It's been a very strange day, so I'm going to tell you about what happened, and then I'll start the lecture.

So I I got up this morning and, uh, started to put my day together.

And then I tried to sign into my Gmail account and it said that it had bean disabled because I violated the terms of service with Gmail, and I thought, Well, I didn't violate any terms of service that I know of now.

I set up a new YouTube channel yesterday called Jordan Be Peterson clips, and so we made some technical changes.

And so I thought maybe it had something to do with that.

And I had been shut out of Google one other time years ago.

So when you get shut out like that, there's a little form you can fill out.

And so I filled out the form and I said that I had been shut out and uh, that I didn't know why, and I sent it off.

And then I realized one of my staff members called me and said that she was locked out of the YouTube account and I thought, Oh yeah, the YouTube account is hooked to the CI e mail account.

So that meant that I couldn't get access to any of my YouTube videos.

They were still up on online, but I couldn't get access to them.

I couldn't post last week's Biblical lecture for for, for example, and so that was worrisome and made me suspicious.

And then a boat.

Two hours later, something like that.

I got an email from Google and they said that they had reviewed my request to be reinstated and that I had violated Google's terms of agreement or terms of service, and they weren't going to turn my account back on.

And I thought, and they didn't say why.

They didn't say anything I got There is no warning whatsoever about any of this.

They didn't tell me why, and they didn't say why in the email response.

And so I wrote him back and I said, because they said I could.

I wrote him back and I said This might not be a good idea, basically, and you might want to think about it.

And then I tweeted tweeted what had happened right?

I took screenshots and I tweeted and I contacted a whole bunch of journalists because it turns out that I know a whole bunch of journalists.

And so and so then what happened then was that, um I got a call from the Daily Caller in the United States.

I had done an interview with them last week, which isn't posted yet, and they interviewed me and within 20 minutes posted it online.

And so they have a fairly big audience.

And so that was good.

And then somebody phoned me from Ottawa and I did a live radio show about that, and that was good.

And then a number of other journalists contact me, and I sent them the information.

But another one of my staff and actually my son e mailed me and he said, Look, you should hold off because maybe there's still a mistake here and I thought, Yeah, there might be it might be just a mistake.

But then white in the world did.

I e mailed Google and they contacted me and they said they would not reinstate it, and they didn't provide me with any information.

So I contacted the other journalists and I said, Well, you never know.

Maybe this is just a mistake.

So let's hold off then.

Well, I was about half an hour later, while I was trying to get into my I used this AdWords account that's looked linked to Google.

I don't run ads on my videos, but I need the AdWords account because it helps me add some little gadgets to the videos that I wouldn't otherwise be able to.

And I was.

I was playing with that.

The system came back online.

I thought, Well, that's interesting.

And lots of people that e mailed me and twittered me and some people within Google and some people elsewhere, and they were doing whatever they were going to do to help me get all this material back up and running.

And so something worked.

My suspicions are that what worked was the publicity.

Now so but maybe not.

You know, it's very weird being in this situation, because there has been a number of recent episodes where these larger companies Facebook, Google, patri on.

Not that it's a massive company, but it's starting to become reasonably significant, have decided on rather arbitrary grounds to shut down their users.

And this is very ominous to me, partly because we've we've turned our communications over two very large systems or very large systems have emerged to mediate our communication, right?

I mean, there's lots of benefit to it, so you don't want to get too cynical about it.

But we're blind with regards to the policies that regulate the the the actions, the regulatory actions of these large organizations.

And that's really a bad thing.

And something else is even more ominous, really ominous.

You know, it's highly probable that we're going to build political algorithms into artificial intelligence, and this sort of thing will be regulated by machines that no one understands.

And that's a really bad idea.

And that's a really likely possibility.

So, anyways, I was all confused about this.

I thought, Jesus, maybe I flew off the handle, you know, because I was sort of it was stressful, man, you know, because I have like, 100 and 50,000 emails in that account, like, That's a lot of emails, and it's all my correspondence for the last 10 years, you know.

So it's an archive as well as an ongoing email system.

I have a commercial email system that I just set up three weeks ago with, like six different email addresses now to try to organize my correspondent.

So I wasn't completely unable to communicate.

My calendar was gone, and that's a bloody disaster because, like, I've got things scheduled out forever, and I don't remember what they are.

I can't even remember what I'm doing in a day so much less in a month.

But I thought maybe I flew off the handle and I was worried that I contacted the journalist too soon and you know, but anyways, it all worked out.

So then what happened?

Well, just as I was coming to this lecture, I stepped outside and there's little package outside.

Luckily, it wasn't a bomb.

There's a There's a package outside.

Nice little packages We look.

My wife and I looked inside it.

There was a couple of bottles of wine in there that was nice.

And there was a little note, and so I'm going to read you the little note because it's actually pretty interesting.

So So this person said that they had finally tackled the self are throwing sweet, so they seem to be happy about that.

But that's not so interesting except peripherally.

A friend on Twitter has contact with Google engineers, she said.

Quote.

I spoke with some friends inside Google who offered to help, and I did get contacted by quite a few people at Google who said that they had been watching my lectures and so on and were happy about what I was doing.

Anyways.

I spoke with some friends inside Google who offered to help, but they suggest he set up a back up plan, the team's air feeling significant pressure from advocacy groups and quote, I haven't least four Google engineers who offered to speak up on his behalf, but they know the team dynamics and, unfortunately, especially YouTube is an S J W cess pool.

I hope this information is useful to you.

It's like, Yeah, it's kind of useful.

All right, so there was That was part of what happened today.

And so anyways, I still don't really understand it, right, because I don't know why it got shut down and I don't know if anything, I did go to turn back on, and I don't know the reasons for it, and that's also rather ominous.

It seems to me that when I was thinking it through and was that?

