The Charlie Kirk Show - Jordan Peterson - Best of TCKS

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00:00:08.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:09.000 Hope you're doing great.

00:00:10.000 I am off the grid this weekend enjoying the beautiful country in the summer.

00:00:14.000 And so we are giving you a rewind of our greatest episodes because we have grown probably tenfold since the last time some of these episodes dropped.

00:00:22.000 My conversation with Jordan Peterson at a Turning Point USA event, you guys are not going to want to miss it.

00:00:27.000 My conversation with the great, the amazing Jordan Peterson, who has really impacted my life tremendously.

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00:01:03.000 All right, buckle up.

00:01:04.000 Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk.

00:01:06.000 You're going to enjoy it.

00:01:07.000 Here we go.

00:01:09.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:01:10.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:01:12.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:01:16.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:01:19.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:01:20.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:01:21.000 His spirit, his love of this country.

00:01:23.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.

00:01:30.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:01:38.000 That's why we are here.

00:01:41.000 Doctor, thank you so much for taking time to be here with this unbelievable audience. 0.59

00:01:48.000 Crowd of angry young white men.

00:01:49.000 Nice to meet you. 0.97

00:01:50.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:01:51.000 You know, I was reading one of the articles on you earlier.

00:01:54.000 I think it was from the New Yorker.

00:01:56.000 It said, Dr. Peterson's doctrine of masculinity.

00:02:00.000 I kind of look around at a young women's leadership summit getting a standing ovation.

00:02:04.000 It's a little bit different than the narrative they've been trying to paint about you recently.

00:02:10.000 Well, you know, the more identity politics leaning media types that have been covering what I'm doing have a very difficult time with it because they can only see the world through their ideological lens.

00:02:24.000 And the lens that they use basically assumes that the world is populated by groups above all, and that every individual within that group is nothing but a mouthpiece for the group and its, let's say, claims for power.

00:02:41.000 I'm trying to help people put themselves together as individuals, but that isn't part of that narrative because within that narrative framework, which I've characterized, and other people as well, as sort of postmodern/slash neo-Marxist, even those two things don't fit together very logically.

00:02:59.000 In that narrative, there aren't any individuals.

00:03:01.000 We're just groups and power.

00:03:03.000 And so when they talk about me, they have to put me in a group-oriented category of one form or another.

00:03:10.000 And it's often radical right, or it's male or it's whatever.

00:03:16.000 White, it's racist, racial. 0.71

00:03:18.000 That's the other one. 0.88

00:03:20.000 But that's not what it's about as far as I'm concerned.

00:03:24.000 And your book, which is fantastic, by the way.

00:03:24.000 Right.

00:03:27.000 Thank you.

00:03:28.000 Is it still number one?

00:03:29.000 It was number one for it bounces up and down.

00:03:32.000 It's been number one in about eight countries now, I think, something like that.

00:03:35.000 Fantastic.

00:03:36.000 It talks about the individual, what an individual can do to improve their life as an antidote to chaos.

00:03:42.000 And what I love about your teaching is that you're brutally honest.

00:03:45.000 Life is suffering.

00:03:47.000 Yeah, well, you know, it's a.

00:03:50.000 So I've been on this tour of one form or another since January.

00:03:55.000 We've gone to about 40 cities, something like that.

00:03:59.000 There's probably about another 40 or so on the roster in the US and Canada and the UK and Europe and Australia.

00:04:06.000 And, you know, part of what I'm doing in that tour is laying out a conceptual landscape.

00:04:13.000 And part of the basis of that is the blunt truth, I suppose, that life has a tragic element, you know, because we're vulnerable, all of us, and we know it, which is the particularly human curse, let's say.

00:04:28.000 We're aware of our vulnerability.

00:04:29.000 And it's not just vulnerability in the tragic sense, it's also the human proclivity for evil that makes the tragedy of life even worse than it would otherwise have to be.

00:04:40.000 And you could say that that's a basic truth.

00:04:42.000 You could even say that that's a basic truth with regards to the meaning of life.

00:04:45.000 You know, it's a pessimistic way of looking at it in some sense, but it leads to an optimistic conclusion.

00:04:52.000 All of us have to face our limitations and malevolence in the world and the possibility that we'll be betrayed or betray other people and act improperly.

00:05:04.000 And that's a heavy burden.

00:05:05.000 But the truth of the matter is, as far as I'm concerned, that each of us has enough potential, character, power of character, let's say, if it's properly manifested, to contend with that in a noble way and to rise above it and to transcend and to deal with it in large part, because we can make the world a much better place than it is for each of us individually and for our families and for our community.

00:05:32.000 And we can constrain the malevolence, at least in our own hearts, and perhaps have a positive effect on those around us as a consequence.

00:05:40.000 And that actually does make things better, and we actually can do that.

00:05:44.000 And that's where the meaning in life is to be found.

00:05:46.000 And that meaning, you know, that goes along with the adoption of that kind of responsibility is actually the antidote to the suffering.

00:05:53.000 You know that perfectly well, because all of you need a reason to get out of bed in the morning, especially on a rough morning, you know, when things aren't going so well in your life.

00:06:02.000 And there will be plenty of times when things aren't going so well in your life.

00:06:06.000 And you still need a reason to get up and get moving and get out there.

00:06:09.000 And if you have adopted the responsibility at an individual level to make things better, given how bad they are, if you've adopted the responsibility to make things better, then you have a reason to get up.

00:06:22.000 And so one of the things that I've been stressing to people is that there's very little difference between the meaning in life that gives you fulfillment and that engages you in existence and the willingness to shoulder as much individual responsibility as you can possibly handle.

00:06:37.000 Those are the same things.

00:06:39.000 And that's a really useful thing to know.

00:06:41.000 And you kind of know this, right?

00:06:42.000 Everybody knows this because, first of all, if you're not living up to your responsibilities, even to take care of yourself, the probability that you're going to be ashamed of that at some level is extraordinarily high.

00:06:54.000 And so your own soul tells you that you're in error, so to speak.

00:06:58.000 But also, if you look at who you spontaneously admire, which is a good indication of where your value system really sits, you'll see that the people you admire are always people who take responsibility for themselves and responsibility for their family and responsibility for their community.

00:07:15.000 You know, cynically, it's often considered that we admire, let's say, the rich and successful because of their status and their wealth and their power.

00:07:27.000 But that's a very shallow and it's very trivial.

00:07:31.000 And I also don't really believe that it's true.

00:07:34.000 I think that the people we admire are people who conduct themselves admirably in life.

00:07:39.000 And you get a spontaneous admiration as a consequence of that.

00:07:42.000 And that's a call from the deepest reaches of your being to imitate and to follow in that pathway.

00:07:50.000 And you can do that.

00:07:51.000 And so, well, and so that's not a narrative that fits very well with the whole identity politics collectivist notions of how humankind is constituted.

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00:08:52.000 Well, let's talk about that.

00:08:53.000 And so for those in the room that are not totally familiar with this idea of postmodernism and identity politics, where did this come from?

00:09:01.000 And what is your analysis of where it stands today?

00:09:04.000 And what is the true agenda of those people that are pushing postmodernism, identity politics, so on and so forth?

00:09:10.000 Well, I would say that the intellectual groundwork for postmodernism was probably laid in France in the late 60s and early 70s.

00:09:22.000 And it was mostly laid by people who were at one point Marxist types.

00:09:27.000 They were radical leftists.

00:09:28.000 And I mean, that was very common, especially in France at that time, because there was an immense student revolutionary movement in France, probably bigger there than anywhere else in the world except perhaps the United States.

00:09:39.000 And the problem was that the leftist narrative ran into some major problems in the late 60s and early 70s.

00:09:47.000 And the basic leftist narrative is the radical leftist narrative.

00:09:51.000 I should say, just as a point of clarity, that there is utility for political belief across the spectrum from the left to the right, right?

00:10:00.000 Because what the right tends to do is to make a case for the utility of hierarchies.

00:10:07.000 And what the left tends to do is say, well, look, one of the things you have to understand about hierarchies is that they tend to dispossess people so that they stack up at the bottom.

00:10:15.000 And so you need people to speak for the dispossessed, and you need people to speak on behalf of hierarchies.

00:10:21.000 And so that's the political spectrum.

00:10:22.000 And there should be a dialogue between those two groups constantly because you want to keep your hierarchies functional and intact and healthy, but you want to make sure that they don't alienate people who aren't succeeding in the hierarchies because then they stack up at the bottom and that's hell for them and it's not good for the stability of society in general.

00:10:39.000 So you need that dialogue.

00:10:40.000 But clearly, people can go too far on the right and they can go too far on the left.

00:10:45.000 They go too far on the right, I think, when they start talking about ethnic and racial superiority.

00:10:49.000 And we've kind of boxed that in.

00:10:51.000 We kind of know when that's gone too far.

00:10:53.000 When they go too far on the left is a much more difficult thing to determine conceptually.

00:10:58.000 I think the left-wingers go too far when they start talking about, for example, equality of outcome, which is an absolutely catastrophic doctrine.

00:11:06.000 Anyways, what had happened at the end of the 60s was that the evidence that the extreme leftist experiments had failed catastrophically became so overwhelming that even the radicals couldn't, in all good conscience, support an affiliation with those systems anymore.

00:11:24.000 I think the real deathblow to the idea of communism as an acceptable moral solution came with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago in the early 70s.

00:11:34.000 And I would highly recommend, and I'm dead serious about this, I would highly recommend that you read that book.

00:11:39.000 It's one of the seminal books of the 20th century, certainly one of the most important 10 books that were written in the 20th century.

00:11:46.000 And the reason that it's so important to read it is not only because it documented the absolute catastrophe of the Soviet system and by implication the Maoist system and the system that obtained in Cambodia and in Venezuela more recently and in North Korea, these catastrophically murderous systems.

00:12:05.000 It documented their excesses, but that isn't the particular contribution of the book.

00:12:10.000 The particular contribution of the book is that it showed that the catastrophe of the system wasn't an aberration in relationship to radical leftist thought, but the logical conclusion of it.

00:12:23.000 And, you know, there was an idea that was pushed hard because people had been documenting what was happening horrifically in the Soviet Union, really from the 1920s onwards.

00:12:32.000 And of course, the revolution only happened in 1918.

00:12:35.000 So the catastrophe started to pile up right away as soon as the revolution occurred.

00:12:40.000 People attempted to finesse that by saying that it was, well, it was a cult of personality and that the catastrophe could be laid at the feet of Stalin and that that wasn't real communism, despite the same thing that was every time it's tried.

00:12:53.000 Yes, well that's the thing.

00:12:54.000 And so, but by the 1970s, the early 1970s, it was clear that that narrative wasn't going to fly anymore because the evidence that it was an utter catastrophe of unparalleled proportions became so clear that even French intellectuals had to admit that something was wrong.

00:13:13.000 And what arose instead was this postmodern view.

00:13:18.000 And it's complicated.

00:13:20.000 The postmodernists basically stumbled onto a problem that's actually bedeviled a lot of different disciplines.

00:13:28.000 And the problem is that the world is unbelievably complex and it's very difficult to perceive it.

00:13:34.000 This is why it's been difficult to build artificial intelligence systems that can perceive the world, because it turns out that just looking at the world is incalculably difficult because there are so many ways of looking at the world.

00:13:45.000 There are an immense number of ways that you can look at anything.

00:13:48.000 So even small sets of objects are complicated in ways you can't possibly imagine.

00:13:53.000 And so the postmodernists figured this out in literary theory, essentially.

00:13:57.000 They thought, well, we have these books.

00:13:59.000 We regard them as canonical.

00:14:00.000 How is it that we should interpret them?

00:14:03.000 And the answer was, well, there's an indefinite number of interpretations, which is actually true.

00:14:09.000 There isn't, like, trying to interpret something like the corpus of books that make up the Bible, for example, it's like there's no end to the number of interpretive frameworks that you can use.

00:14:19.000 And so that was mystery number one.

00:14:23.000 Mystery number two was, well, if there's an indefinite number of ways of interpreting something, how do you know which ways are to take precedence?

00:14:32.000 Well, that was a big problem because, you know, if you're teaching, for example, a course in literary theory and you have an interpretation of a book, you want to make the assumption that there's something particularly valuable about your interpretation or why bother teaching it.

00:14:46.000 But if there's an indefinite number of interpretations and you can't rank order them, then how can you justify your particular approach?

00:14:54.000 No one knew.

00:14:55.000 Well, in some sense, the jig was up.

00:14:58.000 And that's what happened with postmodern theory.

00:15:00.000 It was, well, we can't figure out why what we're teaching is the proper thing to teach.

00:15:04.000 We can't justify it intellectually.

00:15:05.000 And the consequence of that was a questioning of the idea of a canonical interpretation at all.

00:15:12.000 And so there's a real ethical and moral relativism that comes in there.

00:15:15.000 But that was the underlying intellectual rationale for that.

00:15:20.000 Well, what happened, and this is where things get strange, is that the problem with a viewpoint like that is that it doesn't leave you with any way to orient yourself in the world, right?

00:15:30.000 Because if no interpretation is better than any other interpretation, then why do anything?

00:15:36.000 Why do one thing instead of another?

00:15:38.000 Which, of course, you have to make decisions to do one thing instead of another, or you'll never do anything.

00:15:42.000 And you have to do things.

00:15:44.000 And so there's a real nihilistic element to postmodernism that's built into it.

00:15:49.000 And the way that that was resolved, as far as I can tell, was really blindly in some sense by an alliance between the neo-Marxist types that were still around and looking for a new doctrine and the postmodern types.

00:16:00.000 It's like, even though the postmodernists criticized the idea of overarching narratives, and Marxism is certainly an overarching narrative, that didn't stop them from allying with this leftover Marxism and reconfiguring it in some sense.

00:16:14.000 So instead of the old Marxist narrative about the bourgeoisie, the upper class, the ownership class, say, and the proletariat who were being oppressed by them, we got identity politics out of it.

00:16:25.000 And what we got is the same old victimizer-victim narrative in new form.

00:16:31.000 And instead of being fundamentally economic, it became racial or ethnic or gender-based or sex-based or you name it, age-based or attractiveness-based.

00:16:40.000 It didn't really matter.

00:16:41.000 And so the Marxist types could keep on playing the same old game in new clothing, let's say.

00:16:51.000 And that movement became extraordinarily popular, first at Yale, so it was actually Yale's fault, just so you all know.

00:17:00.000 And then across the universities over approximately a 30-year period.

00:17:07.000 Now, I'll close with this.

00:17:08.000 You see, I think the postmodernists are seriously wrong.

00:17:11.000 And I actually think we know why they're wrong.

00:17:14.000 Because although there is a very large number of ways of looking at the world, or perhaps a near-infinite number of ways of looking at the world, there isn't a near-infinite number of ways of acting in the world in a manner that actually is successful.

00:17:29.000 So there are constraints on how you can interact with the world in a successful manner.

00:17:35.000 Let's assume that you don't want undue pain and anxiety.

00:17:39.000 We could just start with that.

00:17:40.000 And I think that's a reasonable proposition.

00:17:42.000 You can tolerate some pain and anxiety if it's in the service of something greater, obviously, but I just mean pointless pain and anxiety.

00:17:49.000 We don't want any more of that than is necessary.

00:17:52.000 And that means that you have to take care of yourself to some degree.

00:17:55.000 But the manner in which you take care of yourself is severely constrained.

00:17:59.000 This is partly why you have to be intelligent and careful and plot your way through life properly.

00:18:05.000 You have to take care of yourself today, but you have to take care of yourself today in a way that doesn't interfere with you taking care of yourself tomorrow and next week and next month and next year and five years from now and ten years from now.

00:18:21.000 So you can't do just what you want to in the next hour because if it's impulsive pleasure seeking, let's say, something like that, excess alcohol use or excess drug use or careless sexual behavior or betrayal of people to gain you something in the moment, you're going to pay for that.

00:18:40.000 You're going to pay for it tomorrow.

00:18:41.000 You're going to pay for it next week and next month and next year.

00:18:44.000 And so because you're going to exist in the future and because you have to live with yourself, there's only a certain number of ways that you can act that are going to work.

00:18:52.000 But it's more than that.

00:18:53.000 It's not just that you're responsible to your future self or the set of all your future selves, is that you also have to act in a way that works for your family.

00:19:03.000 Because otherwise your family is going to disintegrate and break down and cause you and them all sorts of misery and grief.

00:19:09.000 And not just your family now, but also your family into the future.

00:19:13.000 And then not just your family either, but also your community.

00:19:16.000 And so you have to set your aspirations so that they serve you in the broadest sense over a long period of time.

00:19:24.000 And they also serve your family and they also serve your community.

00:19:27.000 And that's a very tight set of constraints.

00:19:30.000 And I think that the best solution to that set of constraints from a philosophical perspective or maybe even a theological perspective is to view the world as a place not of groups but of individuals, of sovereign individuals who are responsible for their destinies, responsible for their families and for their communities.

00:19:47.000 And that's essentially the ethos of the modern West.

00:19:51.000 Because the thing that's so remarkable about the West, I would say, is that we did a remarkable, we did a wonderful job of articulating out the idea of individual sovereignty and we made that the cornerstone of our political and economic systems.

00:20:03.000 And the thing about that is it works.

00:20:06.000 And the evidence that it works is, well, it's right here in this room.

00:20:10.000 Everything in this room is working, right?

00:20:12.000 And around the world, increasingly, people are becoming economically better off at a rate that's absolutely staggering.

00:20:20.000 And a huge portion of that is because we've articulated out the ethos of the responsible sovereign individual.

00:20:28.000 That's not the same as the individual with rights.

00:20:32.000 It's not like rights are irrelevant.

00:20:34.000 But rights are really there to facilitate your adoption of individual responsibility.

00:20:40.000 And one of the things I would like to say to all of you, and it's one of the things I really wanted to talk about coming here today, and I was thinking about it, is that you don't want to play identity politics.

00:20:50.000 And that can happen because it can be played on the right and the left.

00:20:54.000 And that's a collectivist idea.

00:20:55.000 You don't want to do that.

00:20:57.000 What you could bring to the table that hasn't been brought to the table for years is an emphasis on individual responsibility.

00:21:04.000 And the right way to do that, as far as I'm concerned, is to start with yourselves, is to develop a vision for your life.

00:21:10.000 You start to think about if you could be who you could be, what would that look like?

00:21:15.000 That's the beginning of a mature philosophy of being.

00:21:18.000 If you could be the person that you would admire, who would that person be?

00:21:23.000 How would you configure yourself?

00:21:25.000 How would you configure your career, your education, your family, the use of time outside of work?

00:21:31.000 If you wanted to be the noblest person that you could be who was adopting the maximal amount of responsibility, how would that look?

00:21:38.000 Then you need a strategy to put that into place.

00:21:41.000 And that's the way you change things properly and also the way you do the least amount of harm while you're changing them.

00:21:47.000 And so it should be an individual-focused set of ideas.

00:21:51.000 And that way you can sidestep the identity politics traps.

00:21:54.000 And that would be a very good thing.

00:21:56.000 And I think a modern conservatism, which isn't really all that distinguishable from a classical liberalism, as it turns out, is to put tremendous stress on the responsibility of the individual.

00:22:07.000 And one of the things that's wonderful about that, as far as I'm concerned, and I made reference to this a few minutes ago, is that you need a meaning to offset the tragedy of life.

00:22:18.000 Otherwise, you just suffer stupidly and you tend to make people around you suffer the same way.

00:22:23.000 It's not good. 0.99

00:22:23.000 That's what the modern left does. 0.99

00:22:25.000 Yes, well.

00:22:26.000 And the way that you find that meaning is by adopting as much responsibility as you can.

00:22:32.000 And what's also so fascinating about that is, you know, you're characterized by an indefinite potential.

00:22:39.000 And it isn't easy to understand exactly what that is, that potential, but you know, it's what people call you on when they say, you know, you're not living up to your potential, whatever that is.

00:22:48.000 That potential will be called forth from you as a consequence of adoption of responsibility because it won't manifest itself unless you take on a load.

00:22:57.000 You're not going to develop in all the ways you could develop unless you set yourself a serious challenge.

00:23:03.000 Because it takes the challenge to pull that out of you and also to motivate you to rid yourself of all the weaknesses and personality flaws that you've accumulated across the years and to let those disappear and burn off you.

00:23:17.000 You need to load yourself up before the demands of life will be such that you will discipline yourself properly.

00:23:25.000 And a noble goal is a very good way of beginning that.

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00:24:53.000 What do you think is, and this is a debate that you see a lot, what is the motivation then of the postmodernists?

00:24:59.000 Are some of the individuals afraid or hesitant to take responsibility their very own life and they want to play the victim and they find admiration in that victimhood or they find meaning in the victimhood?

00:25:10.000 Well, I think a lot of them, I think this is particularly true for a lot of the young people in universities, is, you know, I think the universities are in some sense, especially the radical end of the humanities and the social sciences.

00:25:22.000 And so I'd really put my finger on disciplines like women's studies and ethnic studies, all the cultural studies programs, anthropology, sociology, social work.

00:25:31.000 Education is an absolute bloody catastrophe. 0.57

00:25:34.000 Law is probably the worst.

00:25:36.000 Well, there was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education just three weeks ago saying exactly that.

00:25:41.000 Law is degenerating at a very rapid rate.

00:25:44.000 But these radical disciplines, see, what I see them doing is the same thing that cults do.

00:25:50.000 And what cults do is prey on people who are dispossessed in various ways.

00:25:55.000 And I think that if you have had bad relationships, perhaps particularly with men, in your life, you've never had a stable relationship with someone who is masculine and you're confused about exactly how the world works in relationship to how men and women should behave, that you're a great target for exploitation by radical professors.

00:26:16.000 But a lot of the people who are in that position are people who've been badly hurt in one way or another.

00:26:21.000 And, you know, and they're trying to contend with the fact of their hurt, and they are often doing that by identifying the perpetrators.

00:26:28.000 You know, the problem is, is that they've often had something terrible perpetrated upon them.

00:26:33.000 But that doesn't mean the fact that you've suffered at the hands of a man, let's say, or a woman for that matter, doesn't mean that all men are somehow suspect as a consequence.

00:26:45.000 Or that the proper way of dealing with that is to transform the sociological structure of the world. 1.00

00:26:51.000 But many, many young people are taught exactly that by their idiot professors. 0.99

00:27:00.000 So that's part of the motivation. 0.99

00:27:03.000 I mean, there's also, see, there's this weird amalgam of compassion for the dispossessed and hatred for the successful as well.

00:27:14.000 That's a constant characteristic of the left.

00:27:17.000 It's what George Orwell observed when he was a former socialist.

00:27:20.000 Said, socialism has become much more about hating the rich than helping the poor.

00:27:26.000 Yeah, well, the problem is, and this is something I just, I actually, I've been working on the preface to the 50th anniversary version of the Gulag Archipelago, the abridged version, and so that'll come out in about a year.

00:27:38.000 And so that's been a great thing to work on. 0.83

00:27:40.000 And I was trying to distill Solzhenitsyn's observations about why the Russian Revolution went so catastrophically wrong, because as I already said, there's reasons to be concerned about the dispossessed, right? 0.97

00:27:55.000 And that's the proper area of concern of the, let's call them the moderate left. 0.56

00:28:02.000 It's something perhaps the Democratic Party has been reasonably good at over the decades, is serving as a political forum for the working class, and they need a political voice, obviously.

00:28:17.000 The problem is, and this started to happen very early on after the Soviet Revolution with its demands for equality of outcome, is that, first of all, who's an oppressor and who's oppressed is not a very easy thing to figure out.

00:28:32.000 And the problem really is that each of us is an amalgam of oppressor and oppressed, because you think about it this way, is all of you have, I hate to use this terminology, but I'll use it for the purposes of illustration.

00:28:43.000 All of you have unearned privilege.

00:28:46.000 What's the privilege?

00:28:47.000 It's like, well, you didn't build this infrastructure, you didn't build the highway system, you didn't build this amazing technological society that you live in that granted you a certain unparalleled standard of living.

00:29:02.000 You know, you're undeserving, let's say, beneficiaries of what your ancestors bestowed upon you.

00:29:08.000 And so, and you could call that privilege if you wanted to.

00:29:12.000 Now, the problem with that is that you can divide people up in a very large number of ways.

00:29:18.000 And so, what do you have for privilege?

00:29:20.000 Well, maybe you have gender privilege, and maybe you have attractiveness privilege, and maybe you have intelligence privilege, and maybe you have being born in the United States privilege, and you have being.

00:29:30.000 Yeah.

00:29:34.000 And so, if you buy the idea that all that has been purchased at someone else's expense, then that makes you an oppressor.

00:29:39.000 Now, this is what happened in the Soviet Union. 0.77

00:29:41.000 It's really what happened is the initial doctrine was let's raise up the dispossessed. 0.57

00:29:46.000 But the problem is, is that you can categorize people so many different ways in groups that you can always find a reason why someone's not a victim, why they're a victimizer.

00:29:55.000 And you just can't believe, and this is why you need to read the Gulag Archipelago, you just cannot believe how many groups of people were obliterated in the nature of, in the service of, in the name of equality.

00:30:08.000 You know, the communists wiped out all the socialists, so that's very interesting.

00:30:12.000 They wiped out all the religious believers, they wiped out all the students, they wiped out anybody who had a middle-class background, and that didn't just mean middle-class people, it meant their families, including their children and their extended relatives.

00:30:25.000 It's like if you were even peripherally associated with someone who could be regarded as privileged by any measure whatsoever, then the probability that you were going to get rounded up and killed or imprisoned or brutalized in some manner was, well, was almost 100%. 0.77

00:30:40.000 And so, the problem is that it's not very easy to distinguish those who have compassion for the dispossessed from those who are using compassion for the dispossessed as an excuse to take revenge against anybody they think has any more than them.

00:30:57.000 And because unless you're a saint, and you're probably not, the proclivity for hatred can be a more powerful motivator than the proclivity for love, given that you're not very developed, then it was the proclivity for hatred that seemed to rise to the top very rapidly in these revolutionary societies.

00:31:15.000 And the consequence of that was absolutely, to call it dreadful is barely to scrape the surface.

00:31:20.000 And so, hypothetically, there's motivation with regards to compassion for the dispossessed.

00:31:26.000 But in real life, even if these movements are often started to give the devil his due by people who are genuinely compassionate, that doesn't mean they won't be taken over by people who have hatred as their fundamental motivation very, very rapidly.

00:31:40.000 And that certainly happened in, I can't think of a circumstance where there was a radical leftist revolution in the last hundred years where that didn't invariably happen.

00:31:49.000 That's what happened.

00:31:50.000 And so it's not good that that happens.

00:31:53.000 We don't want that to happen.

00:31:54.000 And the proper response to that, as far as I'm concerned, is to develop a view of the world that's focused on the individual conceptually, to think of the individual as the fundamental category, and then to act that out pragmatically.

00:32:08.000 And what that essentially means is get your act together.

00:32:11.000 You've got things to do in the world.

00:32:13.000 The absence of your full being in the world leaves a hole that is filled by terrible things.

00:32:19.000 At minimum.

00:32:20.000 So at minimum, you have an ethical responsibility to ensure that the world doesn't devolve into something approximating hell.

00:32:27.000 And at maximum, you have the responsibility, again, the ethical, and it's a heavy ethical responsibility to do everything that's in your power to make things as good as you can possibly make them in this sophisticated manner that takes you and your family and your community into account.

00:32:42.000 And it's on you, right?

00:32:44.000 And that's meaning.

00:32:45.000 You know, people say, well, I'd like to have a meaningful life.

00:32:47.000 It's like, well, fair enough.

00:32:49.000 But the price that you pay for the meaning that transcends tragedy is the adoption of responsibility for the catastrophe of existence.

00:32:58.000 But that ennobles you, right?

00:33:00.000 It makes you into someone strong and someone competent and someone who's worthwhile and who lives in a manner that justifies their own suffering.

00:33:10.000 And that's what there's nothing better than you can possibly do than that.

00:33:13.000 And this is a movement that could.

00:33:19.000 So I guess among the professors you've dealt with, would you say that they're coming from a position of virtue and goodness or from the triad of evil that you talk about?

00:33:30.000 From the kind of destruction of the envy?

00:33:33.000 I don't really think about it that way necessarily.

00:33:37.000 I do think about it more in the manner that I just laid out.

00:33:40.000 It's like I think that the collectivist viewpoint is very dangerous, and I just described why.

00:33:45.000 I think you do not subsume the individual to the group.

00:33:48.000 The other thing that should, that is happening on the left that shouldn't happen, and it does happen on the right too, by the way, is that individuals are accused of the crimes of their group, which is sort of the essence of bigotry, I would say.

00:34:03.000 And again, this is something that happened in these totalitarian radical left societies, where if you were the member of a group and the group was accused of some sort of crime, whatever the crime happened to be, the fact that you were a member of that group meant you were also guilty of that crime.

00:34:19.000 I think that's an absolutely terrible way of looking at things.

00:34:23.000 I would say it's better to stay disentangled from the collectivist narrative entirely.

00:34:29.000 Because one of the things that I've come to realize here is that if you want things to work out properly, the best way to make them work out is to tell a better story.

00:34:37.000 It's not necessary to fight against the people that you think don't hold your viewpoint, because the fighting actually produces negative consequences.

00:34:45.000 And I'm not saying you should be a pushover, because you bloody well shouldn't be a pushover. 0.99

00:34:49.000 That's pathetic. 0.99

00:34:50.000 You should be able to stand up for yourself. 0.99

00:34:55.000 But I mean, part of the reason that all of you are here is because you're looking for something.

00:34:59.000 You know, and hopefully you're not looking for an enemy, although an enemy can make your life like it can give a facade of meaning to your life.

00:35:06.000 Hopefully, the reason that you're here is because you've decided that you're going to take your proper place in the world and that you're going to move forward with dignity and with strength and with responsibility and all of that.

00:35:16.000 And so, that's a great motivation.

00:35:18.000 And I would say you can, in some sense, forget about the collectivist narrative if that's what you're going to do, because the act of putting yourself together will be so powerful, both for you personally and for the people around you, but also by example, that you'll just blow the other narrative completely out of the water.

00:35:33.000 And it's to tell the better, the person who tells the best story wins.

00:35:37.000 It's as simple as that.

00:35:39.000 And the idea of the transcendent individual, that is the best story.

00:35:43.000 There's nothing that can compare to that.

00:35:45.000 And everyone wants that because you, I mean, even if you're cynical and bitter, you know, and maybe embittered towards the world, you know, there's still a part of you that would like things to work out well.

00:35:57.000 And you can call to that part in people and say, look, you know, no matter how much you're suffering and no matter how bad things have been for you, things can improve and you can become the sort of person that you admire.

00:36:09.000 And that's the best thing you can do.

00:36:11.000 And everyone is desperate to hear that.

00:36:14.000 And best of all, it's true.

00:36:16.000 Well, I've seen this happen firsthand on campus.

00:36:19.000 I've seen these ideas collide.

00:36:22.000 So we were at UCLA and we had one of our many campus events.

00:36:26.000 We did a speaking tour at UC Berkeley, Stanford, and UCLA and lived to tell about it.

00:36:31.000 And we needed, of course, armed guards at every campus.

00:36:33.000 And so Candace Owens and I were at UCLA.

00:36:36.000 And there was this Black Lives Matter protester that came up and started to try to shout down our speech.

00:36:41.000 And Candace essentially said, I believe in you.

00:36:43.000 I believe that you can be better tomorrow than you were today.

00:36:47.000 I believe in self-empowerment, so on and so forth.

00:36:49.000 And the protesters are screaming and said, stop it.

00:36:52.000 That's racist. 0.99

00:36:53.000 That's bigoted, homophobic. 0.99

00:36:54.000 And we both said, we believe in you, we believe this. 0.97

00:36:57.000 And she was really upset.

00:36:58.000 And we said, fine, we don't believe in you.

00:37:00.000 She said, thank you.

00:37:00.000 I was like, what?

00:37:03.000 It's almost as if as soon as they're rejecting responsibility in some ways.

00:37:09.000 Well, look, man, everybody's got the reasons to reject responsibility.

00:37:13.000 It's tough.

00:37:14.000 Well, that's it.

00:37:15.000 It's not easy.

00:37:16.000 If you're looking for a host of reasons why people might view the world from a collectivist perspective and attribute blame elsewhere, is because, well, that is a dispersal of responsibility.

00:37:27.000 And we should also point out quite clearly that the idea that even the societies in the world that are thriving, and I would say those are fundamentally Western societies, although that's spreading very rapidly all around the world, right?

00:37:41.000 Because things are getting better on the economic front at a rate that's absolutely beyond comprehension.

00:37:48.000 You know, I don't know if you know this or not, but this is worth knowing.

00:37:53.000 It's also worth thinking about.

00:37:57.000 If you don't know it, that's also worth thinking about because it's so important that you should know it.

00:38:02.000 And if you don't, there's a reason for it.

00:38:05.000 You know that the rate of absolute poverty in the world fell by half from the year 2000 to the year 2012.

00:38:13.000 So the rate of absolute poverty was defined as living on approximately something approximating a dollar a day in today's money.

00:38:20.000 Now the first thing you want to understand is that that was the situation for the average person in the Western world in 1895.

00:38:27.000 Okay, so it's only been 130 years or so that we've seen this unbelievable acceleration in living standards.

00:38:33.000 And of course, in the West, we got rich first and before everyone else.

00:38:37.000 But it's not been that long.

00:38:39.000 It wasn't even 100 years ago that there were chronic famines in places like Sweden and Italy.

00:38:44.000 You think, well, how can that be?

00:38:45.000 It's like, well, that's the way of the world.

00:38:47.000 That's how it was.

00:38:50.000 But the economic miracle has been spreading everywhere, right?

00:38:53.000 There's no one starving in China.

00:38:54.000 There's no one starving in India.

00:38:55.000 And Southeast Asia is increasingly rich.

00:38:57.000 And the fastest growing economies in the world right now are in sub-Saharan Africa.

00:39:01.000 And child mortality rates are plummeting, and people are getting access to fresh water at an unparalleled rate, and we're spreading cell phones all around the world.

