Dr Jordan B Peterson
@jordanbpeterson • 6,154,409 subscribers
Best-Selling Author | Clinical Psychologist | #1 Education Podcast | Co-founder of @petersonacademy | Order my new book "We Who Wrestle With God" here:
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What does it mean to actually live your life, not just survive it? In this lecture, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson explores the story of Abraham and what it reveals about identity, sacrifice, and the call to adventure. Why do people with everything still feel empty? Why does comfort, without purpose, corrupt rather than satisfy? And what does it actually cost you to keep playing it safe? Peterson also digs into what marriage and parenthood really demand. Commitment isn't a cage. It's the condition for becoming someone worth being, and why the people who take it seriously end up with more, not less. This is a lecture about what it takes to become who you're supposed to be, and why most people never do. This lecture was filmed in Boston, Massachusetts, on June 5, 2024.
Dr Jordan B Peterson206,126 Aufrufe • vor 6 Tagen
What does a seventy-year-old man who has never left his father's tent have in common with the first murder ever committed? In this lecture, Jordan Peterson works through the story of Cain and Abel and arrives somewhere nobody expects: a precise, almost clinical account of how resentment is manufactured, step by step, in an ordinary person who believes he has been treated unfairly. Along the way he explains why Freud and Jung both thought Nietzsche's solution was impossible, why your reputation is a better place to store wealth than your bank account, what you are actually doing when you tell your son it matters how he plays the game, and the one experiment he ran on himself that he says is worth the price of the ticket on its own. Then Konstantin Kisin comes out to argue that none of it requires God at all, and the conversation turns to the pill, the family, and a question about what has to change in a culture before a technology becomes thinkable. The story of Cain and Abel turns out to be less about an ancient crime than about a door you have already been offered, and whether you opened it. This lecture was filmed on April 9, 2024, in New York City, New York.
Dr Jordan B Peterson370,120 Aufrufe • vor 27 Tagen
What does it mean to wrestle with God—and can anyone avoid it? In this lecture, Jordan Peterson takes up a question that reaches beyond the divide between believer and atheist. Drawing on ancient stories and his experience as a clinical psychologist, he explores faith, doubt, and what our choices reveal about what we believe. Audience questions bring the discussion into the challenges of marriage, parenting, and maintaining discipline when life becomes difficult, connecting the evening’s larger questions to the demands of everyday life. Recorded live in Phoenix on the We Who Wrestle With God tour.
Dr Jordan B Peterson171,825 Aufrufe • vor 13 Tagen
What does a man who spent seventy five years living in his father’s tent have to do with the question you have been avoiding about your own life? In this lecture, Jordan Peterson works through the story of Abraham and arrives at the hardest passage in scripture, the moment a father is told to take his only son up a mountain and offer him as a burnt offering. The atheists call it proof of a monstrous God. Peterson thinks they have the story upside down, and getting to why takes him through a savings account, a sports team, a statue Michelangelo carved at twenty four, and the thing every mother does on the first day of school. Then a police officer asks him for one piece of advice, and the answer takes six minutes and costs Moses the promised land. By the end there is a calculation involving twenty minutes, fifty repetitions, and the two percent of your life you could fix this week. What Abraham is actually offered turns out not to be faith in the conventional sense at all, but a trade: everything you are comfortable with, in exchange for something you already know you want more. This lecture was filmed on March 10, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Dr Jordan B Peterson243,644 Aufrufe • vor 20 Tagen
Why would a grown man pay money to sit in the dark and be terrified, and what does that have to do with the reason the modern world feels like it is coming apart? In this lecture, Jordan Peterson argues that everything you think you know about how you see the world is backward: that you do not navigate by facts or reason but through a story, and that the direction you secretly aim decides what you are able to perceive at all. From the first date in a crowded restaurant to the three great stories fighting for control of the West, he builds toward an unsettling diagnosis of a civilization living unconsciously on inherited wealth, illustrated by nothing less than a children's cartoon and a myth older than the Bible. Then the writer Konstantin Kisin joins him on stage to push back, and their conversation turns to the hardest question of all, whether the ancient stories are merely useful or actually true, and what it would cost us to find out we cannot live without them. This lecture was filmed in Nashville, Tennessee, on April 5, 2024.
