Lecture: Biblical Series X: Abraham: Father of Nations

[Music] [Applause] Hello everyone. Hello! 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 got up this morning and, uh, started to put my things together. Then I tried to sign into my Gmail account, and it said that it had been disabled because I violated the terms of service with Gmail. 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 B. Peterson Clips, and so we made some technical changes. I thought maybe it had something to do with that.

I had been shut out of Google one other time years ago. When you get shut out like that, there's a little form you can fill out. So, I filled out the form and I said that I had been shut out and that I didn't know why. 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.

I thought, oh yeah, the YouTube account is hooked to the Gmail account, so that meant that I couldn't get access to any of my YouTube videos. They were still up and online, but I couldn't get access to them. I couldn't post last week's biblical lecture, for example, and so that was worrisome and made me suspicious.

Then about two hours later, something like that, I got an email from Google. 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. I thought, and they didn't say why. They didn't say anything. There was no warning whatsoever about any of this. They didn't tell me why, and they didn't say why in the email response.

So, I wrote them back. I said, because they said I could. I wrote them back and I said this might not be a good idea, basically, and you might want to think about it. Then I 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.

Then what happened was that 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. Within 20 minutes, they posted it online. They have a fairly big audience, and so that was good.

Then somebody phoned me from Ottawa, and I did a live radio show about that, and that was good too. A number of other journalists contacted me, and I sent them the information. But another one of my staff, actually my son, emailed me and he said, look, you should hold off, because maybe there's still a mistake here. I thought, yeah, there might be. It might be just a mistake, but then why in the world did I email Google if they contacted me and said they would not reinstate it? 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, about half an hour later, while I was trying to get into my AdWords account that's 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.

I was playing with that when the system came back online. I thought, well, that's interesting. Lots of people had emailed me and tweeted me, and some people within Google and some people elsewhere were doing whatever they were going to do to help me get all this material back up and running.

So, something worked. My suspicions are that what worked was the publicity. Now, so, but maybe not. You know, and it's very weird being in this situation because there have been a number of recent episodes where these larger companies, Facebook, Google, Patreon—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.

This is very ominous to me, partly because we've turned our Commun...