In this episode, Dr. Jordan Peterson and Dr. Sam Harris talk about their journey to understanding the relationship between truth and values, and how they approach the difficult topic of truth versus reality. They talk about how they came to the conclusion that there is no such thing as objective truth, and why they think there is such a thing as a moral truth. They also talk about what it means to be a philosopher, and what it's like to be involved in discussions in front of a large audience, where the audience is along for the ride. And, of course, they answer some of your questions. This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumberg. It was edited by Matthew Boll. Our theme music was made by Micah Vellian and our ad music was written and performed by Mark Phillips. Additional music was provided by Joseph McDade. The opinions stated here are our own, not those of our companies, unless otherwise specified. We do not own any of the rights to the music used in this podcast. It was produced, produced, and licensed under license from any other works mentioned in the books mentioned. If you have any objections, please contact us directly or through a third party. Thank you for any amount you can manage, we are not responsible for the production of this podcast or any other service provided by the author. or our patrons. , we are working with a third-party provider. and we are looking forward to hearing your objections. in the future episodes of the podcast, and we appreciate the feedback we receive from the feedback from the podcast. Thank you, and the support you send us back to us. Thanks to our sponsors, we appreciate your support, and your support is greatly appreciated! We appreciate the support and support the support we receive, we really do appreciate it. Please reach out to us, so we can make this podcast is very much appreciated. We really appreciate it, it really does mean the work you provide us in advance of the work we can do the work that you do for us, and it really helps us in the process of producing this podcast, it helps us get the best possible support we can get out there. - Thank you. XOXO. -- Thank you so much, thank you, Sarah and we really appreciate all of your support. Timestamps: 1:30 - 2:00 - What is truth? 3:15 - What does truth mean to you? 4:00 5:40 - How do you feel about it? 6:20 - How does it matter?
00:00:27.000I mean, you might think it's kind of perverse to be discussing with a 3,000-person audience, but...
00:00:32.000It's not, because if you pay attention to the audience, they're constantly, and the individuals in the audience, they're constantly providing feedback.
00:00:39.000So it's a discussion as far as I'm concerned.
00:00:42.000Feedback in applause, laughter, sometimes they shout things out too, right?
00:00:49.000Yeah, well, really what you want, if you're on track, if you're where you should be, then it's dead silent and everyone's focused and listening.
00:00:57.000And so if that's not happening, I mean, you know, there can be laughter and that kind of thing, but generally speaking, you don't want to hear noise from the audience.
00:01:05.000So if you're pursuing a complicated topic and you're paying attention, and I'm always looking at individual people in the audience, you know, in the first few rows, because that's all I can see because of the lights.
00:01:19.000I'm trying to make sure that everyone's on track with the talk and, you know, there's people gesture with their face and they gesture with their eyes and they shake their head and they nod and there's lots of things to pick up.
00:01:31.000And if you're not speaking with notes, you can really pay attention to the audience and then you know if you're in the dialogue and that's where everyone wants to be.
00:01:38.000Yeah, it's an interesting thing you're doing because you have experience in doing that with lectures and colleges and universities, but now it's the general public and people just pay to see it and you fill up these huge...
00:02:41.000But the discussion itself was an attempt on Sam's part and my part to further our thinking about the topic and to bring everyone along for the ride, you know, for the journey, so to speak.
00:02:55.000Yeah, well, you guys had two podcasts that you did over the phone.
00:02:59.000So these were the first meetings that you guys had in person.
00:03:02.000Yeah, it was the first time I'd met Sam.
00:03:04.000The first one that you two had was marred by this discussion about what is truth.
00:03:11.000And it was like a strange sort of a...
00:03:32.000And I wasn't in tip-top shape for that first discussion, well, or for the second one for that matter.
00:03:37.000But each discussion I've had with Sam has been getting better.
00:03:41.000So as far as I'm concerned, I think he feels the same way.
00:03:45.000And I mean, we're trying to sort something out that's really, really difficult.
00:03:48.000And it's the relationship between facts and values, which is parallel to the relationship between, say, objective truth and narrative, or parallel to the distinction between scientific fact and religious truth.
00:04:01.000All of those things sort of are layered on top of each other, and it's an extraordinarily difficult topic.
00:04:06.000And so it's not surprising that it's taking all of this discussion to even vaguely get it straight.
00:04:11.000It's been a central bone of contention among philosophers for, well, probably forever, but certainly since the time of David Hume, several hundred years.
00:04:20.000Well, one of the more fascinating things that's coming out of the realm of podcasting is these kind of discussions, these long-form live discussions in front of enormous groups of people where you go over very complex issues.
00:05:47.000The technological revolution is online video and audio, immediately accessible to everyone all over the world.
00:05:54.000And so what that's done is it's turned the spoken word into a tool that has the same reach as the printed word.
00:06:01.000So it's a Gutenberg revolution in the domain of video and audio.
00:06:05.000And it might be even deeper than the original Gutenberg revolution because it isn't obvious how many people can read, but lots of people can listen.
00:06:15.000So, I mean, you got a little bit of that with TV, right?
00:06:17.000And you got a little bit of it with radio.
00:06:20.000But there was bandwidth limitations that were really stringent, especially in TV, where you could get 30 seconds if you were lucky and six minutes if you were stellar to elucidate a complicated argument.
00:06:32.000Everything gets compressed to a kind of oversimplified entertainment.
00:06:38.000But now, all of a sudden, we have this forum for long-form discussion, real long-form discussion, and it turns out that everyone is way smarter than we thought.
00:06:48.000We can have these discussions publicly and there's a great hunger for it.
00:06:51.000And I see this parallel, and this would be, what would you call it, supporting evidence for this hypothesis.
00:06:57.000The same things happened in the entertainment world because, you know, TV made us think, well, we can handle a 20-minute sitcom, right?
00:07:05.000Or maybe we can handle an hour and a half made-for-TV movie.
00:07:09.000But then Netflix came along, and HBO as well, with the bandwidth restrictions gone, and all of a sudden it turned out that, no, no, we can handle 40-hour complex, multi-layered narratives where the characters shift, where the complexity starts to reach the same complexity as great literature,
00:08:30.000And I think there's a lot of people that are beholden to mainstream organizations, whether it's newspapers or magazines or television shows, that feel trapped.
00:08:40.000I think they feel trapped by this format that they're stuck in.
00:08:56.000You know, this idea that you're gonna go to commercials every 15 minutes and, you know, and in between you have 15 people arguing.
00:09:03.000I mean, I watched a panel on CNN once and I think we counted 10 people.
00:09:08.000That we're trying to talk during this five-minute segment like who what genius thought that it would be a good idea to get ten people struggling for airtime Barking over each other.
00:09:20.000No one's saying anything that makes any sense because everybody's talking over and trying to stand out and trying to say the most outrageous things and I'm seeing, like, some of the resistance to this.
00:09:32.000When we span, I mean, pretty far, you know, from Sam and I lean more left, and Ben leans more right, and you're what you would call a classic liberal, and Eric's very difficult to define, and Brett is fiercely progressive.
00:09:47.000I mean, Brett, in particular, is a very left-wing guy.
00:10:04.000Yeah, well, there's a couple of things going on.
00:10:05.000I think one of them is that the technological transformation that I laid out, and then the other is that I do believe that, especially for the radical leftist types, the whole notion of free speech among individuals is not only anathema,
00:10:21.000but also something that isn't possible within their framework of reference.
00:10:25.000I've been trying to think this through very carefully, because, you know, free speech in some sense has become identified as a right-wing issue, and I thought, well, how the hell did that happen?
00:10:37.000If you're radically left and you're playing the identity politics game, there's actually no such thing as free speech because you're only the mouthpiece of your group, whether you know it or not.
00:10:46.000So you don't get to talk as Joe Rogan, you get to talk as like Joe Rogan, patriarchal white guy, and that's it.
00:10:52.000And your utterances aren't a reflection of your own opinions as an individual, but they're an attempt on your part, whether you know it or not, to justify your position in the power hierarchy.
00:11:03.000And so everything right now, and this is where the technology and the death of the mainstream media and this political polarization all unite, everything is turned into a political conversation in the mainstream media, and it has to be cast as left versus right.
00:11:21.000And if you're criticizing the left, then all of a sudden you're right, and right-wing, and it has to be about politics.
00:11:27.000It's like, well, it doesn't have to be about politics.
00:11:30.000It doesn't have to be cast in political terms.
00:11:33.000And then it's also subject to a form of, well, it's made more stupid than it has to be by these terrible bandwidth limitations.
00:11:44.000Like, I mean, I've been on mainstream TV talk shows, and it's a very strange experience because you're definitely content.
00:11:52.000You know, Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message, right?
00:11:55.000The medium shapes the dialogue, and it does in a tremendous way, powerful way.
00:12:02.000You go on a TV talk show, and maybe it's an hour long, something like that, and there's five guests, and you've got your eight minutes, something like that, and you have to be bright and chipper and entertaining and intelligent and sort of glitzy, and it puts that facade of momentary charisma on you,
00:12:17.000and if you don't play that out, you actually fail.
00:12:20.000Because you can't start a long-form discussion when you've got six minutes.
00:12:23.000And if you're trying to talk about something that's deep and difficult, well, you want to talk about it because you've got the access then and the opportunity, but you've got your six minutes.
00:12:33.000You can't help but turn into sort of a glitzy entertainer.
00:12:38.000And then the other thing that I think is happening is that as the mainstream media, television in particular, dies, The quality people are starting to desert, like rats leaving a sinking ship.
00:12:50.000I guess they're good rats if they're quality people.
00:12:53.000And then there's ever more enticement to use clickbait journalism to attract a diminishing portion of the remaining audience.
00:13:02.000It's like one of the things that's happened.
00:13:04.000So if you look at the five major indices of violent crime in the United States...
00:13:27.000And then to turn everything into a polarized political discussion takes no real intellectual energy.
00:13:32.000But it's also driven by the death spiral of the classic media, I think.
00:13:37.000And I think that's actually why the polarization seems to be so acute now.
00:13:41.000Some of it is genuine, but some of it is the consequence of this underlying technological transformation and the death throes of the smoke signalers, fundamentally.
00:13:52.000What you're talking about when you're saying people, especially radical leftists, have to concede certain points whenever they discuss things, this is so true and so important because you see that play out over and over again.
00:14:05.000There's very little variation from the official narrative when they talk about important subjects or controversial subjects, whatever they are, whether it's transgender rights or whatever's in the news that's big and It's very popular right now.
00:14:23.000There's these certain things that you're not allowed to deviate from.
00:14:28.000And that's an insanely restrictive perspective.
00:15:07.000Equality of outcome essentially across every possible dimension in the universities and it's been used as a weapon by the radical left.
00:15:14.000But you know some of that's driven by legislative necessity.
