In this episode, we're joined by writer and podcaster, Alex Blumberg, to discuss the fallout from a controversial TV interview with comedian Kathy Newman. Alex and Alex discuss the backlash to the interview, and how it was handled by Channel 4, the media, and the general public, including Alex's own fans, who mocked the interview and called her a "victim." They also discuss the power of the victim card, and whether or not it's ever appropriate to use it in a real life situation. And Alex explains why he thinks it's a bad idea to be a victim in real life, and why we should all hand in our victim card at some point in our lives. If you're not a victim, you need to be one, because we're all victims, right? We're in no way affiliated with the Bill Simmons Podcast, the Ringer, or Bill Simmons, and we're not here to make you feel like you're a victim. We're here to help you become a better version of yourself, and that's what we're here for you! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Artwork by Ian Dorsch. We'd like to learn more about you, the listeners, so please take a few minutes to leave us a rating and review us a review on Apple Podcasts. or wherever else you're listening to this podcast. Please rate and subscribe to our podcast. Thank you so much for all the support we're listening and reviewing, it's really means a lot to us, we really appreciate it. Thank you, really really helps us a lot of people, really appreciate you. We really do appreciate it a lot. - thank you. XOXO, Sarah, Sarah - Thank you very much, much appreciate you, bye bye. Much love, bye, bye. <3, bye - Sarah, bye - Erika, Kristy, Caitlyn, Matt, Natalie, Margo, Emily, Evan, and Jack, Jacklyn, Jai, & Jacklyn Sarah, EJ, Elesa, and Sarah, Marnie, and Jadyn, <3 - Ollie, Rachael, Elyssa, JUICY, J.A. & Gage, Maren, B.J. ( )
00:00:17.000This interview that you just did with this woman, Kathy Newman, was that in the UK? It was, Channel 4, UK. I just went, I felt bad, but I was also laughing.
00:00:28.000I went to her Twitter page to read, and with each one of her tweets, no matter what she says, someone writes underneath it.
00:00:36.000So what you're saying is, and then some ridiculous, but by the way, Your fans were mocking her, but politely, non-aggressively.
00:01:26.000Went into it incredibly confrontational, not trying to find your actual perspective, but trying to force you to defend a non-realistic perspective.
00:01:35.000Yes, well, I was the hypothetical villain of her imagination, essentially.
00:01:40.000Well, what happened was interesting, too, the way it played itself out.
00:01:45.000I met her in the green room beforehand, you know, she was being made up, and then they put a little bit of powder on me, and we had a friendly kind of interchange, and then we went and sat in front of the cameras for a couple of minutes, you know, before the show got rolling, and we had a pretty pleasant back and forth, and then as soon as the cameras went on, she was a completely different person.
00:02:06.000Yeah, well, so that kind of alerted me to, well, the fact that there was something rotten in the state of Denmark, let's say.
00:02:13.000Yeah, but, you know, this is also why YouTube is going to kill TV. Because television, by its nature, all of these narrow broadcasts, To their credit.
00:02:42.000I think that they thought that the interview went fine.
00:02:46.000That's the scuttlebutt I've got from sort of behind the scenes, because I know some people who know what's going on at Channel 4, and they're shell-shocked by the response.
00:02:56.000And then, of course, there was the counter-response.
00:02:59.000The Guardian, the next day, published an article saying that the head of Channel 4 had to call in police security because of threats.
00:03:09.000Well, first of all, you can call the police in about anything, and they never did detail out exactly what the threats were.
00:03:17.000But then about 20 newspapers picked that up and went for the, well, Kathy Newman is now being harassed by an army of online trolls for doing nothing but doing her job, Which, well, and then there was a backlash against that in the press, so it's been a...
00:04:16.000Well, one of the things that you pointed out was when you were talking about competition for very lucrative jobs, and you were saying, look what you've done.
00:04:40.000I can't imagine anything we could possibly strive for in our society that would make it into hell faster than equality of outcome.
00:04:48.000Like, the historical evidence for the pathology of that root is so strong.
00:04:54.000It's like, You have to be historically ignorant beyond belief or malevolent or resentful beyond comprehension in order to think that that's a good idea to argue for that.
00:05:06.000I agree with you, but I think that even if you came into this with no knowledge of history, but a complete understanding of human beings, You would say, well, that doesn't make any sense.
00:05:14.000And one of the best quotes that I've ever read about it is that if you have real true freedom, you're never going to have equality of outcome.
00:05:20.000Because with real true freedom, you have the freedom to not engage.
00:05:24.000Well, look, if you look at a guy like Jeff Bezos, for instance, that Amazon guy who's worth more money than anybody ever, right?
00:05:55.000They work so efficiently and so effectively and make use of every second in ways you can't even imagine unless you're in that sort of position.
00:06:03.000So, you know, doing that doesn't mean that you will succeed, but not doing it certainly means that you will fail.
00:06:09.000Well, not doing it certainly means you will never achieve that level of success, and that's what we're talking about.
00:06:15.000We're talking about a quality of outcome.
00:06:23.000And I should have the freedom to not do that.
00:06:25.000As he should have the freedom to do that.
00:06:27.000If we're going to play this game called capitalism, which we're all agreeing is probably, at least as far as the models that we have right now, is the best one that we have.
00:06:35.000If we're all going to play this game, if someone decides to be the Michael Jordan of capitalism, you can't stop them.
00:06:41.000You can't say, no, no, no, you're playing this game too well.
00:06:49.000You can try to stop people from winning crookedly, which is what you should do.
00:06:53.000And, you know, there's a couple of things that are really worth delving into with regards to that, too, because there's this sort of Marxist notion that all this inequality is generated as a consequence of capitalism, and that's actually technically false.
00:07:56.000This phenomena where a small number of people end up controlling a tremendous proportion of the resource is not only limited to money, and it doesn't only occur in capitalist societies.
00:08:08.000So you see the same thing with number of points scored by a spectacular sports figure.
00:08:14.000There's always a tiny proportion of people who are way ahead on the curve, or people who make records, or people who sell paintings, or people who compose music, or people who sell music online.
00:08:29.000And so, well, first we can't blame that on capitalism.
00:08:33.000And second, we should note that it actually does constitute a problem, which is what the left-wingers are always jumping up and down about, right?
00:08:38.000Like, too much inequality starts to destabilize your society.
00:08:41.000And it isn't obvious how to shovel money from the top end, maybe the one-tenth of one percent who have almost all the money, down to the people who have almost nothing, in a way that's effective.
00:08:52.000So that they don't get thrown out of the game completely and so that the whole society doesn't destabilize.
00:08:59.000It is a problem because inequality does exist and it does tend to magnify across time.
00:09:04.000And then there's another problem too, which we haven't figured out is, imagine that in order to make everyone rich, You have to tolerate a certain amount of inequality.
00:09:44.000I think it was something along the lines of why can't people hear what Jordan Peterson is saying.
00:09:48.000You are misrepresented more than anyone I know in a weird way.
00:09:54.000You are villainized in a weird way where I can't believe that these people are honestly...
00:10:01.000Looking at your opinions and coming up with these conclusions I can't help but feel like what is happening is people are consciously deciding to ignore reality and paint you as this archetypal figure of oppressive white male patriarchy Ignorance,
00:10:23.000fill in the blank with all the rest of the descriptives that you'd like to use, but they've decided to paint you in this way like as As a target.
00:10:34.000Because they need a target to sort of reinforce this idea that transgender people are being victimized and women are being victimized.
00:10:43.000Well, even deeper that the right narrative is the way that we should view the world is victim versus oppressor.
00:10:50.000Because that's the basic postmodern neo-Marxist template.
00:10:53.000It's the right way to view the world is that it's a power ground.
00:11:23.000Well, that isn't what we do in the West, let's say.
00:11:26.000We put your individual identity paramount.
00:11:29.000And then, well, that's just for starters, fundamentally.
00:11:34.000And then, I guess the other reason that people are on my case to some degree is because I have made a strong case, which I think is fully documented by the scientific literature, that there are intrinsic differences, say, between men and women.