Dr Jordan B Peterson267,414 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
I read Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane at least five times over the last two decades. I thought it was a masterpiece the first time I read it. But every time I reread it, I thought it was better. That's why I decided to teach a course devoted to the book. It launches today on Peterson Academy. What's it about? Attention. What grips our attention, voluntarily and involuntarily, bears on our deepest desires. That grip is possession by what is deepest within us. What is deepest is by definition what is sacred. Everything depends on what is sacred. That's what makes it sacred. The atheist or the relativist might object: nothing is sacred to me. But If nothing is sacred to you, your life has no sustaining meaning. There will come a time, if it hasn't already, where you will suffer for that lack. And If nothing is sacred to you, then nothing matters to you. That means that you are responsible to nothing and no one. That means that people should avoid you by all means possible. So what should be sacred? That is the question....
Dr Jordan B Peterson316,454 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
What does a golden rope in a dying man's dream have to do with the person in your life you can no longer reach? In this lecture, Jordan Peterson sets out after three questions that turn out to be the same question, what is a man, what is a woman, and what is the highest thing a person can aim at, and pursues them through the strangest doorway imaginable: the despair of the most successful author who ever lived, who had everything a human being could want and still could not find a reason to stay alive. From Tolstoy's vision of something infinite suspended above the abyss, to a treacherous brother who remade himself into the founder of a nation, Peterson builds toward a practical answer with startling reach. And in the most moving moment of the night, his wife Tammy steps on stage to tell the true story of how she won back a sister she was losing, using nothing more than the one thing almost no one is willing to do. What begins as a lecture on identity ends as an instruction manual for getting back the people you thought were gone for good. This lecture was filmed in San Antonio, Texas, on December 12, 2024.
Dr Jordan B Peterson222,330 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
What if the reason you feel stuck has nothing to do with your circumstances and everything to do with a story you don't know you're telling? In this lecture, Jordan Peterson sets out to answer a single question, what is and should be the story of your life, and arrives somewhere most people never look: the ancient account of a people escaping slavery, and a shepherd who becomes a leader only once he has grown up. Along the way Peterson argues that tyranny is not first a political fact but a personal one, playing out in your own head, your marriage, and your kitchen before it ever reaches a nation, and that the thing you aim at silently decides everything you are able to see. What begins as a walk from one point to another turns into a map of how an ordinary person is called out of the desert, and a surprisingly practical answer to the oldest complaint of all, that you know what you should do and cannot make yourself do it. This lecture was filmed in Los Angeles, California, on May 15, 2024.
Dr Jordan B Peterson253,834 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
What does the oldest sibling feud in the Bible have to do with the argument you keep having with the person you love most? In this lecture, delivered improbably in the city of sin, Jordan Peterson takes the story of a twin who cheats his own brother out of everything and uses it to map a single idea he calls aiming up. Starting from something as ordinary as a fight with your spouse that never seems to resolve, Peterson descends, level by level, into what he argues is really going on underneath: a buried betrayal, a broken trust, and a choice between the desire to win and the harder work of peace. Along the way he explains why the cynic is not the intelligent one in the room, why the wealth of an entire nation rests on something as fragile as a handshake, and how a crook with no reason to hope becomes the father of nations. What he arrives at is not a sermon but a description, of the one decision available to you in any moment, no matter how far down you have fallen, and of the strange acceleration that begins the instant you make it. This lecture was filmed in Las Vegas, Nevada, on May 19, 2024.
Dr Jordan B Peterson236,651 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
What does the way your attention moves across a crowded restaurant have to do with why civilizations collapse? In this lecture, Jordan Peterson opens where you’d least expect a talk about God to begin—with Richard Dawkins, a problem in cognitive science, and the uncomfortable fact that there are infinitely many true things you could attend to and only a handful you ever do. From there he moves through why you’ll pay money to watch a villain on a screen, what a sleeping lion has to do with your paycheck, and why a man who spent seventy-five years in his father’s tent was the one who finally got the invitation. What he’s building toward isn’t an argument for belief in the conventional sense, but something stranger and much harder to dismiss: that you have already placed the wager, every single time you decided what was worth looking at. The only question left is what you’ve been aiming at all along without admitting it. This lecture was filmed on March 4th, 2024, in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Dr Jordan B Peterson239,340 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
What does a nervous man on a first date in a crowded restaurant have to do with the darkest impulses a human being can harbor? In this lecture, Jordan Peterson takes a scene so ordinary you have lived it a dozen times and slows it down until something unsettling appears underneath. Every glance across that table, he argues, is already serving a hidden aim, and the direction of that aim quietly decides whether the person sitting across from you is a partner to love or a tool to use. From the biology of why we pair bond, through the four dark traits that psychologists spent fifty years mapping, to the story of two brothers and a sacrifice gone wrong, Peterson traces how ordinary desire curdles into something monstrous, and how the same attention, aimed differently, becomes the foundation of trust, marriage, and everything worth building. What begins as dating advice ends somewhere you will not expect, with a burning sword, a fleeing prophet, and a question you answer without meaning to every time you look at another person. This lecture was filmed in Phoenix, Arizona.
