The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #877 - Jordan Peterson

00:00:05.000 Alright, we're live.

00:00:07.000 Sir, first of all, thank you very much for coming on.

00:00:09.000 I really appreciate it.

00:00:09.000 I've enjoyed your YouTube video.

00:00:11.000 I wouldn't say I've enjoyed.

00:00:12.000 I have enjoyed them, but I've been puzzled by them.

00:00:15.000 I've been puzzled by the subject.

00:00:16.000 And for people who have no idea what's going on, let's sort of unpack this for them.

00:00:21.000 In Canada, Canada is very different than the United States.

00:00:25.000 I love Canada.

00:00:27.000 I'm a giant fan of Canada.

00:00:28.000 If there's one place I would live outside of the U.S., 100% it would be Canada.

00:00:32.000 I love it up there.

00:00:32.000 I think the people are at least 20% more polite than America.

00:00:36.000 But you've got some weird shit going on up there. 0.99

00:00:39.000 And your king, what do you call him? 0.99

00:00:42.000 Prime Minister?

00:00:43.000 Trudeau?

00:00:43.000 That fella?

00:00:44.000 The Castro lover.

00:00:45.000 The Castro lover.

00:00:46.000 I was just going to say that. 1.00

00:00:46.000 This fucking guy. 1.00

00:00:48.000 And people have been posting today all the atrocities that Castro committed during his regime to sort of show how preposterous. 1.00

00:00:56.000 What's a few thousand firing squad deaths?

00:00:57.000 A few thousand.

00:00:58.000 How about all the different people that they executed and then sold their blood to the Viet Cong? 0.60

00:01:02.000 Yes, I tweeted that one this morning.

00:01:04.000 Wonderful, wonderful man.

00:01:06.000 50 bucks a pint. 1.00

00:01:07.000 Yeah, he was a wonderful man, that fucking savage. 0.99

00:01:12.000 Trudeau, what he represents is, I think... 0.99

00:01:17.000 The good side of it, what he's trying to do, they're trying to make a kinder, more progressive, more inclusive country.

00:01:24.000 But along the way, what they're doing is they're promoting what you would call online social justice warrior values.

00:01:33.000 And some of them are a little preposterous.

00:01:36.000 You are one of the very few academics who have fought against some of these ideas that are not just being promoted, but are being enforced.

00:01:46.000 And enforced and written into law.

00:01:48.000 And one of them is about gender pronouns.

00:01:53.000 What we mean by gender pronouns is not just he and she, but a whole slew of invented gender pronouns that you're going to be compelled to use.

00:02:06.000 Yeah, you're already compelled to use, and likely in the States, too, even though people don't know it yet.

00:02:11.000 Certainly in New York, and the employment EEOC has already ruled on that with regards to businesses for the U.S., and Yeah, businesses and I believe also landlords.

00:02:25.000 I think if your landlord chooses to misgender you, and not just misgender you, like if you're a transgender woman, you used to be a man, now you're a woman, and they call you a he.

00:02:34.000 It's not just that.

00:02:35.000 You're compelled to use...

00:02:37.000 What is the number of them now?

00:02:39.000 While there's no standard nomenclature for the non-binary types, there's many, many invented words.

00:02:46.000 And which of those you're supposed to use is dependent entirely on the subjective choice of the person that you're talking with.

00:02:52.000 Now, most people, I believe, out there listening are going, what the hell are they talking about right now?

00:02:57.000 We're talking about as many as 70-plus people.

00:03:01.000 Invented gender pronouns like Z, X-E, Xer, H-I-R, a bunch of weird ones.

00:03:09.000 And this is for people that don't necessarily think they're a he or a she.

00:03:14.000 So they prefer these things.

00:03:18.000 On top of that, you have animal kin.

00:03:22.000 Yeah, otherkins, including Wormself, which was the one I found most amusing.

00:03:26.000 Wormself, Foxkin... 1.00

00:03:27.000 I guess that's for the low self-esteem otherkins. 1.00

00:03:31.000 This is people that truly believe that they are in the wrong body and that they should have been born some form of animal and would like you to refer to them as this animal.

00:03:44.000 Or elf.

00:03:45.000 Or elf.

00:03:46.000 Or fairy.

00:03:47.000 I've seen pixie.

00:03:48.000 Yeah.

00:03:48.000 Pixiekin.

00:03:50.000 I haven't seen Pixie Kid.

00:03:52.000 That's a good one.

00:03:53.000 Just get on Tumblr.

00:03:54.000 Gotta get on Tumblr.

00:03:55.000 Yes, absolutely.

00:03:56.000 That's where it all goes down.

00:03:59.000 Professor Peterson, what the hell's going on?

00:04:00.000 What is this?

00:04:03.000 Well, I think it's partly a form of narcissism.

00:04:06.000 Yes.

00:04:07.000 It's partly a consequence of the new rise again of, say, Marxist doctrine, I would say.

00:04:17.000 It's part of postmodernism.

00:04:18.000 Maybe it's postmodernism more than anything else.

00:04:20.000 Because the postmodernists, that's a philosophical community, let's say, believe that the entire point of human categorization is power.

00:04:31.000 and that dialogue between people is only a power dialogue and that there's no real reality outside of interpretation and that basically what we do is exchange interpretive viewpoints to ratchet up our dominance and status and that's that and there's no biology as an ideology and the idea of the objective world is an ideology and science is an ideology and it's all interpretation all the way down like turtles all the way down What do you mean by it's all about power?

00:05:00.000 In what way?

00:05:01.000 Well, you imagine that there are groups of people who are competing in the world for resources, I suppose, and that it's a zero-sum game and it's every group against every other group.

00:05:14.000 And the reason that we engage in dialogue isn't to establish the truth or move towards some closer approximation of reality, but to structure the social interaction so that our group comes up on top.

00:05:27.000 Right.

00:05:28.000 And that is really what the problem is with all this, is that it's not just a matter of choosing to be defined in one way, but compelling others to define you in that way.

00:05:39.000 Well, one of the most awful elements of it, I think, is the idea that individuals should be defined in terms of their group identity at all.

00:05:47.000 I mean, you could argue, and this is one of these weird inversions that's so characteristic of this chaotic state that we're in, when people originally started fighting against unfair discrimination, and I say unfair discrimination because lots of discrimination is fair.

00:06:00.000 If you discriminate against people on the basis of their competence, that's perfectly reasonable. 1.00

00:06:06.000 It's unfair discrimination that constitutes the proper battleground for people who have a more egalitarian viewpoint.

00:06:13.000 But, um...

00:06:15.000 The initial idea was to eliminate the proclivity for people to be categorized according to their group identity because that was interfering with everyone's ability to view them as competent individuals.

00:06:26.000 But that got flipped probably in the 70s after the Soviet state so self-evidently was revealed as a catastrophe.

00:06:34.000 That got flipped so that the world was turned into One group against another. 0.96

00:06:40.000 Power struggle from one group against another.

00:06:43.000 And then the social justice warrior types and the lefties, even the Democratic Party, started categorizing everybody according to their ethnic or sexual or racial identity and made that the canonical element of their being.

00:06:54.000 And that's an absolutely terrible thing to do.

00:06:57.000 In the Soviet Union, when that happened, for example...

00:07:00.000 They introduced that idea along with the notion of class guilt.

00:07:05.000 So, for example, when the Soviets collectivized the farms, they pretty much wiped out or raped and froze to death all of their competent farmers. 0.60

00:07:15.000 They called them kulaks, and they attributed class guilt to them because they were... 0.95

00:07:28.000 We're good to go.

00:07:39.000 But the Soviets were big on collective guilt. 0.51

00:07:41.000 And all of these things that you hear about now, like white privilege, for example, they're variants of collective guilt.

00:07:48.000 I pick your bloody identity, whatever it happens to be, and then I make you a guilty member of that category, and then you and the rest of the guilty members of that category are judged as a unit.

00:08:00.000 It's absolutely... 0.90

00:08:02.000 It's murderous, pushed to its extreme.

00:08:04.000 And we've seen that many, many times.

00:08:06.000 Yeah, you're oppressed, or your opinions, rather, are suppressed, and you are automatically put into this category of people who should be dismissed because of the fact that you have white privilege.

00:08:16.000 You should step back and let others talk.

00:08:19.000 You should step back.

00:08:20.000 And this is a narrative that gets repeated over and over again in the social justice warrior culture, this idea that you should just step back and let these others talk because they understand more.

00:08:29.000 Yeah, and the others are always other groups.

00:08:31.000 Yes, right.

00:08:32.000 And somehow their discourse is to be privileged in reverse because, hypothetically, they're a member of an oppressed class.

00:08:40.000 Right.

00:08:40.000 Of course, and you can multiply the numbers of oppressed classes ad nauseum, which is another part of the problem.

00:08:46.000 Yeah, like the idea is that in giving them privilege because they have been marginalized, you will balance things out.

00:08:52.000 You will somehow or another reverse the scale.

00:08:54.000 Yeah, and that's another example of the class-based guilt idea.

00:08:58.000 You know, it's...

00:08:59.000 It doesn't seem to me self-evident that I'm to blame for slavery, for example.

00:09:04.000 I mean, being a Canadian, it's a slightly different situation, I suppose.

00:09:07.000 But the idea that as a member of a culture, that you're somehow responsible for the past sins of that culture, let's say...

00:09:18.000 It's a very, very anti-Western ethos.

00:09:21.000 It goes along with this idea of class guilt.

00:09:23.000 Because your group membership is the most important thing.

00:09:26.000 If your group at some point in the past did something reprehensible, which of course every group has done, that's for sure, then you are de facto responsible in the present for that.

00:09:36.000 How do you think we got to this point where people are repeating these patterns that were ultimately incredibly unsuccessful and dangerous and deadly in the past?

00:09:45.000 Like Marxism, for example.

00:09:47.000 People proudly proclaim themselves as having Marxist ideology.

00:09:51.000 One in five social scientists claims to be a Marxist.

00:09:55.000 How do they not understand the history?

00:09:57.000 Why don't you fill people in on how that went bad?

00:10:00.000 Well, the estimates vary, but in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959, somewhere between 30 and 50 million people were killed in internal oppression alone.

00:10:11.000 So that's pretty bad.

00:10:12.000 And then in China, which was operating under exactly the same principles, might have been up to 100 million killed during Mao's time.

00:10:21.000 And of course, Mao was still revered in China, appallingly enough.

00:10:25.000 And Vietnam and Cambodia and wherever these ideas were implemented, Cuba, wherever these ideas were implemented, the result was absolute mayhem, absolute mayhem. 0.89

00:10:36.000 And I think what happened is that the Marxist ideas are actually quite attractive if you're an intellectual and if you're, I would say, if you're tilted towards compassion from a personality perspective because they're based on doctrines like from each according to his ability to each according to his need.

00:10:53.000 And the idea that you should fulfill people's needs, or that society should fulfill people's needs, is on the surface of it an attractive idea.

00:11:01.000 Of course, the problem is who gets to define the needs and who gets to define the abilities, and that really is a big problem.

00:11:07.000 And, well, and then those ideas were put into practice first in the Soviet Union, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wrote The Gulag Archipelago, did a very lovely job of Detailing, in horrifying detail, how those initial doctrines were transformed into legislation and then how those legislation was transformed into endless genocide,

00:11:29.000 essentially, and almost destroyed the world.

00:11:32.000 Let's not forget that, partly with the help of Castro, who just died.

00:11:39.000 The doctrines, when put into actual practice, were murderous instantaneously.

00:11:46.000 Now, what happened?

00:11:48.000 There were always apologists for the left in the West, especially in France, especially among the French intellectuals, especially in the late 1960s.