00:15:20.000What's happening, the reason that I think this is coming from the universities is because I don't think that this could, well there's all these activist disciplines that are essentially subsidized by too high tuition fees and also by state funding and they've produced an entire substructure of activists and those activists are doing everything they can to lay out the theoretical structure for the radical left and that's a That's a structure that involves,
00:15:46.000Diversity is one, but that means diversity by race and ethnicity and sexual preference, for example, as if those have anything to do with genuine diversity of ideation, and they don't, and there's no evidence that they do.
00:15:58.000Inclusivity, I'm never even sure what that means.
00:16:02.000Which is a marker for, what would you call it, it's a code word in some sense for equality of outcome, which is an absolutely deadly doctrine.
00:16:09.000I think of all the mistakes that the radical left are making, and the moderate left for not calling them out on it, the equity doctrine is at the top of the list.
00:16:16.000And then there's other associated things like white privilege, that's a good one, and systemic bias, which is a It's an absolute embarrassment from the perspective of a reasonable academic psychologist, because psychological tests have been used to prove that there's this implicit bias that lurks everywhere,
00:16:34.000and the tests aren't reliable and valid enough to make that claim.
00:16:38.000Even the people who've made the test, the implicit association test, have admitted, except for Mazarin Banaji, who's the chairman of the Department of Psychology at Harvard, they've admitted that the tests aren't reliable and valid enough to be used Is there any benefit
00:17:08.000in having these conversations, talking about implicit biases, and recognizing that There's an extreme pushback against racism or sexism and all these different things and that even though these things these These these ideas that they're pushing might not be tested and proven the idea of putting it out there in the mainstream that there's a shift in consciousness in terms of like how people will or won't accept racism
00:17:39.000or sexism or homophobia or whatever else is being discussed that Maybe it's far left, but maybe it's moving the needle towards where it needs to be.
00:18:30.000You have to value some things more than others.
00:18:32.000Then you have to act out what you value in the social environment because you're a social creature and you're not going to do things alone.
00:18:39.000Then as soon as you start to act out things of value in the social environment, you inevitably produce a hierarchy.
00:18:45.000And the reason you do that is because no matter what you're acting out, Some people are way better at it than others.
00:19:29.000A, your hierarchy can get corrupt and might, and B, because some people are way better at it than others, you're going to produce a bunch of dispossessed people at the bottom.
00:19:37.000And that's not only not good for the dispossessed people, it actually threatens the whole hierarchy.
00:19:50.000Okay, so now you can think about that as an eternal problem.
00:19:54.000You can't do without hierarchies, but, and that's the right wing claim in some sense, you can't do without hierarchies and they're valuable, but they're also prone to corruption and they dispossess people.
00:20:05.000Okay, so now that's an internal problem.
00:20:07.000The question is what do you do about it?
00:20:08.000And the answer to that is there's no final answer to the problem.
00:20:13.000So what you have to do is you have to have a left wing and you have to have a right wing and they have to talk all the time about whether the hierarchy is healthy and whether or not it's dispossessing too many people.
00:20:23.000And then the problem with that is that discussion can go too far.
00:20:26.000Because the right-wingers can say, hierarchy uber always, right?
00:20:30.000That the state is correct and everything's right.
00:20:33.000And so that's the right-wing totalitarian types.
00:20:36.000And the left can say, we'll flatten everything so there's no inequality.
00:20:40.000And so both the left and the right can go too far.
00:20:43.000Now, the problem is we know how to define...
00:20:45.000I think one of the problems is we know how to define when the right goes too far.
00:20:49.000I think we learned that after World War II. I think if you're making claims of ethnic or racial superiority, you get to be put in a box and put off the shelf, right?
00:20:59.000It's obvious that the left can go too far, even though there are necessary participants in the discussion, but we don't know how to define when they've gone too far.
00:21:10.000No, and you might think, well, that's the moderate leftists' problem.
00:21:14.000It's their moral responsibility to dissociate themselves from the radicals, just as it's the moral responsibility of reasonable conservatives to dissociate themselves from the John Birch and Ku Klux Klan types.
00:21:27.000But it isn't just the moderate left's problem because even the people on the right don't know what to point to when they say, no, you've gone too far as a leftist.
00:22:30.000And one of the things Solzhenitsyn did, which was one of the things that made that book Arguably the greatest work of non-fiction of the 20th century, I mean, it's in the top 10 anyways, was to point out very clearly that the excesses of the Russian Revolution started right away.
00:22:48.000It wasn't that Lenin was a pretty good guy and then Stalin came in and corrupted everything.
00:22:51.000It was like Lenin was not a pretty good guy.
00:23:02.000And you're gonna do something about the oppressors.
00:23:04.000The problem is, is that you can define people multiple ways.
00:23:08.000This is the intersectionality problem.
00:23:10.000And almost everybody can be defined, in terms of their group identity, in some way that makes them an oppressor.
00:23:16.000So, like, if you're a black man, well, you could argue that you're oppressed because you're black, but what about the fact that you're a man?
00:23:24.000And so does that make you an oppressor or someone who's oppressed?
00:23:27.000And the answer is, as the revolution progresses, if there's any dimension along which you can be categorized as oppressor, you end up dead.
00:23:36.000And so that's part of the pathology of the equality of outcome doctrine.
00:24:18.000And so what seems to happen as soon as you decide that the hierarchy is unfair because there are oppressors and oppressed, then you can go after the oppressors with moral virtue.
00:24:29.000But the problem is that there's almost no limit to the number of ways that you can categorize someone as an oppressor.
00:25:08.000And the definition kept slipping because, well, look, even now, it's like, well, let's say we rally against the 1%, you know, and those would be the money owners, let's say.
00:25:57.000Well, and you also see the interesting thing, too, is that this is complicated.
00:26:01.000So I've been thinking about this proclivity of the left to destroy members of the moderate left.
00:26:08.000It's like part of the game that's being played, as far as I can tell, the ideologically pathological game is, I'm more virtuous than you.
00:26:17.000Now, look, if you're on the radical left and you say, well, you're more virtuous than a right-winger, it's like, well, who cares?
00:26:24.000That's obvious, because the right-wingers are, you know, pathological.
00:26:28.000So being more virtuous than them, that's not much of an attainment.
00:26:32.000But if I have my moderate leftist compatriot standing right beside me, and he's pretty damn virtuous, but I'm even more virtuous than him, Then that's a real attainment on my part.
00:26:44.000It's a moral attainment with no effort on my part.
00:26:46.000If I can figure out some way of classifying that previously virtuous person as an oppressor along some dimension, then all of a sudden I get an increment in my moral virtue.
00:26:56.000And that happened all the time in these leftist revolutions run amok.
00:27:06.000Why is it, and this is something that's always puzzled me, why is it that the left is defined by, there's certain values, and one of them is when you look at the right, you automatically think of racism,
00:27:22.000potential racism at least, dislike for gay people, homophobia, there's certain qualities that are always attributed to conservatives, and then there's certain qualities, and these are social things.
00:27:57.000We make these hierarchies, and they're hierarchies that are devoted towards a goal, and that the sum total of all those hierarchies is something like the patriarchy, even though I hate that word, and I don't think anybody should use it.
00:28:08.000I don't like that word at all, but we're speaking within the confines of that theory.
00:28:27.000Well, that's the theory, is that it's male-dominated.
00:28:31.000What is patriarchy is a male-dominated word.
00:28:34.000Well, and it's a funny thing, because, of course, there's lots of elements, there's lots of sub-elements of the patriarchy that aren't male-dominated.
00:28:40.000So healthcare, for example, universities, the education system in general, there's lots of places where these sub-elements are female-dominated.
00:28:50.000But do you think that they're defined as the patriarchy?
00:29:39.000Right, but it's a peculiar definition because it means you have to fractionate the patriarchy into pieces.
00:29:48.000You can no longer talk about it as a uniform structure if you're going to take out all those pieces that are dominated by women and say, well, that's not the patriarchy.
00:29:55.000But the thing is that the whole concept is so ill-defined that it's It's always power, though, right?
00:30:23.000When you're going looking for a plumber, you go look for a massage therapist, or a surgeon for that matter, or a lawyer.
00:30:29.000You go look for the person who's most competent.
00:30:32.000And one of the things the left can't tolerate is the idea that hierarchies are predicated, in part even, on competence, which they clearly are.
00:30:40.000The best predictors for success in Western hierarchies are intelligence and conscientiousness.
00:30:46.000Those are the best psychological predictors of success.
00:30:48.000They only account for about a third of the variation in success.
00:30:52.000Maybe a third is probably about right.
00:30:54.000So there's still lots of room for randomness and even for systemic discrimination.
00:30:59.000But the notion that our Our systems aren't predicated in part on competence is clearly wrong.
00:31:06.000Now, you asked a question about the left.
00:31:08.000It's like, why are the left always on the side of the people who don't fit in, let's say, or don't fit so easily in?
00:31:13.000And I think that is a matter of the consequence of hierarchical structures.
00:31:17.000So imagine in every hierarchy there are some people who don't do very well in any given hierarchy.
00:31:22.000Then imagine a Then imagine across all the hierarchies that there's a subset of people who are very likely to not do well in any of them.
00:31:31.000So you might say, well, they're systemically discriminated against.
00:31:34.000The left would be on their side because they're on the side, even temperamentally, of the people who are dispossessed.
00:31:40.000And the thing about that is that it's valid.
00:31:43.000Look, we need a spokesperson, politically, for the dispossessed.
00:31:50.000That's what the Democratic Party used to do when they worked for the working class.
00:31:54.000Because the working class needed a political voice.
00:31:56.000It's like, okay, that's the Democrats.
00:31:57.000Well, why do they need a political voice?
00:31:59.000Well, to keep the hierarchy from degenerating into rigid tyranny.
00:32:04.000It's part of the political discussion.
00:32:06.000But now the problem is, and this is the problem with the left, is that, well, what's the hierarchy?
00:32:15.000It's partly corrupt, like every system, but it's less corrupt than most systems, and there's a lot of elements of it that are devoted towards self-improvement and self-monitoring.
00:32:25.000You have to be a little nuanced and subtle about these sorts of things, and you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
00:32:31.000And the leftist rhetoric has got so intense that the idea is, and people believe this, while the world is going to hell in a handbasket, everything is getting worse in all possible ways, and there's systemic racism everywhere, and it's utterly unfair, and it should be torn down and rebuilt.
00:32:44.000It's like, no, it's actually functioning unbelievably well, even though it still has its problems.
00:32:51.000You know, and there's a big difference between saying there's systemic racism everywhere, and the reason that there isn't perfectly equal outcomes is because of prejudice, and saying, no, no, look, the system is functioning, let's say, at 75%.
00:33:07.000It's got some problems, including systemic prejudice, which hopefully will work themselves out across time and which show every bit of evidence of doing so.
