Transcription
You know that burning bush story? That's Moses' entry point, by the way. God, uh, "Here I am," and the call of Samuel. "Here I am," for example. So that phrase, "Here I am," *hanei*, is repeated about seven times throughout the Old Testament. Oh. Oh. Jordan Peterson talks to Charlie Kirk about the burning bush and the call of God. And Charlie Kirk actually reveals something to Jordan Peterson that I think is super interesting. So let's get right into it.
And I imagine, too, that it must have been heartening to you as well to see that you could hold your own. Exactly. And I re— So that's a really important point here. "Here I am," as a kid that didn't go to college, thinking, "Do I really have the intellectual capacity to joust with kids that are learning all day long?" Yeah. I realize they're not learning all day long. Yeah. You see, I was reading Mises and Rothbard before I came across you. Yeah. Hayek, you know, Milton Friedman. Very libertarian economics was my baseline foundational philosophy. A lot of reasons for that. Very, very interesting. Tons of profound insights, some of which don't, I think, actually play out very well in the material world. But so I would encounter kids on campuses who profess to be studying economics, for example, and they didn't know very much, right? And I realized, I said, "Well, there's a disconnect. They're they're borrowing money to go learn about things that I actually have a greater mastery of because I was..." Well, you can learn a lot if you read the right books. Oh, and in my idle time, I became obsessed with being proficient and understanding economics. That was kind of my entry. Oh, yeah. I see. And so, you have to remember 2013. You know that burning bush story? Oh, yeah. That's Moses' entry point, by the way.
So, the burning bush moment, I think. Yeah. The burning bush moment happens when Moses goes off the beaten path. He's a shepherd, right? So, a good man keeps the wolves and lions at bay, serves the vulnerable. He's got that mastered. And then something attracts his attention, and he takes it seriously, and that's what transforms him. So, you said you did that with economics. Moses said, "Hanei, here I am." Yeah. At that moment of the call of God, right? Exactly. Exactly. So, so, so this is it's a repeated theme throughout the scriptures. *Hanei*. Yes. Well, *Hanei*. *Hanei*, which is a "here I am." So you remember in the in the Moses, right? So he's making himself available. But remember Abraham said that with the binding of Isaac when God, uh, "Here I am," and the call of Samuel, "Here I am," for example. So that phrase, "Here I am," *Hanei*, is repeated about seven times throughout the Old Testament. Oh, oh, that's really interesting. Like, oh, interesting.
It's funny because Jordan Peterson tries to get his point across and Charlie Kirk is trying to get his point across. But because I've heard Jordan Peterson say this story 100 times, the call to adventure, but you have to be listening to that call, and you have to be willing to offer your body as a living sacrifice. Say, "God, here I am. Use me." Whatever it is. So that's interesting. Spell it. Uh, *haneni*. Uh, I don't know how to spell Hebrew, but it's "here I am." It's in the English translation, right? So it's like, "Take me, use me. I'm available. Mold me. I, I, I, I, I am your obedient vessel." Right. Right. That's like the Mission Impossible motif. "Your assignment, if you choose to accept it." Exactly. But it's a very powerful, it's a very powerful Hebrew word. It's basically "here I am." My, my arms are out. I am yours. Full surrender to your purpose.