00:11:46.000And I think the evidence in that, this is the thing that staggered me, is that no serious scientists have debated that for like four decades.
00:11:56.000That argument was done by the time I went to graduate school.
00:12:00.000Everyone knew that human beings were not a blank slate, that biological forces...
00:12:06.000We've parameterized the way that we thought and felt and acted and valued.
00:12:13.000The fact that this has become somehow debatable again is just, especially because it's being done by legislative fiat, they're forcing it.
00:12:20.000To me, as a scientist, it's just, well, and in the States, too, with Title IX, for example, because Title IX is sort of predicated on that viewpoint.
00:12:29.000What is Title IX? Title IX was originally just a piece of legislation that mandated that female sports teams were funded to the same degree that male sports teams were funded in American universities.
00:12:40.000But it's been expanded out so that if there's any differences in any areas whatsoever between the genders, then the universities are being taken to court.
00:12:48.000And like 200 of them, last I looked, about 200 of them were up...
00:12:53.000And they can have their funding revoked if they violate Title IX provisions.
00:12:56.000So it's become like a vicious weapon for social justice warrior equality of outcome types.
00:14:11.000If you took a random woman out of the population and a random man, and you had to bet on who was more temperamentally aggressive, if you bet on the man, you'd be right 60% of the time.
00:16:58.000Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of 115. So in the typical population overall has an average IQ of 100. 15 points is about the difference between the typical college student and the typical high school student.
00:17:10.000Okay, so it's not a massive difference, but if you go to the extreme, say, well, let's go look at people who only have an IQ of 145, which is kind of where you hit the beginnings of genius level.
00:17:21.000It's like the Jews are overwhelmingly overrepresented.
00:17:25.000So, relatively small differences in the average can produce walloping differences at the extremes.
00:17:32.000It's not surprising, because it actually requires a fairly sophisticated grasp of statistics.
00:17:37.000But when we're talking about things like differential outcome in the workplace, Then you have to take a sophisticated statistical approach to it, or you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
00:17:48.000And unfortunately, many of the people who are talking about things like gender differences, they have no idea what they're talking about.
00:17:57.000Like the social constructionist types, the women's studies types, the neo-Marxists, they don't give a damn about biology.
00:18:04.000It's like they inhabit some disembodied universe.
00:18:08.000So, the review was poorly written, at best, and showed a very poor grasp of the relationship between group differences and economic and practical outcomes.
00:18:22.000And there's a need, in some way, on that side, this side of the debate, the anti-Jordan Peterson side, to Label men and women as being virtually identical when there's so much evidence that that's not the case.
00:18:40.000And what you're saying, you've never said one is superior, one is inferior.
00:18:46.000What you are is a guy who's pointing out the reality of the difference between the various types of human beings.
00:18:52.000And you've been very open about the extremes.
00:19:15.000I think one of the beautiful things about freedom...
00:19:18.000Is that people get an opportunity to express themselves in a way that's genuinely them.
00:19:23.000And whether that is like our friend Alex Honnold, who's a free climber, who is like climbing up these fantastic mountains with no ropes, or whether it's a female MMA fighter like Raquel Pennington, Just a tank and beating the shit out of people,
00:20:45.000I'm sorry, I don't know how to say her name.
00:20:47.000W-O-J-I-C-I-C-K-I said that women find geeky male industries as opposed to social industries not very interesting, and Sundar cites research on gender differences.
00:21:01.000Yeah, well, that's exactly the difference in interest that I just pointed out.
00:21:03.000Yes, and this is what James Damore wrote in his memo that got him fired.
00:21:08.000And this, in my mind, if I was the lawyer for James Damore, I'd be like, oh, well, look what we have here.
00:21:36.000So when you tell an engineer that you want feedback, the engineer thinks, oh, you want feedback, and you want, like, facts and stuff, right?
00:21:45.000Because that's what feedback would be like.
00:21:47.000So Damore went and wrote this, like, thorough memo and gave it to them.
00:21:50.000He said, well, you know, this is what I think.
00:22:54.000This is just a guy that was talking about the differences and the choices that people make that's based on just the variations that you were just discussing.
00:23:01.000Well, there's a good study done a while ago, and unfortunately I don't remember the author, but they were looking at junior high math prodigies.
00:23:08.000And they're pretty equally distributed between boys and girls.
00:23:12.000But by the time university came along, the math prodigy boys, they tend to go into the STEM fields, but the girls wouldn't.
00:23:18.000And it isn't because they lacked ability, because they had stellar ability.
00:23:23.000And it turns out, like the interest thing turns out to be a big one.
00:23:26.000So with personality alone, if you measure men and women's personalities, and then you add up all the differences in personalities, you could tell with about 75 to 80% certainty by looking at a full personality readout whether a person's male or female.
00:23:40.000So you'd be wrong 25% of the time, something like that.
00:23:43.000But if you add interest to that, you can get it up to about 90%.
00:23:46.000And so, you know, you say, well, are these differences large?
00:23:50.000Well, individually, they're not that big.
00:23:54.000They make more difference at the extremes, but if you add them up, then you can almost completely differentiate men from women.
00:24:02.000So, by that token, they're very large.
00:24:04.000And the interest thing actually turns out to matter a lot.
00:24:06.000Like, it's probably the most important individual difference that has been discovered between men and women at the psychological level.
00:24:12.000It has real decent explanatory power, because you might say, Well, men have a slight edge in spatial intelligence, and that's why they're over-represented in STEM fields.
00:24:21.000And women have a slight edge in verbal intelligence.
00:24:23.000This is debatable, but literature kind of indicates that.
00:24:26.000And that's why they're overwhelmingly the majority of fiction readers, for example.
00:24:31.000Is that the reason that there's differential representation in the STEM fields?
00:24:36.000It doesn't look like it's an intellectual issue.
00:24:38.000Which is also what Damore pointed out, by the way.
00:24:40.000He never said once that this was a cognitive issue.
00:24:43.000But it's a matter of choice, a matter of interest.
00:24:46.000And women tend to be more people-oriented.
00:24:50.000Now, the thing is, this has also been discovered in chimpanzees and other primates.
00:24:55.000Like, if you offer baby or child chimpanzees, juvenile chimpanzees, the choice between thing-like toys, like cars, or people-like toys, like dolls, the males will go for the thing-like toys and the females will go for the people-like toys.
00:25:13.000And you think, well, is that surprising?
00:25:14.000It's like, well, no, it's not that surprising, really.
00:25:17.000I mean, women have to take care of infants, tiny infants, and you have to be really people-oriented to do that, because a tiny infant is an unbelievably demanding social relationship, and it's a primary relationship for about two years, you know,
00:25:33.000and so women are tilted towards the kind of temperament that makes that possible.
00:25:38.000It's like, well, is that such a shock?
00:26:38.000If I'm reasonable, and I'm standing up against the radical left, and they admit that I'm reasonable, then there has to be an admission that reasonable people could stand up against the radical left, which kind of implies that the radical left isn't that reasonable.
00:26:54.000And so while they're not going to go there, of course, they're not that reasonable.
00:26:57.000Unreasonable beyond belief, as we saw in the situation with Lindsay Shepard in Canada.
00:27:04.000Yeah, let's talk about that real quick, because that was a fascinating thing, too, and that also had to do with you.
00:27:09.000So, she was discussing you in class, and you could fill up...
00:27:14.000Well, yeah, she's in the communications department at Wilfrid Laurier, and they were talking about...
00:27:23.000The role of language in communication, which is kind of what you would do in a communication class, and she decided to show a five-minute clip from a program I had done for TV Ontario, which is a public television station, mainstream, left-leaning, liberal television station.
00:27:39.000Station news program and a good one a good one and I had been on there with a number of other people including a professor Nicholas Matt from the University of Toronto who claimed essentially that there were no biological differences between men and women and that had been the scientific consensus for the last four decades so anyways she showed a clip from this and Well she got hauled in front of two professors And an administrator,
00:28:04.000Adria Joel, who was basically hired for that purpose and raked over the coals for daring to show this video.