00:33:15.000And so we don't need a radical solution.
00:33:20.000One of the things I've started to do with my Twitter account is to tweet out Good, non-naive news.
00:33:26.000Because one of the things that's happening in the world, and there's been half a dozen books on this or more written in the last five years by credible people, is that the distribution of the idea of individual sovereignty and property rights and free market economies, etc., out into the rest of the world,
00:33:43.000the non-Western world, is making the non-Western world rich really, really, really fast.
00:33:49.000So between 2000 and 2012, the rate of absolute poverty in the world fell by half.
00:34:07.000You know, the rates of child mortality in Africa are now lower than they were in Europe in 1950. The fastest growing economies in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa.
00:34:19.000Many, you know, millions of people, millions of people a month are getting access to this incredible technology that's embodied in cell phones.
00:34:27.000People have access to fresh water like they've never had access before.
00:34:33.000Kids are getting immunized at a rate that's unprecedented.
00:34:39.000And yet we have this idea that's become rampant in the West that there's something ultimately corrupt about the patriarchal tyranny and that it has to be dismantled right down to its core.
00:34:51.000And a lot of that's being taught by the activist disciplines and universities and I just don't get it.
00:34:57.000So they see these hierarchies and their proposal to level everything off and to take away the insane power at the very top is a quality of outcome.
00:35:10.000It's unproven in terms of it's never been done successfully to a utopian Right.
00:35:18.000Well, and I also don't even think you can do it in principle, because if you accept the proposition, the propositions I laid out, which is you have to pursue things of value, and if you pursue things of value in a social space, so you do it cooperatively and competitively,
00:35:33.000you do it with other people, then you're going to produce differential outcome because people will be differently good at it.
00:36:22.000And the reason you're selective is because there are things that are happening that need to happen or that are entertaining and interesting, and you want the best in all of those realms.
00:37:44.000So we have to talk about it constantly to figure out how to solve it, because it's an ongoing problem that transforms, and that's the reason that political dialogue is necessary.
00:37:51.000And then the danger is that the political dialogue will polarize into the radical left, no hierarchies whatsoever, or the radical right, our hierarchy is 100% right at all costs.
00:38:02.000And so those are the, we have the eternal problem and those are the two poles that we have to negotiate between.
00:38:08.000It's interesting because the accusation has always been that what the left is trying to do with this equality of outcome thing is sort of an infantilization of the populace, right?
00:38:20.000And the best example of that is sports.
00:38:24.000When you look at sports, clearly the best people win, right?
00:40:50.000So, one of the things that Jean Piaget, the developmental psychologist, he was very interested in figuring out a way out of this, and it's very much relevant to your concept, your talk about athletics.
00:41:02.000Because this is also something that points the way to a proper morality, which was actually something that Jean Piaget was very concerned about.
00:41:08.000He wanted to reconcile the distinction between religion and science.
00:42:03.000Because a game is, most of the time, a game is the beginning of a series of games.
00:42:09.000So let's say that you're on a soccer team.
00:42:11.000Well, there's winning the game, but the game isn't the issue.
00:42:15.000The game is the whole series of games.
00:42:16.000So maybe the game is winning the championship.
00:42:18.000And winning the championship and winning a game are not the same thing.
00:42:22.000And the reason for that is, well, maybe if you want to win a game, the best thing to do is to let your star player make all the moves.
00:42:28.000But if you want to win a championship, maybe the best thing is for your star player to do everything he or she possibly can to develop all the other team members.
00:42:36.000That's a different strategy, and the reason it's different is because it iterates across time.
00:42:42.000So when my kid was playing hockey when he was about 12 or so, he was in the championship game, just at a local arena, you know, and it was really fun to watch.
00:42:51.000The teams were pretty equal, which is something that you want, so that everybody can...
00:42:56.000Expand their skills while they're playing.
00:42:58.000And it was like five seconds to the end of the game and the other team made a breakaway and the guy came down nice and scored.
00:43:05.000It was a beautiful goal and it was 4-3 and that was the end of it, right?
00:43:08.000And on my kid's team there was the kid who was the star and he was a pretty good hockey player.
00:43:12.000He came off the ice and he was very annoyed about what had happened.
00:43:16.000He smashed his stick on the cement and was complaining about the refereeing and acting as if he'd been robbed.
00:43:22.000And his father came up and instead of saying, get your act together, kid, that's no way to display yourself after a loss.
00:43:28.000He said, oh yeah, man, you were robbed that the referees didn't ref right and you played the best and you should have won.
00:43:34.000And I thought, you absolute son of a bitch.
00:44:01.000And so what you're actually trying to train your son to do is to be a contender in the entire series.
00:44:08.000And the way you do that is by helping him develop his character.
00:44:12.000And the character is actually the strategy that would enable him to win the largest number of games across the largest possible span of time.
00:44:19.000And one way you do that if you're a kid is like, well, what do you want to do with your kid?
00:44:29.000So that means to try to win, but also to pay attention to developing the other people around him and not to put winning the game above everything at all times.
00:44:56.000And if kids line up to play with him, then he'll have friends his whole life, and he'll be socialized, and he'll be invited to many games, some of which he'll win, all of which he'll be able to participate in.
00:45:05.000And if he's fun to play with, then adults will teach him things, and then he wins that life.
00:45:10.000And so when you say to your kid, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, it matters how you play the game, what you're saying is, don't forget, kid, that what you're trying to do here is to do well at life.
00:45:19.000And you need to practice the strategies that enable you to do well at life while you're in any specific game.
00:45:25.000And you never want to compromise your ability to do well at life for the sake of winning a single game.
00:45:31.000And there's a deep ethic in that, and it's the ethic of reciprocity in games.
00:45:36.000Part of the reason that we're so obsessed with sports...
00:45:39.000It's because we like to see that dramatized, you know?
00:45:42.000Like, the person we really admire as an athlete isn't only the person who wins.
00:45:47.000We don't like the narcissistic winners.
00:45:50.000But if they're narcissistic, they're not good team players, they're only out for themselves, then we think, well, you're a winner in the narrow sense, but your character is suspect.
00:45:59.000You're no role model, even though you're a winner.
00:46:01.000And it's because we're looking for something deeper.
00:46:04.000We're looking for that, the manifestation of character that allows you to win across the set of possible games.
00:46:33.000It's right like look you're not gonna win it You're not going to you're not going to score on every shot, right?
00:46:38.000Doesn't mean you shouldn't take the shots doesn't mean you shouldn't try to to hit the goal but part of part of being able to continue to take shots is Is to have the strength of character to tolerate the fact that in that instance you weren't on top.
00:46:52.000It's more trivial in games than it is in fights.
00:46:55.000And the response is much more negative from the fans if you lose a fight and complain about it.
00:47:44.000They want you to be the person that has the courage to step into a cage or a ring or whatever the format is you're competing and to do something that's extremely difficult.
00:47:52.000And when you do that, they hold you to a higher standard.
00:47:56.000Yes, and when you fall, especially if you were a champion, that is one of the most disappointing things ever, when a champion complains, and its response is horrific from the audience.
00:48:08.000So let's imagine, what does the person who loses something important with grace do?
00:48:13.000And the answer is fairly straightforward.
00:48:16.000He accepts the defeat and thinks, okay, what is it that I have left to improve that will decrease the possibility of a similar defeat in the future?
00:48:24.000So what he's doing is, because the great athlete and the great person is not only someone who's exceptionally skilled at what they do, but who's trying to expand their skills at all times.
00:48:36.000And the attempt to expand their skills at all times is even more important than the fact that they're great to begin with, because the trajectory is so important.
00:48:43.000More important in particular to the audience.
00:48:46.000It's extremely important to the audience because the person who's competing, you are expecting them to live out this life in a perfect way or in a much more powerful way than you're capable of.
00:48:56.000Yes, and so part of that is the skill because they put in the practice, but part of that also is the willingness to push the skill farther into new domains of development with each action.
00:49:05.000And that's really what people like to watch, right?
00:49:07.000They don't like to watch a perfect athletic performance.
00:49:10.000They like to watch a perfect athletic performance that's pushed into the domain of new risk.
00:49:15.000They want to see both at the same time.
00:49:17.000You're really good at what you do and you're getting better.
00:49:19.000Okay, so you lose a match, which is not any indication that you're not good at what you do.
00:49:23.000You might not be as good as the person who beat you.
00:49:26.000But if you lose the match and then whine, what you've done is sacrifice the higher order principle of constant improvement of your own skills.
00:49:33.000Because you should be analyzing the loss and saying, the reason I lost, insofar as it's relevant to this particular time and place, is the insufficiencies I manifested that defeated me.
00:49:44.000And I need to track those insufficiencies so that I can rectify them in the future.
00:49:48.000And if I'm blaming it on you or the referees or the situation, then I'm not taking responsibility and I'm not pushing myself forward.
00:49:55.000And so then you also take the meaning out of it.
00:49:57.000Like, one of the things I've been doing on my tour People are criticizing me to some degree for saying things to people that are obvious.
00:50:05.000Well, first of all, it's not like I didn't bloody well know they were obvious.
00:50:08.000When I wrote those rules, well, the rules in my book, for example, stand up straight with your shoulders back, you know, treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping.
00:50:16.000It's like, I know perfectly well that those can be read as clichés.
00:50:20.000The question is, cliché, let's say, is something that's so true that it's become, that it's become, it's widely accepted by everyone.
00:50:30.000Well, but we don't know why it's true anymore.
00:50:33.000And so this issue, the issue that we're talking about here, the issue of being a good sport, we need to figure out why that's true.
00:50:40.000And the reason that it's true is that you're trying to push your development farther than you've already developed at every point in time.
00:50:47.000And now that's the proper moral attitude.
00:50:56.000When you see an athletic performance where someone is pushing themselves beyond what they are, you see someone dramatizing the process of proper adaptation.
00:51:04.000It isn't the skill itself, it's the extension of the skill.
00:51:07.000And when you see someone acting like a bad sport, then they're sacrificing that.
00:51:10.000And so they're sacrificing the higher for the lower, and no one likes that.
00:51:46.000And the way people treat the champions, it's a very different thing.
00:51:52.000It's the respect and adulation that a champion receives.
00:51:57.000It's the pinnacle of sports in terms of the love from the audience when someone wins a great fight.
00:52:05.000There's nothing like it, and this is one of the reasons why these people are willing to put their health on the line, because that high, the high of victory, and it's not just a victory, it's a, you know, who is it, who said the victory is really the victory over the lesser you.
00:52:26.000The victory is over, you've got to realize, a guy like Stipe Miocic, who defends his heavyweight title this weekend, In the UFC. He's the heavyweight champion of the world, but he's not undefeated.
00:53:25.000So the question is, who should you defeat in the final analysis?
00:53:28.000And the answer is, you should defeat your former self.