Well, that's it. So, you know, there's a pattern that's established in that in that burning bush story because the burning bush is something living. Yes. That's but it doesn't consume it, which is what's so amazing. Well, that's that's life. Life metabolizes. Life burns but without being consumed. It's that's the secret of life, right? So that the burning bush is life most deeply apprehended. And Moses is being a shepherd. He's near Mount Sinai or Horeb, which is where heaven meets earth. And something attracts his attention. And then the thing, what happens to Moses is that he takes it seriously and he gets to the bottom of it, and that transforms him. So the idea is something like, if you watch for adventure and opportunity, if you watch for the pathway forward, something will grip your attention and it'll compel you, you'll be obsessed by it. Well, you take that obsession seriously. You get to the bottom of things, that transforms you. Okay. So you were doing that with economics. And it's funny, as I went to the bottom of it, it actually brought me back to my Christian upbringing and my roots, which is ex— Well, that's what happens to Moses because when he gets to the bottom of things, it's the voice of the spirit of his ancestors, right? Because eventually I was reading Hayek. Yeah. I think something that in my life I learned is you're trying to chase this thing that you feel like you're supposed to do. It's what you're, well, absolutely supposed to do, but you're doing it for the wrong reason, or you're doing it for yourself. You're not doing it for God. So God brings you on this path, then after finally, when you surrender your life to Jesus, and you almost get this full circle moment of life. It's crazy. Road to Serfdom. Yeah. And I had kind of an aha moment. I said, "There's a lot of good and evil claims in this book. By what standard are they saying something good?" Right. Exactly. So, it brought me back to my Christianity because in the, you know, the Road to Serfdom, it's all about the idea of how government tyranny will will swallow society. We'll envelop it, but it happens in steps. I said, "Time out. There's truth claims being made embedded in this. By what standard do we consider this?" How did you figure that out? I might have watched one of your videos. I mean, I to be to be honest, I don't know. I, I, I do remember though thinking to myself, libertarian economics is not enough. I want to go deeper. Yeah. Yeah.
Look, I made exactly the same conclusion when I was studying political science in university. The first year or two was okay because we were reading great ancient thinkers. But then in my third and fourth years, when it started to become more specialized, the basic claim was that human beings are motivated economically. And then it became left. And I thought, "No, that's not right. That's that's not right." Correct. There, there's a foundational foundation. There's a substructure there. That's why I started studying psychology. And so that's where I started to take, and it's been, I take my faith very seriously. I love your biblical series, your Exodus series, and your Gospel series is terrific. You deserve a lot of credit for that. And it's been phenomenal. My wife, Wire Types, deserve a lot of credit for that, too, because they took a big risk. Yeah. But you had the initiative to bring everybody together and, you know, it was, you did a great job with it. And you, you presented it in a way that I'd never have because you have, you have a very unique psychological understanding and interpretation of of the scriptures. Yeah. Well, we had great panelists, too. Like they were a very good crowd, the people that that decided. Yeah.
What ended up happening is 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. 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, and 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? I mean, that's the sin of Eve. Exactly. You can take the right to establish the moral order to yourself. It's the one thing that's claimed. There's many axiomatic claims in Genesis, in the openings of Genesis, right? That the word is the creative force that brings good out of chaos and possibility. That human beings are made in the image of God. That men and women exist as independent entities, and that they each... Yeah. Yeah. And that you're not to take the right to establish the moral order to yourself. It's the one... 2018, the peak was 2020. Back when I was in college. And yeah, the woke agenda kind of ran society. And man, has it flipped like no other. It's it's mind-boggling to see these things change and to realize how much the world has changed. I would say not always for the better. But the mindset to get rid of, like he just said, back to the garden. "Is that really what they meant? Is that really what God said? Is that really what our forefathers said?" Prohibition. And I think biologically, it's something like you fundamentally you have to adapt yourself to the realities of the world. Right? You don't have the wherewithal. This is where Nietzsche went spectacularly wrong because Nietzsche said after his pronouncement that God had died, that human beings would have to create their own values. He said with lament. Yeah, he did. He did. Remember? But then he felt that creating our own values was the pathway out, and it's not. The pathway out is a return to the foundational values, right? And the more intense the crisis, the more toward the middle of the foundation you have to look. So it's not political because this isn't a political crisis. It's truly, it's truly the, what would you say? It's the ragged edge of the anti-Christian revolution. That's what it is. Yeah.