Dr Jordan B Peterson289,513 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
So, an update on our challenge to the legacy universities: Peterson Academy. First and most immediate: we are pleased to announce the release of our latest course, the Historical Reliability of the Bible, taught by none other than the great Wes Huff, whose popularity as a podcast guest may (should) have made him familiar to you. The trailer is super cool. It's well worth a minute of your time. This course suits our broader purposes extremely well—our determination to showcase and promote what the modern universities have decided to abandon: the greatness of the West; the irreplaceable necessity of the free market; the criminal catastrophe of Marxism; the inestimable value and beauty of traditionally classic literature and art; and absolutely unapologetically, the treasure-house of our Judeo-Christian heritage. I originally promised to produce a world class liberal arts bachelor's degree equivalent curriculum available to everyone for less than the cost of a single university course. We're very near to delivering on that promise, with the more than 100 politically-incorrect 8-hour courses we have produced—and in a mere two and half years. We have gathered the best lecturers in the world. We have produced their courses to a standard reached by no other comparable institution. Our 60000 students are thrilled with our constantly improving platform and its widening social network. Join the education revolution.
Dr Jordan B Peterson369,333 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
What does a punk rock concert full of sneering nihilists have to do with the oldest question about how to live? In this lecture, the final numbers of a long tour, Jordan Peterson begins somewhere unexpected: a Ramones show decades ago, where a room full of people who claimed life was meaningless could not stop moving to the music. That contradiction becomes a thread he pulls until something enormous comes loose, a case that the meaning you insist isn't there is woven into the way you perceive, the way you listen, and the aim you set without realizing you have set it. Along the way he takes apart the fantasy of a life without struggle, asks why a seventy-year-old man asleep in comfort is the least enviable figure in the Bible, and arrives, in the quietest moment of the night, at a piece of advice about love so simple and so practical that you will wonder why no one ever told you. What begins with a joke about slam dancing ends with a question you answer every time you decide what to look for. This lecture was recorded on February 5th, 2024 in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Dr Jordan B Peterson245,688 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
I am pleased to release the fourth lecture from my We Who Wrestle With God collection. We plan to make this a Sunday ritual, far into the foreseeable future. Today's topic: How can you become a good person? We're all dreaming up how we should act, and we produce our theories. Our great storytellers aggregate those theories and portray them back to us, in dramatic form. We imitate the heroes of our stories. Thus we move ever closer to being good. We can do this consciously, too—explicitly—and aim at becoming the heroes of our own personal stories. Lectured filmed in Abbotsford, Canada on April 1, 2025
Dr Jordan B Peterson312,411 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
What does a 75-year-old man leaving his father's house for the first time have to do with the darkest question a human being can ask about themselves? In this lecture, Jordan Peterson traces a single obsession — how ordinary people commit extraordinary evil — from a teenage encounter with books about Nazi Germany and the Soviet gulag, through unsettling visits to a maximum security prison, to a startling personal reckoning with his own capacity for darkness. What he found waiting at the bottom of that question wasn't despair, but something far more unexpected: an ancient story about calling, sacrifice, and the kind of adventure that makes the weight of being alive feel worth carrying. The story of Abraham turns out to be less about faith in the conventional sense and far more about a question you already know the answer to — whether you're listening.
Dr Jordan B Peterson303,788 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
What if the self you keep trying to serve isn't actually you at all? In this lecture, the final stop of a 60 city tour, Jordan Peterson begins with an unlikely admission from the world's most famous atheist and follows it into the two shortest, densest paragraphs in the Bible: the story of two brothers and the offerings they make. From there he traces a single thread through the whole architecture of a human life, why the child who insists on his own way ends up with no friends, why a marriage cannot survive on getting what you want, and how a thousand quiet hours of resentment turn an ordinary person into someone capable of the unthinkable. What he uncovers is not a rule about religion but a question your own conscience has been asking you all along, one that decides whether the world opens up in front of you or closes in. The answer has nothing to do with belief in the usual sense, and everything to do with what you're willing to give up. This lecture was filmed on June 25, 2024, in Mexico City, Mexico.
Dr Jordan B Peterson233,304 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten