Jordan Peterson on Rules for Life, Psychedelics, The Bible, and More

Tim Ferriss interviews Jordan Peterson around the release of his book Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. They trace Peterson's intellectual formation from his small-town Alberta upbringing and early reading, then move into morality, resentment, and how he maintains composure under adversarial pressure. A long middle section covers the psychology and pharmacology of drugs, psychedelics research at Johns Hopkins, openness, and ontological shock. The conversation closes on biblical stories, the symbolic structure of order and chaos, and how to construct meaning in the face of suffering.

• Peterson argues the best people he's met are dangerous people who keep themselves in check, and that real morality requires the capacity to do anything yet control yourself.
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• He distinguishes resentment from anger, saying resentment is revelatory: it tells you either someone is treading on your territory or you need to grow up and stop complaining.
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• Peterson reveals he held Timothy Leary's old position at Harvard and that he is deeply involved with phase three trials for both psilocybin and MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.
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• He firmly states the world is not the way we perceive it, that it is deeply strange, and that hallucinogens reveal this.
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• He describes a drawing his six-year-old son made depicting order, chaos, a river, and a tree of life reaching to heaven, which he found shockingly shamanic despite no religious upbringing.
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• Peterson confirms that writing Beyond Order was a life raft that anchored him while he was severely ill, echoing Viktor Frankl's account of meaning sustaining him.
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• He frames the deepest values as inherently religious, an argument he tried to impress upon Sam Harris despite Harris disliking the terminology.
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• Peterson grew up near a college in northern Alberta that once had 30 days in a row where temperatures never rose above minus 40.
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• His junior high librarian Sandy Notley introduced him to Ayn Rand, Huxley, Orwell, and Solzhenitsyn; her daughter Rachel Notley later became premier of Alberta.
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• Peterson started working for the NDP at age 14 and ran for vice president of the party that same year.
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• Peterson says his recommended-books list sells hundreds of books a month and is unbelievably popular with readers.
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• His PhD research focused for eight or nine years on drug and alcohol abuse, concentrating on alcohol because it bathes every cell like water.
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• He cites research showing one dose of psilocybin can move a person from the 50th to the 85th percentile in openness, calling it a major neurological rewiring.
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• Peterson references Terence McKenna's stoned ape hypothesis that psilocybin mushrooms and humans co-evolved, and notes even flies seek psychoactive states (hence amanita muscaria the 'fly agaric').
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• Peterson worked on Maps of Meaning from 1985 to 1999, roughly three hours a day, and thought about it up to 13 hours a day in his twenties.
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• Peterson learned the term 'ontological shock' from Roland Griffiths and links it to PTSD and disruption of fundamental axioms.
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• A friend told Peterson that to find meaning you must either find God or have kids, and that having kids is easier.
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