00:39:08.000 And about 300,000 people a week are being hooked to the power grid.

00:39:11.000 And like things are happening that are good so fast you cannot believe it.

00:39:16.000 And if you don't know that, one of the things you should ask is: well, why don't you know that?

00:39:20.000 Because that's the biggest news that there is.

00:39:22.000 And I think there's this chronic pessimism that's invaded our society.

00:39:26.000 Maybe it's a consequence of 50 years of the Cold War or something like that.

00:39:30.000 And we just can't believe that maybe we're not going to light everything on fire and die in an apocalypse, but improve the conditions of living all around the world.

00:39:40.000 So, well, so the way that you do that is by okay, sorry, Charlie, I lost my track there.

00:39:47.000 You'd asked me a specific question.

00:39:49.000 Responsibility is tough, is what we talked about.

00:39:51.000 Oh, yes, yes, yes.

00:39:52.000 Well, okay, oh, thank you.

00:39:54.000 Well, so all of these good things are happening.

00:39:54.000 Thank you.

00:39:58.000 Well, so with the issue with regards to responsibility, is that it is difficult, and everyone has the same issue.

00:40:06.000 We all have our reasons not to bear responsibility, and it's very useful and easy to find other people to blame.

00:40:13.000 You know, then it's not your problem.

00:40:14.000 And do you really want it to be your problem?

00:40:16.000 You have to take stock of all your weaknesses that way.

00:40:19.000 And so, you know, you say, well, people on the left are unwilling to take responsibility.

00:40:23.000 It's like, no, no, no.

00:40:25.000 People are unwilling to take responsibility.

00:40:28.000 And maybe you see exaggerations of that in the pathological collective narrative that's generated on the left.

00:40:34.000 But again, it's better to direct that towards yourself.

00:40:37.000 It's like you're likely to do less harm that way.

00:40:42.000 You can sit down and think about all the ways that you're unwilling to take responsibility.

00:40:46.000 And why would you be?

00:40:48.000 Well, it's hard.

00:40:50.000 It's easier to roll downhill than it is to walk uphill, obviously.

00:40:54.000 And so it's hard to take responsibility.

00:40:57.000 And if you've also had hurtful relationships with people in your life, it's not necessarily that easy to distinguish competence from power and tyranny.

00:41:08.000 And one of the things that's also happening, and I would say this is very characteristic of the hurt radical left, is that people who've been hurt are afraid of any display of competence because they can't distinguish it from power and tyranny.

00:41:21.000 And so they're also unwilling in some sense to manifest that individual competence in their own life because they think of that as a manifestation of the tyranny that they're accusing the entire system as being characterized by.

00:41:34.000 You know, the idea that I hate this idea, it's a terrible idea.

00:41:38.000 The idea that the West is a patriarchal tyranny, which, well, it's absurd.

00:41:44.000 It's absolutely absurd.

00:41:45.000 It's like, well, a tyranny can be.

00:41:46.000 How many of you are taught that in schools, by the way?

00:41:48.000 That there's a patriarchy and it's all ripped up.

00:41:51.000 Well, but I mean, let's look at this clearly.

00:41:54.000 I mean, every society tilts towards tyranny and corruption, right?

00:42:00.000 I mean, because all hierarchies degenerate, and the way they degenerate is by having people by becoming twisted so that power becomes an appropriate way of climbing up the hierarchy.

00:42:11.000 It's like the definition of a tyranny.

00:42:13.000 And hierarchies tilt towards tyranny.

00:42:16.000 But one of the things that you're responsible for as a sovereign individual is to make sure that your hierarchies don't tilt towards tyranny.

00:42:23.000 And so the leftist complaint that hierarchies tilt towards tyranny is actually accurate, but the leftist, the radical leftists, claim that our hierarchies are tyrannies and that all action that fosters those hierarchies is power and tyranny.

00:42:37.000 It's just preposterous.

00:42:38.000 You know, it's part of the problem of undifferentiated thinking.

00:42:43.000 You can see this in discussions of the gender pay gap, for example.

00:42:46.000 I mean, women are paid slightly less than men on average, but there's very many reasons for that.

00:42:52.000 The biggest reason, likely, is that women take an economic hit when they become mothers. 0.66

00:42:56.000 So it's actually not a gender pay gap, it's a mother pay gap. 1.00

00:43:00.000 That's a good way of starting to formalize the issue and make it more precise.

00:43:05.000 But there's all sorts of other reasons as well.

00:43:07.000 Men work longer hours.

00:43:08.000 Men are more likely to work outside.

00:43:10.000 Men take more dangerous jobs.

00:43:11.000 If you work 14% more hours, this is a good hint, by the way, if you actually want to make some money in your life. 0.72

00:43:18.000 If you work 14% longer hours, you make 40% more money.

00:43:23.000 It's a non-linear return.

00:43:25.000 And men are more likely to work longer hours than women.

00:43:27.000 Now, the question is why?

00:43:28.000 But, well, there's all sorts of reasons. 1.00

00:43:30.000 Now, part of the reason that there's a gender pay gap, and perhaps part of the reason that there's a mother pay gap, is because of arbitrary prejudice, because the system isn't perfect. 0.99

00:43:40.000 But the question is, what proportion of the pay gap is due to arbitrary prejudice? 0.99

00:43:45.000 And the answer to that is a far smaller proportion than the total pay gap.

00:43:49.000 And then to attribute all of that to the tyranny and prejudice of the patriarchy is the sign of the fuzziest possible thinking. 0.98

00:44:03.000 Well, the thing about that sort of thinking is that it's not even helpful to the people that you're hypothetically trying to help because you don't solve a problem by conceptualizing it stupidly.

00:44:14.000 And so if you can't do it, if your diagnosis isn't correct, like it could easily be, and this is something for all of you to sort out because this is going to be a problem for all of you, is that it isn't obvious what we should do about the fact that motherhood produces a vicious economic hit for women.

00:44:34.000 You could say, well, that's a problem.

00:44:35.000 Now, maybe we don't know how to solve it.

00:44:37.000 Maybe the only way to solve it is the way we have been solving it, which is to make it a problem that's essentially solved by the family.

00:44:43.000 Maybe that's the best solution there is, but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem. 0.97

00:44:47.000 But we're certainly not going to solve it at all unless we specify the damn problem. 0.87

00:44:51.000 And to conflate the problem of the economic hit that women take for becoming mothers with the gender pay gap is just going to get us nowhere. 0.99

00:45:00.000 We'll just get tangled up in stupid arguments about the patriarchy. 0.67

00:45:06.000 And I have to say, I was made aware of you probably eight or nine months ago, but where I really leaned in is when you just obliterated Kathy Newman. 0.88

00:45:16.000 Is that her name, Kathy Newman, from the UK?

00:45:19.000 Oh, yes.

00:45:21.000 And what was so amazing about it is it seemed like you were being so kind and you were giving her as much opportunity as possible.

00:45:29.000 And you said essentially what you said, there is a multivariate analysis based on the gender wage pay gap.

00:45:34.000 And she said, well, that must make you anti-women.

00:45:38.000 It was astonishing that she couldn't reconcile what you were saying, that you were actually trying to find some commonality upon that this might be a problem.

00:45:45.000 There might be some ways to potentially have a discussion around it.

00:45:48.000 She was immediately trying to marginalize your viewpoint of there's no way that we could possibly have any sort of agreement.

00:45:55.000 Why can't you admit this?

00:45:56.000 So on and so forth.

00:45:58.000 Well, she was skeptical of me.

00:46:00.000 As a person, that would be no evidence.

00:46:02.000 She's like, this is a bad person with bad intentions.

00:46:05.000 I have to do everything I possibly can to try to expose that.

00:46:09.000 Yeah, well, and I would also say I wouldn't say that I obliterated her.

00:46:13.000 I would say that she...

00:46:15.000 No, no, it's not true. 0.98

00:46:17.000 See, because obliteration requires force.

00:46:22.000 Well, it does.

00:46:23.000 It does.

00:46:24.000 And I'm making a very careful point here, and it's one you want to attend to very, very carefully, because you're all interested in whatever you're interested in as a consequence of being here, political action to some degree, I would presume, but perhaps also psychological development.

00:46:43.000 It's like what I did in that interview, and what I've been able to do a number of times with a certain amount of success is apply the doctrine of minimal necessary force.

00:46:53.000 And I'll tell you, this is a very important thing to master, and it's very sophisticated.

00:46:58.000 So there's a New Testament idea that you should turn the other cheek.

00:47:01.000 And that's a very tough one to contend with because it's not easy to separate out that from the appearance of weakness, let's say.

00:47:08.000 Because you want to be able to stand up and defend yourself, obviously.

00:47:10.000 There's no credibility unless you're capable of doing that.

00:47:14.000 And you have no credibility unless you're capable of doing that.

00:47:19.000 In the interview that you're referring to, I attempted to use minimal necessary force.

00:47:25.000 And all I was doing was deflecting accusations that, as far as I was concerned, had nothing to do with me.

00:47:31.000 And the reason that that was successful was exactly because there was no obliteration, it was just stepping back, say, well, that's not accurate the way that you're formulating that.

00:47:42.000 And what happened was that she had to show her hand.

00:47:46.000 And it was her showing her hand that produced the consequences that were associated with that video, which I think has been viewed, the video itself, about 11 million times in the various clips and cuts, is probably 50 million by now.

00:48:00.000 But she, because I didn't use force or any more than was necessary, then she had to keep stepping forward with her accusations and her ideology, and she just laid it out completely so that everyone could see it.

00:48:14.000 And so it's another thing you really want to think about.

00:48:16.000 Like, you don't want to be thinking about this as a polarized political battle, because then you're in the damn polarized political battle, and it's actually the polarized political battle that's the problem.

00:48:29.000 Now, it's not like, as I said already, it's not like you want to be a pushover.

00:48:32.000 But you step away from that and you work on yourself so that you're an increasingly powerful person.

00:48:38.000 But one of the ways that you do that is that you learn to use minimal necessary force.

00:48:43.000 It's like you don't defend yourself any more than you have to.

00:48:46.000 Like, be careful.

00:48:47.000 Don't push any harder than you need to.

00:48:49.000 Because all you do is you generate a counterforce by pushing harder than you need to.

00:48:55.000 And then you're in conflict.

00:48:57.000 And you think, well, I like a little conflict.

00:48:59.000 It's like, look, fair enough, a little conflict, man, no problem.

00:49:02.000 It keeps your life kind of interesting.

00:49:04.000 And maybe that's on the problem-solving edge.

00:49:07.000 But a little conflict can become a lot of conflict very, very rapidly.

00:49:10.000 And if you have any sense at all, that's not what you want.

00:49:13.000 You know, especially if you have other things that are better to do, and you should have other things that are better to do.

00:49:18.000 And so, you know, to deal with these sorts of things, even when you're provoked with a light hand, there is no more effective strategy than that.

00:49:27.000 And it's a real mark of sophistication and your ability to keep your temper in check.

00:49:32.000 It's really something to aim at.

00:49:33.000 And that's true even when you're dealing with yourself.

00:49:36.000 You know, you don't punish yourself any more than necessary.

00:49:40.000 When you're negotiating with someone that you love, a partner, for example, a husband or a wife, at least in principle, you defend yourself with minimum necessary force.

00:49:50.000 And so it's not, you know, there's been a lot of videos that have been cut out of my talks that Jordan Peterson obliterates ex-journalist or why journalist.

00:49:58.000 And I'm not putting those clips up.

00:50:01.000 And they're clickbait to a large degree.

00:50:04.000 But when I've been successful in responding to attacks, it's only because I've responded to them minimally.

00:50:13.000 So for example, there's been a number of times when I've gone to universities and had pretty nasty demonstrations.

00:50:19.000 There was one at McMaster University that got quite out of hand and a worse one at Queen's University where people were pounding on the windows while we were all sitting in the hall.

00:50:28.000 But it was the same thing there.

00:50:30.000 It's like control of temper, detachment, understanding that the full event has yet to play itself out, the ability to step back and the requirement to use minimal necessary force.

00:50:44.000 And when I've been able to manage that, then it's worked.

00:50:47.000 And if I get if my temper gets riled up and I have a temper and if it gets riled up and I start to lash out more than necessary, then that goes badly right away.

00:50:58.000 And I can see that in the comments and I can see that the memes that are made of me turn a little bit more mean instead of funny.

00:51:05.000 And so this is really an important thing to know.

00:51:08.000 It's like keep your temper under control.

00:51:11.000 Don't burst out into self-righteous anger, in particular against those that you might regard as your political enemies.

00:51:17.000 It is not going to help you.

00:51:19.000 It's not going to help the cause.

00:51:21.000 It's not going to help anything.

00:51:23.000 And so, yeah.

00:51:24.000 That's terrific wisdom.

00:51:28.000 See, you can accomplish what you want to accomplish if you're being wise about it by being eminently reasonable.

00:51:36.000 That's the thing, is you can have reason on your side.

00:51:39.000 And I mean reason in the best possible sense.

00:51:41.000 It's like you don't have to be temperamental and impulsive in this sort of situation.

00:51:47.000 You can try to put yourself together, which I would highly recommend, and then you can lay yourself open to the attacks.

00:51:56.000 Now, that means you should be able to defend yourself.

00:51:58.000 You should have the articulated structures at hand.

00:52:02.000 You should orient yourself properly politically and philosophically, and even physically for that matter, so that you're a force to contend with.

00:52:09.000 But once you have that down, then you play it with the lightest possible hand.

00:52:13.000 And that way also you have the highest probability of, let's say, of changing the minds of people who are possessed by an ideology so that they can rejoin the productive political dialogue.

00:52:26.000 And that's what you want.

00:52:27.000 You don't want to defeat them.

00:52:29.000 First of all, good luck with that.

00:52:31.000 It's like, well, you've got to live with them.

00:52:33.000 You can't defeat people that you live with because there they are the next day.

00:52:38.000 And if you defeat them, well, then they're defeated.

00:52:41.000 And maybe that's not for the best.

00:52:43.000 And second, it's not like they're happy about the fact that they're defeated.

00:52:46.000 It's not like they're not going to be waiting around to find out when they can defeat you next.

00:52:51.000 It's like if you're married to someone, think, well, I won that argument.

00:52:54.000 It's like, no, you didn't.

00:52:56.000 No, you didn't, because there that person is, waking up next to you the next day.

00:53:01.000 And so if you won, you know, and they're defeated and humiliated because of it, then the probability that they're going to react properly to you, if they have any sense at all, is very low.

00:53:13.000 And so what you want is you want to negotiate your way to a sustainable peace.

00:53:19.000 And that's what you want to do in the political realm, too, because, well, in this country, you know, there's a certain amount of polarization.

00:53:25.000 I don't think it's anywhere near as bad as the media is making it out to be as they go through their death spirals and generate clickbait like mad.

00:53:33.000 Because in the U.S., you guys have been voting 50% Republican and 50% Democrat for what, about 20 years, right down the middle.

00:53:40.000 It hasn't changed that much.

00:53:42.000 But these people who are on the opposite side of the political spectrum from you, they're the people who live across the street.

00:53:51.000 They're the people who live down the street.

00:53:53.000 They're family members for that matter.

00:53:55.000 And you're going to have to live with them.

00:53:56.000 It's like you don't want to defeat them.

00:53:59.000 You want to bring them back into the reasonable political dialogue.

00:54:02.000 And you do that by having a certain amount, first of all, by getting your act together so that you're a credible and admirable person.

00:54:09.000 But then by having some forbearance and negotiating towards peace.

00:54:14.000 Think about what you want as a victory.

00:54:16.000 You want a victory where you're surrounded by the corpses of your defeated enemies?

00:54:22.000 Or do you want a victory that constitutes peace?

00:54:25.000 Well, that's what you want.

00:54:26.000 And in this country, I mean, you've been able to maintain that for a very long period of time, excluding the Civil War, let's say.

00:54:32.000 And there's been other periods of polarization, like in the early 1970s.

00:54:36.000 You don't want this to be a victory.

00:54:39.000 You want this, not in that sense.

00:54:41.000 You want to decrease the polarization, to bring everyone back under the umbrella of intelligent conversation.

00:54:48.000 And you want to also know that just as you perhaps are temperamentally predisposed, being more conservative, to standing for patriotism, standing for the, what would you say, the, well, let's say patriotism, we'll leave it at that, and for the utility of hierarchies, that there are people who need to speak for the dispossessed, and you have to engage in a dialogue with them for your own good as well as theirs.

00:55:12.000 Because healthy hierarchies do take care of the people who are dispossessed by the hierarchies, and that's one of the things that makes them stable.

00:55:19.000 It's not an easy thing to figure out how to do, right?

00:55:22.000 I mean, you don't do it self-evidently by things like redistribution of income, but it's still a universal problem.

00:55:28.000 The problem of the dispossessed is a universal problem, and it has to be addressed, and that's why you need the political dialogue.

00:55:34.000 So, no victory, peace is the goal, not victory.

00:55:38.000 That's great.

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00:56:35.000 NetSuite.com/slash Kirk.

00:56:40.000 I want to remind everyone, we're taking questions in a couple minutes.

00:56:44.000 So, tweet your questions with our hashtag, hashtag YWLS2018.

00:56:49.000 I have a be looking at some of the tweets.

00:56:51.000 It's been fun.

00:56:52.000 The feedback's been great so far.

00:56:54.000 There's another thing I wanted to say because this is particularly a meeting of women, and because I think this is one thing that you could all do.

00:57:02.000 One of the things I've noticed, and I think this is true right from the beginning of, let's say, women became particularly emancipated as a consequence of the development of the birth control pill, which was much more a technological revolution than a political revolution.

00:57:18.000 Okay, because now you have control of your reproductive function, at least in large part.

00:57:23.000 And so, and there's other technological advances that have also made that possible.

00:57:28.000 So, now the question is: well, with that additional freedom of choice, let's say, what is it that you want?

00:57:36.000 And you see, this is something that a women's movement like this could figure out, because I don't think we really know.

00:57:43.000 I know it's my observation, like I've worked with women my whole life, partly because I've always worked in female-dominated industries.

00:57:50.000 So, you know, I'm young enough, let's say, so that women were fully integrated into the workforce in every domain I was in right from the time I started working.

00:57:58.000 And so, I've watched women in academia, for example, but in all sorts of other professions as well, negotiate their careers over their entire lifespan.

00:58:08.000 And this is what I've observed, and I'm not saying it's right, this is what I've observed: is that it looks to me like in our society, young women are taught to overvalue career.

00:58:20.000 And what I mean by that is that they're not taught when they're 18 or 19 or 16 to 20, something like that, that what's actually going to play a crucial role in their lives.

00:58:31.000 And so, we have this idea that, well, you're going to have a meaningful career.

00:58:34.000 It's like, well, first of all, most people don't have careers.

00:58:39.000 They have jobs.

00:58:41.000 And that's not the same.

00:58:42.000 That isn't, I'm not saying that a job isn't necessary and useful, but it's not a career.

00:58:47.000 It's not necessarily intrinsically meaningful, right?

00:58:50.000 It's something you do because it needs to be done and it's difficult, and that's why you get paid for doing it.

00:58:56.000 And so that's a job, not a career.

00:58:58.000 And even if you have a career, careers are strange things because they're not as intrinsically meaningful as the purveyors of careers like to tell you.

00:59:08.000 And like I worked with a lot of women in law firms, for example, and these were like impressive, these were impressive people, man.

00:59:14.000 They aced their high school, they nailed their university, they were top fifth percentile in their LSATs.

00:59:22.000 They nailed law school, they went into articling, they got their internship.

00:59:27.000 That's not what it's called in law, but the word escapes me from articling.

00:59:31.000 And then they became partners by the time they were 30.

00:59:33.000 They were on this rocket-like trajectory.

00:59:35.000 Almost all of them quit in their 30s.

00:59:39.000 And it happens in law school, in law firms all the time.

00:59:42.000 And you might say, well, that's a consequence of the oppressive patriarchy.

00:59:45.000 It's like, no, it's not.

00:59:47.000 That's not true. 1.00

00:59:48.000 What it's a consequence of is the women hit their late 20s and early 30s. 1.00

00:59:53.000 They make partner, which is sort of the pinnacle. 1.00

00:59:55.000 They're hyper-conscientious women, so they're aiming for the top. 1.00

00:59:58.000 They hit it.

00:59:59.000 They think, now I'm surrounded by all these people, many of them men.

01:00:04.000 All those guys do is work like 80 hours a week.

01:00:06.000 They just work non-stop.

01:00:08.000 They make a lot of money.

01:00:09.000 But, you know, money loses its incremental utility after you have enough money really to keep the bill collectors at bay.

01:00:15.000 The psychological literature on that is quite clear.

01:00:18.000 The women wake up when they're in their late 20s and they think, it isn't obvious to me why anyone would work 80 hours a week when they have other things to do, like have a relationship, like have a family.

01:00:31.000 And let's be perfectly clear about this.

01:00:33.000 Most men are like that too, right?

01:00:36.000 Because people work on average about 35 to 40 hours a week.

01:00:39.000 They're concerned about having a family and having a relationship and having a life outside of work.

01:00:43.000 If you're going to have a high-end career, that's your life.

01:00:48.000 Make no mistake about it.

01:00:49.000 It's like you don't get to the top one percentile of your occupation unless all you do is work.

01:00:56.000 And I don't mean work a little bit.

01:00:57.000 I mean work 16 hours a day flat out.

01:01:00.000 Like some of my clients got new microwaves because it took a few seconds shorter to heat their coffee in the morning.

01:01:07.000 And so, and I'm dead serious about that, man.

01:01:10.000 They were timed to the second, those people.

01:01:12.000 And you think, well, do you want to live like that?

01:01:14.000 It's like, well, maybe the answer is yes.

01:01:16.000 But certainly the answer could be no, because, well, why would you do that?

01:01:21.000 What's the purpose of doing that when you could also have an intimate relationship that you spend some time on and a family? 0.89

01:01:28.000 And so one of the things that you people should figure out, could figure out, is, well, if you could have what you wanted as emancipated women, you know, capable of taking whatever place you want in society, what do you want?

01:01:43.000 And how do you find out?

01:01:44.000 Like, how do you find out what women want?

01:01:46.000 I would say that you could consider partnering with some reasonable social scientists and start doing some surveys and survey women of all different ages from 19 up to, well, up to 70 and find out what women want.

01:02:00.000 You know, I think you'd see it radically shift from 19 to 35, by the way, and I'd like to see that documented because my experience has been that as women mature from 19 to 30, the value that they lay on permanent relationship and family increases.

01:02:20.000 And the value that they lay on career decreases. 0.61

01:02:22.000 Now, maybe that's wrong because it hasn't been documented particularly well, but I don't think it's wrong.

01:02:27.000 It would be worth finding out.

01:02:29.000 Because then you could also find out, if you didn't find out what women actually want, and I don't think we've done a good job of figuring that out at all, then you could also figure out how to facilitate that.

01:02:38.000 And that would be a wonderful thing, because we actually need to know that.

01:02:41.000 And I think to some degree, the academic disciplines in the universities are so corrupted by identity politics that they can't answer these, or ask or answer these questions without falling into an ideological trap.

01:02:53.000 But it'd just be good to find out.

01:02:55.000 Like, we know, for example, that men and women do differ temperamentally.

01:02:59.000 And they do differ in their interests.

01:03:01.000 You know, so women are more likely to be interested in people and men are more likely to be interested in things, broadly speaking, and there's exceptions.

01:03:08.000 And that does modulate career choice.

01:03:11.000 So we know, for example, as well that as societies become more egalitarian, and this is an important point to know, as societies become more egalitarian, the proportion of women who choose STEM disciplines, science, technology, engineering, mathematics, decreases.

01:03:29.000 It doesn't increase, it decreases.

01:03:31.000 Now, I don't know what to make of that, and I don't know whether that's a bad thing or a good thing, but I do know that men and women do differ in their proclivities and their interests on average.

01:03:41.000 And it would be interesting to see if we took that fully into account, which would seem to be something you do with a true feminism: is like, well, we are going to deal with women as they are, and perhaps as they could be, but at least we could start with as they are. 0.61

01:03:55.000 So, what do they want? 1.00

01:03:56.000 How can we facilitate their ability to acquire that?

01:03:59.000 How can we set up our society so that they benefit and everyone else benefits because of it?

01:04:04.000 And I really think there's a hole there that needs to be filled.

01:04:07.000 And that would be a lot.

01:04:09.000 It'd be nice to see a political organization that grounded itself carefully in actual gathering of data.

01:04:17.000 And you could do that. 1.00

01:04:18.000 It's like, what do women want? 1.00

01:04:20.000 How is that going to work out properly for society? 1.00

01:04:23.000 And is there any way that that could be properly facilitated?

01:04:26.000 It'd be a lovely thing for everyone to find out and for it to be depoliticized to the degree that that was possible.

01:04:32.000 So one of the questions we're getting a lot of on Twitter, it's interesting, is this war on men and the idea of masculinity of all questions at a women's summit. 0.81

01:04:41.000 So I'll read it.

01:04:42.000 As conservative women, how can we help end society's negative stereotype of masculinity? 0.83

01:04:53.000 I think you do that. 0.86

01:04:55.000 I really think the fundamental way you do that is by constraining it in your own relationship.

01:05:00.000 You know, now, one of the things you'll find, now I'm going to tread on thin ice here, but that's okay.

01:05:05.000 One of the things you'll find is that that attitude towards, let's say, toxic masculinity is likely to manifest itself in your own relationship, in your distrust of your partner, say.

01:05:17.000 And I'm not saying that you should naively trust your partner.

01:05:21.000 I don't think you should naively trust anyone.

01:05:24.000 And sometimes people confuse naivety with trust.

01:05:27.000 Say, well, when I was a kid, I trusted everyone.

01:05:29.000 It's like, well, that wasn't wisdom.

01:05:33.000 You just didn't know any better because you were a kid.

01:05:35.000 And you say, well, then I got hurt and now I don't trust anyone.

01:05:38.000 It's like, well, you're wiser now that you've been hurt.

01:05:43.000 Because you know that that can happen and you know that that's within the realm of human possibility.

01:05:47.000 And you say, well, yeah, but it's damaged my ability to trust.

01:05:50.000 It's like, no, it hasn't.

01:05:51.000 You never had any ability to trust.

01:05:53.000 You just had naive faith in other people and that's not the same thing.

01:05:58.000 Once you've been hurt, trust becomes an act of courage, not an act of naivety.

01:06:04.000 You say, well, I know that, like me, you're full of snakes, and God only knows when one's going to pop out and bite me.

01:06:10.000 And the same goes for you in relationship to me.

01:06:13.000 It's like, so well, why should I trust you?

01:06:15.000 And the answer is, because you're courageous.

01:06:18.000 Because if you put forward your hand and trust someone to do the right thing, you radically increase the probability that they will.

01:06:26.000 Now, you don't increase it to 100%, and you lay yourself open for betrayal, right?

01:06:31.000 But if you know that, if you're awake to that, you say, look, I'm willing to take the risk to be hurt in order to extend my hand in trust.

01:06:39.000 Well, that's how you combat toxic masculinity right then and there.

01:06:43.000 You do it in your own heart, you know.

01:06:45.000 And you will call forth the best from the person that you're with by doing that.

01:06:49.000 You know, and that's partly the willingness to be vulnerable.

01:06:51.000 And I don't mean naively, right?

01:06:54.000 Because you're not, you're not, there's no courage in vulnerability unless you know the price that you might pay.

01:07:02.000 And so you have to trust and you have to be honest.

01:07:06.000 That's the other thing, you know.

01:07:07.000 And that's part of trusting.

01:07:09.000 You need to let your partner know who you are and what you want.

01:07:13.000 And that also means you have to let yourself know, and that's not such an easy thing, too.

01:07:17.000 You have to have a dialogue with yourself and figure out what you want, and you have to be willing to share that with your partner.

01:07:22.000 I think the way that you glue the relationships between men and women back together is by doing that locally, first of all, right?

01:07:29.000 You deal with your boyfriend, you deal with your husband, you deal with your brothers, you glue things back together with your father if you can do that.

01:07:38.000 You establish a positive relationship with your son, and then having learned how to do that, well, you're going to spread your influence out properly into the broader community.

01:07:49.000 And I'm a very big admirer of local action.

01:07:52.000 It's like, because local action isn't local, it spreads out so quickly you can't believe it.

01:07:57.000 And if you do things right in the little domains that you have right in front of you, first of all, that's not easy.

01:08:03.000 Like, it's hard to have a good relationship that maintains itself properly across time.

01:08:07.000 That will take everything you've got.

01:08:09.000 And if you're capable of developing the character that will allow you to do that, moving that out into the broader social world will be a simple thing in comparison.

01:08:19.000 So you start by manifesting courageous faith in your partner and the men that are close to you in your life.

01:08:30.000 And then you watch, and you let them know when that trust has been violated, obviously, because you're not a pushover.

01:08:37.000 You say what you have to say, and that way you heal those relationships, and that'll do the trick.

01:08:42.000 That's all you need to do.

01:08:44.000 All you need to do.

01:08:45.000 It's like, good luck with that.

01:08:46.000 It's very, very hard.

01:08:49.000 But you can do it and it won't cause any harm.

01:08:52.000 That's also a very good thing.

01:08:54.000 So the universities have become so radical when you say things such as men are better at some things than women and women are better at some things than men.

01:09:09.000 Those are considered horribly radical statements because of some of the insanity that has infiltrated higher education.

01:09:18.000 I think some of the miscategorization upon your work and your teaching is just rooted in how they've moved the goalposts.

01:09:26.000 Well, it's a funny, it's such a comical thing.

01:09:31.000 The data that I've put forward with regards to the differences between men and women isn't controversial.

01:09:39.000 So, you know, you say, well, so this is pseudoscience, that's one accusation.

01:09:45.000 Well, here, let me tell you about it, okay?

01:09:47.000 So, just so you know, okay, so you've got to try to figure out when scientific data is credible.

01:09:55.000 Okay, so here's one, because you might say, well, it also gets contaminated with politics, and that does happen.

01:10:01.000 Now, science has mechanisms to stop that from happening across time.

01:10:05.000 But one thing you can be reasonably sure of is that if scientists publish data that violates their own political leanings, that's one bit of evidence that it might be reliable because they're not going to rush out and be thrilled about publishing something that shows that their fundamental political presuppositions are in error.

01:10:28.000 Okay, so let's look at the personality literature just because this is where you see the differences between men and women.

01:10:34.000 Okay, so the first thing is that the best way those have been measured is by using a scale called the big five personality inventory.

01:10:44.000 There's a variety of different variants of it, but they all measure five fundamental traits.

01:10:48.000 Extroversion, positive emotion dimension, neuroticism, a negative emotion dimension, agreeableness, which is compassion and politeness, conscientiousness, and openness, which is a creativity dimension.

01:11:01.000 Okay, now, the first question is, how did those dimensions come to be identified?

01:11:06.000 Because you might say, well, is there political bias there?

01:11:09.000 And the answer seems to be no.

01:11:11.000 And here's why.

01:11:12.000 So the way no one predicted these dimensions, they emerged as a consequence of brute force statistical analysis.

01:11:20.000 So imagine that you ask a great number of people an immense number of questions.

01:11:25.000 Okay, and every sort of question you can imagine.

01:11:28.000 And I mean that because you get teams of people sitting down and writing down as many questions as they can think up.

01:11:34.000 And so you give those questions to as many people as possible.

01:11:37.000 And then you use a process called factor analysis, which is a statistical process that tells you how the questions clump.

01:11:43.000 So for example, questions like, I'm in a good mood in the morning and I'm often happy.

01:11:48.000 People who answer seven on a scale of one to seven for the first question and seven on a scale of one to seven for the second question, that's going to happen and the statistics can pull out those patterns.

01:12:00.000 And there's five patterns.

01:12:02.000 And those are the traits.

01:12:03.000 So that doesn't seem to be politicized.

01:12:05.000 And it was a-theoretical to the degree that that was possible.

01:12:09.000 Okay, so now you have the traits.

01:12:10.000 And they started to be established in the 1960s.

01:12:13.000 And we got pretty good at measuring them, I would say, by the 1990s.

01:12:16.000 That started to become a pretty stable model.

01:12:18.000 Well, then the next question is: are there differences between men and women? 0.95

01:12:22.000 That's pretty easy.

01:12:23.000 You just look.

01:12:26.000 And they don't even believe in men and women, though.

01:12:29.000 They think men and women are a social construct.

01:12:31.000 Yeah, well, you know, we can get to that. 0.98

01:12:36.000 And so the answer is yes. 1.00

01:12:39.000 The biggest differences are women are higher in negative emotion and they're higher in agreeableness. 0.97

01:12:44.000 And the difference isn't massive at the average level. 0.67

01:12:47.000 So here's the difference. 0.70

01:12:48.000 If you took a random woman and a random man out of the population and you had to lay a bet on who was more agreeable, so that's more compassionate and polite, and you bet on the woman, you'd be right 60% of the time.

01:13:00.000 So it's not 50-50.

01:13:01.000 There's a tilt towards women being more agreeable.

01:13:04.000 And you see this manifested in the culture. 0.68

01:13:06.000 So the best personality predictor of being incarcerated is low agreeableness.

01:13:12.000 And you have a 10-to-1 incarceration rate, men to women.

01:13:16.000 That's in keeping with that. 0.90

01:13:17.000 So, and then women are higher in negative emotion. 1.00

01:13:19.000 That seems to kick in at puberty because you don't see that with boys and girls. 1.00

01:13:23.000 You see it at puberty.

01:13:25.000 And that's also in keeping with the psychiatric literature that indicates that worldwide women have two to three times the rate of depression and anxiety, which goes along with that.

01:13:34.000 Okay, so there are differences.

01:13:37.000 Then you might ask, well, are those sociocultural?

01:13:41.000 Now, the proclivity of the social scientists would be to say yes, because they're leftist.

01:13:48.000 All the social scientists are on the left, all of them.

01:13:54.000 So they're going to be biased towards the socio-cultural interpretation.

01:13:59.000 So here's how you do it.

01:14:00.000 You say, okay, well, let's look across countries at differences between men and women.

01:14:05.000 And so if the socio-cultural explanation is correct, as societies become more egalitarian in their social policies, the differences between men and women should disappear.

01:14:16.000 Very straightforward prediction.

01:14:18.000 And so those studies have been done. 0.94

01:14:20.000 And it's not some obscure damn study that's collecting dust under some tree in the middle of a field.

01:14:27.000 These are studies that have been cited thousands of times and by scientific standards that's overwhelmingly successful. 0.80

01:14:33.000 If your paper is cited 100 times, it's a major deal.

01:14:37.000 If it's cited like 3,000 times, you've hit it out of the park.

01:14:40.000 Like that happens to you once in your career or probably never.

01:14:44.000 So these are major pieces of scientific inquiry and with tens of thousands of subjects.

01:14:49.000 So and what they found was, so you stack up countries by the egalitarian nature of their social policies and then you look at differences between men and women.

01:14:58.000 And what do you find?

01:15:01.000 You find that the more egalitarian the society, the bigger the differences between men and women. 0.59

01:15:09.000 Well, people published that.

01:15:10.000 This is why the paper got cited like 3,000 times.

01:15:13.000 It's like, whoa, we didn't expect that.

01:15:17.000 And the reason is, it seems to be, is that imagine that there are two reasons why men and women might differ, sociocultural and biological.

01:15:25.000 You remove the sociocultural influences, the biological differences maximize.

01:15:30.000 Now it isn't what anyone expected, and it isn't what the researchers wanted to find.

01:15:36.000 But that's the case.

01:15:37.000 Okay, so what do we do about that?

01:15:39.000 Well, you could say we increase the pressure on men and women to equalize them, regardless of the biological differences.

01:15:46.000 But the problem with that is, well, first of all, are you sure you want to do that?

01:15:51.000 Like, maybe you are.

01:15:53.000 Maybe you're going to say, hey, man, equality of outcome no matter what the cost.

01:15:57.000 And so we'll socialize little girls more like little boys and we'll socialize little boys more like little girls.

01:16:02.000 That's a possibility.

01:16:03.000 But the problem with that is that the differences are large enough and pronounced enough.

01:16:07.000 So you're going to have to produce a pretty tyrannical bureaucracy to impose that degree of equalization on the outcome.

01:16:14.000 And I would say you want to be very careful before you do social engineering on that scale.

01:16:19.000 Alternatively, you could say, okay, well, look, there are the differences.

01:16:24.000 How are we to understand them?

01:16:26.000 And what are we going to do about them?

01:16:28.000 Because one of the things that happens because of these differences, it appears, is that men and women sort themselves out into different occupations if you let them.

01:16:36.000 And you see that most particularly, again, in the Scandinavian countries, where there's a massive preponderance of male engineers.

01:16:44.000 And remember, being an engineer is a very niche category, right?

01:16:48.000 Most people aren't of the engineering type.

01:16:51.000 Most of them aren't.

01:16:53.000 But the preponderance of those who are appears to be male.

01:16:57.000 Okay, and we're not exactly sure why that is.

01:16:59.000 It seems to have something to do with interest in things rather than people.

01:17:03.000 And the preponderance of people who go into healthcare, nursing in particular, are women.

01:17:09.000 Is that okay? 0.79

01:17:11.000 Well, this is the sort of thing that your generation is going to have to figure out.

01:17:16.000 Do we want to, like my proclivity, and this is a personal proclivity, would be to let people sort themselves out as they see fit.

01:17:23.000 That's kind of a free market solution.

01:17:28.000 And then it seems to me that that's a saleable message to young women.

01:17:34.000 It's like, well, you're not exactly the same as men.

01:17:39.000 Now, the parameters of difference aren't fully defined, and the causes for that aren't fully understood, but there seems to be a fair bit of variability.

01:17:47.000 It's like, manifest the variability in a free market.

01:17:51.000 That seems to be, to me, that's the least injurious solution.

01:17:55.000 And I think that's a salable message to young women.

01:17:57.000 It's make your choices based on your proclivity.

01:18:01.000 All right, assuming that you're also taking care of yourself and your families and your community.

01:18:05.000 And I think that that's a perfectly reasonable way of going about it because the alternative is to engage in really large-scale and intense social engineering in an attempt to eradicate the differences.

01:18:16.000 And the other thing, too, is we don't know how useful those differences are.

01:18:19.000 So I've been, and this is my opinion, just so you know it, I've been trying to puzzle out why women are more prone to negative emotion than men and why that kicks in at puberty.

01:18:31.000 So because it's not so fun to be more prone to negative emotion, right? 0.93

01:18:35.000 You pay a big price for that.

01:18:37.000 It produces increased emotional pain and anxiety.

01:18:40.000 So it's a big price.

01:18:42.000 So why in the world, why in the world would women be characterized by higher levels of negative emotion, given that it produces an excessive depression and anxiety and it's associated with a fair bit of suffering.

01:18:52.000 And I thought, well, here's a bunch of reasons.

01:18:54.000 You can tell me what you think about them. 0.99

01:18:56.000 Okay, women become sexually vulnerable at puberty.

01:18:59.000 And sex is more dangerous for women than it is for men for obvious reasons, right? 0.89

01:19:03.000 Because men don't get pregnant.

01:19:05.000 So the cost of casual sexual encounter or forced sexual encounter is very, very high for women.

01:19:13.000 And so maybe there is reason there to be more apprehensive in general.

01:19:18.000 Women are smaller than men and they're not as strong in the upper body.

01:19:21.000 So there's a physical issue here as well. 1.00

01:19:24.000 So that's reason number two.

01:19:27.000 But I think reason number three might be paramount.

01:19:30.000 Look, we don't know how susceptible you need to be to distress to be a good mother.

01:19:38.000 Right?

01:19:39.000 And it looks to me like you have to be quite susceptible to distress because what should happen when your infant is upset is that that should make you upset.

01:19:48.000 That's an empathy response, right?

01:19:49.000 And so it could easily be that you have to be more sensitive to threat than might be good for you because there isn't you.

01:19:57.000 There's you in the infant. 0.97

01:19:58.000 That's the canonical female configuration, let's say, from an evolutionary perspective.

01:20:06.000 And so you're not afraid for you.

01:20:08.000 You're afraid for you and the infant.

01:20:11.000 And that puts you at a certain disadvantage in dealing, say, with adult men in the general world because you're a little bit more sensitive to negative emotion than might be optimal.

01:20:19.000 But that's the price that you pay for being particularly sensitive to incredibly dependent offspring, which of course is characteristic of people.

01:20:26.000 Now, I don't know that that's true, but those are hypotheses I have about why the negative emotion differences exist.

01:20:33.000 And if they do exist, like maybe it is the case that your infant has a slightly higher possibility of surviving if you're a little more sensitive to threat.

01:20:44.000 It stands to reason.

01:20:46.000 And obviously that can get out of hand.

01:20:47.000 But those are differences that we might not want to mess with either because we don't understand their utility.

01:20:53.000 And so it isn't obvious that you want to be trained out of that because maybe that would make you harsh.

01:20:58.000 And maybe that would make you too harsh to be really good at taking care of really small infants.

01:21:02.000 Now I don't know, right?

01:21:04.000 Because we've only really sorted out the fact that there are temperamental differences between men and women that are reliable.

01:21:10.000 We've only really figured that out, I would say, in the last maximum 30 years, but really more like 15.

01:21:16.000 It's like, that's not much time to adapt to a piece of information like that.

01:21:20.000 And we've only figured out that it's not fundamentally socio-cultural in its causation.

01:21:26.000 It's been less time than that.

01:21:29.000 But what's troubling is that from even your home country, there's a movement where parents say, oh, I'm going to let my kid decide if they're a boy or a girl.

01:21:40.000 There's this third option on the birth certificate.

01:21:43.000 Yeah, well, good luck with that.

01:21:46.000 But, you know, so I've got a funny story for you about that.

01:21:53.000 So I had a family member who adopted kids, and they were...

01:21:57.000 They were kind of early adopters of the gender-neutral idea, but in a low-level way.

01:22:03.000 You know, they were just not going to use stereotypical approaches to their children.

01:22:09.000 And the outcome of that was absolutely comical as far as I was concerned.

01:22:15.000 Their girl, she was like the most feminine girl I've ever seen. 0.99

01:22:19.000 Her bedroom was like pink, and it was full of flowers, and it was just everything you'd expect from a stereotypical feminine person.

01:22:27.000 And their son liked to hunt and fish, even though his father did neither of those, and grew up to work on the oil rigs and was a real rough guy.

01:22:37.000 It's like, didn't make any difference at all.

01:22:40.000 And I suspect that these intrinsic gender differences, the sex differences, are robust enough so that some minor league social engineering, first of all, is unlikely to change them, but might even exaggerate them.

01:22:53.000 Because, you know, if you try to suppress something, that doesn't make it go away. 0.85

01:22:59.000 What that tends to do is to make it angry and get bigger.

01:23:02.000 And so, I mean, I think that the call for gender fluidity and the idea that there's a gender spectrum is likely to be very confusing for children and adolescents at times when, at a time in their life where the last thing they need is extra confusion about who they are under the guise of choice.

01:23:29.000 So I think that it's a foolish bit of social engineering.

01:23:33.000 I think the underlying theory on which it's predicated, which is now law in Canada, appallingly enough, the social constructionist version of gender, I think it's the reason it's been transformed into law is because the activists lost completely in the scientific domain.

01:23:49.000 They had to circumvent the whole proof issue and just introduce it by fiat.

01:23:56.000 I think it's a sign of the degeneration of the education system in general.

01:24:00.000 So I'm appalled by it. 1.00

01:24:01.000 But I also think that getting rid of gender differences, so to speak, is going to be a lot harder than any social engineers can possibly imagine and that the probability that it will kick back hard is really high.

01:24:17.000 Because I think that what most people will do is defensively revert to a more rigid identity as an attempt to defend themselves against the confusion. 0.68

01:24:28.000 That's the most likely outcome I see.

01:24:30.000 So we'll see, right?

01:24:32.000 And hopefully most of this nonsense will disappear as people come back to their senses, which I hope they are.

01:24:40.000 I sure hope you're right, but in the humanities, I think you first exposed this.

01:24:46.000 80% of all papers are written without peer review or citation.

01:24:49.000 Oh, no, I didn't expose that.

01:24:51.000 I mean, you helped shut down the picture.

01:24:52.000 Oh, yes, I mean, you helped through your platform.

01:24:55.000 Oh, yes, yes.

01:24:56.000 I was an avid tweeter of that particular statistic.

01:25:00.000 You know, and I should hedge my bets to some degree.

01:25:03.000 Like, look, the first thing you have to understand is that most enterprises produce a tremendous amount of useless noise.

01:25:10.000 Right, right.

01:25:12.000 And whether that's academia or government or private enterprise, like, I mean, the first thing you want to think about is this, is that you take a typical corporation, and so maybe it runs on a 5% profit margin.

01:25:23.000 That means it spends 95% of its effort just lumbering forward. 0.97

01:25:28.000 And if you know anything about big corporations, you know perfectly well that they're capable of, well, they do way more stupid things than they do intelligent things, right? 0.72

01:25:37.000 And the bigger the corporation, the more likely that is to be the case, which is why they tend to precipitously fail.

01:25:44.000 Like I think the typical Fortune 500 company lasts 30 years, right?

01:25:49.000 Which is partly, it's also partly why capital doesn't accumulate in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of the same people, even though there is that 1% distribution that's characteristic of pretty much all economies. 0.99

01:26:01.000 So almost all large-scale human enterprises produce a tremendous amount of stupidity. 0.99

01:26:08.000 And that's also true of academia. 0.97

01:26:10.000 And so the fact that 80% of humanities papers receive zero citations is mostly a consequence of the fact that most papers are hardly ever cited.

01:26:21.000 So it follows a Pareto distribution.

01:26:24.000 So what you basically do is you take the number of papers that are published and assume that the square root of that number receives half the citations.

01:26:32.000 So if there's 10,000 papers published in a discipline, then 100 of them will receive half the citations.

01:26:38.000 And that's the same law that applies to the distribution of money.

01:26:41.000 It's the same law that applies to number of basketball hoops successfully completed by pro-athletes or goals scored by hockey players or size of trees in the Amazon or size of cities or mass of stars or like it's a universal principle.

01:27:00.000 It's price's law essentially.

01:27:02.000 However, the fact that 80% of the papers receive zero citations is a metric for something approximating catastrophic failure.

01:27:14.000 Now one of the things that's happened in the universities that's facilitating this, the reason I put that preamble in is because I don't want you to think that the universities are more spectacularly unsuccessful than most things because they're not.

01:27:26.000 But that doesn't mean the lack of success isn't worth assessing.

01:27:31.000 So one of the things that's happened is a lot of these systems for evaluation have been gerrymandered.

01:27:37.000 So zero citations means really no one, not even your friends or yourself, has cited your paper.

01:27:44.000 So that's not so good.

01:27:45.000 What happens with a lot of these journals is that a very small number of people publish in them.

01:27:50.000 It's the same people.

01:27:52.000 They request that the library subscribe to them.

01:27:56.000 And the libraries pay radically inflated prices to subscribe to these journals, which is why the publishers publish them.

01:28:03.000 And the price of the subscription is subsidized by tax money or by insane tuition fees, either way, it's equally reprehensible.

01:28:11.000 So there's a market for useless information that's generated by the subsidization of publishing journals at inflated prices.

01:28:19.000 And so you get this generation of excess material that's completely useless and expensive, and that's part of what's driving this sort of thing.

01:28:29.000 It's not good.

01:28:30.000 I mean, it's one of about seven fatal errors that the universities are making, because I think they're making approximately seven fatal errors.

01:28:38.000 So too much administrative overhead, like way too much administrative overhead that's been getting out of hand over the last few decades.

01:28:48.000 When the size of the faculty has remained essentially constant and the number of faculty that have full-time positions has been plummeting, that's error number two.

01:28:56.000 The faculty are being replaced with part-timers who have no job security, who get paid nothing.

01:29:01.000 And I really, I don't mean literally nothing, but it's so close to nothing that it might as well be nothing.

01:29:06.000 And who have no power over the destiny of the universities whatsoever.

01:29:12.000 So that's part-time adjunct staff that are up to 40% of professors in many institutions now and higher in some.

01:29:18.000 So administrative overhead, the decimation of the professoriate, insane acceleration of tuition fees, far above the cost of inflation, right?

01:29:28.000 Way outstripping the value of the degrees, gerrymandering the, what would you call it, the standards necessary to graduate, the proliferation of the activist disciplines, the use of these ethics committees that have taken scientific research, especially on human beings and animals, down at the knees.

01:29:49.000 They've made it so cumbersome and slow that anyone with any sense is appalled by it.

01:29:54.000 The fact that in the United States, if you take out student loans, which are easy to access, that you can't declare bankruptcy, which is just absolutely mind-boggling to me because it's a form of indentured servitude.

01:30:06.000 It's a way that the university administrators have figured out how to pick the pockets of the future earnings of their current students.

01:30:12.000 So that's, I think, that's seven.

01:30:14.000 There's more.

01:30:15.000 But failure to teach people how to read, failure to teach people how to write, failure to teach people how to speak, failure to teach them the proper classics, especially in the humanities, because they're actually worth learning.

01:30:27.000 It's just an unbridled, bloody catastrophe.

01:30:30.000 And the universities are going to pay for it.

01:30:36.000 Well, beyond that, I had a campus lecture a month ago where a student came up and they said, you know, in our literature class, we are no longer, this is Stanford, actually. 0.66

01:30:49.000 We don't learn Shakespeare because he was a white male.

01:30:54.000 And so I'm going to push back with one thing you said. 0.96

01:30:58.000 I don't know if it's going to get better anytime soon.

01:31:02.000 It has gotten better.

01:31:02.000 Oh, I think the universities are going to lose their purchase on higher education.

01:31:06.000 I sure.

01:31:06.000 That's what's going to happen.

01:31:07.000 I mean, well, look, look at it this way.

01:31:09.000 I mean, why read Shakespeare?

01:31:12.000 Well, the answer is either there's intrinsic value in Shakespeare or there isn't.

01:31:16.000 If there isn't any intrinsic value, then it doesn't matter.

01:31:19.000 If there is intrinsic value...

01:31:22.000 So let's say the intrinsic value of the liberal, what's the intrinsic value of the liberal arts?

01:31:26.000 It's not an obvious, the answer to that question is not obvious.

01:31:31.000 But here's my answer to that.

01:31:33.000 So the liberal arts present to you the great works of literature and philosophy of the past.

01:31:40.000 Okay, so why is that useful?

01:31:43.000 Well, the reason it's useful is because it's useful.

01:31:46.000 Is that these are examples coded in stories and often in explicit philosophy that tell you how to live properly with a minimum of excess suffering, with a minimum of unnecessary damage to others.

01:31:59.000 They contain wisdom.

01:32:01.000 And wisdom is valuable because wisdom is what you need in order to know how to live properly.

01:32:07.000 And it's valuable.

01:32:08.000 Okay, and then the liberal arts also hypothetically taught you to speak clearly, to write intelligibly, to think properly, and to familiarize yourself with those great works.

01:32:21.000 What's the utility in that?

01:32:23.000 We'll be blunt about it economically.

01:32:25.000 Well, that's simple.

01:32:27.000 If you can communicate in those means, speaking, writing, and if you can think, you are so powerful that nothing can stop you.

01:32:37.000 You think about it, well, what do you mean?

01:32:39.000 Well, I don't care who you are.

01:32:40.000 I don't care if you're a plumber or a waitress.

01:32:43.000 Not that there's anything wrong with being a plumber or a waitress because there isn't.

01:32:46.000 It's like you're going to negotiate for a raise.

01:32:48.000 You're going to negotiate for a promotion.

01:32:50.000 You're going to negotiate how your customers treat you.

01:32:53.000 You're going to negotiate how you advertise yourself, for example, with regards to picking up customers.

01:32:59.000 That's all articulated linguistic ability, the ability to express yourself.

01:33:05.000 If you're good at that, you win, period.

01:33:09.000 And so, right.

01:33:12.000 Look, there's a reason, like the children of rich people took liberal arts degrees.

01:33:20.000 Why?

01:33:22.000 Because the rich knew that that was the best possible training for leadership positions.

01:33:27.000 And it wasn't because it was a romp through the park for four years and then daddy's inheritance.

01:33:32.000 It was because if you learned how to communicate, you were unstoppable.

01:33:36.000 Now, if the universities stop teaching people valuable things, they abandon the classic literature, for example, and they abandon their sacred duty to teach people how to communicate properly, all that means is that they'll devalue their brand and they'll disappear because that's their brand.

01:33:53.000 And then if they leave all that valuable material just lying around, then you can be sure that someone else will come and pick it up and make something useful out of it.

01:34:02.000 And so I think that'll happen way faster than people think.

01:34:05.000 It's already starting to happen online.

01:34:07.000 I mean, the lectures that I put online, they're university lectures and they're devoted to what I just described, to helping people put their lives together and learning to communicate.

01:34:16.000 I mean, there's millions of people have watched them.

01:34:19.000 It's like, and that technology is just sitting there.

01:34:22.000 And so the probability that we can generate systems quite rapidly that will educate and accredit thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people at very, very low cost you watch, that's going to happen so fast it'll make your head spin.

01:34:36.000 And the universities will collapse.

01:34:39.000 I always say you can learn much more from watching Dr. Jordan Peterson and Prager University for a month than going to spend four years trying to pursue some liberal arts degree for $200,000 in debt.

01:34:55.000 More wisdom, more instruction for life.

01:34:58.000 So in the short time we have remaining, what advice do you have for this room, this particular audience, and what would you like to say that you haven't already had a chance to say to this historic gathering of young women?

01:35:10.000 Don't underestimate yourselves.

01:35:12.000 Don't underestimate.

01:35:14.000 Let me rephrase that.

01:35:15.000 Let me rephrase that.

01:35:17.000 Don't overestimate yourself, but don't underestimate who you could be.

01:35:22.000 That's a much better way of thinking about it.

01:35:24.000 You know, psychologists of the careless sort, I would say, have been pushing the idea of self-esteem for a very long time, probably since the early 60s, in its more careless forms.

01:35:36.000 You should be content with yourself the way you are.

01:35:39.000 It's like, no, you shouldn't.

01:35:41.000 Especially not how old are you people?

01:35:43.000 You're like 18.

01:35:44.000 You can be content with yourself the way you are.

01:35:47.000 Well, what are you going to do with the next 60 years then?

01:35:50.000 Seriously, like, you're nowhere near what you could be.

01:35:53.000 You're not even close.

01:35:55.000 Right?

01:35:56.000 And so that's a way more optimistic message.

01:36:00.000 Like, you ain't seen nothing yet.

01:36:02.000 That's the right message.

01:36:03.000 And so I would say, don't overestimate yourself now, but don't underestimate your future self.

01:36:09.000 And, you know, you're so, you have so much influence as an individual if you get your act together that you can't believe it.

01:36:16.000 There isn't anything that has more influence than that.

01:36:19.000 You have all the power that there is right where you are to put things right around you.

01:36:24.000 And if you start now, you're all so young.

01:36:26.000 You start now, you develop a noble vision of who you could be.

01:36:30.000 You start to put that into practice, develop some discipline, familiarize yourself with the great works of the past.

01:36:35.000 Learn to read, learn to write, learn to speak, learn to think.

01:36:40.000 Man, you'll be deadly.

01:36:47.000 Dr. Jordan Peterson, so everyone knows, he took two flights to get here.

01:36:51.000 He had to come here and he's going back tonight, I think, either to Kentucky or Indianapolis.

01:36:55.000 Indianapolis tonight.

01:36:56.000 You're on tour, so the fact you made time for this means the world to all of us.

01:37:02.000 You are.

01:37:09.000 In my opinion, you have been the most important thinker in my life and the creation and advancement of Turning Point USA and my world philosophy.

01:37:18.000 And I believe you are the most instrumental thinker that will continue to allow us to help save Western civilization.

01:37:26.000 And you are my hero, and I want to thank you again for making the time.

01:37:29.000 Thank you.

01:37:33.000 What a great conversation that was.

01:37:35.000 Please email me or questions, freedomatcharlikirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.

01:37:40.000 If you guys want a signed copy of the MAGA Doctrine, type in Charlie Kirk Show, hit subscribe, give us a five-star review, screenshot it, email us, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.

01:37:50.000 First 20 to do so, we'll get a signed copy of the MAGA Doctrine.

01:37:54.000 And also, thank you for supporting the Charlie Kirk Show by going to CharlieKirk.com slash support.

01:37:58.000 Please consider becoming a monthly donor.

01:38:00.000 In just a couple of days, we have a private Zoom call coming up for you.

01:38:03.000 Thanks so much, everybody.

01:38:05.000 God bless.

The Charlie Kirk Show - July 11, 2020

Jordan Peterson - Best of TCKS

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