00:28:10.000And she had the wherewithal to tape it.
00:28:15.000And then she made the tape public, and in that tape they compared me.
00:28:18.000It was really blackly comical, you know.
00:28:21.000They compared me to Hitler, but then said, well, it's Hitler or Milo Yiannopoulos.
00:28:26.000I thought, you guys, you're so damn clueless, you can't even get your insults right.
00:28:29.000It's like, you can't say, that's like playing a video of Hitler or Milo Yiannopoulos.
00:28:35.000It's like, first of all, Hitler and Milo Yiannopoulos, they're actually not in the same category.
00:30:07.000To a lot of people that were on the outside of how preposterous some of the dialogue was inside these universities.
00:30:14.000Yeah, well they couldn't have done me a bigger favor than having that scandal, because when I made videos about Bill C-16 15 months ago, I said, look, here's what's going to happen, because this legislation is written in an appalling manner, and the surrounding policies are pathological.
00:30:29.000I said, here's what's going to happen.
00:30:45.000You know, they threw everything but the kitchen sink at me.
00:30:48.000And like, fair enough, you know, because there's always a possibility that I was wrong.
00:30:52.000But the problem was, is I read the policies, and I understood them, and I knew where they were leading.
00:30:56.000But I never imagined That one of the consequences of Bill C-16 and its sister legislation was that a teaching assistant at a Canadian university would be pilloried and accused of breaking the law and then accused of all sorts of reprehensible political beliefs by two professors and an administrator hired for that purpose merely because she showed a video about two people talking about the law.
00:31:21.000It's like, that paranoid as I am, let's say, that exceeded the grasp or the reach of my imagination.
00:31:29.000And then, of course, it was made public and people just couldn't believe it.
00:31:32.000And then you think, okay, well, what's the defense?
00:32:19.000The universities have so much to be ashamed of.
00:32:23.000Well, there was an article in the Boston Globe this week saying the same thing, that all of this crazy postmodern identity politics, equality of outcome nonsense is not only disrupted the university in a way that might be irreparable, as far as I can tell,
00:32:39.000but it's rapidly spreading outside into the Normal, say, business world, which is exactly what you see, for example, at Google.
00:32:47.000Well, the tech industry in particular seems to be more left-leaning than pretty much any industry there is.
00:32:54.000And I guess it's because there's so many intelligent people there, so many people that have spent a tremendous amount of time in universities, and they get indoctrinated into this mindset.
00:33:02.000And you're seeing that in the CEO of YouTube's response to the James Damore memo.
00:33:10.000They're talking about harmful gender stereotypes.
00:33:13.000That's not what he talked about at all.
00:33:15.000What's fascinating to me about all of this is it just reeks of tribalism.
00:33:22.000That these people on the left have decided, I mean, and I'm mostly on the left, which is really crazy.
00:33:30.000I mean, when it comes to most policies and most thoughts of equality and the idea of just letting people be who they are, I mean, that's what the left used to stand for.
00:33:41.000It used to stand for being open-minded.
00:33:43.000It used to stand for being a reasonable person.
00:33:47.000Now it seems to be all about this very toxic tribal ideology and this is one of the reasons why so many of these attacks on you are so baffling to me is because there's a willful ignorance or a deceptive There's a deceptive description of who you are and what you're saying and what you represent.
00:34:07.000And it's this conveniently categorized, not even convenient, willfully deceptively categorized into these categories of homophobia, transphobia, sexism.
00:34:21.000These are reprehensible categories that if they can just shove Something that you're saying, figure out a way to push you into this little narrow, confined, then everyone has to disagree with you, everyone has to insult you, and everyone has to take that girl into their office and chastise you for not even speaking up for you.
00:34:59.000Ugh, it's so strange, but what they don't understand, and this is what's really crazy, is that the world is watching, and that most people, maybe it's a 60-40 like we were talking about before when it comes to aggressive women versus aggressive men.
00:35:43.000And they've occupied powerful positions in many, many institutions.
00:35:47.000HR, one of the things I really can't figure out right now, and for anybody who's running a company that's listening, they should think this through.
00:35:55.000Like, to let these post-modern neo-Marxists into your company through the guise of human resources is an absolute catastrophe.
00:36:26.000I agree with you, but I don't think people are aware of it.
00:36:28.000I think part of the problem is this battleground is largely ignored by the general population.
00:36:33.000I don't think most people are aware of what's going on.
00:36:36.000You are, because you're Obviously, you're deeply embedded in the university system in Canada, and you're obviously now branching out into YouTube and podcasts and all these different ways to get this information out.
00:36:49.000But the average person that is a CEO of a company, they're concerned with their own company.
00:36:55.000They're concerned with their own individual needs.
00:36:57.000They're concerned with organizing things and keeping their bottom line and Yeah, well, they're also concerned with looking fair and making sure that they're not prejudiced and all of that, which is laudable.
00:37:08.000I just don't think they see the wave coming.
00:37:29.000It's like, well, that's what happens when you play identity politics, this tribalism.
00:37:32.000This is really what I can't stand about identity politics.
00:37:35.000And I've been warning about the consequences of that on the right wing, too, because what I see happening is that As the left, like let's say the left gets to define the linguistic territory, which was what I was objecting to in Bill C-16.
00:37:48.000When it came out, I said, look, I'm not going to use these neologisms, Z and Xur, etc.
00:37:54.000Because as far as I'm concerned, they have nothing to...
00:37:56.000People don't know what you're talking about.
00:37:58.000A bunch of different made-up gender pronouns to describe people in a non-male or female way.
00:38:55.000But most people think that that's a gigantic step to go from saying you don't want to say z or zur or any of these made-up gender pronouns to these are murderous people.
00:39:16.000When you're saying this, when you were so adamant about it, I had to start reading about it myself, and I had to start doing a lot of research about it myself.
00:39:24.000And I think most people hear Marxism and they think socialism.
00:39:28.000They think pooling all your money together, making things more even for people.
00:40:16.000Well, that's why you have to look at the underlying ideology, you know, and you think, well, what is the level at which these things should be addressed?
00:40:34.000Well, and I think that's why I recommend it to people continually to read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.
00:40:38.000So actually, there's a set of books that lay this out perfectly.
00:40:42.000You read Dostoevsky's wrote a book called The Possessed or The Devils.
00:40:46.000And it's a description of the initial breakdown of the Orthodox Christian society in Russia in the late 1800s and the rise of radical socialist ideas.
00:40:57.000So it's sort of like the prodroma to the Russian Revolution.
00:41:02.000And it concentrates on the personalities that are involved.
00:41:06.000And then if you read after that Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, where he details what he does in that book is quite remarkable.
00:41:13.000He says, look, there were tens of millions of people killed from 1919 to 1959 in the Soviet Union, as a consequence of internal repression.
00:41:21.000And it's so dreadful that words can't do it justice.
00:41:25.000I mean, it's absolutely dreadful what happened in the Soviet Union.
00:41:28.000I mean, just for starters, six million Ukrainians died in the 1930s because of enforced starvation.
00:41:33.000In fact, in the 1930s, here's how terrible it was.
00:41:38.000So all the food that the collective farmers, newly collectivized farmers, had produced, which wasn't very much, by the way, was taken from them and brought to the cities.
00:41:49.000So let's say you were the mother of some children and all your grain had been shipped off to the cities and you thought, well, I'm not going to have my children starve to death.
00:41:57.000I'm going to go out in the field and I'm going to, on my hands and knees, and I'm going to pick up the grains that are left over that the harvesters didn't get and I'm going to feed those to my kids.
00:42:44.000How much tyranny you have to impose in order to produce something like equality of outcome.
00:42:50.000And Thomas Sowell has talked about this a little bit too.
00:42:54.000What the people who are agitating for equality of outcome don't understand is that you have to cede so much power to the authorities, to the government, in order to ensure equality of outcome that a tyranny is inevitable.