00:11:57.000 When all of the information about what was happening in the Soviet Union came flooding forward, and that culminated, say, in about 1973 when Solzhenitsyn's book was published, the French intellectuals changed their tune.

00:12:10.000 Instead of agitating on the part of the working class, which allied them with murderous Marxists, they switched and started to talk about power and to talk about group identity.

00:12:21.000 It was like a sleight of hand.

00:12:22.000 The underlying pathological philosophy remained exactly the same.

00:12:26.000 But the surface nomenclature changed.

00:12:28.000 And that became very attractive.

00:12:30.000 And at the same time, the Soviet Union dissolved.

00:12:33.000 And so one of the problems I think we have now, a perverse problem, is that these Marxist ideas are very attractive to compassionate intellectuals.

00:12:41.000 And we don't have good, bad examples like the Soviet Union around that everybody can point to and go, yeah, yeah, well, that sounds good, but, you know... 0.87

00:12:48.000 What about the murderous death camps and the millions of people who are suffering?

00:12:51.000 We still have North Korea, but, you know, people treat North Korea like it's a joke instead of like it's an exemplar of a pathological system.

00:12:58.000 And people have no historical memory.

00:13:01.000 Like my students, and that's partly because they're taught so badly in schools, is they have no idea what happened in the Soviet Union.

00:13:08.000 They have absolutely no idea.

00:13:09.000 They know a little bit about the Second World War, maybe.

00:13:12.000 And, of course, people generally know about the Holocaust, but they have no idea what happened in the Soviet Union, so they have no idea where these ideas could lead.

00:13:20.000 And the universities and the high schools are so full of people who are radically left-leaning that students are never taught any proper history.

00:13:30.000 You know, they're taught about the evils of capitalism.

00:13:33.000 I mean, it's not like any system is perfect, but there's a difference between imperfect and consciously murderous.

00:13:43.000 I think one of the things that you just said that's very important is that it's attractive to compassionate intellectuals, people that, without really looking at what the potential for these laws and regulations,

00:13:59.000 what the negative potential for them is, The underlying inclination to lean towards that is that you care about people and that you want people to be okay.

00:14:12.000 Yeah, well, you're kind of treating them like they're your children.

00:14:14.000 And I don't mean that in an entirely sarcastic manner.

00:14:20.000 It's reasonable in some sense to treat other people like people that you love, although it's not reasonable in very many other ways, which is why you don't invite every stranger on the street to come and live with you in your house.

00:14:31.000 I mean, everybody puts up boundaries, and you have to do that.

00:14:36.000 And people tend more than we ever expected, and I've done a lot of research in this in my lab, that people do tend to vote and think their temperament a lot more than anyone really realizes.

00:14:48.000 And if you're kind, and that's your highest virtue...

00:14:52.000 Then you tend to treat people like their kin, because that's what kind means, right?

00:14:56.000 It's an extension of the word kin.

00:14:58.000 But that doesn't work well in larger groups.

00:15:00.000 You need other principles.

00:15:01.000 And so you look at something like the idea of equity, which is equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity.

00:15:08.000 On the surface of it, it seems perfectly reasonable to say, well, if every resource isn't distributed absolutely equally to every group, then the system is unfair.

00:15:17.000 And on the face of it, that's a reasonable proposition, but it falls apart under minimal examination.

00:15:22.000 So here's something to think about for everyone who thinks that equality of an outcome is a good idea.

00:15:28.000 It's like, why the hell are you striving for anything then?

00:15:32.000 Because the reason anyone strives to better themselves or to develop a skill or to move forward in life at all is to produce inequality.

00:15:42.000 You're trying to rise above the mediocre masses every time you make an effort at anything.

00:15:49.000 And so everything that we associate positive Movement forward to your positive motivation is actually an attempt to render the world more unequal.

00:15:59.000 Now, you're rendering it unequal in a just way, right?

00:16:03.000 Because we might say, well, if you work really hard, you deserve an unequal outcome.

00:16:07.000 Well, yeah, unless you want people to stop working hard.

00:16:11.000 And that was the old joke in the Soviet Union, you know.

00:16:14.000 They pretend to pay us.

00:16:16.000 We pretend to work.

00:16:20.000 So, it's so thoughtless.

00:16:23.000 That's the problem.

00:16:24.000 That is a big problem with the phrase income inequality.

00:16:28.000 You never hear effort inequality because effort is not the same.

00:16:33.000 Oh, well, you know, on some campuses, and this is true in California, it's now considered a form of aggression.

00:16:39.000 It's classified under the microaggression to say that hard work is one of the reasons that people accumulate more Accumulate more.

00:16:49.000 Accumulate more value, accumulate more property, accumulate more money.

00:16:53.000 It's aggressive to say that because it implies that people who are poor don't work hard.

00:16:59.000 Now, see, that's another Terribly fuzzy form of thinking because there are lots of reasons for people to not have money.

00:17:06.000 Many.

00:17:07.000 To be poor, let's say, which is even different than not having money.

00:17:12.000 Alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, physical illness, intellectual incapacity, and...

00:17:20.000 Lack of work.

00:17:21.000 All of those things contribute.

00:17:23.000 Also environmental factors, what communities you grow up into, what you're being exposed to.

00:17:27.000 People imitate their atmosphere.

00:17:28.000 You're around people that are constantly in trouble with the law, and you're dealing with horrible environments.

00:17:33.000 There's a lot of factors.

00:17:35.000 Yeah.

00:17:35.000 And I think one of the things that's really important about having these discussions is that they break down these rigid ideologies that a lot of these kids that are going to these universities are sort of being shoved into.

00:17:48.000 They're being shoved into these ideologies.

00:17:50.000 You're either on the left or you're on the right, and there's very few on the right.

00:17:53.000 There's no open market of ideas when it comes to discussing these things.

00:17:59.000 You're compelled and enforced Yeah, well, Jonathan Haidt, he's a psychologist at the New York University Business School.

00:18:08.000 He's done a really good job of documenting the dearth of ideological viewpoints, let's say political or temperamental viewpoints, because that's more accurate in the modern university.

00:18:18.000 And it's appalling, because along with all this push for ethnic and sexual and racial diversity, which I think is just a mask to enforce a kind of ideological homogeneity, Ideational diversity is the only relevant value for a university.

00:18:39.000 The rest of it's all predicated, say, on the assumption that if you do select people because of their ethnicity or racial background or gender, that that will in and of itself produce diversity of ideas, which is another really pernicious idea because it assumes that,

00:18:55.000 and it's so contradictory, The left describes anything that's associated with the assumption that someone who's female, for example, will think in a female way.

00:19:07.000 They regard that as an unreasonable prejudice.

00:19:09.000 Yet they're perfectly reasonable to say that we need more women in X discipline because they will bring in female ideas. 1.00

00:19:17.000 It's like, well, what the hell are female ideas? 1.00

00:19:21.000 You can't have it both ways unless you're completely...

00:19:25.000 Unless you don't care at all about coherence or consistency, and ideologues really don't, because they care about putting their ideology forth.

00:19:33.000 But the idea that you're going to get a diversity of ideas because you have a diversity of class of people assumes that ideas and identity are the same thing.

00:19:44.000 And that's an absurd proposition.

00:19:47.000 In fact, that's an essentially racial proposition.

00:19:51.000 Racist proposition. 0.99

00:19:52.000 Black people think differently than white people. 0.99

00:19:55.000 It's no, some do and some don't and the overlap is substantive and the difference between the individuals is far greater than the difference between the groups.

00:20:03.000 I think we also need to make a very clear distinction between discrimination and people that are just inclined to gravitate towards different careers and different focuses.

00:20:12.000 There's a big difference between women being forced out of tech and women being not as compelled to enter into tech careers as men. 0.80

00:20:21.000 Yeah, well, the tech issue is a really interesting one for a couple of reasons.

00:20:25.000 I mean, one is that, of course, high tech basically developed after the playing field for men and women was more or less leveled.

00:20:33.000 I mean, that happened in the 1970s.

00:20:35.000 And despite that, there aren't anywhere near as many women in tech. 1.00

00:20:39.000 There's far more women in caring professions. 1.00

00:20:41.000 And you see that particularly in Scandinavia, where they've done everything they can to equalize the playing field.

00:20:47.000 It's 20 to 1 female to male nurses and 20 to 1 male to female engineers. 1.00

00:20:53.000 Explain that if you could, the Scandinavia issue, because it's very interesting what they've done over there and what the results have been.

00:20:58.000 Yeah, well...

00:21:00.000 Imagine that there are two reasons that people differ.

00:21:03.000 There are more than two, but just imagine for the time being that there are two.

00:21:06.000 One is for environmental reasons, cultural reasons, and the other is for biological reasons.

00:21:11.000 What happens if you flatten out the environmental reasons, which is what's happened in Scandinavia, is you maximize the biological differences.

00:21:18.000 You don't get rid of them, you maximize them.

00:21:20.000 And so what's happened in Scandinavia is that men and women are more different from a temperament and personality perspective, and also in terms of their interests.

00:21:27.000 They're more different in Scandinavia than they are anywhere else in the world.

00:21:31.000 Now, what have they done to try to flatten things out, as you say?

00:21:35.000 Well, they've transformed their social policies so that men and women have as close to equal opportunities, say, as any society has managed.

00:21:42.000 But that hasn't produced the hope for equality of outcome.

00:21:45.000 Quite the contrary.

00:21:46.000 In many situations, it's exaggerated it.

00:21:48.000 And you could say that that's actually okay.

00:21:51.000 What you want is to have a society where the genuine differences between people are free to manifest themselves.

00:21:59.000 So, for example, if you have three or four kids, say, the kids are going to be different from one another genetically.

00:22:08.000 That's why they're not identical twins.

00:22:10.000 They differ genetically.

00:22:11.000 And if you set the environment up so that each child is supportive, the children actually turn out quite differently.

00:22:17.000 Now, if you're an absolute brute and you beat them and you abuse them, then they'll all turn out the same because there's tremendous environmental influence on them then.

00:22:23.000 But if you form an individual relationship with each of them and allow their strengths to manifest themselves as they will in a supportive environment, then the kids are going to turn out very different.

00:22:34.000 And so a free society is actually one that...

00:22:37.000 That produces massively unequal outcomes because it allows the genuine differences between people to manifest themselves.

00:22:43.000 These people who are pushing equity, which is equality of outcome, that's what the word equity codes for, by the way, equality of outcome and not equality of opportunity.

00:22:53.000 I don't know what in the world they do with regards to the fact that a very large number of professions are, you know, high-quality, high-pay professions are female-dominated. 1.00

00:23:03.000 Physicians, for example, psychologists, any of the disciplines that have to do with human care are almost inevitably dominated by women, and that's increasingly the case. 1.00

00:23:12.000 Is it we're supposed to stop that?

00:23:14.000 Is that also a sign of oppression?

00:23:16.000 We're going to force women to do things they're not interested in? 1.00

00:23:19.000 Well, there's also a very disingenuous way of framing it here in America, where people consistently, even the President of the United States, Obama, was talking about income inequality.

00:23:27.000 And the way they frame income inequality, they talk about the 79 cents to the dollar.

00:23:31.000 But what they don't discuss is that we're talking about completely different careers.

00:23:35.000 The way they frame it, they frame it as if two people are working side by side.

00:23:39.000 One is a man, one is a woman. 0.99

00:23:40.000 They're both doing the same job.

00:23:41.000 The man makes a dollar, the woman makes 79 cents. 0.99

00:23:43.000 That is not the case.

00:23:44.000 Well, it's typical of ideological We talked about poverty a few minutes ago, and we said, well, there's many, many reasons that one person might have more money than another.

00:23:59.000 There are many, many reasons why...

00:24:02.000 Women might make less money on average than men. 1.00

00:24:05.000 Their small businesses that women run, for example, make far less money than small businesses that men run. 0.97

00:24:11.000 But that's partly because a lot of women run their businesses part-time because they have kids. 1.00

00:24:15.000 It's also partly because men do all the horrible, dangerous jobs.

00:24:20.000 The ones where there's a high chance of dying.

00:24:22.000 Men are much more likely to work outside.

00:24:25.000 Men are much more likely to move in pursuit of a career opportunity.

00:24:29.000 There are lots of reasons that men and women differ in terms of their income.

00:24:33.000 But if you're an ideologue, you can only handle one variable.

00:24:36.000 Oh, men and women...

00:24:37.000 Measured en masse, don't have the same incomes, therefore the system is corrupt.

00:24:42.000 Jesus, how much thinking does it take to come up with a theoretical scenario like that?

00:24:47.000 It's so boneheaded and it just runs, it just pushes the ideological, it just pushes the ideology forward with no thought.

00:24:57.000 Now as a professor, why is this sort of objective reasoning and really Absolutely honest assessment of this situation.

00:25:06.000 Why is this so rare amongst professors?

00:25:09.000 Why is this so rare in universities?

00:25:12.000 Why is this such an unusual subject?

00:25:14.000 Well, I think the reason is that when people first encounter a complex topic, like income differences, it's like, imagine you were drawing a map of a territory, and you don't know the territory very well.

00:25:30.000 The first thing you do is just roughly Sketch out the shapes of the continents.

00:25:34.000 And maybe you're wrong.

00:25:36.000 Like the early European maps of North America.

00:25:38.000 You know, you kind of get one coastline right and you guess in the rest.

00:25:42.000 It's blurry and grey.

00:25:43.000 And then, as you investigate more and more, your picture of the situation becomes higher and higher and higher and higher in resolution.

00:25:51.000 It's hard to go from a low resolution representation to a high resolution representation.

00:25:56.000 And ideologies are low resolution representations.

00:25:59.000 So, the thing about a low resolution representation is it looks like it covers everything.

00:26:05.000 But it doesn't.

00:26:06.000 The closer you look, the more details there are.

00:26:08.000 You know, if you get a three-year-old to draw a helicopter, they put like a little cross on the top and a circle and a stick and another circle, and that's the helicopter.

00:26:16.000 Well, you know when you look at it, that's a helicopter.

00:26:18.000 But no one would expect that thing to fly.

00:26:21.000 If you want to change that into a real model of a helicopter, you have to increase your focus and concentration on every single element of the entity.

00:26:28.000 And that takes a tremendous amount of cognitive effort.

00:26:31.000 And sometimes you don't even know what you don't know about something.

00:26:35.000 You know, I could say, well, there are 50 reasons why men and women's income differ. 0.84

00:26:41.000 Well, that doesn't mean I can say all 50 of those differences.

00:26:45.000 And each of those 50 differences are fragmentable into maybe another dozen categories each.

00:26:50.000 Maybe there's 600 reasons why men and women's salary differ. 1.00

00:26:54.000 Differ.

00:26:55.000 But you have to spend a tremendous amount of time paying attention and thinking to build your model of reality into that level of resolution, and basically what you do is default to temperamentally influenced ideologies.

00:27:09.000 They give you a one-bit answer to everything.

00:27:11.000 Why are men and women, why do men and women's salaries differ? 1.00

00:27:14.000 Oppression.

00:27:16.000 It's always the same thing, and it makes you feel like you know something.

00:27:21.000 And people like that because they don't like the feeling that there's something they don't know.

00:27:25.000 They don't like to be in chaos.

00:27:26.000 That's basically chaos.

00:27:28.000 They like to be in order.

00:27:29.000 And order is where you know everything.

00:27:32.000 And professors are no different than people, obviously, given that they're people.

00:27:39.000 Maybe they're more intelligent on average.

00:27:42.000 They're also more sheltered, I would say, in many ways, on average.

00:27:45.000 And they're also not challenged as often.

00:27:48.000 Tenure.

00:27:51.000 Tenure's an issue and also not competing in the marketplace, not being in the workforce, going from being in high school to being in universities to getting a degree to teaching to being a professor to getting tenure, staying inside of that intellectual bubble.

00:28:06.000 Yeah, well, it's complicated.

00:28:08.000 Often these things happen.

00:28:09.000 They're like positive feedback loops, you know, when you bring a speaker too close to or a microphone too close to a speaker and it starts to howl.

00:28:16.000 And I think something like that's happened in the universities is that they started to tilt towards the left in the 60s.

00:28:21.000 And then as they tilted, they tilted harder.

00:28:24.000 And as they tilted harder, they tilted even harder until all of the...

00:28:28.000 Diversity was forced out of the universities, and I don't know if it's so much a consequence of the actual policies of the university as just a feedback process that got out of control.

00:28:38.000 I mean, if it's 50% liberals and 50% conservatives, no problem.

00:28:42.000 But if it's 70% liberals and 30% conservatives, maybe it rapidly goes to 99% liberals and 1% conservatives.

00:28:51.000 Is that what it's like right now?

00:28:53.000 When you look at the University of Toronto, where you are, what is the number, if you had to guess?

00:28:59.000 Well, it would depend to some degree on the discipline, but professors also tend to be characterized by personality traits that do tilt them towards liberalism.

00:29:09.000 They're higher in trait openness, which is both creativity and interest in ideas.

00:29:13.000 That's one of the things that temperamentally distinguishes liberals from conservatives.

00:29:17.000 Conservatives are more conscientious.

00:29:19.000 They're more orderly and industrious.

00:29:21.000 Liberals are more open, so they're more interested in aesthetics and ideas.

00:29:24.000 And, of course, being interested in aesthetics and ideas does tilt you towards an academic career.

00:29:31.000 It's hard to tell.

00:29:32.000 I mean, it's certainly the bulk of intellectuals are liberal and liberal left.

00:29:40.000 Virtually all of them, I would say.

00:29:41.000 And that's probably not as true.

00:29:44.000 We know this.

00:29:44.000 It's not as true in the hard sciences.

00:29:46.000 But in the social sciences and the humanities, it's the overwhelming majority.

00:29:51.000 I mean, I could see that even in this battle that I've been in in Canada with regards to Bill C-16 and these compelled pronouns.

00:29:57.000 I've had almost no support from my faculty colleagues.

00:30:00.000 Now, I didn't expect any, and I'm not shocked by that, but it's an indication that if you put to them a choice between...

00:30:08.000 Social justice slash all-consuming compassion and freedom of expression.

00:30:14.000 They're going to tilt hard towards the social justice compassion end of things.

00:30:18.000 But it almost seemed like when I was watching some of the debates that you've engaged in, it almost seems like they're politicians.

00:30:23.000 It almost seems like they're wetting their finger and going with the breeze.

00:30:27.000 There's some conversations that you had that were just...

00:30:29.000 I had to stop and rewind them because I couldn't believe the arguments.

00:30:33.000 There was a woman... 0.99

00:30:34.000 I don't know.

00:30:35.000 It was a...

00:30:37.000 Was it a transgender man that you were having a discussion with that was saying that there's no difference, no biological difference in the sexes?

00:30:46.000 Yeah, no biological difference.

00:30:47.000 He said that the scientific consensus for the last four...

00:30:49.000 I'm not sure.

00:30:51.000 I don't believe so.

00:30:52.000 He was a professor who taught transgender studies at the University of Toronto.

00:30:56.000 And yeah, he said outright that there were no biological differences between men and women and that that was the scientific consensus.

00:31:03.000 And he believed that he...

00:31:04.000 had the qualifications to say that because he was a historian of medicine.

00:31:09.000 Which hardly qualifies as a scientist.

00:31:12.000 Not that you have to be a scientist to notice that there are biological differences between men and women.

00:31:17.000 It was very bizarre for me at that point in the last few months because I was under substantial pressure from the university to stop repeating my claim that I wouldn't use compelled pronouns to refer to people because the university regarded that as against the university policies and also against the Ontario Human Rights Code,

00:31:36.000 so also illegal.

00:31:37.000 And as my employers, they're responsible for everything I say, whether or not there has been a complaint made, whether or not the consequence of my speech is intended or unintended, because that's built into the legislation.

00:31:48.000 And believe me, that's coming your way, because this legislation spreads like mad.

00:31:52.000 But on the one hand, I got two letters of warning from the university for...

00:31:58.000 Refusing to use these compelled pronouns, which I regard as the ideological constructions of radical left-wingers.

00:32:04.000 And this professor went on the agenda, this Ontario news show, and announced publicly that there were no biological differences between men and women.

00:32:12.000 It was like, huh...

00:32:14.000 You'd think maybe the university would have had something to say about that, since they do, in fact, have a biology department.

00:32:19.000 But, oh no, that went by without notice.

00:32:22.000 That's insane.

00:32:22.000 That was perfectly fine.

00:32:23.000 It is.

00:32:24.000 It's insane.

00:32:25.000 It's such an insane thing to say.

00:32:26.000 If there's no biological difference, then why are they taking hormones?

00:32:29.000 Well, that's a good question.

00:32:30.000 Why bother with the surgery and especially the hormones?

00:32:33.000 Yeah.

00:32:34.000 Because that's not...

00:32:35.000 Like, you could argue with surgery that that's cosmetic, right?

00:32:38.000 Yeah.

00:32:38.000 This person, whoever this professor was, is an expert in transgender studies.

00:32:43.000 Nicholas Matt.

00:32:45.000 I'm pretty sure...

00:32:47.000 That used to be a woman, or she, they. 1.00

00:32:49.000 You're not allowed to say that.

00:32:50.000 If you say that, you're a bad person if you say they.

00:32:53.000 And they and them is the most reasonable of these alternative pronouns, they and them.

00:33:01.000 Like you could say, if you know a guy and he doesn't know how to swim, they should probably stay out of the pool.

00:33:08.000 Right, right.

00:33:08.000 You could say that.

00:33:09.000 You could use that in a non-plural form.

00:33:12.000 Yes, and they is used to repair awkward sentences, basically.

00:33:15.000 But it's never been used, despite the claims of the gender-bender activists, it's never been used for the singular.

00:33:21.000 And we shouldn't give up the distinction between the plural and the singular. 0.83

00:33:28.000 No, it's ridiculous.

00:33:29.000 We actually need to know whether it's one person or more than one person. 0.61

00:33:33.000 Do you think it's reasonable for people that are asexual, people that really are uncomfortable with the idea of being a man or a woman?

00:33:39.000 Is it reasonable that we come up with a distinction for that?

00:33:42.000 I mean, that seems like it would be nice, and this is one of the things that you've said.

00:33:46.000 One of the things that you don't like about this is that you're being compelled to use these made-up pronouns, and that if we as a society, as a culture, as a civilization, sort of adopt a new phrase, that you would be fine with that.

00:33:59.000 Well, we kind of had one.

00:34:00.000 We had transsexual.

00:34:02.000 Yeah, but...

00:34:03.000 I know, I know.

00:34:04.000 That's problematic because it's not asexual.

00:34:07.000 You know, transsexual would be trans... 0.92

00:34:09.000 And here's the other distinction.

00:34:10.000 This is another important thing.

00:34:12.000 Those aren't the people that have the problem with it.

00:34:14.000 The people that have the problem with these pronouns, the transsexual community almost entirely, or at least, I shouldn't say entirely, but predominantly prefer the alternative pronoun. 0.82

00:34:24.000 A male to female transgender person prefers to be called a woman, or she, and use the female pronouns.

00:34:30.000 It's the whole point.

00:34:31.000 So there's some tiny fraction of the transsexual community, or we could say there's some tiny fraction of people who are identifying themselves with the transgender community, which is already a tiny fraction, who claims that they have an identity that doesn't fit into either binary category.

00:34:49.000 Well, it's a proposition that I think bears some scrutiny to begin with, because I don't believe that the claims that that tiny community is making are coherent in any sense, because they say, well, you could be man, woman, or neither, or both.

00:35:04.000 Those aren't coherent claims in my estimation.

00:35:09.000 What they're saying is that we don't fit into a category and therefore we get to invent our own plurality of categories.

00:35:16.000 It's not logically tenable.

00:35:18.000 That isn't how it works because you get an infinite number of categories out of that.

00:35:22.000 And that's what's happening already online.

00:35:25.000 One of my favorite stories came out of an all-girls university in Massachusetts where a group of women, where they were trying to pick a president of the student body or whatever, and one of the girls who went to that school decided that she identified as a man.

00:35:45.000 So she changed her name, and I don't believe there was any hormones or anything involved.

00:35:50.000 I think she just changed her name. 0.99

00:35:51.000 She called herself Masculine of Center Genderqueer, changed her name to a masculine name, ran for president of whatever the hell this is. 1.00

00:36:00.000 I think it was Willisley.

00:36:01.000 Yes, I believe you're right.

00:36:02.000 Won, and then was denounced by the rest of the class because now she was a white male, so she was a part of the patriarchy, and she was a part of the whole problem with society, and that she should not be allowed, or he should not be allowed to take that position, 0.73

00:36:18.000 which I just...

00:36:20.000 That's a really good example.

00:36:21.000 We've read it on air and I couldn't stop laughing.

00:36:23.000 Right, right.

00:36:23.000 Well, that's a really good example of the chaos that ensues when you start to blow apart standard categories.

00:36:29.000 There's a chaos in between categories that's made of an infinite multiplicity.

00:36:34.000 That's why you see, too, with the LGBT rainbow.

00:36:38.000 They're getting caught in their own metaphor.

00:36:41.000 So there's an infinite number of gradations in a rainbow.

00:36:44.000 And there's an infinite number of letters that are accumulating on the LGBT rainbow. 0.69

00:36:50.000 And there's an element of clear absurdity to that.

00:36:53.000 And one of them is, I believe it's Q plus that includes the other kin types. 0.92

00:36:58.000 It's like, well, the claim is, well, I'm marginalized.

00:37:01.000 And then that sort of becomes normalized.

00:37:03.000 And then there's a group right outside of that that says, well, I'm marginalized, too.

00:37:07.000 And another group says, well, here I am.

00:37:09.000 I'm also marginalized.

00:37:11.000 And there's absolutely no logic.

00:37:14.000 Once you've identified yourself as marginalized, there's no logical way that you can exclude anyone else who regards themselves as marginalized.

00:37:23.000 And so the marginalized, the community of the marginalized, expands and expands and expands and expands.

00:37:29.000 And part of the reason for that is that People are, every individual is a multiplicity, and there's an element to every individual that's marginalized.

00:37:40.000 You know, so for example, It's clearly the case that when a child is socialized, there's pros and cons to that.

00:37:49.000 The pros are, the socialization turns the little beastly two-year-old into a four-year-old that other children can play with.

00:37:56.000 And that does happen between the ages of two and four, if a child is socialized properly.

00:38:01.000 Then what the child does is kind of turn into a clone of everyone else so that he or she can benefit from being able to interact with everyone else.

00:38:10.000 Now, that builds up a certain amount of individuality because kids learn to talk and they learn to play and all that.

00:38:16.000 And it destroys a certain amount of individuality.

00:38:19.000 So everybody sacrifices a certain portion of their peculiarity to become a socialized creature.

00:38:25.000 And some of that's good and some of it's bad.

00:38:26.000 And we know that.

00:38:28.000 That's the standard story of the rebellious adolescent against society for crushing their individuality, right?

00:38:34.000 And there's an element of that that's true.

00:38:38.000 But...

00:38:40.000 By the same token, if you don't sacrifice a certain amount of your individuality to the group, there's no such thing as society.

00:38:51.000 Everybody has to live on their own.

00:38:53.000 Everyone is in their own subjective bubble, which is, of course, now required by this law.

00:38:57.000 And society itself breaks down.

00:39:01.000 You can't have a society without marginalizing people, or you can't have a society without making everyone, part of everyone marginalized.

00:39:09.000 And so then when you start to concentrate on the marginalized, it just grows and expands and grows and expands and grows and expands until everyone becomes marginalized.

00:39:17.000 And that just highlights a real problem with quote mining, that someone is going to take that, you can't have a society without marginalizing people, quote, and put it under Dr. Jordan Peterson, this is what he believes.

00:39:29.000 Right.

00:39:29.000 Well, that's actually what Jacques Derrida said.

00:39:33.000 The most famous of the post-modernists.

00:39:36.000 That's why Derrida is such an invasive force. 0.84

00:39:40.000 He said, well, you can't have a society without marginalizing.

00:39:43.000 It's like, well, that's true.

00:39:44.000 It's true, comma, but...

00:39:49.000 The fact that you can't have a society without marginalizing doesn't mean that you shouldn't have a society.

00:39:54.000 And it doesn't mean that the only reason that society exists is to marginalize.

00:39:59.000 And that was Derrida's claim.

00:40:01.000 That's what makes him so...

00:40:02.000 He's absolutely pathological to the core, Jacques Derrida.

00:40:06.000 And apart from his claims that...

00:40:10.000 All we do is trade power games, because that's another one of his claims.

00:40:13.000 His other claim is that the purpose of categorization, the purpose of society, is to marginalize.

00:40:19.000 And that's absolutely absurd.

00:40:20.000 The purpose is so that we can all play a moderately mediocre but productive homogenous social game.

00:40:29.000 Is it perfect?

00:40:30.000 Well, obviously not.

00:40:32.000 Does it require the sacrifice of individuality?

00:40:35.000 Yes.

00:40:36.000 Is some of that sacrificed individuality valuable?

00:40:39.000 Absolutely!

00:40:41.000 What's the alternative?

00:40:43.000 No society.

00:40:45.000 Well, I don't think so.

00:40:46.000 That doesn't seem like a very good alternative to me.

00:40:49.000 Or maybe some sort of Egalitarian utopia.

00:40:53.000 Well, yeah, we had a hundred years of that.

00:40:55.000 And a hundred million deaths as a consequence.

00:40:58.000 And so maybe not that either.

00:41:00.000 What we have right now is a flawed system.

00:41:03.000 But it's the best flawed system that anybody's ever come up with.

00:41:06.000 And of course it marginalizes people.

00:41:08.000 How could it not?

00:41:10.000 You know, if kids organize themselves in a playground to play hide-and-go-seek, they've marginalized all the kids that wanted to play tag.

00:41:18.000 Obviously.

00:41:19.000 But that doesn't mean that they shouldn't come to a consensus and go ahead and play a game.

00:41:23.000 At least they're bloody well playing a game that, you know, pretty much everybody has access to.

00:41:29.000 I think marginalized is a lot of times associated with oppression.

00:41:32.000 That term marginalized.

00:41:34.000 And it's not necessarily the case.

00:41:35.000 And I think that society as a whole and civilization is sort of a work in progress.

00:41:40.000 We're working all this out, and that's one of the beautiful things about you being able to discuss these things on your YouTube page, as opposed to just having to battle it out inside the echo chamber of the universities.

00:41:55.000 We're good to go.

00:42:10.000 Egalitarian utopia idea it's beautiful in its concept that we should all be able to get along and everything should be equal the problem is it defies human nature it defies the 200 300,000 years of DNA that we have a Bouncing around inside of our bodies that demand certain types of behavior and I think It's so important that we discuss these things.

00:42:36.000 And I think that society and civilization as a whole, this thing that is ultimately in this growing state, this constant state of improvement and objective Interaction.

00:42:49.000 There has to be some sort of discussion.

00:42:52.000 One of the problems that I have with the so-called social justice warriors and with this movement is that they're enforcing a certain type of thinking and behavior, and they're incredibly aggressive about it, hence the warrior term.

00:43:07.000 Yeah, well, I think a fair bit of that is grounded again in temperament, which is quite comical.

00:43:12.000 I mean, one of the things that our research indicated, research on political correctness indicated that this trait, agreeableness, is a good predictor of holding politically correct views, and also that being female is a good predictor of holding politically correct views.

00:43:26.000 And I think part of the reason for that, and the warrior aspect to it, too, is that agreeableness is...

00:43:33.000 A maternal instinct trait, roughly speaking.

00:43:37.000 And, you know, human beings have very powerful maternal instincts.

00:43:40.000 That's true for women and for men, because men are very involved.

00:43:44.000 Male human beings are very involved in the raising of their children, which makes them quite different than many large animals. 1.00

00:43:53.000 On the one hand, if you're very maternal, you're very compassionate and protective of those that are within your kin boundary.

00:44:01.000 And you can try to include more people in that if you want.

00:44:04.000 And that's the political goal.

00:44:07.000 But you're unbelievably hostile to anyone who's outside of that that you regard as a threat slash predator.

00:44:14.000 And so agreeableness makes you divide the world up into protected children and predators.

00:44:20.000 And you see that on Social Justice Warriors' Twitter pages.

00:44:23.000 I mean, I follow a bunch of them, and I go to them and I watch this, incredibly supportive, ridiculously so, in terms of mediocre expressions, tweets, oh my god, it's so brilliant, and you're saying almost nothing.

00:44:36.000 And they're so incredibly supportive of the people that think along their lines and so incredibly hostile.

00:44:43.000 And this idea of shaming people that don't agree with them, not interacting with them, but almost immediately insulting them, almost immediately marginalizing them, which is ironic.

00:44:54.000 This is what you see constantly.

00:44:57.000 It's like super supportive and super aggressive against people that have any sort of an opposing viewpoint.

00:45:03.000 Yeah, well, they're all predators, the ones that have an opposing viewpoint.

00:45:06.000 And that's how they define them.

00:45:07.000 It's one of the things that's very comical about this, from my perspective, is that it's such sex-stereotypical behaviour, is that at the same time that the social justice warriors are denouncing the idea that psychology, for example, might have anything to do with sex differences,

00:45:23.000 they're acting out sex-stereotype behaviour like mad in terms of their persecution of predators and their protection of the kin-slash-in-group.

00:45:34.000 And you are a social psychologist?

00:45:36.000 No, no, no, I'm not.

00:45:38.000 I'm a clinical personality psychologist.

00:45:40.000 What is the difference?

00:45:41.000 Well, one of the differences is that personality and clinical psychology isn't a corrupt enterprise, whereas social psychology fundamentally is.

00:45:49.000 It's been going through an absolute internal revolution over the last two years because of its own discovery that many of its fundamental studies and propositions are flawed.

00:45:59.000 I would say social psychology is the most...

00:46:03.000 Social justice slash left-leaning part of psychology and its methods are generally appalling.

00:46:11.000 They're not well documented and they produce all sorts of categories that don't exist.

00:46:16.000 Whereas personality...

00:46:17.000 I know it might seem like a trivial distinction to people outside of the field, but these disciplines are quite separate from a historical perspective.

00:46:25.000 They develop quite separately.

00:46:27.000 Personality psychologists are very, very careful about Defining what they measure.

00:46:33.000 And so, for example, I study the big five personality traits.

00:46:36.000 That's extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness.

00:46:41.000 And under openness falls intelligence.

00:46:43.000 These are very well documented.

00:46:45.000 We can really measure them.

00:46:47.000 We can't measure them as well as we would like to.

00:46:49.000 We've identified the biological basis for most of the traits.

00:46:52.000 And we understand a fair bit about how they make people different.

00:46:58.000 And...

00:47:00.000 And personality psychologists have been very, very careful about measurement, whereas social psychologists are, as a general rule, very, very cavalier about their concepts.

00:47:09.000 And that's led to a tremendous pollution, I would say, of the psychological literature.

00:47:13.000 The implicit association test is a good example of that.

00:47:16.000 That's the test that's being used to assess people's unconscious biases, unconscious racial biases.

00:47:23.000 For example, if I showed you a bunch of pictures of black people and a bunch of photographs of white people, and then I asked you to associate a good or a bad word with the black people or the white people to respond after you've seen the picture.

00:47:37.000 If you are white and you saw white photos, you'd be faster at responding to the positive words.

00:47:45.000 And so they've used that as evidence of racism.

00:47:48.000 But part of the problem with that is that you can't distinguish it from a novelty response.

00:47:53.000 So, I mean, most people in a given racial group are far more familiar with members of their racial group.

00:47:59.000 And the fact that they're more likely to associate negative things with racial groups that are outside of their racial group isn't something that can be easily distinguished from just a novelty effect.

00:48:09.000 But they make wide-ranging claims about the inbuilt biases in people, and that's lent impetus to these movements that are racing through corporations across the United States and governmental agencies, where people are being subjected to mandatory unconscious racial bias retraining.

00:48:29.000 And there's no evidence, by the way, that that works at all.

00:48:32.000 In fact, the evidence that there is suggests quite the contrary, if you...

00:48:35.000 I saw this on one of your videos.

00:48:37.000 You were discussing how preposterous this is on one of your videos because one of the people that was opposing you was actually a part of something like this, right?

00:48:45.000 Yeah, well, the Human Resources and Equity people at the University of Toronto have made mandatory unconscious racism training, anti-bias training, and they've made it mandatory for their staff.

00:48:58.000 And I found that absolutely appalling.

00:49:00.000 First of all, it's political re-education.

00:49:02.000 So when you say mandatory, like this is something that you had engaged in?

00:49:05.000 No, I didn't have to, because I'm not part of the human resources staff.

00:49:09.000 But the people that they're consulting with to implement these sorts of programs certainly have faculty and students in their sights.

00:49:16.000 I mean, these are trial runs for much broader rolling out of exactly this sort of...

00:49:23.000 of exactly this sort of re-education process.

00:49:25.000 What's the methodology behind it and how has this been vetted?

00:49:30.000 Oh, I don't think it's been vetted at all.

00:49:32.000 Like, if you're going to, let's say you want to put into practice an educational process, what you need to do is you need to measure the initial state validly so that your measure, so you need to use multiple measures and all those measures need to say the same thing.

00:49:48.000 So if you're going to accuse someone of racism, you need several different measures of racism and then you have to show that across all the measures, it's like using different meters, all the meters should read the same thing.

00:49:59.000 Then you have to implement your educational intervention, carefully defined.

00:50:04.000 Then you have to see afterwards if the consequence of the educational effort was a reduction in those initial...

00:50:14.000 Indices, those additional measures, that sort of thing, when it's been done at all, has showed that educational interventions of that sort that are mandatory actually make racism and bias worse rather than better.

00:50:25.000 But why let a few facts stop you?

00:50:27.000 Because we already know from the post-modernists that there's no such thing as facts anyways.

00:50:33.000 Look in Canada, here's something.

00:50:36.000 This is one of the things that really makes me proud of my country.

00:50:40.000 Our government has now announced that the judiciary in Canada will be selected.

00:50:45.000 If you're going to be a candidate to be a judge, you have to produce a dossier that specifies your identities, whatever they happen to be, racial, ethnic, religious.

00:50:55.000 And then the committee that's going to appoint you to the judiciary has to have undergone mandatory anti-racism and bias training before they're allowed to serve on the committee.

00:51:06.000 So basically, we've set up a situation in Canada where...

00:51:10.000 The people who select our judges have to go a kind of indoctrination that has no validity from a scientific perspective before they're allowed to select our judges.

00:51:20.000 Now, who's enforcing this?

00:51:21.000 Where did this come from?

00:51:23.000 The Justice Minister.

00:51:23.000 The Federal Justice Minister.

00:51:24.000 Where did this program come from?

00:51:26.000 There's all sorts of people who are offering these programs now.

00:51:30.000 It's become a growth industry.

00:51:32.000 But what is their qualifications?

00:51:34.000 That's a good question, right?

00:51:36.000 None.

00:51:36.000 Qualifications.

00:51:37.000 Zero.

00:51:37.000 The eyebrows are raised.

00:51:39.000 Yeah, well, there's no way of having qualifications for doing this sort of thing because it's not a valid procedure.

00:51:45.000 So how do they...

00:51:46.000 They're people who claim to be qualified.

00:51:47.000 So they claim to be qualified, they come to the university and they say, have a solution.

00:51:51.000 The university says, finally, just run with it.

00:51:53.000 That's exactly right.

00:51:54.000 And they just implement it because to question anything that would absolve racism is racist.

00:51:59.000 Yes, right.

00:52:00.000 Yes, and they did that in collaboration with the Black Liberation Collective.

00:52:04.000 Explain that one, because that one's adorable.

00:52:07.000 The Black Liberation Collective, isn't that the group that somehow thinks that white people are inferior because they don't have enough melanin?

00:52:14.000 Yeah, it was started by a woman who said exactly that. 0.93

00:52:18.000 She's a black supremacist, and she said that the reason that white people are inferior is because they don't have enough melanin in their skin. 0.91

00:52:25.000 And melanin, apparently, is this agent. 0.94

00:52:28.000 Obviously, it's a pigment, but it's apparently this agent that transforms cosmic energy into wisdom.

00:52:33.000 I mean, she's completely...

00:52:35.000 You can make up your own mind about her.

00:52:38.000 And then the other person who started the Black Liberation Collective is a woman who used to work for the University of Toronto Students' Union who is now being pursued by that Students' Union for embezzling $300,000 from that organization with the help of a couple of her cronies.

00:52:55.000 Well, why let a few facts stand in the way of abolishing racism?

00:52:58.000 Yeah, well, they also are perfectly willing to promote violent means of social transformation.

00:53:04.000 And the university claims that it's in favor of safety, you know, because they've gone after me because my refusal to use compelled pronouns has apparently made the campus unsafe.

00:53:14.000 But they're perfectly willing to take advice from the Black Liberation Collective.

00:53:17.000 And not only are they willing to take advice from them and not disavow them, despite their support for violent means of social revolution, they're also pushing equality of outcome on their employees.

00:53:29.000 And the people who taught their mandatory anti-racism and anti-bias training program said outright in their training material, which I have copies of, That any institution that doesn't have equality of outcome as part of its characteristic at every level of the power organization is corrupt and should be restructured.

00:53:50.000 But that pales in comparison to my refusal to use compelled pronouns, obviously.

00:53:54.000 I just don't understand how this gets so far.

00:53:57.000 I just don't understand how no one has...

00:53:59.000 There's no rational thinking.

00:54:02.000 Involved in the administration and the people that are implementing these ideas.

00:54:06.000 I just don't understand how it gets to the point where...

00:54:09.000 Well, things get to terrible places one tiny step at a time.

00:54:13.000 You know, if I encroach on you and I'm sophisticated about it, I'm going to encroach two millimeters.

00:54:19.000 I'm going to encroach right to the point where you start to protest.

00:54:22.000 Then I'm going to stop.

00:54:23.000 Then I'm going to wait.

00:54:25.000 Then you're going to calm down.

00:54:26.000 Then I'm going to encroach again, right to the point where you protest.

00:54:30.000 Then I'm going to stop.

00:54:31.000 Then I'm going to wait.

00:54:32.000 And I'm just going to do that forever.

00:54:34.000 And before you know it, you're going to be back three miles from where you started, and you'll have done it one step at a time.

00:54:40.000 And then you'll go, oh, how'd I get here?

00:54:42.000 And the answer was, well...

00:54:44.000 I pushed you a little farther than you should have gone, and you agreed.

00:54:47.000 And so then I pushed you a little farther than you should have gone again, and you agreed.

00:54:51.000 And if anybody's interested in this sort of process, and this is a horrifying book, if you want to read about how this process works, you can read a book called Ordinary Men by Robert Browning.

00:55:01.000 And Ordinary Men is about...

00:55:03.000 Browning was interested in how the Nazis trained their...

00:55:09.000 How they train people to kill, basically.

00:55:12.000 And so Robert Browning studied this police battalion.

00:55:15.000 It's a very interesting book.

00:55:16.000 So these were middle-aged German men.

00:55:19.000 So they were raised and educated really before Hitler came to power.

00:55:23.000 So they weren't indoctrinated Nazis.

00:55:25.000 They were policemen.

00:55:26.000 And when the Nazis went through Poland and then needed to impose their brand of order on Poland, they brought policemen in. 0.67

00:55:34.000 They brought this battalion of middle-aged policemen in.

00:55:38.000 And their commandant, their commander...

00:55:41.000 He was, by all accounts, a pretty decent guy, and he told them that because it was wartime they were probably going to have to do some pretty terrible things, but that they could go home if they didn't think they were up to it.

00:55:51.000 So there was no compulsion, you know, this wasn't a Milgram experiment or an experiment where you had to obey orders.

00:55:58.000 The guy who was giving the orders said, look, this is going to be awful, but you can back off.

00:56:01.000 But the guys thought, well, I'm not going to leave my comrades here to do the dirty work, you know, which is kind of a virtue in a perverse way.

00:56:09.000 And then Browning details how they went from ordinary policemen to guys who were taking naked pregnant women out into the middle of fields and shooting them in the back of the head.

00:56:17.000 And they were physically ill during most of the transformation process.

00:56:21.000 You know, they started out by rounding up the Jewish men between the ages of 16 and 65. Well, you know, you can kind of understand that because you're at war.

00:56:29.000 And then, well, then they put them in stadiums.

00:56:31.000 And then, well, then they had to shoot some of them.

00:56:33.000 And then they had to load them on cattle cars.

00:56:35.000 It was like one step at a time.

00:56:36.000 These guys were having a dreadful time of it.

00:56:38.000 They didn't stop.

00:56:40.000 They didn't stop.

00:56:42.000 And so that's how things get to where they are now.

00:56:45.000 I know they're not at that point, and I'm not trying to make the case that they're at that point.

00:56:49.000 Well, you're one of the first people that's sounding an alarm, that there's a real issue with controlling people.

00:56:54.000 There's a real issue with controlling dialogue, controlling the way people communicate, And that these ideologies, although seemingly innocuous, they can take you down very dangerous roads.

00:57:05.000 Yes, well, seemingly innocuous ideology.

00:57:08.000 Those words, innocuous ideology, those words do not go together.

00:57:12.000 There are no innocuous ideologies.

00:57:14.000 And there are forms of pathological oversimplification.

00:57:17.000 And there are also clubs.

00:57:18.000 I mean, the kind of clubs that you hit people with as well as the clubs that you belong to.

00:57:23.000 The advantage to me being an ideologue is that I can explain everything I can feel morally superior, and I know who my enemies are.

00:57:32.000 And you know what you're supposed to do with enemies.

00:57:35.000 They're not your friends, right?

00:57:37.000 You move against them. 0.99

00:57:38.000 And, you know, we're approaching a situation, and this has already happened, I think, more in the United States than in Canada, although our countries are competing to see who can cross the idiot line fastest. 0.97

00:57:49.000 You're in a situation in the U.S. where 50% of your population won't talk to the other 50%. 0.98

00:57:55.000 That's not good.

00:57:56.000 And I would say it's more pronounced on the left liberal side because they regard everybody who voted for Trump as essentially as an enemy.

00:58:02.000 It's like, hey people, that's 50% of your citizens.

00:58:06.000 You might think about talking with them.

00:58:09.000 You know, people you can't talk to, those are enemies. 0.52

00:58:13.000 Well, ironically, I really truly believe that one of the big factors in Trump's rise to power is that people are sick of this oversimplification, this ridiculous ideology coming from the left. 0.64

00:58:25.000 Yeah, they're sick of identity politics. 0.78

00:58:27.000 Exactly. 0.62

00:58:27.000 And so they've chosen an identity politics that opposes the identity politics that they think is disgusting. 0.62

00:58:34.000 Yeah, and that's just It's just starting.

00:58:37.000 It is just starting.

00:58:37.000 That's right.

00:58:38.000 Well, if you teach one side to play identity politics, de facto, you teach the other side to play identity politics.

00:58:45.000 And I've seen more and more people who are center people, as far as I'm concerned, pushed to the right because of the continual insistence that by their mere existence, they're part of the perpetrator group.

00:58:56.000 Just by being a white person who is somehow or another successful, you are a privileged person, you're part of the elite, you're part of the 1%, you're part of the problem.

00:59:07.000 Yeah, you're part of the oppressors. 0.79

00:59:08.000 Absolutely.

00:59:09.000 You're an oppressor by being just a person with a home in the suburbs.

00:59:14.000 Well, and it's also extremely annoying for people who've worked really hard and who've made the requisite sacrifices to become successful along some dimension to have that immediately attributed to their oppression.

00:59:25.000 Yes.

00:59:26.000 And it's not obvious that that's something we want to do.

00:59:29.000 It's like...

00:59:29.000 For the social justice warrior types out there who might be listening, it's like, are you really willing to say that every single person who's accomplished something has done that as a consequence of oppression?

00:59:41.000 That's again what the Soviets claimed with regards to the successful peasants just before the 1920s.

00:59:48.000 It's like, well, the peasants weren't emancipated.

00:59:51.000 They were serfs until about 30 years before that.

00:59:54.000 They were serfs.

00:59:54.000 They were basically slaves.

00:59:56.000 And some of them had clambered up to the point where maybe they could own their hut and a cow and could, you know, employ someone.

01:00:02.000 Well, the Soviet claim was, well, that's all theft. 0.60

01:00:05.000 You got that all because you're an oppressor.

01:00:07.000 And so then the Soviet intellectuals went into the villages and just imagine how this happened.

01:00:12.000 So imagine a village, a small town where everyone knows everybody.

01:00:15.000 And there's maybe 10, 20 people there who are moderately successful.

01:00:19.000 Okay, and so you can imagine that those 20 people have like 100 enemies at the bottom of the socioeconomic distribution.

01:00:26.000 Useless, horrible people who are jealous and resentful about the fact that these people have been successful.

01:00:31.000 Okay, so now the intellectuals come in and say, property is theft. 0.98

01:00:35.000 Success is oppression.

01:00:36.000 And then they look for the people in the village who are willing to move against those 20 successful people.

01:00:42.000 Well, those guys at the bottom, those hundred resentful, jealous, murderous people at the bottom, they're just waiting for an opportunity to go kick down some doors.

01:00:51.000 And that's exactly what they did in the 1920s.

01:00:53.000 And as I said, they wiped out all their productive peasants.

01:00:56.000 And then six million Ukrainians starved to death.

01:00:58.000 They had posters.

01:00:59.000 The Soviets produced posters in the 1930s that said, essentially, don't forget, it's wrong to eat your children.

01:01:09.000 So...

01:01:10.000 Whoa! 0.71

01:01:11.000 Yeah, whoa!

01:01:13.000 There's nothing about the Soviet... 0.99

01:01:15.000 There's nothing that you can imagine that's horrible enough so that it matched the reality of what happened in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959. And, you know, the West knew about this too.

01:01:27.000 Early, Malcolm Muggeridge in the 30s was documenting for England, for English newspapers, exactly what was going on in the Soviet Union.

01:01:34.000 Bloody intellectuals didn't admit it until the mid-70s, you know, with the exception of people like George Orwell.

01:01:42.000 So...

01:01:42.000 Why do these patterns repeat themselves?

01:01:45.000 What is it about human beings?

01:01:47.000 Well, we like things simple.

01:01:49.000 We like things simple.

01:01:51.000 A simple explanation is a good explanation unless it's too simple, but distinguishing between simple and too simple is no easy matter.

01:02:01.000 We like to know who's our friend and who's our enemy, and we like the feeling of unearned moral superiority.

01:02:08.000 Unearned moral superiority.

01:02:11.000 Why earn it, man?

01:02:12.000 Especially when there's no such thing as earning anyways.

01:02:16.000 So, and then, I mean, there's deeper and darker things that are underneath that.

01:02:19.000 It's like the human proclivity to pull down those who have more than you.

01:02:24.000 It's like these kids on the campuses who are claiming identity with the oppressed, you know, somewhere like Yale.

01:02:30.000 It's like, how in the world you can speak of oppression if you happen to be at Yale is beyond me.

01:02:36.000 I mean, first of all, you're North American, which puts you in the top 1%.

01:02:40.000 And then of North Americans, you're in the top 1%.

01:02:43.000 So you're in the top 1% of 1%.

01:02:46.000 But yet you want that.

01:02:48.000 You want to have all the power that goes along with that.

01:02:50.000 And you want to have the moral superiority that comes from being a representative of the oppressed. 0.80

01:02:57.000 So that's exactly what you want.

01:02:59.000 You want all the power and you want all the victimization at the same time.

01:03:02.000 Well, Yale is a great example because Yale was one of the...

01:03:07.000 What happened with the Halloween costume debacle at Yale was one of the first videos that was released that made people horrified, where they couldn't believe how students were communicating with professors Yeah, well, the student who screamed up a storm about the male professor,

01:03:25.000 who was the husband of the woman who wrote the pro-Halloween costume letter, it turned out she was on the bloody hiring committee that hired him.

01:03:32.000 One of the things she screamed was, who hired you? 1.00

01:03:35.000 It was like, well, it turned out it was you, because you were on the committee just a few years before.

01:03:39.000 I know, and they took, like...

01:03:42.000 Explain that to people that don't know what the hell we're talking about.

01:03:45.000 Explain this debacle, because it really was about questionable Halloween costumes.

01:03:52.000 Well, it was about questioning Halloween costumes.

01:03:54.000 Halloween costumes are Part of the whole point of Halloween is to have questionable costumes, right?

01:04:02.000 You play with death, for example, and decay and horror.

01:04:06.000 And it's a time when the norms with regards to the expression of things that are outside of our normal behavior are suspended so that everybody can...

01:04:17.000 Have a little celebration, as it turns out.

01:04:20.000 Well, you know, campuses have got all upset about things like cultural appropriation.

01:04:23.000 At Queen's University in Canada just the other week, they were going after students who were dressing up as Viet Cong, for example, or Mexicans.

01:04:31.000 It's like, I just don't see what the hell's racist about dressing up like a Mexican.

01:04:35.000 Mexicans have traditional clothing.

01:04:39.000 There's nothing wrong with Mexicans, so why is it wrong to dress up like them? 1.00

01:04:43.000 If you want to be Pancho Villa for Halloween, what's wrong with that?

01:04:46.000 Well, you can regard that as an homage just as much as a denigration.

01:04:51.000 It's like, why is that such a problem?

01:04:53.000 But anyways, it doesn't matter, because nothing's too trivial to be a problem to a social justice warrior, because they don't like to deal with real problems.

01:05:00.000 And Yale went after Halloween costumes.

01:05:03.000 So this woman wrote a letter saying, maybe we should just relax about this stuff, and don't put restrictions on what people wear for Halloween, but let people decide what is and isn't offensive.

01:05:16.000 Yes, and well, many Halloween costumes are offensive.

01:05:20.000 That's the point.

01:05:21.000 But her letter was really reasonable.

01:05:24.000 Yeah, it was perfectly reasonable.

01:05:25.000 It was like an adult wrote it.

01:05:27.000 Yes.

01:05:28.000 Yeah, and all hell broke loose.

01:05:30.000 All hell broke loose.

01:05:31.000 And she ended up quitting. 0.94

01:05:33.000 And I think he did.

01:05:34.000 Did he leave?

01:05:35.000 No, I don't think he left.

01:05:36.000 I don't think he left, but she did.

01:05:37.000 Seeing him bow down to this woman screaming at him, swearing in his face, was so disturbing.

01:05:44.000 It was so humiliating.

01:05:46.000 I felt so humiliated for him because she was screaming, this is our home. 1.00

01:05:51.000 What the fuck are you doing? 1.00

01:05:53.000 You're not making this safe. 1.00

01:05:53.000 And it's not her bloody home. 1.00

01:05:55.000 The university is not a home.

01:05:56.000 It's not a safe space.

01:05:58.000 It's not a secure space.

01:06:00.000 None of that.

01:06:05.000 A university isn't a home.

01:06:07.000 That's not what it is.

01:06:08.000 It's a place to be confronted by, I would say, often horrible ideas.

01:06:12.000 You want to learn about history?

01:06:14.000 You think that's going to be safe?

01:06:15.000 Do you know what human history is like?

01:06:17.000 It's an endless bloodbath with a certain amount of hopeful progress underlying it.

01:06:23.000 It's a horror show.

01:06:25.000 And great literature is like that.

01:06:28.000 And biology is terrifying, and physics is terrifying, and you want to be safe.

01:06:33.000 It's stay home.

01:06:34.000 Stay home with your mom.

01:06:35.000 Stay home with your dad.

01:06:37.000 Don't come to university if you want to be safe.

01:06:39.000 Don't even go outside.

01:06:40.000 No.

01:06:42.000 If the university is going to make you safe, then it's ceased to be a university.

01:06:47.000 So one of the things I try to do in my class, I have this class called Maps of Meaning, which concentrates on Atrocity, basically.

01:06:54.000 On Soviet atrocity and Nazi atrocity, mostly.

01:06:58.000 And what I try to do in the class is to teach my students that had they been in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, they would have been Nazis.

01:07:06.000 And had they been offered the opportunity to be in Auschwitz camp guard, then maybe they would have leapt at it.

01:07:12.000 And maybe they would have been in the more sadistic proportion of the Auschwitz camp guard population. 0.57

01:07:19.000 You think that makes you feel safe?

01:07:21.000 It doesn't make you feel safe to know that Nazis were humans and you happen to be one of them. 0.86

01:07:26.000 So I think that educators that tell students that they're offering them a safe space are doing them a profound disservice.

01:07:34.000 I'm a clinical psychologist and here's one of the things you do to make people less afraid.

01:07:40.000 You don't make the world safer.

01:07:44.000 What you do is people tell you what they're afraid of and then you break it into little bits so that they can go confront them.

01:07:50.000 You know, so maybe they're afraid of going to a party and you break that down and you say, well, do you know how to introduce yourself?

01:07:55.000 And they say, well, I don't really even know how to shake someone's hand.

01:07:58.000 And so then you practice having them shake their hand and introduce themselves because maybe they weren't taught by their half-witted parents when they were...

01:08:05.000 When they were young, because they were ignored.

01:08:07.000 And so then you say, well, maybe you can go to a party for half an hour and all you have to do is introduce yourself to two people and we'll call that success.

01:08:14.000 And you build up their confidence and their confidence one step at a time.

01:08:18.000 And what happens, the clinical literature indicates quite clearly, is you don't make people less anxious by doing that.

01:08:24.000 You make them braver It's not the same thing.

01:08:28.000 You don't make the world and its horrors smaller.

01:08:32.000 You make the person and their capacity to deal with horror larger.

01:08:38.000 You encourage them.

01:08:39.000 You strengthen them.

01:08:40.000 That's what you do at a university.

01:08:42.000 You arm people with arguments.

01:08:44.000 You hone their intellect.

01:08:45.000 You help them learn to write so they can marshal their arguments.

01:08:48.000 You help them learn how to engage in intellectual combat.

01:08:52.000 Because that's better than engaging in real combat.

01:08:55.000 You make them hard and strong.

01:08:58.000 You don't mollycoddle them and make them safe unless you're their enemy, unless you're trying to devour their spirit.

01:09:06.000 And that's what we have in the universities.

01:09:07.000 We have the reign of the Oedipal Mother, whose answer to everything is, oh, just come a little closer, dear, and I'll protect you from the world. 0.99

01:09:15.000 It's just like Hansel and Gretel's, you know, the witch in the Hansel and Gretel story.

01:09:21.000 Well, my house is made of gingerbread.

01:09:23.000 Just come in here and everything will be fine.

01:09:24.000 Well, she feeds you candy to fatten you up so she can eat you. 1.00

01:09:27.000 That's the archetype of a modern university.

01:09:30.000 When did this start?

01:09:31.000 When did the trigger warnings, when did the safe spaces, when did all this emerge?

01:09:36.000 Well, it has its roots in the student radicalism of the 1960s, especially the far-left radicalism.

01:09:41.000 It really popped up in the 1990s, in the early 90s.

01:09:45.000 I was teaching in the U.S. at that point.

01:09:47.000 Which university?

01:09:48.000 I taught at Harvard from 1993 to 1998. And there was a fair push for political correctness, especially in the early part of the 90s.

01:09:56.000 But it got pushed back down and disappeared and went underground.

01:10:01.000 It went underground, it's more accurate.

01:10:02.000 And then it's just come back with a...

01:10:04.000 We've had a vengeance in the last five years.

01:10:06.000 And I think it's partly because we have all these radical left political activist departments at the universities.

01:10:13.000 Women's studies being at the top of the list.

01:10:16.000 That have done nothing for the last 30 years.

01:10:19.000 It's even longer than that now.

01:10:21.000 It's almost 40 years.

01:10:22.000 30 years, let's say.

01:10:23.000 Have done nothing but produce a never-ending stream of ideologically minded counter-civilization political activists.

01:10:32.000 And that's all subsidized by tuition and by the public purse.

01:10:36.000 And that's another thing we really got to ask ourselves.

01:10:39.000 Why the hell are we subsidizing revolution?

01:10:43.000 Why are we doing that?

01:10:45.000 It's crazy.

01:10:46.000 And it's dangerous.

01:10:47.000 It's dangerous.

01:10:52.000 So what exactly is going on with women's studies that you believe is fostering revolution? 0.99

01:10:58.000 Well, you go on their websites and read.

01:11:01.000 Read what they say.

01:11:02.000 I mean, first of all, for the women's studies types, and this is, what would you call it?

01:11:09.000 False anthropology.

01:11:11.000 There's this idea that way back when there was a feminist paradise, and that would be like noble savage mode of living where everything was egalitarian and women dominated. 1.00

01:11:23.000 It was a matriarchal culture. 1.00

01:11:24.000 That was put forward by a UCLA anthropologist named Gembutes.

01:11:29.000 I can never pronounce her name properly, but I think I got it.

01:11:31.000 And then that was overthrown by patriarchal institutions, essentially starting at about the time, say, of Judaism.

01:11:40.000 And that was all overthrown and ever since then we've lived in an oppressive patriarchy.

01:11:45.000 And now that's what our culture is.

01:11:46.000 It's an oppressive patriarchy.

01:11:48.000 So they're pointing to one unsuccessful society that they believe existed or did it actually exist?

01:11:52.000 No, it didn't exist.

01:11:53.000 There's no evidence for it whatsoever.

01:11:55.000 It's complicated, but it's the telling of a kind of psychological myth as if it was history.

01:12:01.000 Whoa.

01:12:02.000 And anyway, so the basic claim is that Western civilization is a brutish patriarchy and that whatever positive things it might have managed to accomplish were all accomplished as a consequence of oppression and theft.

01:12:16.000 And that the appropriate thing to do is to restructure it from the bottom up.

01:12:21.000 And they mean that.

01:12:22.000 They mean that. 0.82

01:12:23.000 They mean every single bloody concept.

01:12:25.000 And you can marry that with modern postmodernism and throw in a nice dash of Marxism and you have the...

01:12:32.000 Ideological and motivated grounds for social revolution.

01:12:38.000 Just go online and look at a dozen women's studies websites. 1.00

01:12:42.000 Just read them.

01:12:43.000 You can see what they say.

01:12:45.000 They produce political activists and their goal is to restructure the patriarchy.

01:12:49.000 Well, what's the patriarchy?

01:12:51.000 Well, the patriarchy is Western civilization.

01:12:53.000 And what does restructure mean?

01:12:55.000 That's easy.

01:12:55.000 It means tear it down and destroy it.

01:12:58.000 Why?

01:12:59.000 Because it's a brutish system that's predicated on nothing but oppression.

01:13:04.000 It's nothing but a tyranny in the eyes of the radical women's studies types. 1.00

01:13:10.000 Heterosexuality, that's a tyranny. 1.00

01:13:11.000 Capitalism, that's a tyranny. 0.57

01:13:12.000 Democracy, well that doesn't even exist, and even if it did, it would be a tyranny.

01:13:17.000 Everything's a tyranny.

01:13:19.000 And so you can ask these, and what would they replace it with?

01:13:22.000 They'd replace it with their own ideological utopia.

01:13:25.000 Well, we've already had a hundred years of that.

01:13:27.000 We saw what happened.

01:13:28.000 Oh, well, that doesn't matter.

01:13:29.000 That wasn't real Marxism. 0.95

01:13:30.000 That's what the bloody Marxists always say.

01:13:32.000 That wasn't real Marxism.

01:13:34.000 It's like, oh, how many millions of people have to die before you're convinced that it's real Marxism?

01:13:39.000 And I know what they mean by that, too.

01:13:40.000 They mean, hey, if I was the Marxist dictator, things would have gone a lot better.

01:13:46.000 It's like, uh...

01:13:48.000 You should think again, sunshine.

01:13:50.000 If you were the Marxist dictator, things wouldn't have gone a lot better.

01:13:54.000 So, and if you're the sort of person that thinks that if you would have been in control, things would have gone a lot better, then you're exactly the sort of person who should never be in control.

01:14:04.000 And it's resentment.

01:14:06.000 It's horrible resentment.

01:14:08.000 That's an important point, because I think this is something that you've said that I absolutely agree with, that I think a lot of this thinking and the way people are behaving, it seems based on revenge.

01:14:17.000 It seems based on revenge for awkward upbringings, social uncomfortability.

01:14:24.000 It seems like there's something about the way they view the world, where they want to get back at people that have literally done them no wrong.

01:14:32.000 It's resentment for the burden of being.

01:14:35.000 It's deeper.

01:14:36.000 It's deeper.

01:14:36.000 I mean, human existence is characterized by a fair bit of suffering.

01:14:40.000 You know, we're limited creatures and life is very hard.

01:14:43.000 Everyone dies.

01:14:44.000 Everyone you love is going to die.

01:14:46.000 Most of the things you do, all of the things you do will eventually fail.

01:14:50.000 You know, suffering is a certainty.

01:14:52.000 And it's very easy for people to become resentful about being, about existence.

01:14:57.000 You know, these kids who shoot up high schools and these mass shooters, they're the perfect examples of people who run on nothing but resentment.

01:15:06.000 They're out to kill the innocent because that's the best marker of... 0.93

01:15:10.000 That's the best way of showing just how much contempt they have for existence itself.

01:15:14.000 Why punish the guilty?

01:15:15.000 They deserve to be punished.

01:15:17.000 It's a lot more malevolent and vengeful to punish the innocent.

01:15:22.000 It's like people are motivated to a great degree by resentment of being.

01:15:27.000 And a huge chunk of that is manifested in...

01:15:29.000 That's the dark side of ideological possession.

01:15:33.000 So I get to decide who my enemies are, and then I get to go after them, and I can go after them for every single thing that's ever been done to me that isn't good.

01:15:40.000 And, well, a lot of that's just built into the structure of existence.

01:15:42.000 Then they group up.

01:15:44.000 They exhibit confirmation bias.

01:15:46.000 They all...

01:15:48.000 That form some sort of a groupthink, and then they act accordingly.

01:15:52.000 And this is what you've been warning against, and this is where I completely agree with you, and this is why I think the subject is so important, and I love the way you've outlined all the steps and the problems with Marxism and ideologies in general, that we are dealing with this.

01:16:06.000 These are the beginning steps of it, and people who look at it now and they say it's social change, it's social justice.

01:16:11.000 It's not.

01:16:12.000 It's not.

01:16:13.000 It's not.

01:16:13.000 That's right.

01:16:14.000 It's not.

01:16:14.000 And this is not going to improve things.

01:16:16.000 Implementing these policies will make things worse.

01:16:18.000 They've made things worse every single place they've ever been implemented.

01:16:22.000 And often they've made things so much worse that you actually can't imagine it.

01:16:27.000 And people don't do the reading.

01:16:29.000 I've done the reading.

01:16:30.000 I've done the reading.

01:16:31.000 I know how bad things can get.

01:16:33.000 They can get so bad that no matter how bad you think they are, you're not even in the bloody ballpark.

01:16:38.000 Well, it's just so strange that these sort of courses and these sort of ideologies are thriving in universities.

01:16:47.000 And it's really disconcerting to someone who has children.

01:16:50.000 And you know that your children are going to go there and they're going to be exposed to these ideas.

01:16:54.000 Send them to trade school.

01:16:55.000 You know, I think that...

01:16:57.000 Wow!

01:16:57.000 A guy who used to teach at Harvard just says, send them to trade school.

01:17:00.000 I think the universities...

01:17:01.000 I think you can make a reasonable case that the universities do more harm than good now.

01:17:07.000 I hate to say that.

01:17:09.000 Well, this is a strange time where access to information is so incredibly easy.

01:17:13.000 You could educate yourself seemingly endlessly online and with books.

01:17:20.000 There's so much information available.

01:17:22.000 This is not the 1930s.

01:17:24.000 It's not a time where it was difficult to get an education outside of a university.

01:17:32.000 Which is like the repository of human wisdom and the attempt to expand that may have already moved outside the universities.

01:17:43.000 You know, just because an institution calls itself a university doesn't mean it is.

01:17:48.000 And many disciplines have turned into ideological factories.

01:17:52.000 And so where's the university?

01:17:53.000 I mean, the university is where anyone wants to learn about their culture and where anyone wants to expand the domain of human competence.

01:18:01.000 And a lot of that's happening online now.

01:18:04.000 So maybe that's the future.

01:18:06.000 The only thing the universities have now, I think, that people can't get elsewhere is accreditation.

01:18:12.000 But they're doing everything they can as fast as possible to make their accreditation valueless anyways.

01:18:17.000 So, yeah, it's a terrible thing to say that the universities may do more harm than good.

01:18:24.000 And I haven't come to that conclusion lately.

01:18:26.000 And I hate to say it.

01:18:28.000 I'm sure you do.

01:18:29.000 There's also a gigantic financial stake, the amount of money that you're...