I know I have a fairly What would you call it?

Respectable YouTube following.

I don't know if you'd necessarily call it respectable.

It's fairly large YouTube following.

And it seems to me that it would have bean appropriate for Google if they were going to shut down my account to tell me why I would think and also maybe looked me up maybe, especially after I e mailed them.

And then maybe not to have emailed me back and said, No, we're not going to reinstate you, but we're not going to tell you any reasons that they didn't say they wouldn't tell many reasons.

They just didn't tell me any reasons.

And then it also seems very strange to me that it just all a sudden went back on after two hours and so well, so I don't know what to make of that.

Maybe more information will come to light over the next few days.

I hope that I didn't jump the gun, but it's very a very peculiar set of circumstances.

I thought it was kind of amusing, actually, that the video that they stopped me from posting today was the last biblical lecture.

You wouldn't necessarily think that that would be the sort of thing that people would want to stop from being posted.

But, um, we're in very, very strange times.

So that was my adventure for today.

And so I didn't You know, I hate speakers who apologized to the crowd before they talk to them.

Because, you know, if you're speaking to people and they put all this effort into coming, then you shouldn't tell them what a sorry and useless creature you are before you talk to them, you know, and ask for their forbearance and forgiveness.

It's like it's a little you're a little late for that.

But I'm still going to do that a little bit today because, you know, I wanted to spend all day preparing this lecture.

I mean, I've prepared a lot before him, but that rattled me up a lot.

And so I didn't prepare a CZ much as I could have anyways will stumble forward and see how it goes.

I I'm I'm I'm reasonably familiar with the stories now.

And so onward and upward.

So I'm going to reiterate this.

You know, I've learned something.

I have this idea that it would be a good idea for young people on Boulder people, citizens of the West, let's say to learn more about their culture and their civilisation, right, because it's a great civilisation and its it's taken a lot of work to put together.

But I don't think that we really know.

I mean, I know a fair bit about it, although I wouldn't consider myself nearly as educated as a person should be.

But I'm not too badly educated.

And But I tell you, going through these biblical lectures, verse by verse just makes me even more aware of how unbelievably ignorant I am.

No, and partly for 22 reasons like one is because I've been using this Bible hub dot com place, and I think I told you last week, but I wanted to reiterate it, cause it's important.

It's so interesting the way that they've set it up, because you could go through the biblical stories verse by verse, and then for each first There's a hole small font page of commentary from multiple sources.

And so you know, not only is the Bible hybrid hyperlinked in the way that I discussed in the first lecture with all the versus referring to not all the other versus but lots of them.

But it's un.

It's got its tendrils out into literature, you know, direct commentaries on the text, but also all the all the literature that's being influenced by it.

So it's it's it's unbelievably central and core text, and it's so interesting to read a book where every sentence has been commented on what really in volumes.

And then just to get a sense of that volume of material, you know how much power brainpower there's been put into this and and to also understand how bloody, ignorant, like I'm so ignorant about this.

There's all this work, and it seems that we've left it to decay in the dust, and it's a big mistake, man.

It's a big mistake because the people who were writing these commentaries like, you know, a lot of it's from the 14th and 15th and 16th century.

It's kind of archaic, and it's and it's some of its outdated and some of it you wouldn't agree with.

But if you read all the commentaries side by side, you know you get a pretty good blast of wisdom coming at you and like the thing about wisdom is, it stops you from running face first into walls.

You know, it's not just their toe, too, so that you can talk to people at parties about what university you graduated from, you know, and it's there because the information is unbelievably useful.

You know, one of the things that I've realized that I want to return to tonight because I've been thinking a lot about this idea of the Ark.

You know, I think I mentioned to you last week that I'd figured out that there is this idea that Noah was perfect in his generations, and that meant that he has said his family in order wasn't just him.

But he had said his family in order.

And because of that, when the catastrophe came like it comes to everyone, he was able to withstand it because he had the support of the people who were near and dear to him.

And that's really important when things come along to lay you low like if you're alone and the flood comes, it's like man, good bye to you.

If you've got 10 or 15 people supporting you in a tight network, you know, and and your inter relationships with them are pristine, and you can tell them the truth and they can tell the truth back to you.

It's possible that you might be able to find that thin way that will preserve you.

When, when?

When?

When you know the terrible things come knocking at your door.

And so there's This idea of the Ark is very, very concrete in Noah.

It's actually a structure that that he inhabits, You know, it's a con critized, almost like a child's story.

And I'm not being cynical about that because there are some bloody brilliant child's Children's stories.

But, you know, it's really concretize.

But then Abraham comes along, and instead of a narc, there's a covenant.

Right now, it says in the story of Noah that Noah walked with God.

And of course, Abraham.

It isn't clear, exactly did.

He's walking with God or before God, which will get into later.

But you see, I see this is part of the increasing cycle psychology ization of the sacred ideas that were acted out by archaic people.

So first of all, it's Kong critized in the form of ah ship that actually sustains you when the floods come, right?

It's very concrete imagery, the sort of thing you might see in a movie.

But then, with Abraham, it turns into a psychological covenant.

In some sense, it's like a contractual agreement.

Now it's a It's a contractual agreement between Abraham and God, but But that doesn't really matter that let me know if you think it matters.

But it's that it's only it's only half of what's important about that.

The other half is that it's a contract.

And you know, one of the things that you do with your ideal, let's say, is you establish a contract with you also established like a social contract with other people, right, that that's what keeps society organized.

And so there's this idea that emerges in the Abraham stories of a sacred contract, and that has the same function as the Ark and what it does because what happens in Abraham Will Seymour this today is that he you know God tells him to go forward into the world, and we've talked about that last week, and he does that the encounters, famine and the encounters tyranny, and he encounters powerful people who want to take from him.