00:45:42.000Second of all, well, at least in principle, a lot of those people might have something to offer the world, or their children might, and you want to open up avenues of opportunity to them so that they can succeed, but so that everyone else can benefit from their success.
00:45:58.000And then the next thing is, well, if the inequality gets out of hand too much, then the whole society starts to destabilize, because if you get enough people stacked up at zero, especially young men, You get enough young men stacked up at zero, they think, oh, to hell with it, we'll just flip the whole board over, and it'll settle in a new configuration,
00:46:15.000and maybe we won't be stuck at zero in the new configuration.
00:46:20.000So there's lots of reasons to be concerned about inequality.
00:46:23.000And so you need a voice on the left to say, look, we've got to parameterize the tendency towards inequality so that it doesn't destabilize the entire society, so that everybody has an opportunity to advance.
00:46:37.000Okay, so that's the technical reason for the necessity of the left.
00:46:40.000And then, I think it's attractive because, well, because young people can be resentful, partly, because they're at the bottom of the heap, so to speak.
00:47:31.000Maybe you're resentful and irritated because you're young and you're still at the bottom of the heap and you've got other problems too.
00:47:37.000It's more difficult for people of your race or ethnicity or gender, at least you think it is.
00:47:41.000And so you say, well, I want to make things fair.
00:47:45.000And then that's also driven by some real compassion because nobody really likes that, the consequences of radical inequality.
00:47:51.000Like nobody likes the fact that homeless people exist and have to go to the emergency ward to get treated and they don't have medical coverage and they have to live in tents on the street.
00:48:01.000And so if you have some compassion, then you think, well, we've got to do more for the poor and dispossessed.
00:48:07.000It's like, okay, that's an understandable sentiment.
00:48:17.000That desire to help is contaminated by resentment and ideological certainty, and then also by something that George Orwell pointed out so nicely in his book Road to Wigan Pier.
00:48:26.000It's like, the typical middle-class socialist, this was his diagnosis, and he was a socialist by the way, his diagnosis was the typical middle-class intellectual socialist doesn't like the poor.
00:48:37.000In fact, they don't have anything to do with the poor.
00:48:57.000And so there's some positive motivations for being engaged on the left, and there's a lot of negative motivations as well.
00:49:02.000And the people who are really driven by the radical left ideology, the real radicals, they're almost all driven by resentment and hatred, as far as I'm concerned.
00:49:15.000So back to the idea of the Ideological and verbal territory.
00:49:21.000I said with Bill C-16 that I wouldn't speak the language of the radical leftists because I don't think that that language should define the game.
00:50:21.000And that's like, then you think, well, there's people in the middle, they're kind of looking back and forth, which side of the identity politics spectrum am I going to fall in?
00:50:28.000Do I want to go with, do I want to go, do I want to be driven primarily by compassion, and am I going to accept guilt for my historical privilege?
00:50:40.000And then I'm the oppressor, I'm the member of the oppressor group, or am I going to say, no, to hell with that, I'm just going to play to win.
00:50:46.000Well, then I'm going to go to the right.
00:50:47.000It's like, well, my sense is, how about we don't play either of those games?
00:50:51.000And the reason we shouldn't play them is, well, the Soviets played the left-wing game and, like, killed who knows how many tens of millions of people.
00:51:20.000See, what I've been trying to do, really, what I've been trying to do for the last 30 years is say, look, there's heavy temptations to play those sorts of games.
00:51:50.000Very dark chapter about the motivations of the Columbine High School killers and this other guy named Carl Panzram who was a serial rapist and arsonist and murderer.
00:51:59.000And he wrote an autobiography and the Columbine kids also wrote about why they did what they did.
00:52:11.000Well, I'm suggesting that people stay away from that resentment, resentfulness and bitterness, even though life is hard and there's malevolence in the world.
00:52:19.000It's like, yeah, you can tell a story where everyone's a victim because we all die.
00:52:24.000We all get sick, you know, and things happen to us that are Bitter and terrible.
00:53:20.000We're too technologically powerful to get all tribal again.
00:53:24.000What's exciting to me is that I think this is the first time in my life that I've ever seen so much communication on these subjects.
00:53:33.000And I think so much recognition about the consequences of tribal, toxic tribalism.
00:53:39.000This tribal thinking that everyone seems to be engaged in on the right and on the left.
00:53:44.000I mean in America you need to go no further than going back and forth from CNN to Fox News to say something's wrong here.
00:53:51.000These are supposed to be news outlets.
00:53:53.000You have two completely different narratives and that has nothing to do with what we're talking about with gender politics and radical left socialism and Marxism.
00:54:01.000What you're seeing in universities though is a radical departure from what I always considered universities great for.
00:54:11.000What I always considered universities great for is separating from your parents, challenging belief systems, and being engaged in the works of brilliant people who you can compare all of their findings and their discoveries and sit down and debate them in class.
00:54:30.000When I was a kid, when I was in high school, I went to a very good high school, Newton South High School in Newton, Massachusetts.
00:54:37.000And one of the things that they did is they put on a debate between a guy from the Moral Majority, which was this right-wing Christian group that, I don't even know if they're around anymore, but this was 19, I was 14, so 81. And Barney Frank,
00:54:56.000who was that congressman, is now one of the first openly gay guys in Congress.
00:55:01.000And you got to watch these two people in this auditorium debate their points.
00:55:08.000And this moral majority guy had this right-wing, Ronald Reagan sort of point of view.
00:55:40.000And it's one of the things that's always attracted me about the...
00:55:45.000The idea that two people with differing viewpoints can get together in front of a neutral audience, and these people can sort of decipher which way these people are thinking and why they're thinking.
00:55:56.000Yeah, well, bad as that is, and rife with conflict as that is, the alternative is to separate, as you pointed out, into two camps that don't talk.
00:56:11.000Because the only way you can stop From fighting with other people, is by negotiating with them.
00:56:17.000And you know, one of the things that's also interesting, and this is partly why Silicon Valley leans to the left, is that a fair bit of your political preference is determined by your biological temperament.
00:57:03.000Stay in the damn rut and move forward.
00:57:06.000Okay, so that's the conservative approach.
00:57:07.000And when things are going right, it's the right approach.
00:57:11.000The problem is, is that sometimes it's not the right approach, because something is shifted, and so something new has to emerge.
00:57:17.000And so then there's a bunch of people who are adapted to the new, and those are the entrepreneurial and creative types, and of course they dominate Silicon Valley because it's a very entrepreneurial, it's a very entrepreneurial, what would you call it, geography.
00:57:30.000And so, they're going to lean to the left.
00:57:33.000But they have to understand, people have to understand that the left and the right need each other.
00:57:37.000The liberals and the conservatives need each other.
00:57:50.000So if the company is working and the product line is good and everything is stable, like hire some conservatives because they'll maximize efficiency and they'll move down that track.
00:57:59.000But if the track is no longer going in a good direction because something's changed, the environment's changed, well then you've got to bring in the creative people.
00:58:28.000Now, I was on a CBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, interview a couple of days ago, and they took me to task.
00:58:34.000I tweeted out this invitation to the Keck Boys to fill out this program that I developed called Future Authoring, and it helps people make a plan for their life.
00:59:43.000So they had to figure out what it meant.
00:59:45.000And then I showed this picture of Michigan J. Frog, which is the frog from an old Warner Brothers cartoon, Dancing Frog, that wouldn't perform when anyone was watching it.
00:59:53.000So, CBC hauled that out and said, well, look, aren't you, like, appealing to the radical right?
00:59:59.000And I said, well, no, what I'm doing, I said, look, these people are attracted by the radical right, although they're satirists and juvenile satirists and graffiti types, and, you know, they're playing a weird satirical game.
01:00:12.000And my sense was, well, why don't you develop yourself as an individual and get the hell out of the ideological trap?
01:00:18.000So here's my program, which helps you write about your future, and that'll help you decide who you are as an individual, because that's the way out of the ideological trap.
01:00:28.000Obviously, what's the way out of tribalism?
01:00:31.000First, the way out of tribalism is not to never join a tribe.
01:00:36.000You actually have to join a tribe as you mature, right?
01:00:39.000Because what happens is, first of all, you're an infant, and then you have your parents to make a relationship with, but then when you move from your parents, you have your tribe, you have your group.
01:00:49.000Maybe it's the music you listen to, it's the gang you hang around with, whatever.
01:00:52.000You have to be socialized into the tribe.
01:01:40.000It has its rules and its regulations, and if you're a member, that's all you are.
01:01:44.000But the group can go badly wrong, so the group needs individuals to keep the group alive and revivified.
01:01:50.000So you have to become an individual, so you can revivify the group.
01:01:53.000That's the call in the West, to heroism, essentially, to noble way of living, is to develop yourself past your group identity so that you can reconfigure the game when that becomes necessary.
01:02:05.000And I think that there's a very influential line of developmental psychology pioneered by Jean Piaget that laid that out as a developmental progression.
01:02:18.000First, you're A child, then you're a member of a group, then you're an individual.
01:02:23.000It's like, get to the individual level.
01:02:27.000But you have to accept responsibility to do that.
01:02:31.000And this is what your future authoring program is basically all about.
01:02:34.000I mean, it's a wonderful program, along with this book, Rules and Guidelines for Life.
01:02:39.000I think that's one of the things that a lot of young people are lacking, is a structure to how to go about establishing who they are in the world.
01:02:48.000Well, what's really cool, and it's been really quite remarkable, I would say, is that what I've noticed when I've been speaking publicly, say, over the last year and a half, because there's a hole in our culture where there should be a discussion about maturity,
01:03:17.000But take care of yourself in a way that also means that simultaneously you're taking care of your family, and that also means that simultaneously you're taking care of the broader community.
01:03:39.000Okay, that'll give your life some meaning.
01:03:41.000Now adopt, make a plan, generate a vision.
01:03:44.000That's what the Future Authoring Program helps people with.
01:03:46.000Make a, develop a vision of what your life could be like if it was worth living, despite all its suffering.
01:03:52.000It's like, what would you need so that you would be happy to be alive?
01:03:55.000You'd find your life meaningful so you don't get all bitter and resentful and cruel and hostile and ideologically addled and like murderous and genocidal.
01:04:06.000How would you have to configure your life so that despite its suffering and the malevolence that's part of it, that you would regard it as worthwhile?
01:04:13.000So that's up to you to develop a vision.
01:04:16.000And so when I talk to people about this, and most of my audiences are young men, it's probably about 65, 35. More and more women are showing up, but that's about what it is right now.
01:04:28.000Because nobody's said so clearly for like 50 years that almost all the meaning that you will need to get you through the hard times of your life is going to be a consequence of adopting responsibility.
01:06:22.000Well, the other thing I've been telling young men is that, and this is something I think that you could relate to tremendously, is I read this New Testament line, well, decades ago, and I could never understand it.
01:06:33.000It's the line is, the meek shall inherit the earth.
01:06:35.000And I thought, there's something wrong with that, that line.
01:07:00.000So you have a biblical line and then they have like three pages of commentary on each line and so because people have commented on every verse in the Bible like to the degree that's almost unimaginable so you can look and see all the interpretations and all the translations and get some sense of what the genuine meaning might be and the line the meek shall inherit the earth Meek is not a good translation.
01:07:25.000Or the word has moved in the 300 years or so, 300 years or so since it was translated.
01:07:43.000And so, like, one of the things I tell young men, well, and young women as well, but the young men really need to hear this more, I think, is that you should be a monster.
01:07:52.000You know, because everyone says, well, you should be harmless, virtuous.
01:08:44.000Well, it's the uncomfortable feeling that people associate with losing.
01:08:48.000When they've personally experienced it, they look at losing as they've been oppressed or they've been hurt.
01:08:54.000But what they don't understand is that is the motivation for growth.
01:08:58.000One of the most beautiful things that I think a young person can get involved in is martial arts, because martial arts teach you that in a way that very few things do.
01:09:07.000They teach you it in especially jujitsu, because jujitsu is so complex and there's so many possibilities to it that it attracts a lot of really smart people.
01:09:16.000If you think of jujitsu, you would think of like brutish individuals engaging in this hard martial art.
01:09:22.000If you go to a real good jujitsu school, you see Nerds.
01:09:25.000You see a bunch of like really smart kids that really get obsessed with the possibilities of this physical language.
01:09:31.000This physical language also teaches you the consequences of not working hard, of not being prepared, of not understanding positions, of not doing due diligence and doing the work.
01:10:56.000Let me tell you about when I was two years in, or five years in, or four years ago.
01:11:01.000Let me tell you about some horrible moments on stage where it went wrong.
01:11:05.000Just so you understand, like, those things took me to another place, because I realized I don't want to ever feel that feeling again, and so I ramped everything up, and then I went back to work, and I went over my notebooks, and I went over my recordings, and I figured out what I was doing wrong, and I tried to improve upon it.
01:11:20.000But if it wasn't for that horrible, sick feeling, that's the same feeling you get when you get tapped out in Jiu-Jitsu class.
01:11:27.000Same feeling you get when you lose a martial arts tournament or anything else.
01:11:45.000Because, you know, like, let's say you're a grandmaster chess player, and all you do is play amateurs, and every night you go home and congratulate yourself on what a genius you are, because you just stomp these people left, right, and center.
01:12:06.000But that way, because to be a winner...
01:12:09.000You want to be disciplined, you want to know what you're doing, and then you want to be on the edge where your skills are being developed.
01:12:14.000And if you're going to be on the edge where your skills are going to be developed, you're at a place where loss, where losing is always a possibility.
01:12:23.000Because otherwise you're not pushing yourself beyond your current capacity.
01:12:27.000And so, one of the things that I've outlined in 12 Rules for Life is a theory of meaning.
01:12:33.000Because meaning, as far as I'm concerned, the sense of meaningful engagement is the antidote to malevolence and suffering, essentially.
01:12:40.000Because you want to have a life that's so engaging that you think, despite the fact that I'm limited and that we're mortal and that life is tragedy and there's evil in the world, despite all that, this is worth doing.
01:12:51.000And I think that there's a technical meaning that That genuinely exists.
01:13:00.000And that's the meaning that you get when you're in a domain where you have some discipline and some skill.
01:13:04.000So you're laying out your competence and your ability.
01:13:08.000But you're simultaneously pushing yourself to develop past where you are.
01:13:15.000And what that is doing is expanding your competence.
01:13:18.000And so life is suffering and betrayal in many senses of the word.
01:13:24.000But you can adopt a way of traversing through life that...
01:13:29.000It's more powerful than the tragedy and the malevolence.
01:13:32.000I agree, and I say to many people that what is going on in your life is you have a series of human reward systems that are in your body, encoded in your body, in your genetics, and it's the reason why human beings survived to 2018. In order to be happy,
01:14:12.000And that, to me, is the only way to stay balanced.
01:14:15.000With me, with my body and my mind, that's the only way I've been able to stay balanced.
01:14:20.000And when any of those things get out of whack, I get out of whack.
01:14:23.000Yeah, well, so part of that is, so imagine this.
01:14:25.000So imagine that you're this loose collection of all these things that need to be gratified, that need to be fed.
01:14:31.000It's a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it biologically.
01:14:33.000Okay, so now you have to conjure up a mode of being that satisfies all those necessities simultaneously.
01:14:41.000But then, and this is a technical explanation of why the postmodernist insistence that there's an infinite number of explanations turns out to be wrong.
01:14:51.000An infinite number of interpretations.
01:14:53.000There's a very finite number of viable interpretations.
01:14:57.000So the first constraint is exactly what you just said.
01:15:00.000You have these inner demons, let's say, all of which need to be satisfied.
01:15:04.000But they need to be satisfied in a very particular way.
01:15:07.000Not only do they need to be satisfied today, But they need to be satisfied today in a way that doesn't interfere with satisfying them next week, next month, next year, and in a decade.
01:15:17.000So, because there's no point in you betraying your future self to gratify your present self.
01:15:34.000But it's like there's an infinite number of you's Extending indefinitely into the future and all of them have to be satisfied simultaneously.
01:15:42.000But then it's worse because it isn't just you.
01:15:45.000You have to figure out how to gratify all those internal demons in a sustainable way, in a way that other people not only don't object to, but probably help you with.
01:15:55.000And that benefits them at the same time.
01:15:57.000Well, then you think, you think, well, there just aren't that many ways of solving that problem.
01:18:06.000So the book is all about The meanings of life, the negative meanings, suffering, malevolence, those are indisputable realities.
01:18:16.000And then a mode of being that integrates the sorts of things that you were talking about, these underlying needs, with everyone else's and like doing that voluntarily.
01:18:24.000It's a call to responsibility and meaning.
01:18:29.000The thing that's been so exciting for me for the last three decades, looking into these things, is that I believe that there is a genuine human ethic.
01:19:48.000And that's what happens in the first chapter of Genesis, is that God uses, God order, let's say, uses the power of truthful speech, that's the logos, to transform potential into order.
01:20:00.000And that's what People are made in the image of.
01:20:03.000So there's this theory, it's a lovely theory that's laid out right at the beginning of the Bible that says that if you tell the truth, you transform the potential of being into a habitable actuality.
01:20:31.000And I think it's true at the practical and scientific level as well.
01:20:36.000I think it's true in all those levels simultaneously.
01:20:38.000So that's been ridiculously exciting to sort through.
01:20:41.000I think this notion, and one of the things that you said that I think really resonates, is that there's not a voice out there that is Advocating for responsibility.
01:20:54.000And that is talking about how important this is.
01:20:57.000And I think this is an inherent principle that most people are kind of aware of.
01:21:12.000Well, it's so funny because one of the things psychologists have done for the last 20 years, especially the social psychologists, is push this idea of self-esteem.
01:21:28.000Why should you feel good about who you are?
01:21:30.000It's like, you should feel good about who you could be.
01:21:33.000That's way better, because you've got 60 years to turn into who you could be.
01:21:36.000But wait a minute, are you what your accomplishments are, or are you this individual going through this journey?
01:21:42.000I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong with feeling good about who you are, as long as it's tempered by an understanding of potential and what you have accomplished versus what you can accomplish.
01:21:51.000But having confidence is a big part of...
01:22:30.000But you should concentrate on who you should become, especially if you're young.
01:22:34.000And so let's say you're miserable and nihilistic and chaotic and depressed and all of that now, and you have your reasons, you know, terrible parenting, abuse, all of those things.
01:22:42.000It's like, well, you should feel good about yourself.
01:22:45.000It's like, no, no, it's not the right message.
01:22:49.000It's more like you should understand how much potential there is within you to set that straight.
01:22:55.000And then you should do everything you can to manifest that in the world, and it will set it straight.
01:23:33.000But there's more to you than you think.
01:23:35.000And if you stand up and face it with a noble vision, with discipline and intent, You can go far farther to overcoming it than you can imagine.
01:23:47.000And that's the principle upon which you should predicate your behavior.
01:23:51.000And I think that one of the things that's really nice about being a clinical psychologist is that this isn't just guesswork.
01:23:57.000Like one of the things, we know two things in clinical psychology.
01:24:00.000One is, truthful conversations redeem people.
01:24:04.000Because if you come to a clinical psychologist, Whose worth is salt?
01:25:21.000So, to tell people that if you confront the world forthrightly, if you speak the truth, and you expose yourself courageously to those things that you're afraid of, that your life will improve, and so will the life of people around you.
01:25:34.000Like, as far as I'm concerned, that's as close to undeniable fact as we've got.
01:25:38.000And it also dovetails nicely with the underlying archetypal stories, the heroic stories.
01:25:42.000It's like, go out there, find the dragon, confront it.
01:25:56.000It's like, yeah, it's the oldest story of mankind.
01:25:58.000I think one of the factors in the resistance to these ideas of discipline and of taking responsibility for yourself and of a lot of the things that you've been saying in regards to, you know, all the things that we discussed earlier...
01:26:11.000Is people recognizing that they're not doing that in their own lives and they get upset and instead of looking internally They try to attack the thing that's upsetting them.
01:26:21.000They attack your message They attack the philosophy behind it rather than look internally and objectively and having some sort of introspective Point of view where you go.
01:26:31.000Okay, am I reacting to this because this is resonates like I'm missing this aspect of my life is this guy does Does this diminish me?
01:26:41.000Or is this guy pointing something out that I can benefit from?
01:26:44.000Very few people are willing to do that.
01:26:47.000Very few people are willing to take that critical moment to look at their own behavior and look at their own thought process and wonder if the actual adverse reaction they have to this person's message is because they know that they're wrong.
01:30:40.000I think this is one of the reasons why a book like this is so important.
01:30:43.000The idea of discipline in most people's eyes is like, if you're not a disciplined person, it's uncomfortable, it's going to be painful, it's frustrating, you have to force yourself into these things.
01:30:58.000It's a muscle, and it's a muscle that has to be developed, and these patterns have to be developed in your own mindset.
01:31:05.000Yeah, well, so you're right, just telling people not to waste their lives is not enough, and this is another reason why I've so much enjoyed being a clinical psychologist, because clinical psychologists don't stick with high-level abstractions, especially the behaviors.
01:33:20.000Then we do something else, which is, okay, um...
01:33:23.000Your bad habits and your resentment and your bitterness and all of that, your procrastination gets completely out of hand and you auger down and you're in your own personal version of hell in three to five years.
01:33:36.000It's like, everyone can look into the future and think, well, if I keep going on this dark path, this is where I'll end up.
01:33:42.000Well, then you've got a little hell outlined for yourself to run away from, and you've got a little heaven outlined for yourself to run towards, and then you're motivated.
01:33:51.000Because sometimes, you know, you're just hopeful.
01:33:55.000It's like, yeah, but, you know, I'd like to drink half a bottle of whiskey tonight, too.
01:33:58.000It's like, so which is it going to be?
01:34:01.000Well, just being hopeful about the future might not be enough, but then you think, oh, I see, like, there's that little hell thing that I outlined that's waiting for me.
01:34:09.000And maybe I'm afraid of taking the next step forward because it's demanding and challenging.
01:34:14.000It's like, yeah, I'm afraid of that, but I'm way more afraid of where I might end up if I don't get my act together.
01:34:54.000This is another concept that doesn't have a voice right now.
01:34:58.000This is a giant part of being a human being.
01:35:02.000And instead of identity politics and right versus left, I think these right versus left battles, oftentimes what they are is simply the battleground for the conflicts in your own mind.
01:35:14.000Better to have the conflict in yourself.
01:35:16.000That's another thing I really learned, well, not only from the New Testament, but a fair bit from that.
01:35:21.000You know, the idea is that, well, there's evil in the world of all sorts, and some of it's the evil in other people.
01:35:29.000And some of it's the evil in your brother's heart.
01:35:32.000But the part of it that you can really do something about, that's the malevolence in your own heart.
01:35:37.000You can actually do something about that.
01:35:39.000And that's actually way more useful than you think.
01:35:42.000Because if you can face it in you, then you start to understand it.
01:35:47.000And that also makes you strong enough to identify it and to fight it when you see it in the external world.
01:36:36.000And that's what I'm hoping people will do.
01:36:38.000Yeah, I'm hoping people will do that, too.
01:36:40.000And I think if more people live their life in this sort of a manner, I think we're going to have less differences in terms of our ideologies and more of an understanding that people have different ways of looking at things and different ways of living.
01:36:53.000And this combat between people, this internal strife that manifests itself in this combat between ideologies, I think...
01:37:04.000You are much more inclined to let other people live their lives if you're living your life in a satisfactory manner.
