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.

In one Australian town, a lot of people live underground. Coober Pedy sits in South Australia’s outback, about 850 kilometers north of Adelaide. From the surface, it looks rough and dusty, with low buildings, piles of pale dirt and very little shade. Then you realize how much of the town is beneath your feet. Homes have been dug into the sandstone, along with hotels, shops and churches. Locals call the homes dugouts. In a place where summer heat can be brutal, living underground keeps temperatures much steadier. But the digging started for another reason. Opal was discovered here in 1915, and Coober Pedy grew around the people who came looking for it. Miners cut shafts into the ground, and some eventually used the same skills to carve out places to live. After World War I, returning soldiers helped make underground homes more common. You can still see that history all over town. Bedrooms, kitchens and living rooms are cut straight into the rock. There are underground churches, hotels and old mines that have been opened to visitors. Outside, heaps of excavated dirt sit beside shafts where people spent years hoping to find opal. In 1920, the settlement officially became Coober Pedy. The name is commonly explained as coming from an Aboriginal expression meaning “white man in a hole.” Mining brought people here from all over. By the late 1960s, workers from across Europe were arriving as opal prices climbed and mining equipment improved. That mix of backgrounds became part of the town too. Coober Pedy still feels like a mining town. Dust gets everywhere. Equipment sits outside homes. The edges can look unfinished. You’re never far from some reminder that people came here to dig. That’s what I find interesting about it. The underground homes weren’t dreamed up as a tourist attraction. People were trying to work in one of the harshest parts of Australia and needed a better way to handle the heat. The town grew around that problem. Dig for opal. Dig somewhere to live. That simple connection explains a lot about Coober Pedy. It’s the kind of place I write about in my newsletter. The underground homes pull you in, but the mining history is what makes the town make sense. If you like places with a story behind them, subscribe to the Timeless Traveler.

🛑 Man Fights ICE Agents in New Brunswick While Kevin Supplies the Soundtrack 🛑 ICE agents had to forcibly detain a man in New Brunswick, New Jersey after he insisted on resisting arrest by a handful of agents, per video posted this morning. Kevin stands nearby whining, "This is messed up! Get the f*ck off of him!" ICE has not yet released the man's name or immigration status. Kevin, there is nothing messed up about federal agents enforcing federal law. Under 8 U.S.C. 1357, ICE officers have the authority to arrest aliens they believe are here illegally, and choosing to resist turns a routine detention into a struggle that puts everyone at risk, including the man on the ground. This is not New Brunswick's first round. On Jan 31, DHS arrested 4 people from Honduras, Ecuador and Mexico in a targeted operation in the city, and said some had criminal histories including larceny and felony illegal re-entry. New Brunswick is 39.9% foreign-born, compared with 35.4% for Middlesex County and 23.9% statewide, per Census ACS data. New Jersey's 2018 Immigrant Trust Directive bars local police from helping with civil immigration enforcement, and Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed it into state law on Mar 25, 2026. Pew estimates 600,000 illegal aliens live in New Jersey, the 5th highest in the nation, and FAIR puts the cost to New Jersey taxpayers at $5.27 billion a year, or $1,551 per household. Kevin, if you want a country that accepts illegal aliens, then go find an unclaimed rock and write your own constitution. Let us know how that works out for you.

