapy as well because it's like people being able to see for themselves the rightness and the goodness of this patriarchal order is what cures the confused thoughts that have been pumped into the ecosystem from his perspective into the discourse by the woke mind virus. The woke mind virus has introduced a doubt and suspicion about like wait a minute actually like should we be organizing our society based on these principles of inequality and he thinks that that's a threat to what actually is required for goodness to exist at all.
[27:37] And to the point we were talking about earlier with psychedelics being introduced to certain populations and not changing their worldview, he's talking about being indepth interested in psychedelics for the last two decades. And his worldview has not changed. If anything, it's gotten more rooted in these kind of right-leaning ideologies himself. That is actually an underdiscussed aspect of what psychedelics can do. People often focus on or like talk about the fact that psychedelics can make you more open-minded and more receptive to new ideas, but it's actually quite common for people to experience psychedelics as a as an affirmation of what they already believe and to make them even more convinced of those prior beliefs.
[28:26] What people don't really understand about this concept of interconnection is that like they like we were saying before, people assume that that means that they'll be more equality-minded. But the phenomenology of interconnection plugs in differently to different worldviews. And so within a fascist hierarchy, an authoritarian hierarchy, that same experience that might have led one person to feel more empathetic to immigrants or whoever else in that different worldview when you slot it in, it actually confirms the legitimacy of scapegoating the immigrants. It operates completely differently in these different frames of reference. Alongside Roland Griffiths, I have been reviewing some of the past interviews that Jordan Peterson has done with psychedelic figures like Dennis McKenna, the brother of Terrence McKenna, and Robin Carheart Harris, the neuroscientist from Imperial College London, now at UCSF, who gained prominence in the psychedelic field for
[29:27] His brain imaging studies, as well as his theories around how psychedelics act on the default mode network. And listening through some of these interviews, it just struck me that Jordan Peterson has a very specific worldview and ideology. And the guests he brings on, he largely uses to justify his kind of metaphors and worldviews. The next couple clips we're going to watch of him with Robin Carheart Harris, I think it'll become obvious that he's sort of pitching his worldview at Carheart Harris in order for Harris to justify them or provide credence to what he's saying. For this first clip we have queued up, you can see based on what we've described earlier about the way that Jordan Peterson thinks about the woke mind virus.
[30:13] Although all of those ideas aren't coming up in this conversation explicitly, we've shown the way that he's thinking about these concepts. And in the clip that's coming up, he's drawing on cellular mechanisms to describe how life maintains the root system of hierarchies that enables everything to exist or in this case for life to exist. And we saw already how he's thinking about the woke mind virus as a similar kind of cancerous threat to the cellular descriptions that he's about to go over. There was a paper published in Nature just two months ago looking at genetic mutation. Okay. So the idea is that genetic mutation is essentially a random process. And the reason for that is well, let's talk about genetic mutations that are brought about by radiation, solar radiation, and so forth.
[31:06] And so they're randomly knocking atoms out of the genetic structure and producing random mutation. But it turns out that the error correction post DNA damage is not random. So the older the genetic structure that's being damaged by the cosmic radiation, the higher the probability that it will be repaired by intrinsic DNA repair mechanisms. So there's a hierarchy of genetic presumption built into the code. And so the cells will allow variation on the fringes to take place without correction. But if the mutation affects something that would be fatal and because it's so core to the actual biological continuation of the organism, then the probability that it'll be error corrected reaches 100%.
[31:59] And so this is you can think about that as an anal it's analogous to the conceptual structure, right? Imagine there's a hierarchy of conception. The deeper the conception, the more fundamental it is to the whole cognitive process, the more caution there should be in undertaking any sort of radical revolution because it's too destabilizing and the less likely that will occur. So yeah, so that was that's an amazing finding as far as I'm concerned, you know. So that's neat and that's canalization. Yeah, that's you know the these are phenotypes that that matter that are essential. And you can even see from the reference to revolution there that he's thinking not just in terms of cells but in terms of broader structures including societal structures.
[32:53] What yeah what it seems like he's saying how he would be bolstering his own worldview with this kind of thinking about these cellular level processes he essentially says that variations on the fringe should not affect the central core of things that that's a danger yeah I mean and the way that this connects into like systems of ideas is that you know we can tolerate some diversity of perspective but once you're introducing ideas into society that are destabilizing the central hierarchy of patriarchy that enables goodness to exist in the world. That shouldn't be a hard line. That's the kind of threat to the survival of society that justifies this, you know, approaching 100% hard line about that we can't endorse those ideas.