01:37:11.000I have a chapter in there on raising kids.
01:37:14.000It says, don't let your kids do anything that makes you dislike them.
01:37:18.000It's like, well, that's first predicated on the observation that you're quite a monster and it would be better for your kids if they didn't get on your bad side.
01:37:25.000Again, because I'm a clinical psychologist...
01:37:32.000I've seen families where it's as if every single person in the family has their hands around the neck of the family member that's close to them, and they're squeezing, but only tight enough to strangle them in 20 years.
01:37:43.000But you're not always using it as a pejorative.
01:37:45.000You've also used it, you should become a monster.
01:38:23.000You don't have any strength of character unless you can put up a fight.
01:38:26.000You know, and to be able to say no to something is to be able to put up a fight.
01:38:30.000So you can't do that if you can be pushed around.
01:38:33.000You'll just get argued into submission or you'll feel guilty because you're causing conflict or something like that.
01:38:39.000But isn't there confusion using those terms as a positive and a negative?
01:38:42.000Maybe there's another word instead of monster.
01:38:44.000Well, there is the potential for confusion.
01:38:48.000You say, well, is that something that can be...
01:38:50.000Because I think a monster is a horrible thing.
01:38:52.000I don't think of it as being like a wall.
01:38:56.000Like someone who is just rocks-solid in their belief system and rocks-solid in their understanding of themselves.
01:39:02.000Well, when you fight someone who's formidable, say, what do you think of the person that you're fighting?
01:39:07.000Like, how would you characterize them?
01:39:08.000I mean, they have a monstrous side because they can bring physical Substantial physical force to bear on the situation and be willing to do it.
01:39:22.000So they're not naive and harmless by any stretch of the imagination, right?
01:39:26.000They have a well-developed capacity for mayhem.
01:40:01.000And so you need to organize your family with a certain amount of discipline and a certain amount of structure so that you get to do what you want, which is back to the point that you made earlier, so that you're happy to have your kids around, so that you won't take revenge on them.
01:40:16.000And so you want to lay your life out so that...
01:40:21.000Well, so that it's providing you what you need to not be bitter and to work for your best interests and for the interests of everyone else.
01:40:32.000You know, because the book is very dark, and I'm a very dark guy in some ways, because I've looked at the terrible things that people do to one another.
01:40:40.000That's a fascinating way of looking at it.
01:40:47.000I think you're very serious, and especially about these very complicated issues, and I think that's one of the reasons why you have made this gigantic wave.
01:41:00.000In online discourse and people discussing these very tumultuous times we live in.
01:41:06.000It's because you're a guy that did extrapolate.
01:41:09.000You're a guy that did look at that C-16 bill and look at Marxism and go, do you know where this is headed?
01:41:14.000And you were the guy that had the courage to say, murderous.
01:41:18.000And people are like, what the fuck is he talking about?
01:41:22.000And you had to spell it out and explain it, and when you do, you realize why this is so significant to you.
01:41:30.000Yeah, well, the tribalism issue that you were discussing earlier doesn't seem to be all that, what would you say, debatable.
01:41:38.000That if we degenerate into tribalism, the probability of bloodshed becomes vastly enhanced.
01:41:44.000It's like, well, that always happens when people devolve into tribalism.
01:41:46.000So when I'm pointing to a particular kind of tribalism, I guess the darkness is that, you know, I'm very aware of the terrible things that people not only are likely to do to each other, but do do to each other all the time.
01:41:58.000I mean, what, it's about 40% for divorce rate, right?
01:42:02.000You have to go through a fair bit of ugliness to get to divorce.
01:42:46.000I think we need more people who are actualized human beings, more people who understand themselves, more people who have gone through adversity both in real life and personal in terms of their understanding of their own growth,
01:43:23.000Suggesting to people is that they pick something difficult to do.
01:43:27.000I read this funny little paragraph by Kierkegaard, it was written about 1840, and he was thinking about his role as a student and writer, and he was a student and writer forever, you know, he never really had a career apart from that.
01:43:39.000And he said that he wasn't one of these people who was capable of inventing something wonderful to make life easier for everyone, like so many people were doing, you know, during the Industrial Revolution.
01:43:49.000He said, well, maybe I'm one of these people who's Benefit to society will be that I will make things more difficult for everyone because there will come a time when what people want not They don't want ease.
01:44:00.000They want difficulty instead and I think well that is what people want That is what they want.
01:44:05.000You think, well, I want an easy, happy life.
01:44:07.000It's like, no, actually, that isn't what you want.
01:44:09.000I think what people want is things that are difficult that they can overcome.
01:44:17.000When you overcome something, when you do something difficult, whether it's, I mean, I've never written a book, but I assume when you write a book, when you're done writing that book, there's a great feeling of accomplishment because it's very difficult to do.
01:44:43.000It's to say, I did something difficult, and that was worthwhile.
01:44:47.000Basically, what you're saying to yourself is, well, there was a lot of suffering attendant on that, along with the just general suffering of life, but it turned out that was worth it.
01:46:05.000It's more like victory on the honorable battlefield or something like that.
01:46:09.000Yeah, the perception that people have of ultimate success and ultimate happiness is it seems motivated by what they don't have rather than an understanding of what success and happiness really is.
01:46:21.000Their idea is that one day I'm going to go and I'm going to be in my golden years and I'm just going to be able to sit around and do nothing and tell everybody to fuck off.
01:47:17.000It's true, but when you are working and slaving away, you think about that beach with your feet up, and the waiter comes over, would you like another margarita, Mr. Peterson?
01:47:58.000And it's been very fun talking to, especially talking to young men about this.
01:48:02.000It's like, well, and that's the other thing, too, is I think the world is full of darkness, let's say.
01:48:08.000And we could say each of us have a little bit of light, and if we release that light, if we let it shine properly, Christ, it's too cliched to go on with in some sense, but...
01:48:20.000The world is a lesser place if you do not reveal from within yourself what you have to reveal.
01:48:27.000And the fact that the world is a lesser place actually turns out not to be trivial.
01:48:30.000Like, if you aren't everything you could be, more people will die.
01:49:11.000That's the other thing that's so cool, is that people think, well, there's seven billion of us, and each of us is just this separate dust moat, like floating in the cosmos, and what the hell difference does it make what you do anyways?
01:49:23.000It's like, that is not how we're connected.
01:49:25.000It's like, you're the center of a network.
01:49:28.000And you know, well, you know way more people than this, but let's say, typically, you're going to know a thousand people in your life, well enough to have an impact on them, okay?
01:49:37.000And each of those thousand people is going to know a thousand people.
01:49:40.000So you're one step from a million, and two steps from a billion.
01:50:51.000So, just by trying to organize this little part of their life, they immediately run into the people whose actions they're casting in a dim light by trying to improve themselves to some degree.
01:51:01.000They might have to have, like, a thorough war in their household to be allowed to do something as simple as keep the room orderly.
01:51:09.000They find out very rapidly that A, that's way more difficult than it sounds, and B, that the consequences of it are far more far-reaching than people think.
01:52:25.000Well, it means that both of you end the day upset.
01:52:28.000That's not so good, because why would you want that?
01:52:31.000It means that you're spending 45 minutes fighting when you could spend 20 minutes doing something positive, like reading to him, say.
01:52:37.000It means that you don't get to spend that time with your wife, so she's not very happy with you, plus you're annoyed because you don't see her, plus you blame it on the kid because he's the proximal cause.
01:54:01.000Want to talk about the rippling effect because I know you got to get out of here at one but I want to talk about the rippling effect that You have had on people and how how that makes you feel I mean you were relatively unknown just a year and a half two years ago and now you have become I mean,
01:54:21.000for lack of a better term, you're an online celebrity.
01:54:27.000This thing that you were talking about, about how your impact can affect the people around you in a not insignificant way, a very significant way.
01:54:50.000I had a little bit of, you know, a little bit of exposure.
01:54:53.000I did some work with a public television station in Canada, and, you know, I had my little flashes of public appearances, that sort of thing.