From the water, Ikaria looked dead. A long, dark ridge heaved out of the Aegean like the keel of a wrecked ship. No harbor lamps. No chimney smoke. No whitewashed village clinging to the shore. A corsair scanning that coastline in the 1600s would have sworn the island had been emptied, and that was exactly the point. Piracy was older than the navies sent to kill it. For centuries the Mediterranean had been a hunting ground. In 67 BCE Rome finally handed the problem to Pompey, who carved the sea into sectors and hunted the fleets that had been strangling grain ships and coastal towns. He won, for a while. The Greek islands, scattered and poorly defended, remained perfect refuges, and perfect targets. Ikaria paid the price again and again. Just offshore, the maze of coves around Fourni, also called Phourni, made an ideal staging post. Raiders could lie unseen, watch the lanes between Samos and the Anatolian coast, then strike. When the sails appeared, the people of Ikaria did not form a fortress. They vanished. They left the beaches and climbed. High in the Aetheras range the island itself offered a kind of architecture. Granite slabs the size of houses lay tilted across the slopes, forming natural roofs. A family needed only to close the open sides with one or two dry-stone walls and the mountain had swallowed them. These dwellings, later called anti-pirate houses, were almost invisible until you were standing on top of them. From the sea they were nothing. From a neighboring ridge they were still nothing. You had to be close enough to touch the stone before a door appeared. For much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the island seemed uninhabited. Travelers recorded an overturned ship of rock and silence. Behind that silence a whole society was living on the opposite schedule of the world below. The houses stayed one story and lower than the boulder that hid them. There were no chimneys. Smoke is a confession. A thin gray thread against a blue sky can be read from miles away. Cooking happened by day, if at all, and the smoke was let out through a shifted stone rather than a stack. After dark the islanders moved, talked, and worked by starlight and memory. They kept no dogs. A bark carries farther than a voice, and a bark is an invitation. Lookouts watched the approaches. When pirates did claw their way inland, rare, exhausting work on those paths, they found the rooms already empty. A few rags. A cracked pot. Nothing worth the climb. The people had melted into further folds of rock, or into the night. It was a strategy of poverty as much as of stone. The best defense against greed is to own almost nothing a raider can carry. Ikarians grew what they needed on scattered terraces, kept goats, made honey, and treated the mountain as both wall and pantry. They did not cluster into a single target. Houses stood apart, each with its own plot, so that a village was not a village until you already knew it was there. The pirate era lasted, in one form or another, for some three hundred years. Only in the early nineteenth century, when the raids finally ebbed, did people drift back toward the coast. Here is the strange part of all that hiding. The same island that taught its children to live without fire, without dogs, without being seen, became famous as one of the places on earth where people forget to die. One in three Ikarians reaches ninety. A striking number pass a hundred. Researchers later talked about wild greens, wine, walking, and unhurried time. A people who spent centuries disappearing into granite learned how to live small, close to the ground, and a very long time. The houses are still there. You can walk past one and never know, until the rock overhead becomes a ceiling and a low doorway opens in what you took for a cliff. That was the whole trick. The island was never empty. It had only learned, better than almost anywhere else in the Aegean, how not to be found.

Yesterday was my first @OpenAIDevs DevDay. I've attended 40+ tech events around the world, and this one was in the top 3 for sure. The energy, the people, the conversations, the venue, the talks, the launches, EVERYTHING was spot on. What I liked the most was how chill the team was with the live demo issues they had. Shit happens. Two small issues during an event with 20+ launches, ~2,000 people, and even a live audience Q&A. That's impressive. This is proof of a team that's not afraid to build in public and own its mistakes. This AI event had more human connection than any other tech event I've been at. I'm glad to be part of it and especially to be around an amazing developer community. You all rock. See you at the next one.

🚨#BREAKING#: A man who spent 20 YEARS building a garden in Colorado is left in total disbelief after a Black man arrested DOZENS OF TIMES destroys it in front of his eyes. It took police 3 HOURS to arrive at his garden and by that time, it was destroyed. Police say the man is 42-year-old "Worku Woldemariam"... According to court records and the business owners, on July 27th he cuts down the American and Colorado flags outside a Douglas County Sheriff's substation, throws one in the trash, one down a drain. No arrests. The next day he smashes religious artwork at a small Aurora market with a rock. When the owner asks what he's doing, he says "I don't like him." That shop owner's words: "It's not safe anymore." He got a summons for criminal mischief, but police did not arrest him! Days later, police say he threw a rock through a Starbucks window and tossed PROPANE tanks around. He was arrested and two days later, released on bond. Two days after THAT, someone matching him smashed the windows of an ice cream shop on Colfax. And then there's Mr. King. A man who spent TWENTY YEARS building a beautiful garden. Police say Woldemariam tore the ENTIRE THING apart. You can see him get red-pilled in real time: "I have worked 20 years to get this to be nice, and then to have someone come in and destroy it." Back in 2013, this same man was charged with similar crimes, and was found "mentally incompetent" to stand trial. The case was dismissed. WE DO NOT HAVE TO LIVE LIKE THIS.