[33:43] And those ideas for Jordan Peterson as we have seen include the so-called transgender ideology and the woke mind virus in general, right? And then you have him with Robin Carheart Harris sitting there just nodding his head saying, "Yes, yes, endorsing it. That's canalization." Like the he's very much using these prominent figures as a way to like rubber stamp his points on these topics. The next two clips we have from the interview are Robin Carheart Harris and Jordan Peterson discussing the kind of ability of psychedelics to provide a rebirth sort of experience that breaks through the wrong learning or pathologies that one may have developed over their lifetime.
[34:28] Then the question is well when would previous learning be pathological because that's a hard thing to figure out. It is and you know analogies will help us here and one that is perhaps relevant is is rebirth. It can happen that sometimes we learn things too strongly and they dominate our way of thinking our way of seeing the world and our way of behaving. And so the analogy I want to come to is one of rebirth is you know in a sense resetting the system recalibrating the system and yes then we will be experiencing the world with a refreshed level of novelty. Okay. So okay so imagine this imagine that you grow up in a family where the interactions between the father and the mother and the children are pathological.
[35:21] So maybe the father is narcissistic and psychopathic at least to some degree. The children grow up in that environment and they learn to respond to anything masculine as if it has these psychopathic and narcissistic characteristics. And so their perceptions are tuned in that regard. And then they move out into the world and there are all sorts of potential male female interactions that obtain in the actual world and their perceptions aren't calibrated properly for the more generic environment because their specific environment was tilted in a pathological way. But now their very perceptions have been tuned and that that's where the unconscious is, right? It's in the structures that actually govern perceptual categories. And so what'll happen for say a girl in that situation is she won't be able to see anything positive that a man might do because that's so anomalous and outside her perceptual her domain of perceptual familiarity.
[36:20] And anything that's vaguely reminiscent of the pattern that she's already learned will elicit the whole pattern. It's so like insidious listening to him discuss this to me because yes, in some respects like previous abuse or experiences can lead to like unhealthy patterns of like recognition or behavior in the world. But knowing Jordan Peterson's worldview and the kind of topics he's consistently on about, this is like clearly him developing a straw man for what he sees as someone who's pushing back against the patriarchy and western society. He's like clearly created this image of a traumatized social justice warrior who can only see the worst in men and things like that is like what he's really getting at there.
[37:13] And I think pitching it to Robin Carheart Harris who for all the critiques we might have of him in some of his aspects of like psychedelic research, I wouldn't say that he's probably on that same wavelength as Jordan Peterson, but in pitching it to Robin Carheart Harris this way, he elicits like this response that just justifies the worldview for Jordan Peterson. Yeah. So it's almost like by not describing his own full ideas behind what he's saying, it's like he's setting up a euphemism to elicit the kind of affirmation from the scientists that he wants to be able to justify his belief system as like another way of saying what you just said. Exactly. And that's exactly what I was thinking as well listening to it.
[37:59] I was going to say it's like he's envisioning this like you know purplehaired dyed social justice warrior and he's able to write off the concerns that that that you know stereotype is expressing as this person has just you know mental illness that they are opposed to patriarchy or whatever it is. But again, he's not saying all those, but if you spend enough time listening to him talk, you can tell the sort of thing he has in mind when he says those things, right? And the last part of this clip, which is sort of an elaboration on this rebirth concept that they were discussing in this last clip, I think gets more insidious as it goes on as it relates to the conversion therapy concept.
[38:45] And we've already kind of touched on how explicit Jordan Peterson is around conversion therapy, but just if it weren't explicit enough, I wanted to bring up a tweet from around the time that this interview was conducted in 2022 that he's responding to Justin Trudeau calling conversion therapy bans more moral grandstanding in relation to Canada banning conversion therapy. And this tweet was made in January of 2022. The Robin Carheart Harris interview was published the same year that Jordan Peterson was making statements like this online. So with that in mind, I'll play the latter half of this clip about the rebirth that can be afforded through psychedelics.