00:53:30.000You should be constantly trying to do that.
00:53:32.000And you're the right control for yourself, too, because you're the one who's had all your advantages and disadvantages.
00:53:38.000And so if you want to compete fairly with someone, then you should be competing with you.
00:53:42.000And it is the case, and this is what we were talking about, too, with regards to the self-improvement of the fighter, is, well, if you're improving yourself, then what you are doing is competing with your lesser self.
00:54:12.000So, it's very necessary to understand that this is why, you know, I've been stressing this idea of personal responsibility.
00:54:19.000It's like, well, personal responsibility is to compete with yourself, is to be slightly better than yourself the next day.
00:54:24.000And it better in some way that you can actually manage, and that's humility.
00:54:28.000It's right, like, well, I'm a flawed person, I've got all my problems, could I be as good as person X? It's like, not the right question.
00:54:36.000The right question is, could you be slightly better tomorrow than your currently flawed self?
00:54:40.000And the answer to that is, If you have enough humility to set the bar properly low, then you could be better tomorrow than you are today.
00:54:48.000Because what you also have to do is you have to say, well, here's all my flaws and my insufficiencies, and the best that someone that flawed and insufficient could do to improve and actually do it is this.
00:55:01.000And that's not worth going out in the street and celebrating with placards, you know?
00:55:05.000It's like, well, this is why I tell people to clean the room.
00:55:07.000So you're not going to brag to someone that you did that.
00:55:09.000But someone as insufficient as you might be able to manage it.
00:55:12.000And that means you actually are on the pathway to self-improvement and you're transcending your former self.
00:55:17.000And you might say, well, what's the right way of being in the world if there is such a thing?
00:55:21.000And it's not acting according to a set of rules.
00:55:24.000It's attempting continually to transcend the flawed thing that you currently are.
00:55:29.000And what's so interesting about that is that the meaning in life is to be found in that pursuit.
00:55:34.000So I've been laying that out in these discussions too, because I say, well, the fundamental issue is that life is tragic and difficult, very tragic and difficult for everyone.
00:55:44.000And it's also tainted by malevolence, because no matter how...
00:55:49.000Things are tragic and difficult, but there's always some stupid thing that you could do or someone else could do that could make it even worse than it has to be.
00:59:43.000I mean, I am pessimistic about this in my approach in some sense, because when I'm talking to my audiences and the same thing happens in my book, Maps of Meaning and in 12 Rules for Life, I'm laying out the worst case scenario.
00:59:56.000It's things are going really badly for you.
00:59:58.000And there's just chance associated with that sometimes.
01:00:01.000And you and the people around you are doing stupid things to make it worse.
01:00:04.000It's like, okay, what have you got under those circumstances?
01:00:07.000You've got the possibility to slowly raise yourself out of the mire.
01:00:11.000You've got the possibility to do just what the fighter does when he's defeated, which is to say, well...
01:00:17.000Regardless of the circumstances that might have led to my defeat, even if there were errors on the part of the referee, this is no time to whine about it.
01:00:26.000This is a time to take stock of what I did wrong so that I could improve it into the future.
01:00:32.000You know, in the Old Testament, one of the things that's really interesting about the Old Testament stories is in the Old Testament, the Jews keep getting walloped by God.
01:00:39.000It's like they struggle up and make an empire and then they just get walloped.
01:00:44.000And then it's all crushed and they're out of it for generations.
01:00:47.000And then they struggle back up and make an empire.
01:01:05.000The presupposition is, if things aren't working out, it's my fault.
01:01:11.000And that's a hell of a presupposition.
01:01:12.000And you might say, well, of course, you know, that underestimates the degree to which there's systemic oppression, etc., etc., and the vagaries of fate.
01:01:22.000It's like it doesn't underestimate it.
01:01:48.000Well, let's say you've got a kid and you want the kid to improve.
01:01:50.000You don't set them a bar that's so high that it's impossible for them to attain it.
01:01:54.000You take a look at the kid and you think, okay, this kid's got this range of skill.
01:01:58.000Here's a challenge we can throw at him or her that exceeds their current level of skill, but gives them a reasonable probability of success.
01:02:06.000And so, like I'm saying it tongue-in-cheek to some degree, you know, it's like, but I'm doing it as an aid to humility.
01:02:12.000It's like, well, I don't know how to start improving my life.
01:03:13.000I'm going to lift up 150 pounds and injure myself right off the bat?
01:03:17.000No, I had to go in there and strip down and put my skinny goddamn self in front of the mirror and think, son of a bitch, there's all these monsters in the gym who've been lifting weights for 10 years, and I'm struggling to get 50 pounds off the bar.
01:04:07.000But you have to accept the fact that You can set yourself a goal that you can attain, and there's not going to be much glory in it to begin with.
01:04:15.000Because if you're not in very good shape, the goal that you could attain tomorrow isn't very glorious.
01:04:21.000But it's a hell of a lot better than nothing, and it beats the hell out of bitterness, and it's way better than blaming someone else.
01:04:33.000There's a statement in the New Testament, it's called the Matthew Principle, and economists use it to describe how the economy and the world works.
01:04:39.000To those who have everything, more will be given.
01:04:42.000From those who have nothing, everything will be taken.
01:04:44.000It's like what's very pessimistic in some sense, because it means that as you start to fail, you fail more and more rapidly.
01:04:50.000But it also means that as you start to succeed, you succeed more and more rapidly.
01:04:54.000And so you take an incremental step and, well, now you can lift 55 pounds instead of 52.5 pounds.
01:05:01.000You think, well, what the hell is that?
01:05:03.000It's like it's one step on a very long journey.
01:05:46.000And they come up to me and they say, well, I know you've heard this lots of times before, but I've really been putting my life together since I've been watching your lectures.
01:05:54.000Then they tell me a story about where they were in some dark place, too much alcohol, too much drugs, not getting along with their father, not getting along with their mother, not having a vision for their life, being nihilistic, playing too many video games, you know, like being suicidal, that happens a lot,
01:06:10.000having post-traumatic stress disorder sometimes as a consequence of combat, whatever little slice of hell they were occupying.
01:06:16.000They say, look, I've been listening to your lectures, and I've been developing a vision for my life, and I've been trying to take responsibility, and I've been trying to tell the truth, and things are way better.
01:07:53.000It's very beneficial for people and they need to hear that and there's something that comes along with that that's critical and what that is is an honest assessment of yourself.
01:08:05.000An honesty That type of honesty, honesty with yourself, it's very difficult for some people, and they don't have the tools for it, and they haven't been explained how to do this.
01:08:45.000You have to honestly assess your position and move forward.
01:09:04.000But, you know, the self-esteem movements and all of that will accept yourself the way you are.
01:09:08.000It's like, no, because you need a trajectory.
01:09:11.000And one of the things that I think, one of the reasons that audiences are responding to what I've been saying in my lectures and what I've been writing about is that I don't tell people that they're okay the way they are.
01:09:22.000No, I say, no, no, you could be way more than you are.
01:09:24.000And they're relieved about that, you see, because if you're in a dark and terrible place, and someone says you're okay the way you are, then you don't know what to do about that.
01:09:49.000You could be incomparably better across multiple dimensions.
01:09:53.000And in pursuing that better, that's where you'll find the meaning in your life.
01:09:56.000And that will give you the antidote to the suffering.
01:09:59.000The way I always describe it to people is there are disciplines that you can pursue and those disciplines are a vehicle for developing your human potential.
01:10:07.000And if you get better at these things, you can get better at anything.
01:10:10.000And if you figure out what it takes to become better at whatever sport it is or whatever art it is or whatever you're pursuing, the same principles you can apply to the way you treat people, you can apply to the way you educate yourself, you can apply to the way you keep your body in shape.
01:10:30.000People have asked me in my book why I wrote it as an antidote to chaos, you know, because, well, there isn't anything technically wrong with chaos.
01:10:57.000You want to be a kid forever because you don't want to give up the potential.
01:10:59.000And you look out in the world and all you see are Captain Hooks, you know, who've lost a hand, who are chased by death because that's the clock and the crocodile.
01:11:55.000Do the best thing that you can think of.
01:11:57.000Put the best plan you have into practice.
01:11:59.000It's not going to be perfect and it will change along the way.
01:12:02.000But it will change partly because you become disciplined pursuing the path.
01:12:06.000And as you become disciplined, you become wiser.
01:12:08.000And as you become wiser, you become able to formulate better and better plans.
01:12:12.000So you can start vaguely and confused and develop a plan that's not so great and you start to implement it and then you accrue incremental wisdom as you implement your flawed plan and that enables you to fix the plan.
01:12:24.000And so that's part of that process of incremental self-improvement as well.
01:12:28.000One of the more difficult aspects of that is personal honesty, like being honest with yourself.
01:12:33.000Being honest with yourself about what you're doing.
01:13:55.000But if you know that you're the thing that can transcend your problems, most fundamentally, if you know you're the thing that, if it faces the problems, can transcend them, then you have the faith that would enable you to take stock of who you are.
01:14:07.000And you have to do that in small steps because most people don't have experience in transcending their problems, so they really don't know what it even feels like.
01:14:31.000And for some people, it's the first real improvement, marked absolute improvement in their life.
01:14:38.000Right, well then that's an interesting thing too because right there you've got a bit of a measurement system.
01:14:43.000We have this system set up online called the Future Authoring Program and we've implemented, last time we implemented it because we've tested it three times, we implemented at Mohawk College in Canada and we had people write about their ideal future and also to put in measurement strategies.
01:14:58.000It's like okay here's your ideal future, here's how you're going to break it into goals, here's how you're going to mark progress towards those goals.
01:15:05.000Because you've got to be playing a fair game with yourself, right?
01:15:07.000Because when you make progress, you want to reward yourself.
01:15:10.000So you have to identify what the progress is, and you have to reward it.
01:15:13.000The consequence, we had people write a future plan for only an hour when they came for their school orientation in the summer before going to its community college.
01:15:23.000And it dropped the dropout rate among young men by 50%.
01:15:31.000And what that meant was, to me, what that meant was, just think about that.
01:15:34.000What that means is that these kids had been educated for 12 years and no one had ever sat them down and said, okay, what the hell are you doing and why?
01:18:29.000And the reason for that is you're actually adapted neurologically to identify the pathway of maximal incremental improvement.
01:18:36.000That was a discovery conceptually by a guy named Vygotsky, who was a Russian neuropsychologist who coined the term zone of proximal development.
01:18:43.000You hear now and then people say they're in the zone.
01:18:46.000That's the zone of proximal development.
01:18:48.000And that's that place that you occupy when you're improving at the rate that's optimal to you.
01:18:53.000And your sense of intrinsic meaning signifies that.
01:18:57.000That's how your bloody brain is wired.
