You may have seen that in the news that Jordan Peterson checked into a rehab facility. Now I have a lot of feelings about that. Strangely enough, one, we wish him well. Apparently he got on some benzos, Klonopin I think it was. His wife had some cancer and things got tough and he got an addiction. But he's getting help.

So here are the things I would say about Jordan Peterson. If ever there were somebody in the world that you thought had his life figured out, you know I'm talking about life, like how to do life right, it felt like it should have been him. Because he's literally the most productive advisor of how to live of anyone on earth at this moment. You know Tony Robbins has his own deal. But in terms of someone describing to you what life is all about, describing to you how to live it well, he's literally probably the most famous living person for telling you how to do things right. And he got addicted and he had to go into rehab.

So here's what I take away from that. People need to understand that addiction is not a choice in the normal way that we think of choice. That once the addiction becomes who you are, in other words once you've added a certain type of addictive chemical to your body, you're no longer a person who takes drugs. You are a person who is part drug. That's who you become.

So if the old Jordan Peterson could have said no to drugs, once he took them, presumably thinking it was a temporary situation, once he took them he became the drug. So it would not be fair to say, "Hey Jordan Peterson, you're so good with your advice for other people, why don't you just toughen up and stop taking those drugs?" It doesn't really work that way. It doesn't work that way. He's not a person who takes drugs. He is a person who is part drug. He's part chemistry and that chemistry includes the drug. Now that's who he is. Now he has to become a different person and that's what he's working through.

So I have only positive feelings about this. Weirdly it's tragic in a number of ways. He's working through it but we wish him the best. He probably has the strongest signal to noise ratio of anybody you're ever gonna watch. I was just watching one of his videos for maybe the third time. You've probably seen it. This video where somebody asks him a question about climate change and he starts slowly and then he sort of gets up to speed and it's sort of breathtakingly smart. I guess I don't know another word to put on it. And I say smart not in a way that it's gonna be some intellectual conversation but rather he simply breaks down the topic in a way that people don't break it down. So you can kind of see the landscape the way he describes it. You go, oh okay, I'm starting to see it now the way you're describing it.

So here's the thing. Jordan Peterson is one of the most useful people in the universe, meaning that when he talks and people listen to it they become better people. It actually is that powerful. And you've seen lots and lots of people who have said he's influenced them in one way or another. But now he's doing it again. Certainly this is not a path he would have chosen, one assumes. But because he's sort of publicly confessing his addiction and then he's doing the thing that you need to do, which is get help, he is once again becoming a role model for people who may think, well do I have a weakness or you know what's going on.

Jordan Peterson was a rich, successful, smart, capable guy who knew exactly the risks of the drugs. He knew exactly the risks before he put them in his mouth. He's not a tourist. He noticed the landscape, did it anyway. So that should tell you a lot about the nature of addiction. For those people who are always telling me, "Hey it's not China's fault for shipping us fentanyl. People just have to stop taking it." Well you know when you say that it shows that you don't know what addiction is. Nobody intentionally gets addicted. Nobody makes a choice to become an addict. Maybe somebody does but it's pretty rare.