But what the hopeful part to kind of bring this all in is that we are seeing young men, especially, want to return to our roots. Yeah. They want to. So that goes back to the conservative element. What are we conserving? In some ways, we're actually trying to rebirth. We're trying to have a re a new birth of freedom, as Abraham Lincoln would say. Freedom and responsibility. Yes. Because you can't have one without the— No. And and probably the right emphasis is res is responsibility. Remember when God tells Moses to stand up against Pharaoh, what he says? He doesn't say, "Tell them, let my people go." That's what the civil rights crusaders focused on. That isn't what he said. He said, "Let my people go so they may worship me in the wilderness." So, it's ordered freedom. And ordered freedom is voluntary responsibility. And you see what you're seeing, and and let's close with this because I want your insights into this. What you're seeing when those working-class men are coming to your talks, and and they've become more and more popular, as you said, as you've advertised them, is they're looking for, well, they're looking for, it seems, they're looking for responsible direction. Correct. Okay. So now tell me how you've had to modify the manner in which you're conducting these debates. Let's say, because for a while, you would have been testing yourself to see if you could hold your own, and that's kind of an intellectual battle. Shapiro did very much the same thing. Correct. Right. Too bad Milo fell off the edge of the world, but he had a pretty rough go of it. He did, and a lot of trauma. A lot. A lot. So, okay. So, first of all, it's combat, and you're trying to develop yourself, and then you're doing that quite successfully and educating yourself along the way, but then you see this shift. Yeah. So, what sort of shift has there been in your self-conceptualization and your and your understanding of your mission and the way that you conduct yourself? Like, you see, you're being called upon to be a leader, let's say, that's not merely political. That's why my understanding of it. Correct. It's an enormous responsibility. Enormous. I mean, when when I show up to college campus after college campus, mind you, during the day, they have got a million other things they could be doing. This is 12:00 p.m. lunchtime, and 4,000 people are waiting for me to go debate. And what are they on? They're on the campus grounds where, yeah, sometimes amphitheaters. They're all, they're in trees. They're everywhere. I mean, you could see these images. We could supply them to you if you want to. Yeah, we do that. You could superimpose them over this discussion. Let's do that. Um, and I'm not making this up. I'm not exaggerating. I mean, they're they're as far as the eye can see. These crowds are there. And part of it, we must be honest, is they want to see a good verbal combat because they don't get it at the university. You see, they're not, there's something that that's partly likely part of the feminization, the pathological feminization without no competition. But you think about it, what I am doing is hyper masculine, which is no rules except, hey, we're just going to go basically figure this out. This is the closest thing to a a verbal street fight that one can have. Anyone can show up to the mic, prove me wrong. I have no notes. I have no AI. I have nothing. Tell me why you're correct. For three hours, I will sit there, and everyone will watch. It's a gladiatorial match for the best ideas of the West. Right? And there's something there that is remarkably alluring. Uh, but for me, I also need to balance, as Christ would say, being as much truth, which of course I'm inclined towards, as love. It's a lot of these kids are struggling. Yeah, that's for sure.
Well, even that guy that you just talked to, and maybe we'll throw this. Yeah. So he was radically anti-Semitic, but also he said he had served. He looked to me like someone who'd been very, very hurt. He's fallen into to this sort of snake pit of conspiratorial theories and and the brain rot that comes with it. Yeah. Yeah. But you could you could also see that he's he is he would be very happy and he did listen to you to the degree that he could, 'cause he had tilted pretty hard towards paranoia. That's very difficult to escape from once it's established. But he was trying to listen to you. And I thought you did a very good job of not playing easy tricks on him, like because he was an easy person just to throw into the eternal fire, so to speak, right? But there was part of him that was trying to find the way. Yes. Yeah. And that Yeah. I think that's cool. Like, I don't necessarily agree with everything that Charlie Kirk does and some of his stance on all this stuff, but I think it's awesome that he's a Christian and he's becoming super influential in so many different ways and he has a voice to speak up for, hopefully, you know, Christian values. So shout out to him. Shout out to Jordan Peterson for all these guys making a difference in young men like me and other men to really make a difference. So that's absolutely awesome. And uh, yeah, guys, if you haven't ever decided to follow Jesus, I encourage you to do to do that today. It will be the best decision you guys could ever make. Please, uh, if you haven't decided to follow Jesus, in in the description below, you will be able to click a link to help you to decide to follow Jesus for the first time. Do that today.