01:55:48.000I've looked at the, like, 25 things I have to do in a mad rush before 7 o'clock at night.
01:55:54.000I think I'm going to go through them and I'm going to concentrate on them, do the best job I can, then at 7 o'clock tonight I'm going to have a rest, I'm going to take a look at what I have to do tomorrow, and I'm going to do the same thing.
01:56:44.000But then I think the more relevant thing is that I've been studying these old stories, these archetypal stories for a very long period of time, and they have power.
01:57:07.000And I was fortunate enough to study a large number of people, large number of scholars, who knew what that power was, Carl Jung in particular.
01:57:15.000And I could make it more accessible to people.
01:57:56.000And this thing with Lindsay Shepard, that was the worst scandal that ever hit a Canadian university.
01:58:00.000And then there was all the protests, and then there was what happened with Channel 4 in the UK, and it's like, I don't know what to make of it.
01:58:09.000What I'm trying to do is have a good conversation when I come and talk to somebody like you, where we can have a good conversation.
01:58:30.000You know, it's not quite so bad now, because, especially after what happened with Channel 4, some journalists, like, people have been trying to take me out for quite a long time, and it's not, it isn't working.
01:58:44.000You actually believe what you're saying, and it actually makes sense.
01:58:47.000Well, you know, that's not a bad start, eh?
01:58:50.000It's not a bad start, but it's rare in this world, especially in these ideologically charged times, this toxic tribalism that we keep bringing up.
01:58:59.000Well, and I also decided, like a long time ago, and I think this runs through 12 Rules for Life, is Well, I believe that people's decisions tilt the world towards heaven or hell.
01:59:09.000I think there's no more accurate way of describing the consequences of each of your decisions than that.
02:03:50.000Every time I think that, well, it's just one of the surreal circumstances that characterize my life.
02:03:55.000It's like I'm driving the social justice activists in Canada mad because if they let me speak, then I get to speak, and then more people support me on Patreon.
02:04:58.000Yeah, they haven't stopped wanting that.
02:04:59.000In October, when the Lindsay Shepard scandal broke, and it looked so bad for the left-wing ideologues, like 200 University of Toronto A community member signed a petition to get me fired again!
02:05:17.000So my son came over that day and I said, Jesus, Julian, you know, like 200 people at the University of Toronto petitioned the Faculty Association and then they sent in a petition to the administration to get me fired.
02:06:37.000But look, look, I mean, I mean this formally, like 20 members of Pimlott's and Rambucana's faculty, that was communications at Wilfrid Laurier, wrote a letter supporting them.
02:06:48.000So that's why it's not an isolated incident.
02:06:51.000It's like, no, no, they thought that what they were doing was right.
02:06:54.000Well, there is an element of that, that's for sure.
02:06:57.000And there's certainly, again, I hate to bring this term up again, but this toxic tribalism thing, it's like they're supporting their own, and they understand that their own ideologies have been completely connected to the same type of groupthink that's going against Lindsay Shepard in that meeting.
02:07:12.000Oh yeah, when they tried to paint her as a radical right-winger, which she certainly isn't.
02:07:59.000Well, these conversations are so limited by what you were saying before, that they're trying to get this five-minute soundbite in, and that's what television has become.
02:09:03.000You know, we've got our viewpoints and everything, but we're basically...
02:09:06.000And I outline this, and there's a chapter in 12 Rules for Life called Assume that the person you're talking to might know something you don't, which is like the formula for a good conversation.
02:10:47.000I'm trying to figure something out and sharing that process with the audience.
02:10:51.000Which is so different than what is going on in universities that is freaking everybody out.
02:10:57.000What's going on is this indoctrination into this group thing.
02:11:01.000Yeah, it's like here's what's right, memorize it.
02:11:05.000It's like, my lectures are more like, well, I don't know what's right.
02:11:07.000Like, here's some things I know, and they seem to be working, and here's how I use those tools to dig at this story, and here's what it might mean, and this is what I got from it.
02:11:15.000And here's some universal truths about human beings.
02:11:38.000Think, okay, fine, that's a heroic motif.
02:11:40.000But then Abraham goes out and the first thing he encounters is like tyranny and starvation and then a bunch of guys who want to steal his wife.
02:12:18.000I taught from January to May of 2016. Well, the first way it changed it was that I was so shell-shocked when I went to teach last January, and I was really sick.
02:14:06.000That was only the beginning of her illness.
02:14:08.000She had all sorts of other things that were worse than that.
02:14:11.000And so, and we figured she was probably going to die by the time she was 30, because my cousin's daughter had a similar autoimmune problem, and she died when she was 30. So it was bloody dreadful.
02:14:21.000But she figured out at one point that it was associated with diet, and then she went on a radically restrictive diet.
02:14:28.000And she, Christ, she was on antidepressants.
02:16:08.000My life in the last year was so, so strange because I'd get up in the morning and I'd think, God, all these bloody scandalous things are happening around me and I have to deal with that.
02:16:19.000And then I think I need a break, but I can't eat anything.
02:16:23.000I can't eat anything because if I ate the wrong thing it would like knock me out for a month.
02:16:27.000So I was trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with my diet and I was feeling wretched and so it was like if I it was like wolves at the back door and crocodiles at the front door something like that so but but Whatever.
02:16:40.000Like, I'm down to the same weight I was when I was 25. Wow.
02:19:16.000Well, and that would have been complicated enough to keep me occupied for the last two years, especially sorting it out with my daughter because she...
02:19:24.000Well, that was quite the bloody nightmare, I can tell you.
02:22:23.000Brilliant guy, restricted by his university, big scandal, leaves, and I'm hoping he follows the same path, because he has so much to offer, and he has so much to offer for anybody who can get online.
02:22:35.000Well, and one of the things that's really fun about YouTube And having my lectures on YouTube is that the only reason people watch them, is one reason, is because they want to learn.
02:22:46.000And so, you might think, well, where is the university?
02:22:51.000Well, the university is where people want to learn.
02:22:53.000It's like, okay, well, YouTube is the university, because there's hundreds of thousands of people on YouTube, maybe millions, who just want to learn.
02:24:25.000And I really literally mean rewrite it.
02:24:27.000So I take the sentence out of the paragraph, put it in another document, write like 10 variants of the sentence, and then pick the one that was best.
02:24:50.000Do I believe that this sentence is true?
02:24:52.000Then I'd think, like, of ten ways I could attack it and see if I could break it apart and find out what it was wrong.
02:24:58.000And I only kept the ones that I couldn't destroy.
02:25:01.000And, like, I was going out full force to destroy them because I wanted to come up with a, you know, I wanted to produce a book that I could not break, no matter what I did.
02:25:35.000Not to overly exaggerate the significance of this, but just to be completely honest about it, you're the right guy for the job and it sort of found you.
02:25:44.000It's real weird because there's not a lot of people that are that meticulous about their thoughts and about their work and about their writing and about their criticizing their own ideas to the point where they break them down, try to break them, try to tear them apart.
02:27:00.000I didn't want to write an interesting book about it.
02:27:02.000It wasn't even that I wanted to write a book exactly.
02:27:05.000It was just that writing a book was the best way to figure out the problem, because writing a book is so rigorous, you know, because you think, but you can only remember so much.
02:27:14.000You have to write it down, because then you can remember way more, and you can write, and then the next day you can go back and think, okay, I'm going to take that goddamn argument apart.
02:27:22.000I'm going to see if there's anything about it that's weak.
02:27:30.000And then when I... Well, and then I started lecturing about it, and the lectures were always unbelievably well-regarded, like people, the kids in the classes would always write for the evaluations at the end of the year.
02:27:41.00080% of them would say, and this happened for 20 years, they'd say, this class changed everything about the way I look at the world.
02:27:47.000It's like, yeah, that's what happened to me, too, when I wrote that book.
02:27:50.000It's like, I didn't think the same way at all when I was done.
02:27:53.000I started to understand what these ancient stories meant.