01:18:58.000And so then you might say, well, what's the antidote to the tragedy and malevolence of life?
01:19:03.000And the answer is to put yourself in the zone of proximal development, because that's where the maximal meaning is.
01:19:08.000And that actually does prepare you for life.
01:19:10.000And so the question, why think, is, well, you think before you act, and you act to put yourself in the zone of proximal development, and you do that as an antidote to the catastrophe of life.
01:19:24.000And the thing that's cool about that, and this is, I think, part of what I've been telling people that's sort of novel, is, well, where's the meaning?
01:20:49.000You know, it's rough downtown in L.A. and places around the Orpheum, too.
01:20:53.000And Tammy and I, my wife, because she's traveling with me, and is a big help, by the way, We were wandering around downtown LA the morning after the talk, and we were walking down the street, and we were on streets we probably shouldn't have been on, but in any case, because what the hell do we know, being stupid Canadians.
01:21:09.000And so we were walking down the street, and this car pulled up beside us, and this kid hopped out, and this good-looking Latino kid, 20, 21, something like that, he jumped over, and he said, he's all excited, he said, are you Dr. Peterson?
01:21:31.000And so, it's lovely, eh, when you're walking down a kind of rough area, and somebody pulls up beside you, and they jump out of the car to tell you how much better their life is.
01:21:45.000He said, wait a minute, wait a minute.
01:21:46.000Went back to his car, and he got out his dad, and They came over together, and his dad was just smiling away, like a real smile, you know?
01:21:54.000And so was the kid, and they had their arms around each other, and they said, look, like, we've really been working on our relationship for the last year and a half, and it's going just great.
01:22:11.000And everybody that's coming to these talks, that's what they're trying to do.
01:22:15.000You know, I got 3,000 people in each audience, and what they're trying to do is figure out, how can I take maximal responsibility for my own life?
01:22:22.000How can I imbue it with the meaning that helps me withstand tragedy and suffering?
01:23:01.000He just feels like there's some crazy movement going on and something's changing in the world because of this.
01:23:06.000This new avenue of learning and developing is opening up for these people.
01:23:11.000Well, and I've been thinking about that too because, you know, like I said at the beginning, if you're surfing, you don't want to take responsibility for the wave.
01:23:19.000You know, I mean, first of all, a lot of what I've been telling people are things that I've gleaned from the clinical and the psychological literature.
01:23:25.000It's not like I'm coming up with this of my own accord, right?
01:23:28.000I'm transmitting information that I've learned from very, very wise people.
01:23:33.000But also, we don't want to underestimate the utility of the technology, right?
01:23:37.000Because we have this long-form technology now, and it's enabling us to have this discussion.
01:23:42.000And so we can get deeper into things publicly and socially than we were able to before.
01:23:49.000I see this as a manifestation of that.
01:23:51.000And I'm hoping too that maybe what's happening, because we're going to have a lot of adaptation to do in the next 20 years as things change so rapidly we can hardly comprehend it.
01:24:01.000And hopefully the way we're going to be able to manage that is to think.
01:24:06.000And hopefully these long-form discussions will provide the public forum for us to actually think, to actually engage at a deep enough level so we'll be able to master the transformations.
01:24:19.000Part of the reason that I wrote this book, well, part of the reason that I've been doing what I've been doing for the last 30 years is because I really have believed Since 1985, something like that, that the way out of political polarization, the way out of the excesses of the right and the left, is through the individual.
01:24:38.000The fundamental unit of measurement is the individual.
01:24:41.000And the fundamental task of the individual is to engage in this process of humble self-improvement.
01:24:46.000I believe that's the case and that's where the meaning is and that's where the responsibility is and I think and I'm hoping that if enough people in the West and then and then the rest of the world for that matter but we're very polarized in the West right now if enough people take responsibility for getting their individual lives together then we'll get wise enough so we won't let this process of political polarization put us back to the same places that we went so many times in the 20th century.
01:25:23.000But this is not how you're commonly represented.
01:25:26.000You are the most misrepresented person I've ever met in my life.
01:25:30.000I have never seen someone who has So much positive that gets ignored and where people are looking for any little thing that they could possibly misrepresent and switch up and change.
01:25:48.000I mean, I'm really not sure what it is about you that's so polarizing with all these different people that are Deciding that you are some sexist, transphobic, evil person that's this right-wing,
01:26:25.000I mean, it's only been the last few years that you've gone from this relatively unknown professor in a university in Toronto to being this worldwide figure where people, obviously your message is resonating with people in a very huge way,
01:26:43.000but the people that are opposing you They're vehemently opposed.
01:27:13.000I mean, I came out against this bill in Canada, Bill C-16, that hypothetically purported to do nothing else but to increase the domain of rights that were applied to transsexual people.
01:27:25.000But there was plenty more to that bill, man, let me tell you.
01:27:28.000And I read the policies that went along with it, and it was a compelled speech bill.
01:27:33.000And so I opposed it on the grounds that the politicians are not supposed to leap out of their proper domain and start to compel speech.
01:27:40.000It's not the same as forbidding hate speech.
01:27:42.000I think hate speech should be left to hell alone, personally, for all sorts of reasons.
01:27:47.000To compel the contents of speech is a whole new thing.
01:27:50.000It's never been done before in the history of British common law, English common law.
01:27:54.000And it's actually the Supreme Court in the 1940s in the US said that that was not to be allowed.
01:28:13.000So that you can violate this fundamental principle and I should assume that you're doing it for nothing but compassion and that you're wise enough to manage that properly.
01:28:26.000I think they're unbelievably dangerous and I have reason to believe that.
01:28:30.000So I think that when push comes to shove, if your unit of analysis is the group, and your worldview is one group, and it's power claims against all other groups, that that's not acceptable.
01:28:42.000It's tribalism of the worst form, and it'll lead to nothing but mayhem and disaster.
01:28:47.000And part of the reason you're doing it isn't because you're compassionate, it's because you're envious, and you don't want to take responsibility for your own life, and I'm calling you on it.
01:28:54.000And so you don't like me, so I must be an alt-right figure.
01:29:45.000Oh yeah, there's that too, but there's layers.
01:29:48.000Well, part of it's the political polarization.
01:29:52.000You know, at the moment, we're viewing almost everything that happens in the world through a political lens, at least the journalists.
01:29:57.000At least, first of all, first of all, I've got to make this clear.
01:30:02.000First of all, I've been treated well by lots of journalists, really well.
01:30:08.000Like, the best journalists in Canada have been on my side since about two weeks after the Bill C-16 thing erupted.
01:30:13.000And those would be the journalists that have an independent voice and that have created their own following.
01:30:19.000And they're in a number of different media places, mostly in print.
01:30:24.000And there's a coalition of newspapers in Canada, the Post Media Group, 200 newspapers.
01:30:30.000They came out fully in support of my stance on Bill C-16.
01:30:34.000And so there's lots of times that I've been treated properly by journalists.
01:30:38.000There's a small number of journalists, very noisy, and a small number of activists, very well organized, who've been on my case right from the beginning.
01:30:46.000And those are people who are generally driven by a very radical leftist progressive agenda.
01:30:56.000I'm on their side as people who could struggle forward.
01:30:58.000But the collectivist vision, it's deadly.
01:31:01.000But you seem to be the poster boy for this very simple...
01:31:07.000Just characterization like almost a caricature of what the the the alt-right figurehead is it's it's to me as a person who knows you it's very strange to watch this take place and Then when they can find anything that you say that could without further explanation or definition be misconstrued as Appealing to this definition of you like for instance When all this,
01:31:36.000I guess they call themselves incels, involuntary celibates, when all this stuff went down, when this guy drove his car into a group of people, it's a horrible tragedy.
01:31:49.000One of the things that you talked about with incels is that, and this was a part of the New York Times hit piece.
01:32:00.000You said one of the cures for this is enforced monogamy.
01:32:04.000People decided, and I had never heard that term before, quite honestly, and I was like, what the fuck does that mean?
01:32:10.000It's a psychological term, and what it means is enforced by culture, that it is a good value.
01:32:17.000Monogamy, yeah, because polygamous societies tend to become ultra-violent.
01:32:21.000And that's been known in the anthropological literature for a hundred years.
01:32:25.000And certainly, leftist anthropologists were among those who discovered it.
01:32:30.000The journalist knew perfectly well what I meant by enforced monogamy.
01:32:48.000Well, that was funny in some sense because my sense is if you want to pillory someone, you should attribute to them views that someone somewhere has had.
01:32:58.000And the implication of that part of the New York Times article was that I wanted to take nubile young women at the point of a gun under state enforcement and deliver them to useless men.
01:33:08.000It's like no one has ever believed that.
01:33:32.000It's an inaccurate definition of who you are.
01:33:34.000Well, one of the things I've said continually, and this is on record in multiple places, it's like, okay, so you're a young man, and all the women are rejecting you.
01:34:42.000I don't think that involuntary celibates, I don't think that having enforced monogamy as a part of our cultural norm is going to help those people.
01:35:01.000Okay, I could see that in this theoretical world where polygamous societies exist en masse and then you do have this problem where there's a small group of men that are fucking all the women.
01:35:16.000But that's not what we're talking about.
01:35:18.000And also making the women unhappy, right?
01:35:20.000Because the women don't have any access to a genuine, intimate, one-to-one relationship over any long period of time.
01:35:47.000The minor point was that one of the ways that societies around the world have figured out That you keep young male aggression under control is by enforcing monogamous standards, because it gives everyone a chance in some sense.
01:35:59.000It gives everyone a chance, meaning it clears more women will be available for one-on-one relationships, rather than one guy who is some, you know...
01:36:15.000Whatever, for whatever reason, some large figure in society.
01:36:18.000Yeah, well, you see this happening in universities where women outnumber men.
01:36:22.000So the men, hypothetically, have more sexual opportunity.
01:36:36.000And the men who have all the sexual opportunity get cynical.
01:36:40.000But isn't this in some ways against your whole idea of equality of outcome?
01:36:45.000Because you're talking about equality of sexual outcome now.
01:36:48.000If these men, if you have a guy like a LeBron James that's a dominant basketball player that just kicks everyone's ass, this is a guy who succeeded at the highest level, right?
01:37:00.000Well, there's going to be people like that sexually.
01:37:04.000There's going to be people that are better at finding mates, and this is what they enjoy.
01:37:36.000Look, to give the journalist credit, that is the point she was making.
01:37:40.000You know, apart from pilloring me and caricaturing my perspective, that was the point she was making.
01:37:46.000Well, first of all, I'm not in favor of unbridled hierarchies.
01:37:50.000Like I already said, the proclivity of a hierarchy is that all the spoils go to the person at the top, and that can destabilize the whole structure.
01:37:57.000So we have to have a dialogue about how to rectify that.
01:38:00.000But how could you possibly rectify that if one man is...
01:38:07.000Six-foot-five, beautiful man, who's got a perfect body, and he's brilliant, and he just wants to date a bunch of women.
01:38:14.000And all the rest of the people are five-foot-one, and they're fat, and they're lazy, and like, this guy's gonna, if this is the competition, he's going to win.
01:39:58.000And so society steps in on behalf of the children.
01:40:01.000And you can say, well, lots of people don't want to have children.
01:40:04.000Yes, and that's truer now than it used to be, although many of those people end up having children anyways.
01:40:09.000You know, the guys who are sleeping around all the time, so that doesn't circumvent the problem.
01:40:13.000But the issue here for me isn't the men or the women, it's the children.
01:40:17.000We're trying to set up societies where the probability that children will be raised in something approximated in an optimal environment is optimized.
01:40:24.000And that's going to mean sacrifice of opportunity and choice on the part of adults.
01:40:47.000Well, that's why also, look, you see this.
01:40:49.000Women are hypergamous, which means they mate across and up dominance hierarchies.
01:40:54.000And so if you're a male who's successful in a given hierarchy, the probability that you're going to have additional mating opportunities is exceptionally high.
01:41:01.000It's an unbelievably good predictor of that.
01:41:03.000That hypergamy is a very uncomfortable discussion for some people.
01:41:58.000And so we rein that in with enforced monogamy.
01:42:00.000And we do that in order to provide stable circumstances for children.
01:42:05.000Is a polyamorous society just as unattainable as this utopian Marxist idea?
01:42:14.000I think so, because it looks like, and this is another point I was making that didn't get covered in the article, although I wrote about it somewhat extensively on my blog, is that societies tilt towards monogamy across the world.
01:42:51.000That's more common than anyone suspected.
01:42:53.000So part of the way that women solve the problem that you're just describing, and I'm not saying anything for this or against this, this is a purely factual biological claim, is they pick a monogamous marriage and they cheat with high-status guys.
01:43:07.000Now, you know, obviously in the confines of the marriage, that's a terrible thing, but...
01:43:12.000That's a very uncomfortable subject, though, for women in particular.
01:43:15.000Well, it's an uncomfortable subject for everyone.
01:43:17.000It's a terribly uncomfortable subject.
01:43:19.000They don't like the idea that this is a common thing, that women choose a safe man that is willing to be monogamous with them and perhaps maybe they're above him in a social class or sexually, and then they'll cheat with someone who is...
01:43:36.000Well, it's common, but it's not the norm, right?
01:44:55.000I'm sorry to interrupt you here, but this is one of the things that I wanted to bring up, but I kind of lost track of it.
01:45:01.000The misrepresentation of you mirrors the misrepresentation of the gender pay gap.
01:45:06.000Because it's a convenient misrepresentation that upon further inspection and understanding, you realize there is no gender pay gap.
01:45:12.000The gender pay gap, when people discuss it that don't understand it, and I've had these conversations with really intelligent people that just listen to what's in the news or read some very quick article talking about this problem that we have, and they assume that a man and a woman are working the same job,
01:45:29.000but the woman is unfairly paid 79 cents to the man's dollar.
01:45:36.000The case is women choose different professions that don't pay as much, they work less hours, and they oftentimes get married and have children, and because they have children, they take paternity leave, and they make less money because of that.
01:45:49.000So there's about 10 reasons or 20 reasons for the gender pay gap, one of them being motherhood, but there's a whole slew of them.
01:45:55.000Men work more dangerous jobs, men work outside, men are more likely to move.
01:46:20.000Yeah, they want them to be binary in the way they already understand.
01:46:23.000They want everything to fit their ideological lens and things are more complicated than that.
01:46:27.000This is a complex discussion that you're not going to get in a five-minute segment on a talk show.
01:46:34.000You're not going to get this on a radio show.
01:46:36.000You're not going to get this in an article that gets edited by someone with a biased opinion.
01:46:40.000And this is the problem with mainstream media, and this is the problem with ideas, period.
01:46:45.000Warren Farrell's book on, he wrote a book called, Warren Farrell is the guy who's most, what would you call, been most pellered for pointing out the real reasons for the gender pay gap.
01:46:54.000He wrote a book called Why Men Make More.
01:47:00.000Because he wanted to help provide, now obviously he was doing it for public consumption as well, but one of the motivations was, well men do make more.
01:47:08.000And if women want to make more, well, could they learn from the men who make more how to make more?
01:47:13.000The question is whether or not they'll do it, and the probable answer is most women won't, because how much you make isn't the only hallmark of success in your life.
01:47:23.000You know, it's like, it's one measure, and it might be a measure that really competitive men compete for, and they do, and that's partly to provide access to increased mating opportunities, because that's built into the structure, something we never talk about either, although we could.
01:47:39.000So, Warren wrote this to lay out all the reasons that men make more, but it was so that his daughters, at least in part, so that his daughters could figure out how to be socio-economically successful.
01:47:48.000It's like, yeah, but that's not the only hallmark.
01:47:50.000How much socio-economic success are you willing to sacrifice to spend time with your kids before they're three years old?
01:47:55.000Well, the answer to that shouldn't be none, right?
01:51:02.000This is another thing that you and I are in agreement on, but when I see people talk about the way you discuss women, they misrepresent what you're saying and paint you in what I think willfully paint you.
01:51:18.000They do it on purpose, they paint you as a misogynist.
01:51:22.000I don't understand if it is because they disagree with you on things, so this is a convenient way to demonize your position by demonizing you as a human being.
01:51:51.000And people have accused me of pseudoscience, you know, which I really think is quite comical because the studies that I'm reporting aren't...
01:52:11.000Well, because it seems to be there's a reason that goes along with the radical leftist agenda that if there are...
01:52:16.000that a world of equality of outcome could not be achieved, and that's the desirable world, if there are actually differences between people, actual differences, like that aren't just socio-culturally constructed so that you can gerrymand it.
01:52:58.000And I'm not saying that they're ideologically contaminated.
01:53:01.000But what I am saying is there's no evidence whatsoever that right-wing, leaning psychologists produced the Big Five, because there are no right-leaning psychologists.
01:53:21.000There's quite a few differences, but the biggest ones are women are more agreeable, because that's one of the traits, agreeableness, and it's the compassion, politeness dimension, and they're more prone to negative emotion, anxiety, and emotional pain.
01:53:33.000And that mirrors a psychiatric literature that shows worldwide that women are more likely to be diagnosed with depression and anxiety, just like men are more likely to be imprisoned for antisocial behavior, which is the reflection of low agreeableness.
01:53:56.000So now, there are personality differences between men and women.
01:53:59.000Now, the first thing we might point out is they're not that big.
01:54:03.000So if you draw a random woman and a random man out of the population, and you had to bet on who was most aggressive, least agreeable, and you bet on the woman, you'd be right 40% of the time.
01:57:08.000Okay, so the fact of failure within a hierarchy of value is painful.
01:57:13.000And so to give the devil his due, you give the left its due, just like you do the right, is like, yeah, it's painful that hierarchies produce dispossession.
01:57:26.000You get rid of the hierarchy, you get rid of the value structure, you get rid of the tools that allow us to generate absolute wealth and stop people from starving.
01:57:57.000If you look at what happened in the leftist societies that tried to pursue utopia, and you don't read envy and resentment into that, you don't know the history.
01:58:11.000It's like, it's clearly the case that the Soviet Union, for example, was motivated by the desire for equality of outcome as a primary motivation.
01:58:24.000Well, was it all compassion and love for the dispossessed?
01:58:28.000Or was it absolutely bitter resentment and hatred for anyone who had any shred of success whatsoever on any possible dimension of evaluation?
01:58:37.000So this compassion for people that aren't doing well when utilized the wrong way or when approached the wrong way leads to attacking people that do well.
01:59:03.000And that's the flip side of that affiliative agreeableness.
01:59:07.000It's like if you're on my side, you know, if you're the infant who's sheltering under my wings, it's like I'm the absolute epitome of maternal love and care.
01:59:18.000But if I've identified you as a predator, you better look the hell out.
01:59:22.000And that's playing out in our political landscape at a very, very rapid rate.
01:59:26.000That's the female side of totalitarianism as far as I can tell, the feminine side of totalitarianism.
01:59:32.000It's not just that agreeableness motivates aggression, because it certainly does.
01:59:36.000It's also that the envious and the resentful can use compassion as a camouflage for their true intent, which is to tear down anyone who has more than them.
02:01:00.000And it's worse, like, look, in the Russian Revolution, for example, let's say, just for the sake of argument, that the first rung of revolutionaries were only driven by compassion.
02:01:32.000They killed all of them, rounded them all up, killed them, raped them, stole all their property, sent the remnants to Siberia, froze them to death.
02:01:39.000Ten years later, six million Ukrainians died because they couldn't raise crops.
02:01:44.000Why do you think that people are so opposed to discussing these things or to challenging cultural norms?
02:01:51.000Because one of the things that I've seen, especially in terms of the differences between men and women, this reaction to some of the things that you've said has been It's very strange to me.
02:02:08.000It's very strange that people aren't recognizing that these are unbalanced approaches and that there's Well, some of it's just complicated, Joe.
02:02:17.000It's like, well, let's say there are differences between men and women, just for the sake of argument.
02:02:20.000The biggest differences seem to be in interest, by the way.
02:02:23.000And so what's going to happen is that if we let men and women sort themselves out, there aren't going to be very many female engineers and tech types, and there's going to be a lot of female nurses.
02:02:31.000There's not going to be many male nurses and healthcare types.
02:02:34.000There's not going to be very many male elementary school teachers.
02:02:50.000Yeah, well, that's a problem because that's a measure.
02:02:54.000The equality of outcome thing is a non-starter.
02:02:56.000Whether it's okay, like if men and women sort themselves into different occupations, which looks highly probable, I don't know if that's okay.
02:03:04.000And then it's also like, okay, compared to what alternative?
02:03:37.000Some of them are strategic, in some sense, because...
02:03:42.000Women pay a bigger price for reproduction, and so that's going to lead them to make different choices.
02:03:46.000That's just rational based on biological differences, so it's like a second-order biological difference.
02:03:52.000There's differences in temperament and interest.
02:03:55.000It's going to lead them to make different choices.
02:03:57.000Is that a pro-feminist stance or an anti-feminist stance?
02:04:00.000It's only anti-feminist if you assume everyone has to be exactly the same and the outcomes have to be exactly the same.
02:04:06.000If your goal is, no, leave people the hell alone as much as possible, let them make their own informed and free choices, then you let the differences manifest themselves in the world and you take your knocks because of that.
02:04:20.000The problem with that is this narrative of equality.
02:05:06.000Because there isn't a damn thing you can do that isn't counterproductive, despite the fact that the army wants you because they can't get enough manpower.
02:05:39.000One of the conversations that you had that I found to be shocking, and it started a trend of misquoting and misrepresenting you, was you did an interview with Vice, and they use a snippet of one of the things you said and tried to pretend that you had made these very curt statements.
02:06:24.000It's like, A, I know more than you, and B, you're probably that reprehensible person that I've thought about, and it's my job to reveal you.
02:06:33.000He was deciding that what you were doing was representing the patriarchy, or you were representing male-dominant structures that he was saying that are not correct.
02:07:12.000It's a mistake because the right approach in these situations is to use minimal necessary force and to allow myself to get Irritated, let's say, even minorly, when I'm faced with someone who's doing this, is not productive.
02:07:37.000I said, and they didn't put this in their initial cut, I said, I'm not saying that women shouldn't be allowed to wear makeup in the workplace.
02:07:53.000Someone who felt like you were being misrepresented and that the editing was unjust decided to leak it, and people were absolutely furious.
02:08:02.000Yeah, well, I think the Vice people actually released it, but other people took the full release and clipped it with the clipped release and showed how it was being misrepresented.
02:08:12.000But so, okay, so the makeup thing, it's like, all right, look, here's the, first of all, I make a mistake sometimes in treating journalists like I would treat my graduate students.
02:08:22.000So when I'm having a conversation with my students and we say, well, here's a problem.
02:12:18.000He thought he came at the entire conversation with an air of intellectual condescension.
02:12:22.000It was built right into the discussion right from the beginning, and he never dropped it at all.
02:12:26.000It's like, well, I know what you're doing, and I know what's up, and I know how to take you apart, and I know that whatever you're talking about is just an attempt to defend your actually reprehensible opinions.
02:13:19.000These are complex situations when you find men and women who are sexually attracted to each other and they're working in confined environments for long periods of time and they essentially spend more time with the people they work with than they do with their lovers and their wives and their husbands.
02:13:41.000And if they find each other attractive and they're interacting with each other socially, especially if there's any interaction that deviates outside of the work discussion, they start talking about different things.
02:13:52.000You also don't want them to find each other unattractive.
02:13:56.000Like if you're taking someone out for dinner, on a business dinner, it's like even if it's guys going out together, let's say, it's not like they're working to find each other unattractive.
02:15:03.000And he said, well, actually, probably, they probably should be forced to.
02:15:07.000Yeah, well, I was probably wrong in everything I did in that part of the discussion because I hadn't thought that issue through enough to actually give a good answer.
02:15:17.000You didn't expect that issue because it's not something you talk about commonly.
02:15:20.000No, and it's actually complicated, right?
02:15:52.000You know, I'm not happy with my answer to that, but I hadn't spent the week it would take to think through the issue and really have a comprehensive perspective on it.
02:16:01.000And you didn't expect that to be a subject anyway?
02:16:12.000Well, my daughter has told me, and my wife as well, my son as well, in these discussions, we've been thinking about how to handle the media, which is, oh God, a very complicated question.
02:16:22.000And one hypothesis being, don't do interviews that will be edited.
02:16:28.000And I've thought about that and been thinking about it, and that might be the right answer.
02:16:33.000It might be the right answer going forward.
02:16:46.000I mean, there's complex subjects that people would disagree with you on, but when you look at complete mischaracterizations of your point, these have been established because of editing.
02:18:38.000Then there was all this response to it.
02:18:39.000And then the Newman people, who were absolutely flabbergasted by the negative response, said, Peterson has unleashed his army of trolls and poor Cathy had to go into hiding.
02:18:51.000It's like, There's no evidence of any credible threats.
02:18:53.000They said they called in the police, but you can do that without there being reason.
02:18:57.000You can just say that, which is what they said.
02:18:59.000They played a victim narrative instantly, although one thing Cathy Newman is not, even though she might play it at the behest of her employers, is a victim.
02:19:07.000She's one of the most powerful people in Britain.
02:19:23.000The idea that people that are interested in the things that you have to say, that you have control over them, like you can give them marching orders is foolish.
02:19:31.000And you're not the person that does that.
02:19:32.000Well, and how many million people do there have to be before they're not all trolls?
02:19:47.000Well, now, if you look at the video, which is about 10 million, plus all the clips, it's like 50 million.
02:19:54.000And the comments, the pro, the comments that are critical with regards to Kathy Newman's conduct are running about 50 to 1. So that's all trolls, is it?
02:21:44.000You speak in these long-form podcasts and interviews and you get a chance to extrapolate and unpack some pretty complicated issues and compare them to other complicated issues and try to find meaning and middle ground and try to illuminate certain positions.
02:22:07.000When you expose yourself to editing, you expose yourself to someone's idea of what the narrative should be and how to frame your positions in And dishonest way.
02:22:20.000And you're seeing it time and time again.
02:22:22.000And it exposes the problem with media.
02:22:24.000Look, I went to the Aspen Ideas Festival last week, which is a whole story in and of itself.
02:22:29.000But I was interviewed there by a journalist from the Atlantic Monthly.
02:22:32.000And it was a relatively long-form interview.
02:22:35.000I think we talked for 40 minutes, something like that.
02:23:31.000Despite the fact that I've been taken out of context at times, and a fairly significant proportion of times, but not the overwhelming majority of times, the net consequence of all of that has been to engage more and more people in a complex dialogue,
02:23:53.000It doesn't mean that the strategy that I've implemented so far is the only strategy that will work into the future.
02:23:59.000We can also clearly establish that you didn't plan any of this to happen.
02:24:02.000This whole thing that happened from you opposing that bill.
02:24:07.000Then going to where you are how many years later now two years two years almost that's fucking crazy Yeah, I mean you think about the transformation of your life and your your public image I mean it's unprecedented I don't I can't think of a single public intellectual that has gone from being a universal University professor to being essentially a household name I mean you get brought up with at least my circle of friends all the time and And people that I run into all the time.
02:24:34.000I can't tell you how many people I've run into after comedy shows or in an airport that talk to me about you.
02:25:04.000I thought, this is bloody well driving me crazy.
02:25:06.000That damn university is going to force unconscious bias retraining, which is not a validated process by any stretch of the imagination, on its employees.
02:25:15.000And I work for the university, and I'm a psychologist.
02:26:20.000This is an establishment for higher learning.
02:26:25.000How can they possibly act on something When there's no clear evidence that it's real, that it works, that it's effective, and they're doing it just to make people happy, or just to make themselves happy, or just to reinforce an idea that they want to be true.
02:26:42.000For me, it was part of the hegemony of the radical left.
02:26:46.000It's like, no, no, you're not going to do that at the university I work at without me telling people that there's no warrant for that from the psychological community.
02:26:57.000So anyways, I got up at 2 in the morning and made these videos.
02:27:00.000I thought, well, let's see what happens if I make these videos.
02:27:02.000It's like, well, this is back to the technology issue.
02:27:05.000It's like, I didn't know what YouTube was when I put my videos on it.
02:27:25.000So, you know, you're in the right place in the right time, and you're a very interesting interviewer, because, well, especially for long form, because you're very, very curious, but also very, very tough.
02:27:37.000Like, it's interesting watching you, because if you don't understand something, you will go after the person.
02:27:42.000And you're not doing it in a vindictive way.
02:27:44.000But you're quite a formidable interviewer, and I've been trying to figure out why you're so successful.
02:27:48.000And, like, you're a lot smarter than anyone might think, which is quite interesting.
02:27:52.000So you're a weird combination, because...
02:27:54.000You know, your persona doesn't shout intellectual, but you're damn smart and you're tough as a bloody boot and you ask really provocative questions and not because you're provocative.
02:28:04.000And so your personality in this long form seem to suit each other really well.
02:28:07.000You're also really good at pursuing things you don't understand instead of assuming that you know what you're talking about.
02:28:12.000So you take the listeners on a journey, right?
02:28:17.000But fundamentally, what's propelled you to superstardom in some sense is not just your ability, which is non-trivial, but the fact that you're on this giant technological wave and you're one of the first adopters.
02:29:12.000It's certainly easier to listen to a book on tape for me than it is to read a book.
02:29:16.000Yeah, well, so the question is, for how many people is that true?
02:29:19.000And I would say it might be true for the majority of people.
02:29:22.000And then people are doing hybrids, you know, because you can sync your book with Audible, right?
02:29:28.000So they'll read when they have the time, but then when they have found time, which is also a major component of this, that's the time when you're driving or the time when you're doing dishes, is now all of a sudden you can educate yourself during that found time.
02:30:00.000They're interested in having discussions and pursuing the furtherance of their knowledge, even though they might have a prior ideological commitment.
02:30:07.000Sam does, and I suppose I do, and Ben Shapiro certainly does.
02:30:11.000But they're still interested in having the discussion.
02:30:13.000But more importantly, they're capitalizing on the long form.
02:30:17.000And the fact that that's possible is a reflection of this technological transformation, and the technological transformation might be utterly profound.
02:30:27.000And so that's, you know, I've been trying to sort this out because I keep thinking, why the hell are these people coming to listen to what I'm saying?
02:30:33.000It's like, well, I'm a guru, you know, I'm a sage, it's something like that.
02:30:36.000It's like, don't be thinking that first.
02:30:40.000Think if there's situational determinants first.
02:31:51.000I understand what you're saying, but that's one of the reasons why it frustrates me so much is that I see what they're doing, and I'm like, what you're doing is ancient.
02:31:58.000What you're doing is, this is what people did 20 years ago, 30 years ago.
02:32:06.000You used to be able to, if you were in the press, you could take people, quote them out of context, do whatever the fuck you wanted, put an article about them, and they couldn't do a goddamn thing about it.
02:33:39.000Yeah, well that may also be the position that I increasingly find myself in.
02:33:44.000I think it's the right position because then the misrepresentations don't exist anymore.
02:33:49.000So then the only problem is the dispute over the actual ideological conversations or the actual concepts.
02:33:56.000But you know, the thing is you made a point there that's quite interesting.
02:33:59.000It's like we are in a new media landscape so now if someone comes out as a As a media figure with some institutional credibility and misrepresents, it's exposed.
02:34:11.000And so then the question is, how much risk should you shoulder to expose the proclivity for media misrepresentation?
02:34:29.000But there's some utility in having it play out.
02:34:32.000And so, well, so I'm trying to only take those opportunities that appear to have more benefit than risk.
02:34:42.000And when I'm defining benefit, well, the question is then what constitutes benefit?
02:34:47.000And I guess what constitutes benefit is...
02:34:51.000Well, that would further the attempts that I'm making to bring information to a vast number of people that could conceivably help them stabilize and improve their individual lives.
02:35:02.000That's worth a certain amount of risk.
02:35:04.000Well, it certainly increases your profile, increases your profile, and even if, you know, you have 60% of these people are going to get a bad perception of you, 40% of these people that never heard of you, now are going to understand who you are because they do further investigation.
02:35:17.000So there's some benefit in that, but the negative, I mean, I get text messages from random people that I was friends with years ago that say, this Jordan Peterson is just such a lying sack of shit, and he's this and that.
02:35:27.000I'm like, I don't even know who the fuck you are.
02:35:29.000And then second of all, like, why are you contacting me?
02:35:42.000And so they'll see an interview, you know, like the Jim Jefferies clip, which is a minute long or whatever it is, or the Vice piece or the initial Kathy Newman piece.
02:35:53.000And they just form this determined position on you and then read hit pieces on you.
02:35:59.000And then this is where they take their opinion on.
02:36:12.000I don't think that people appreciate it.
02:36:15.000I think the people that are listening to this that do appreciate long-form conversations, and with all warts and all, all the ugliness and the mistakes and the critical errors, the people that appreciate that, they have a real hate for being lied to.
02:36:34.000Also for being treated as if they're stupid.
02:36:58.000There's like the first phrase was in quotes and then there was some joining words and then the second phrase was in quotes and there was some joining words and then the third phrase was in quotes and the three quotes added up to a statement that bore no resemblance whatsoever to what I was saying.
02:37:11.000How can they do that in the New York Times?
02:37:13.000That seems to me to be something that should be the antithesis of what they stand for.
02:37:46.000Oh, they have rules, which they don't disclose, but one of them apparently is, well, if the book is published in Canada and distributed in the United States, then it doesn't count, even though they've had books like that on the New York Times bestseller list before.
02:37:58.000And I think, okay, well, is this bad or good?
02:38:01.000It's like, well, it's bad because to the degree that I might want to be on the New York Times bestseller list, although I haven't been losing any sleep over it.
02:38:07.000But you're selling, I know how many books you're selling.
02:38:10.000Yeah, it's basically been the best-selling book in the world since January.
02:38:13.000You know, it's gone up and down to some degree, but fundamentally...
02:38:16.000Right, but it should be the number one New York Times best-selling book.
02:38:19.000Yeah, so they have their reasons, but I look at that and I think, oh, well, you can only do that ten times until you're done.
02:39:01.000It didn't used to be that, and now it is.
02:39:04.000Are they just responding to this new world where you have to have clickbait journalism, and where people are struggling to find people to actually buy physical newspapers, which is a different thing?
02:40:13.000No one needs cable TV. The only people who have cable TV are the people who haven't figured out yet that you can replace it entirely online for like one-tenth the price with much less hassle.
02:40:22.000But the irony is people want a location they can go to to find out what's going on in the world.
02:41:19.000They're struggling for anyone to pay attention and this is the way they have to do it to ensure.
02:41:23.000And I think what's happening on the other side, which is the side you occupy, say, is that a new technology that's long form That deals with many of those problems is emerging.
02:41:57.000And my answer to that is yes, because although I've been pilloried to a great degree by the radical types in the commentariat and in the classic journalists, the comments with regards to me on YouTube are 50 to 1 in my favor.
02:42:14.000And that's even the case when the ideologues put up videos about me.
02:42:19.000And I've sold a million and a half books.
02:42:22.000It's going to be published in 40 countries.
02:42:24.000And thousands of people are coming to my lectures.
02:42:27.000And so I would say the attempts to discredit me aren't working.
02:42:32.000So, and I think that's because that even, like, even if you go to YouTube, you can see Jordan Peterson smashes leftist journalist, you know, as a clickbait thing.
02:42:41.000Someone's taken a two-minute clip from a video and they put it out and they're using that clickbait headline to attract attention.
02:42:47.000And that probably even furthers polarization.
02:42:51.000But I think that most people, enough people, that's the prayer, enough people are going for the long-form, thorough discussion so that the sensible will triumph.
02:43:32.000Instead of examining their position and wondering whether or not they are taking you out of context and misrepresenting your positions to the world willfully and doing so in order to paint a negative picture of you that does not accurately represent who you are and what you stand for.
02:43:47.000But by doing this, they're destroying...
02:43:50.000The guy is a virtue without any of the work.
02:43:51.000They're also destroying their own credibility.
02:45:09.000I've been on a pure carnivore diet for about two months and a pretty, a very, very low-carb, greens-only, modified carnivore diet for about a year.
02:46:24.000Well, it's arthritis, but there's way more to it than that, but the arthritis was the major set of symptoms.
02:46:30.000She had 40 affected joints, and she had to have her hip replaced and her ankle replaced when she was 15 and 16, and so she basically hobbled around on two broken legs for two years in extreme agony, and that was just a tiny fraction of the whole set of problems.
02:48:10.000Anyways, Michaela noticed about three years ago, no more than that now, five years ago, she was at Concordia University and struggling with her illness and all the associated problems.
02:48:21.000She noticed that around exam time she was starting to develop real skin problems.
02:48:26.000And my cousin's daughter, who I mentioned, had really bad skin problems and wounds that wouldn't heal.
02:48:31.000And that was partly part of the process that eventually killed her.
02:48:34.000And she thought, oh, it must be stress.
02:48:36.000And then she thought, wait a second, I really changed my diet when I'm studying.
02:51:14.000She thought that her whole dietary theory was wrong because it lasted so long and was so extreme.
02:51:20.000It took her two years to figure out that really what she could eat was beef and greens, and then she figured out that she could only eat beef.
02:53:01.000Well, then I lost seven pounds the next month.
02:53:04.000Then I lost seven pounds the next month.
02:53:06.000I lost seven pounds every month for seven months.
02:53:08.000It's like I'd throw away all my clothes.
02:53:09.000I went back to the same weight that I was when I was 26. And my psoriasis disappeared.
02:53:14.000And I had floaters in my right eye and they cleared up.
02:53:17.000And then the last thing that went away for me, I was still having a bitch of a time with mood regulation and that sucked because when I changed my diet, I didn't respond to antidepressants properly anymore.
02:53:27.000And so although I was getting better physically on a variety of ways, like radical ways, I was really having a bitch of a time regulating my mood, and I was having sporadic, really negative reactions to food when I ate something I shouldn't.
02:53:40.000So that took about a year and a half to clear up, and I was still really anxious in the morning up to three months ago, like horribly, and then it would get better all day.
02:53:47.000People said, well, you're under a lot of stress, and I thought, yeah, yeah, I've been under a lot of stress for like ten years.
02:53:52.000It's like, it's a lot, but it wasn't any more stressful than helping my daughter deal with her illness, that's for sure.
02:53:58.000That, no, this is something different.
02:57:02.000However, I have had many, many people come up to me on the tour and say, look, I've been following your daughter's blog and I've lost like 100 pounds.
02:58:53.000One of the things that both Michaela and I noticed was that when we restricted our diet and then ate something we weren't supposed to, the reaction to eating what we weren't supposed to was absolutely catastrophic.
02:59:10.000Well, the worst response, I think we're allergic to, or allergic, whatever the hell this is, having an inflammatory response to something called sulfites.
02:59:18.000And we had some apple cider that had sulfites in it, and that was really not good.
03:00:35.000The fact that my daughter was so sick...
03:00:37.000See, the one thing that I did know, because I scoured the literature on arthritis when she was a kid, the scientific literature, because we were interested in the dietary connection, and the only thing I could find that was reliable was that if people with arthritis fasted, their symptoms reliably went away.
03:00:52.000And that's actually a well-documented finding.
03:00:55.000But then if they started to eat again, then their symptoms came back.
03:01:32.000My point is that you're saying that there is problems with this diet, but that doesn't seem to be a problem with the diet.
03:01:39.000It seems a problem with deviating from the diet, that your body becomes accustomed with it.
03:01:43.000Well, one of the hypotheses that we've been pursuing, and there's some justification for this in the scientific literature, is that the reason that you lay on layers of fat is because the fat acts as a buffer between you and the toxic things that you're eating.
03:02:15.000Well, I would think it would be much more likely that because you think about people who are alcoholics, they develop a tolerance to alcohol.
03:02:21.000You get off of that and then you have a drink and your tolerances are shot and then you immediately have an adverse reaction to the alcohol.
03:02:29.000When people do it all the time, your body becomes tolerant.
03:02:33.000Well, I think that the layering of fat on might be part of the tolerance mechanism.
03:02:39.000So it's not merely a matter of caloric intake, it's a matter of toxic caloric intake, buffered by whatever it is that fat is doing as a neuroendocrine organ.
03:02:48.000But again, like I said, I'm out of my depth here, but, you know, the whole...
03:05:04.000But after I stopped eating carbohydrates for a month, the carbohydrate cravings went away.
03:05:10.000Last night when we were out for dinner, somebody ordered bread pudding, and I bloody love bread pudding with caramel and ice cream.
03:05:17.000So it was sitting there, and I could smell it, and I thought I could go all fantastic Mr. Fox on that bread pudding and just tear it down in about 15 seconds.
03:05:26.000But it wasn't as intense as a craving for a cigarette if you're an ex-smoker.
03:05:30.000It was like, well, it'd be really nice to eat that.
03:05:32.000But my appetite declined by about 75%, and that's been permanent.
03:06:07.000Yeah, well I eat fatty cuts of steak and Michaela is buying fat directly from the butcher store and we cook that up, cut it into small pieces and fry it up until it's crispy.
03:06:25.000I want to find out what's going on with you, because one of the big misconceptions when it comes to cholesterol and saturated fat and food is that if you eat dietary cholesterol, that it affects your blood cholesterol levels.
03:06:40.000Clinical studies with diet are virtually impossible to conduct because you just can't conduct a proper, randomly distributed, controlled experiment.
03:06:56.000Which is one of the real problems with correlating meat with cancer and diabetes and all these different diseases is because people are eating a bunch of shit with that meat.
03:07:04.000Oh yeah, and they have different lifestyle profiles.
03:07:30.000Like, when people make absurd claims, it's like, oh, well, I had 50 health problems and I stopped eating everything but meat and they went away.
03:11:02.000Positive benefits that a lot of people achieve and experience when they switch to a vegan diet.
03:11:08.000And one of the things it is, is you get off of the standard American diet with lots of refined sugars and a lot of preservatives and bullshit, and then you find positive benefits.
03:11:20.000Chris Kresher has gone into depth about this, but then over time, the nutritional deficiencies in that start to wear on your health.
03:11:29.000And I'm wondering whether or not you're going to experience...
03:16:25.000You know, and we've been discussing a fair bit, and I've had good conversations with Shapiro, and Harris for that matter, so there is lots of interplay between us, but I think that's more because we inhabit the same technological space more than the same ideological space,
03:16:41.000apart from the fact that we are actually interested in dialogue, fundamentally.
03:17:27.000I thought when I walked into the restaurant last night, because we were out last night, it was Ben Shapiro, Sam Harris, Eric Weinstein, Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan, and me, right?