[39:32] Here you talk about rebirth. So I spent a lot of time studying Merchia Eliata in particular, historian of religious ideas. He was very interested in the symbolic structure of the idea of rebirth. And so the way that this is laid out in the broad mythological literature is that the rebirth and that would be a baptism too is a return to the beginning of time where chaos and possibility rule unstructured. And so and that return to the beginning of time to see that unstructured chaotic possibility is a time for rejuvenation and renovation. And the idea of baptism is actually ritualistic attempt to produce the kind of rebirth that is in principle redemptive.
[40:24] Now you have a theory about how psychedelics works that makes pharmarmacological sense of this notion of the reconstitution of a generative chaos if I if I've got the theory correct right is that the psychedelics blow off the overarning that constrains perception or maybe even the learning and the danger of that is everything there's too much possibility and too much chaos but the upside is a whole new set of propositions that are more germanine to current life, let's say, aren't outdated, could conceivably be generated. Does that seem approximately appropriate? Yes, it does. And you know, the analogy or the theme, the archetype perhaps of baptism is is useful.
[41:12] Baptism often involves a shock, whether it's, you know, being thrown in water or water thrown on you or a baptism of fire, you know. So there's an appeal to a period a state of chaos and yeah and this opportunity for a second go in a sense. I mean, you hear him say it provides the opportunity for a new set of propositions that are suitable to modern life could be the result of the psychedelic experience in some of these therapeutic contexts like well and it fits with the broader as well the right-wing kind of well we showed Ben Shapiro before saying well if this is done in like a medical professional trained context he's open to it the original description of the you know there's a risk of too much chaos is kind of like if you do psychedelics by yourself, you are risking veering off the edge of the
[42:12] Cliff with this and it might not be helpful for you. But if you do have that trained professional to help reimprint you with a correct way of looking at reality, a healthier way, and from Jordan Peterson's perspective, a more receptive to natural hierarchy and patriarchy way of looking at the world, that psychedelics can provide that grounding for laying down the new track. And it also relates to the ways that some of that earlier MK Ultra research talked about, you know, the psychic driving and repatterning. You break down the original personality structure and belief system in order to lay down these new and healthier ideas. the same essential, you know, beliefs were driving that research as what Jordan Peterson and Robin Carard Harris are describing in this clip.
[43:07] Yeah. The MK Ultra stuff was exactly what came to mind for me when I was listening to this. The whole idea of like break you to remake you. Yeah. Cuz people today a lot of times like think about that research as being, you know, just like mere torture. But it was driven by researchers who believed in exactly those types of beliefs. Mhm. On the basis of those beliefs, they felt that this was actually going to be helpful and healing for people. A lot of the psychedelic underground, which is being lifted into the mainstream through the psychedelic industry today, is based in kind of bombarding and overstimulating clients with visual, auditory, and psychological stimuli in order to reshape their personalities. These connections between conversion therapy and the ideas that Jordan Peterson is describing in his interest in psychedelics is not just circumstantial.
[43:59] It's not just a coincidence that there's resonances there. We can see that these ideas were actually coming together explicitly in Jordan Peterson's circle through the drans influencer Khloe Cole who Jordan Peterson helped to raise to prominence. Yeah. And in fact, as I was reviewing videos for this segment on Robin Carheart Harris, the very first advertisement on the video of Jordan Peterson's interview with Robin Carheart Harris was Khloe Cole discussing the dangers of youth transition. We have an old tweet to share from Khloe Cole that has since been deleted, but we had a screenshot of it to share. So this is Khloe Cole who's been pretty prominent about her attempted transition to presenting as a male in her youth and then dransitioning back to presenting as a female in adulthood.
[44:50] There's nothing wrong with trans people, you know, but her story has been lifted up by her and others in the right-wing ecosystem to critique the whole complex of like transgender ideology and the woke mind virus. So, this is not just like someone who is sharing their personal experiences and describing their journey around gender. They're using those personal experiences in order to justify these right-wing attacks against the transgender community. And yeah, this is Khloe Cole writing about her experience with psychedelics. I am not ashamed of my psychedelic experience while dransitioning. I already had deep feelings of regret before my experience, but it broke down my ego and made it easier to admit to myself I regretted transitioning.
[45:36] I've also heard too many stories from people to think that it wasn't helpful for my trauma. I was a kid and it was what it is. And that was a quote tweet of another person saying, "I guess the other option is taking a massive amount of LSD and suddenly deciding not to be trans. That seemed to work for you." And so again, I mean, part of why I think this tweet is so important is it shows that one of these figures in Jordan Peterson's orbit is using these ideas about how psychedelics work to explain how they deconditioned from this woke mind virus sort of gender ideology. Yeah. And this is a figure who Jordan Peterson has had on for interviews with titles such as The Wounds That Won't Heal. Jordan's daughter, Michaela Peterson, has clips with Khloe Cole entitled things like the fantasy of being trans versus the reality and how I fell for the transgender lie, how parents get brainwashed into trans ideology.
[46:34] So like that's the kind of way that the orbit around Jordan Peterson is using Khloe Cole's story. Yeah. And even the first paragraph of her Wikipedia includes the line that says she began dransitioning at 16 after experiencing hallucinations during an LSD trip. So as we can see from the recent explicit advancement of psychedelic conversion therapy in Trump's orbit. The writing is on the wall here that this is going to be a continuing development amongst right-wing interest in psychedelic medicine. Yeah. And on that note, just jumping in here in post to let viewers know that if that's a topic that you're interested in learning more about, it's one we dive into in depth in episode 3 of this series. And this is ultimately not even just about gender and sexuality because the book mind virus is not just about those themes.
[47:23] It also includes other maladaptive from their perspective ideas like neurode divergence and autism. And we're already seeing those sectors starting to use the dtrans language about autism as we can show in a recent article from the free press. Yeah. So the article I thought I was autistic I was wrong by Christina Buttons. The subheading after spending most of my life feeling different and alone an autism diagnosis gave me the kind of relief that was impossible to resist. This is her Twitter post where she writes I thought I was autistic. I was wrong. I was 30 in 2019 when stories of women discovering they were autistic all along began appearing everywhere. But it was becoming a journalist in 2022 after discovering dransitioners stories that forced me to question narratives about identity and diagnosis, including my own.
[48:13] Journalism also required the social skills autism says I should have lacked. From there, the rest unraveled. Many traits I had come to associate with autism are not uncommon in the general population, but through the female autism framework, they looked like a meaningful pattern. I don't think my story is unique. The same incentives that kept my diagnosis intact may also help explain why so many women are entering the autism category in adulthood. So, I mean, she's essentially saying there that the same patterns that she was seeing from following the drans community also applied to this neurode divergence issue. And there's been a lot of kind of deconstruction of the claims in that piece online, a lot of discourse around it. But I mean, it's preposterous to say the fact that she could do journalism emphasizes that she is not neurode divergent.
[49:00] Like as someone who is neurode divergent, like I'm very capable of doing research and other things. So it's but it just goes to show like this is a new front for this rolling back wokeness agenda of you killing the woke mind virus. The story was published about a week after Trump's executive order about psychedelics. And so I posted that right-wingers/maha will try to develop psychedelic assisted conversion therapy for neurode divergence as well as for LGBT identities. It's all the woke mind virus to them. Psychedelic fascism is an inherently revantist movement that's fixated on quote unquote curing non-normative identity. And I just wanted to pose point also to the first comment on there because I think this is part of why more is not being done to oppose this is that people believe that it won't work you know essentially.
[49:54] So this commenter said the irony of psychedelics contributing to becoming conscious and aware of our oneness with the universe and having compassion and forgiveness as a result is going to backfire LMO. And I emphasized in response to that just because I think this is an important perspective for people to be aware of. Among the many fascists who remain fascists after psychedelics, experiences of interconnection are interpreted as interconnection to hierarchy with disposable out groups. The misplaced confidence that fascists will gain empathy keeps the gates open for their project's Trojan horse. essentially, you know, feeling that, well, this won't work out. Or that some people think being receptive to this right-wing encroachment into the psychedelic sphere is its own Trojan horse cuz they think like, oh, well, they think they're doing this one thing, but psychedelics will teach them, you know, and so it makes people feel like, well, this is going to be in our interest in the end.
[50:49] But it's really important to emphasize, as we have said now a few times, that is not a foregone conclusion. And the you know the idea of empathizing with the hierarchy enables people to say well cancer cells should be you know extinguished. We don't need to have empathy for the cancer right because having empathy for the cancer is lacking empathy for the whole we have to protect the center. We have to protect the whole 100%. All of this discourse becomes more concerning when considering that one of the world's biggest champions of these ideologies is also the world's first trillionaire, the owner of one of the biggest social media platforms on Earth, who has already been linked to millions of deaths through his political projects, including the defunding of US aid.
