https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=NUbSP4Lmbl4
I was very interested after contemplating our last conversation in staying in touch with you, at least in part to get more insight into what it’s actually like to be on the campaign trail. And so now you’ve been hard at it. How long it’s got to be? How long have you actually been campaigning now? Well, it was the last week of February that we began. So it’s been just a little bit over four months, about close to five months. Right, right. So what have you learned? Well, one of the things I’ve learned is actually one of the more surprising expectations is that the political consultant class at the start of this campaign had a concern about my style that I think they still continue to have today, which is the advice they give me is to dumb it down. That this is no longer the era of writing books, as you know. I mean, you’ve written more prolifically than I have, but the last few years I’ve been in a stage of life where I’ve been writing books, examining issues with depth. I think the threats to liberty are complex and I’ve been explaining them. And so what they said is when you need to get used to the political mindset, people don’t have that kind of attention span. They need to be distilled into bullet points, dumb it down when you need to, or nobody’s going to listen to you. What I have found is that I have been at my worst when I’m doing that, and I’ve been at my best when I’m more or less ignoring that advice. And that’s less about me, Dr. Peterson. That’s actually deeply encouraging about the voter base in this country. I’m talking to voters that go beyond the traditional Republican primary base, but everything that I’m saying here applies to the traditional Republican primary base as well. I think that our voters today are hungry for depth, actually, in a way that they may have never been. And why do I say they may have never been? Well, I mean, these political consultants are getting their conventional wisdom from somewhere. I assume it’s from past experience and not just raw stupidity. I think that they must be judging from prior eras, and at least today, I will give you my sense. You put your finger on two things that I think are of crucial importance. One of the things we talked about the last time, you said that you weren’t going to have someone else write your speeches. You said you weren’t going to use a teleprompter. You were going to say what you thought. Now, this is what I’ve watched happen to a number of people that I know quite well. They get they lack confidence in their own ability and their own their own their own capacity to judge the political context. And they hire political consultants and the political consultants claim to be political consultants. But my sense with political consultants is that they’re like money managers. If they could manage money, they’d be rich. And if political consultants knew anything about politics, they’d be running themselves. And they always do the say the same thing. They say just what you said, which is, well, people aren’t very bright. They don’t have a very long attention span. You have to dumb it down, which shows you exactly what they think of people. And it makes it does to just exactly who they want to dumb down for. Like it might be for the people, but it might be for them. And it’s canned advice. And then you said, you know, that you found when you did that, that that’s when you went astray and you fell off course. And that’s what I’ve seen happen to the other people I’ve watched do this. And you know, I don’t dumb what I say down ever. And people watch it online and lots of people say, well, you know, I had to listen to this two or three times and I had to look up some of the words. But I’m pretty thrilled that I’m not being talked down to. And I learned something. And so I think I think all of that’s a lie. I think it’s mendacious. And I also think this is more situational, that it’s a hangover from the television era. Because yes, television. Yeah, right. Right. Because you had television produced fragmented attention because you could only you could only get a 30 second sound bite and you couldn’t assume that your audience was following you. But that’s not true online and not true in the podcasts. So that’s very interesting. That’s actually a great point is that in a certain sense, it’s easy to just blame the political consultants, but they may be playing to the medium of communication. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So they produce 30 second TV ads. That is what they do. Literally, you have to say in 30 seconds and the final one of those 30 seconds has to be paid for by, you know, X, Y, Z. So that is already where they begin. And even TV hits that are unpaid ads and we haven’t been doing very much TV paid ads at all. One of the things I’m learning is that actually is probably certainly at this stage of the campaign, a horrendous waste of money. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense. But even the even the three, four minute TV hits, it’s a bastardized form of the truth. And, you know, I do think especially in this moment we live in the threats to liberty are complex. They do not present themselves in one bad guy and one good guy. In fact, I think one of the mistakes that the Republican Party makes and I see this when I go to party events in particular, you know, there will be a lot of signs that will say, Fire Biden, you know, and then the pledge that the Republican Party has asked people to sign is the called the beat to make it out of the debate stage, which I will sign as a condition for going on the debate stage. But it’s called the Beat Biden Pledge. And it’s so reductionist, right? Like, you know, the entire party apparatus is focused on one man. Not because I have any great feelings about this man. I don’t. I think he’s an awful president. But the deeper point is he’s barely the president. It’s a managerial class that’s actually pulling the strings and we can get into the substance of that. But that gets back to the reductionist form on TV or the political consultants are giving you the advice. And you see this. Just listen to the other candidates in this race. It’s almost as though they’re there as they tell them to do. Stay on message. And that message is how we defeat Joe Biden and the radical Biden agenda, as though these were words uttered by the same carbon copy printer that was served up to the president. The printer that was served up to all of the candidates. I think it in some literal sense was the same carbon copy that was served up to all the candidates. But then, you know, the people. But the good news is you might think, you know, in a less optimistic version of the world that the politicians speaking like this has a dumbing down effect on the people. And what I see, and I think this is encouraging, certainly in the on the ground events that we’re doing. What are these millions of people know? But these are maybe a few hundred or a big event, a few thousand people at a time and at a small event, maybe 50 in roomfuls of that size. People aren’t falling for it. Right. Their eyes will glaze over. And then the questions I get from the grassroots audience base. I like the questions I get from you. Very different from what I would get on cable television on a given night of the week. And so this is deeply encouraging that I think years, I think the last decade of the public knowing that they have been lied to, systematically lied to by the legacy media, I think has inculcated a deep sense of curiosity, intellectual curiosity, skepticism. I think the mainstream media will now complain that that creates conspiracy theories. Many of these conspiracy theories end up being correct. Some of them may not be correct, but they’re still the right spirit of being skeptical of what you’re fed, such that individual people across this country, college degree or not, are asking some of the most intelligent questions I’ve heard. More intelligent questions about central bank digital currencies than I will get from my former colleagues on Wall Street. More detailed questions about the relationship between the US and the UN that I might then I might get in a standard foreign policy briefing from somebody who’s been giving those briefings for 30 years. And so I think this is actually deeply encouraging, actually, to say that, you know, part of the reason, as I often say, right, if you give a people who are sheep, a government behaves like wolves. Well, when those people are not behaving like sheep anymore, when they’re questioning what not only their government, but their media and their political class are feeding them, this is a unique moment. And this is where I’ve maybe I wouldn’t say shifted the messaging. I’ve discovered the core messaging of this campaign in the last three to four months, kind of what was in my heart at the start. I’m now able to articulate. We live in a 1776 moment. That’s what I think. It’s like a moment of the American Revolution. That’s what I feel in the air.