[51:37] We've had our own history with Elon Musk online. Following the 2024 rejection of MDMA for PTSD, we were largely scapegoed as the reason for the rejection. This culminated in a coordinated campaign by funders of the trial, right-wing figures, as well as pieces in the media like a high-profile New York Times piece in which Robin Carheart Harris even chimed in to say that just the name Psymposia causes him a pang of anxiety, which is a joke because the most we've ever quote unquote done to him is point out the sorts of things that we've discussed on this episode. While this campaign was going on against us, former representative Dan Krenshaw produced a video essentially labeling us as left-wing saboturs. This video was endorsed in a quote tweet by Elon Musk stating that Dan Krenshaw's sentiments were all right, which was viewed by millions of people.
[52:28] It gets worse, though. There's another group that's very much against this therapy. They're called Psymposia. Why do they not want veterans to have access to this treatment? I don't know. And Musk's endorsement was used as a springboard by Crenshaw to direct his audience to harass us on our page. Musk has a broad influence across the psychedelic industry because many of his so-called lieutenants, his directors at his companies are major funders and investors in psychedelic medicine. Antonio Gracias who took over the failed MDMA company like now resilient is one of those figures. And then there's also Steve Dervetson who is through his investment firm a funer of a Thai life sciences which is also connected to Compass Pathways which is on the cusp of FDA approval for psilocybin.
[53:17] Yeah. And Steve Jervson, a SpaceX board member, his wife is also a major figure in the funding and influence and lobbying space of the psychedelic industry. Genevie Jervson. She's a board member of the psychedelic science funders collaborative which you can read a whole lot more about in our psychedelic syndicate series where we kind of profile that whole group of Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires who are influencing the psychedelic space right now. Many of them with connections to Elon Musk as well. A recent tweet that I had pulled up just to illustrate some of these connections was regarding the executive order that Trump signed allegedly accelerating research into psychedelics. This was kind of a tweet chain that involved a lot of these people all at once.
[54:03] So, you've got Steve Jervson, the SpaceX board member, tweeting about this historical moment for psychedelics and being in the White House when it was done. Elon Musk responding to Steve. Nice work. And Steve's wife, Genevie Jervson, the Psychedelic Science Funders collaborative member, responding, "Thank you, Elon. Appreciate all the support you've given over the years. This will help a lot of people." There have been exchanges like this before. Anytime that Elon Musk makes some kind of grand statement about the significance of psychedelics, it's almost assured that Steve Regenevie will be in his responses thanking him for the endorsement and the propaganda of the industry. and to show how the fears about the woke mind virus extend across that group of individuals around the election for mayor of New York.
[54:50] Jenny Derbison was pushing a lot of narratives about the dangers of mom Johnny getting elected and in that context she endorsed this essay from Nile Ferguson about the phrase luxury beliefs. This essay, which Genevieve describes as highly recommended and fascinating, defines luxury beliefs as things like defunding the police, having open borders, the idea that men can become women. Nile Ferguson goes on in the thread that she retweets here to say that accusing Israel of genocide, and recognizing a non-existent state are the luxury beliefs of Western foreign policy. They're describing it as luxury beliefs because they claim that people can only advance those ideas if they're sheltered from the consequences of the harms of those ideas.
[55:35] So again, very similar to what we heard from Jordan Peterson about how these ideas are threatening to the order of Western civilization. Yeah. And we just wanted to emphasize this because these people Genevie Jervson, Steve Jervson, Antonio Gracias are becoming some of the most influential leaders in the space. Christian Anger Meyer also another major leader who's good friends with Peter Teal, who's also another investor in this space. the leadership in this field are all existing in this millu around these right-wing fascistleaning talking points like luxury belief, woke mind virus and their concerns are all centered around these as dangers to western society and the advancement of the future that they want to see.
[56:23] What unites many of these figures is the belief that psychedelics can kill the woke mind virus. If Jordan Peterson created the intellectual justification for these ideologies, figures like Elon Musk and billionaires with the power to enact policy change and like real world change are the people who are running with these ideologies and injecting them into the culture. So when you talk about let's talk about trans rights. When you decided to talk about the trans rights movement, you said that it was a woke mind virus. Why do you believe the trans rights movement is a woke mind virus? What do you mean by woke mind virus? What is that?
[57:20] Work mind virus is when you stop caring about people's skills. and their integrity and you start focusing instead on gender and race and other things that are different from that. I think the worldwide virus is fundamentally racist, fundamentally sexist and fundamentally evil. Okay. And we've got a little bit more time so you choose your questions. Okay. Okay. Thank you for that. But you have been deeply outspoken about the issue of trans, right? You posted trans writes you posted that pronouns and bio mean the woke mind virus ate your brain. Do you know what the term woke actually means? It's come to mean a lot of things. It's just being aware of inequities in society and being aware of facts and history. I think we should which we should not make this a constant subject.
[58:07] I think we need to move on. So the but what future do we want? Do we is this something we want to make a part of our constant dialogue forever or do we want to say like let's just move on and treat everyone you know according to just who they are as an individual. So that's Don Lemon asking Elon Musk what the woke mind virus actually means to him as he discusses it online pretty consistently. I think there's a number of interesting points about that clip. First, that silence was real. That was just Elon sitting there blankfaced, not saying anything about it. The second is that he gave him like a quick answer and then was like, "Snap, snap. Be careful what you ask me. You only have so much time." like it's an elitist like vibe to how he answered the question, but then it's this other thing that comes up where Elon is kind of saying that the woke mind virus is like not addressing people's individuality or respecting them on on merit or for their individualism.
[59:07] Whereas if you were to present the case that actually acknowledging people's gender identities and like racial identities and what that means to them that that that actually is a form of kind of like individualism. Well, I think what he's actually getting at there is that you have to hear what he's saying through a supremacist power law ideology where it's like people will hear it in a non-fascist way of like, oh, we're overfocusing on these traits of people instead of what people can actually do. But he means that I would argue from the perspective of white western civilization. Patriarchy in particular is where competency emerges and that other groups of people are not capable of maintaining the structure of society.
[59:58] And it's worth noting that in that same conversation he discusses taking ketamine as a medical treatment. So already the conversations about psychedelic medicine and killing the woke mind virus are connected there. But you've admitted that you've had you have a ketamine prescription. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's something I'd say like there are times when I have I don't know like negative chemical state in my brain like depression I guess you know is or like depression that's not linked to any negative views and then ketamine is helpful for getting you getting one out of a negative frame of mind. The following clip in which he's being interviewed by Bill Maher elaborates on his understanding of what the woke mind virus is and the threat it poses to western society.
[1:00:48] So I think a lot of people thought when you bought Twitter that this is kind of an outlier like how does this what doesn't fit with these other things you're doing. I never thought that because I think you're dealing with big civilizational issues and problems and I was right on your page. I think Twitter is one of them. I mean you have talked about this woke mind virus. Yes. In really apocalyptic terms. I don't you should explain why you don't think it's hyperbole to say things like it's pushing civilization towards suicide. First of all, what is the wol mine virus and if we don't deal with this nothing else can get done. Tell me why you think that. Yeah. So I think we need to be very cautious about any anything that is anti-meritocratic and anything that is that that results in a suppression of free speech.
[1:01:35] So, you know, those are two of the aspects of the work minds that I think are very dangerous is that it's often anti meurecratic. You can't question things. Even the questioning is bad. So, you know, another way to almost anonymous would be cancel culture. Just such a slime ball. Like what he's discussing there is the same exact thing where the values he's discussing that the woke mind virus is apparently treading on are exactly the values that he himself is repressing. It's such a hypocrisy when I hear him discuss things like that. And it's because it is euphemistic. It sounds like something that people can get behind. But when you mean those words from a supremacist mindset where the people on the top of the status hierarchy are the ones whose ideas should not be questioned, then it means something very different than it sounds.
[1:02:28] Yeah. It gets back to the kind of red herring, the fig leaf as we described it earlier with Jordan Peterson saying that the Canadian bill was a compelled speech issue that was treading on his free speech that he was going to be jailed for using the wrong pronouns or whatever. Like these people use these hyperbolic like straw man arguments about the culture that they disagree with to frame them in a completely like unjustified not good faith way. [laughter] Yeah, I mean it's propaganda like straight up. And to emphasize how all of the ideas we've shown in this episode are actually part of the same project. This next clip is Elon Musk talking about the ideas directly to Jordan Peterson. I was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of my older boys, Xavier.
[1:03:18] This is before I had really any understanding of what was going on and we had co going on and so there was a lot of confusion and you know I was told oh he you know Xavier might commit suicide if he that was a lie right from the outset incredibly evil and I agree with you that people that have been promoting this should go to prison. So I was tricked into doing this and you it wasn't explained to me that puberty blockers are actually just sterilization drugs. So anyway, and so I lost my son essentially. So you know they call it dead naming for a reason. Yeah. All right. So the reason it's called dead naming is because your son is dead. So my son Xavier is dead. Killed by the woke mind virus. I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah. I can't imagine what that would be like. Yeah.
[1:04:03] So yeah. And there's lots of people in that situation now. Right. It's not pretty. And lots of demolished kids. Yes. Yeah. Well, that's a good reason to be the final straw. All right. So, let's So, I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that. And we're making some progress. Join the club. Yeah. It's like truly one of the most offensive clips I've seen and also disturbing. like genuinely like frightening, you know, for someone who is the richest person on the planet so openly to destroying the woke mind virus and then to see how his circle has been advancing psychedelic medicine to do precisely that is a signal of very dark times.
[1:04:52] Yeah. All while spreading like blatant misinformation about the actual science around gender affirming care, like puberty blockers being sterility agents or that Jordan Peterson just chimes in, "Oh, that's such a lie." When he says, "My child might have died by suicide." It's all just so offensive. And then to get into this like Hollywood style dialogue at the end there of and so I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus. Like it all feels so like a super villain line. Yes. Literally [laughter] like it ends like a super villain. Yeah. I also wanted to point out the fact that it appeared that Jordan Peterson was like tearing up about this perspective that he was providing there.
[1:05:38] It just goes to reinforce what I was saying earlier about how people need to think with more nuance about empathy and how enhanced empathy can result in different manifestations, you know, what that means cuz for someone like Jordan Peterson, he would feel like he is a high sense of empathy in that moment that like so if psychedelics enhance empathy, that's the type of empathy it can enhance. a sense of like buying into the fascist worldview and the fascist paradigm. It's all a reflection of the symbol system that we are building around these ideas. There's not just one consequence and we need to stay on our feet a bit more about how these ideas can be rolled out in these different environments. Yeah. And as a positive note, Elon Musk's daughter Viven does appear to be beyond I guess her relationship with her father thriving in general.
[1:06:27] So, like contrary to their assumptions or what he's talking about of the woke mind virus killing his child, like she's out here seems to be thriving. Yeah. And I forget where I saw this, but I heard someone say that, you know, Elon Musk is essentially the world's most public abusive father, you know, and the fact that all of this is hinging on the scapegoating of his own daughter allows us to question the positive sounding versions of the ideas that he's providing to the public. Part of the issue with all of this is that the people that he's speaking to who all of this resonates with have been already indoctrinated with the sort of like anti-intellectualism. A lack of education makes it harder to discern the difference between propaganda and genuine like ideas that are reflective of reality.
[1:07:17] And in the place of that capacity, people have been trained within that hierarchical structure to defer to authority. And so it's like when you hear someone like that saying these ideas and you don't have the skill set, you haven't developed the skill set to be able to notice the faults in the narrative, then you're just going to accept that this is the way that the world is. But that's why I think we as a broader community on the left need to be paying attention to this and in order to empower people with the information to be able to challenge some of these attempts to cultivate the psychedelic industry in these dangerous directions. We really wanted to do this episode and discuss some of the ideological underpinnings of the figures that are major endorsers of psychedelics, major funders of psychedelics and some of the trickle down ideology that's coming from these influencers.
[1:08:13] One topic that we didn't touch on that's becoming a much larger sphere of influence in the psychedelic space is this kind of Christian nationalist movement and the idea of interlocking Christianity and psychedelics. This was a topic we hit on pretty inepth in a recent episode of our podcast. You can find the clip up here specifically on Brian Hubard who's one of the biggest proponents of this movement with Ibagane. And it's a topic we'll be diving into a lot deeper in the third episode of this series, which will be an interview with Caleb Graves, an anti-fascist Baptist preacher who recently published an article discussing the modern-day connections between Christian nationalism, psychedelics, and conversion therapy.