01:18:33.000 Well, and this is especially the case in the U.S. I mean, one of the things that's happened over the last 30 years is that the proportion of university expenditures that's gone to the administration has massively, massively increased.

01:18:46.000 And at the same time, the student loan burden has increased.

01:18:50.000 And so what's happened in a weird sense is that the administrators have conspired to steal the future earnings of their students.

01:18:58.000 And then you can't declare bankruptcy.

01:19:00.000 So to me, it's indentured servitude.

01:19:02.000 You can't declare bankruptcy on student loans.

01:19:04.000 That's a very important distinction.

01:19:05.000 That's right.

01:19:05.000 You cannot declare bankruptcy on student loans.

01:19:08.000 So you think about that.

01:19:09.000 You tell me what difference there is between that and indentured servitude.

01:19:12.000 There's not much because it's the only thing that I can even think of where that's the case.

01:19:17.000 Corporations can go bankrupt.

01:19:18.000 They do it all the time.

01:19:19.000 Individuals can.

01:19:20.000 Businesses can fail.

01:19:22.000 You can be deemed incompetent or not capable of paying your debt in every other case, but not with universities.

01:19:31.000 That is crazy.

01:19:32.000 It is crazy.

01:19:33.000 It's crazy because they were just trying to combat the issue where so many kids were defaulting on their student loans, they're trying to make you perpetually responsible for it, or the idea is that these kids have to learn responsibility.

01:19:44.000 Is that the way to do it?

01:19:45.000 By overcharging them for some useless education?

01:19:48.000 Well, I would also say that it's not particularly useful to burden your citizenry with a massive debt as soon as they graduate at a time when they're most likely to take entrepreneurial risks.

01:20:01.000 Yes.

01:20:01.000 You know, you're not going to take entrepreneurial risks if you're so burdened with debt, you can't get yourself off the ground.

01:20:06.000 Yeah, and we're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt with people that if you're lucky, you're going to make, what, $40,000, $50,000 a year straight out of college?

01:20:14.000 If you're lucky.

01:20:15.000 So you're dealing with the amount of money that you would have to make if you didn't pay any taxes or didn't have any expenses.

01:20:21.000 You'd have to work for four or five years, longer than you would actually be in college to get that degree in the first place.

01:20:27.000 It's insane.

01:20:28.000 It's insane.

01:20:30.000 I would say, too, to the university students who are listening, like, a lot of your professors are Marxists.

01:20:34.000 Ask them.

01:20:35.000 Ask them if they're Marxists.

01:20:36.000 Read the Gulag Archipelago first, because you need to get your arguments together.

01:20:41.000 And Solzhenitsyn won a Nobel Prize for that book and for his other writing, and it was one of the key...

01:20:48.000 There was a couple of things that brought down the Soviet Union, but one of them was Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book, and he demolished the intellectual credibility of Marxism forever. 0.99

01:20:58.000 But you have to read the damn book. 0.98

01:21:00.000 And you've got to get your arguments in order. 1.00

01:21:02.000 Go after your Marxist professors.

01:21:03.000 Ask them.

01:21:04.000 And it's a difficult book to read.

01:21:05.000 It's a very difficult book to read.

01:21:06.000 It's a very difficult book, although it's difficult because it's so horrifying.

01:21:10.000 It's not difficult particularly because it's impenetrable.

01:21:13.000 In fact, it's an absolutely fascinating book in the same way that a terrible horror story is fascinating.

01:21:23.000 But there's no excuse for this.

01:21:24.000 There's no excuse for these professors who claim to be benevolent Marxists.

01:21:30.000 Well, I think the way you framed it is very important.

01:21:32.000 I think the way you framed it is them being compassionate intellectuals that are inclined toward this because, on the surface, it seems like it's what a compassionate intellectual would support.

01:21:44.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:21:45.000 And it's the unthinking adherence to compassion as the highest moral virtue.

01:21:49.000 And it's also, whenever you have an ideology, whenever you have these rigid, established forms of communication or methods of thinking...

01:21:59.000 You box people in.

01:22:00.000 You box people in, and you control them, and you get them to stick inside that ideology, and in doing so, you suppress people.

01:22:06.000 It's so ironic that the people that are against suppressing are actually suppressing people through enforcing these ideologies and suppressing the marketplace of free ideas.

01:22:17.000 You're not allowed to have free ideas.

01:22:19.000 You're not allowed to debate these things.

01:22:21.000 I mean, I've seen...

01:22:22.000 There was that really famous instance at the University of Toronto where this one guy...

01:22:26.000 I don't even...

01:22:28.000 Warren Farrell.

01:22:29.000 Yes.

01:22:30.000 What was his book about?

01:22:31.000 Why Men Make More. 0.99

01:22:31.000 Yeah, Why Men Make More. 0.99

01:22:32.000 Yeah, it was a multivariate analysis of the income disparity between men and women.

01:22:38.000 He used to be a feminist activist.

01:22:41.000 He decided to go look into the claim that women were making, I think at the time it was 70 cents for every dollar that men were making.

01:22:48.000 He thought, well, I have daughters.

01:22:49.000 I better go check this out and see, you know, do a little bit of in-depth investigating.

01:22:54.000 And what he found out was that There were many reasons for the disparity, and perhaps one of them was unfair discrimination, but there were another dozen and they seemed to account for more of the disparity than the discrimination.

01:23:07.000 I mean, just the fact that men take the more dangerous jobs is a huge contributor to that, and it's not trivial.

01:23:14.000 You should get paid more if you're putting your limbs on the line.

01:23:17.000 You know, I mean, I grew up in northern Alberta where a lot of young men dropped out of school and went and worked on the oil rigs.

01:23:23.000 It's like, you go try that.

01:23:24.000 Well, maybe you could do it.

01:23:26.000 But, you know, the guys would lose their fingers, they'd lose their toes, it was 40 bloody below up there and they'd be wrestling pipe in the middle of the bush.

01:23:34.000 I have a friend who doesn't.

01:23:35.000 I have a friend who does that in northern Alberta.

01:23:37.000 It's horrific.

01:23:38.000 It is.

01:23:38.000 It's tough work, man.

01:23:39.000 And you're out in the bush for two weeks.

01:23:41.000 When you go outside, there's temperatures where you literally can't be outside of your truck for more than 30 minutes.

01:23:45.000 Right.

01:23:45.000 You have to jump back in the truck and you're almost dying.

01:23:47.000 That was called life where I grew up.

01:23:49.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:23:51.000 Absolutely.

01:23:51.000 Those are very difficult jobs and they're very high paying because people die.

01:23:55.000 Yeah, they're hard work.

01:23:57.000 And there's not a lot of women taking those jobs. 1.00

01:23:59.000 No, and a good thing too.

01:24:00.000 So this guy, I'm sorry, what is his name again?

01:24:04.000 Warren Farrell. 0.99

01:24:04.000 Warren Farrell, who wrote this book, was giving a speech about this book, and the response was so unbelievably violent and crazy and aggressive and also ignorant. 0.99

01:24:17.000 Ignorant to what he was saying. 0.99

01:24:19.000 Ignorant and not wanting to debate the facts, but wanting to call him a misogynist, wanting to call this a hate speech. 1.00

01:24:27.000 Yeah, that's a favorite, man. 0.99

01:24:28.000 And I got accused of that twice.

01:24:31.000 In the last two months because I don't want to use these compelled pronouns.

01:24:34.000 Well, the one woman in the debate that you had with the other man that I believe is transsexual, the one woman who was trying to say what is the difference between not using those words and using racial slurs and hate speech to describe these people.

01:24:53.000 The idea that that's a woman who's a professor, who's expressing it in that way, what is the difference between not choosing to use made-up pronouns versus calling someone generally accepted racial slurs?

01:25:08.000 That they're trying to frame that as the same thing is so intellectually dishonest.

01:25:12.000 Well, the racial slurs are also legal. 0.89

01:25:15.000 So what's happening is the law is already such that not using one of these made-up pronouns is a crime, whereas using a racial epithet isn't.

01:25:26.000 Wow!

01:25:28.000 Wow!

01:25:29.000 That's crazy.

01:25:31.000 That's crazy.

01:25:32.000 So you could use the N-word.

01:25:33.000 Oh, it's legal, too.

01:25:35.000 Yes.

01:25:35.000 But you can't use...

01:25:36.000 You can't...

01:25:37.000 You have to say zir. 1.00

01:25:39.000 Yeah.

01:25:40.000 You have to say zee. 0.94

01:25:47.000 This is crazy.

01:25:48.000 This is really crazy.

01:25:49.000 This is a bizarre moment in time where the preposterous nature of it is so undeniable that it's forcing a lot of people.

01:25:59.000 And I applaud you for doing what you're doing and risking your status with the university, risking your support of your peers, and sticking your neck out the way you've been doing with your YouTube videos.

01:26:12.000 Because if you hadn't done that, there's a lot of people who wouldn't be aware Of how insidious and what you were describing earlier, the creep.

01:26:20.000 The slow creep towards pushing forward, waiting for you to object, waiting, and then moving forward a little bit more once you relax.

01:26:27.000 Because that's what this is.

01:26:30.000 Yeah, and it's been bizarre, I can tell you that.

01:26:33.000 I mean, my son and I counted the number of press articles that have been devoted to this.

01:26:37.000 These are serious press articles.

01:26:39.000 This doesn't count YouTube or radio or TV or any of those things.

01:26:42.000 And I mean, the YouTube coverage has been, I would say, overwhelming.

01:26:45.000 There's been 170 major press articles written about those videos in the last two months.

01:26:50.000 And what's the general consensus?

01:26:54.000 To begin with, in the first two weeks, which was the most stressful part of this for me, I would say, I would say the bulk of the press articles were...

01:27:07.000 Ran contrary to my views.

01:27:09.000 And their basic theme was something like, why doesn't the mean professor just play nice?

01:27:14.000 It was something like that.

01:27:15.000 But luckily, fortunately, I seemed to maneuver past that.

01:27:22.000 And then people started to actually read the policies that I was speaking about and started to think about them.

01:27:31.000 And one thing about the press is that they're actually fairly in favor of free expression.

01:27:38.000 Given that that's their absolute bread and butter.

01:27:41.000 And so the tenor shifted, and I would say the overwhelming majority of press articles in the last, apart from the first two weeks, have been positive.

01:27:51.000 Well, that's great.

01:27:53.000 What you've done in your YouTube videos, which I think is an amazing forum, particularly for what you're doing, is document and describe in great detail the issues with every single one of these problems with no interruption.

01:28:07.000 And I think that's one of the best things about it.

01:28:09.000 The fact that there's not really a whole lot of forums that will give you the chance to express yourself.

01:28:14.000 I've seen some of your videos of hundreds of thousands of views.

01:28:17.000 And there's not a whole lot of forums where you can do that and speak for...

01:28:21.000 I mean, they're all like an hour long, right?

01:28:23.000 I know, I know.

01:28:24.000 I mean, it's amazing.

01:28:25.000 It is amazing.

01:28:26.000 YouTube is...

01:28:27.000 Well, I started posting my lectures on YouTube, my classroom lectures in 2013, and in really bare-bones form.

01:28:35.000 They're just an iPad recording of me lecturing.

01:28:38.000 I didn't edit in the slides or the images, partly because that's very time-consuming.

01:28:43.000 But then I watched it for about two years and by September of this year it had climbed to about a million views and then I really started thinking about YouTube because YouTube was cute cat videos, you know, and Justin Bieber songs for a very long period of time.

01:28:55.000 But it's not that anymore and that's probably been about two years or maybe two and a half years.

01:29:01.000 But then I realized that YouTube is actually a revolution that's as overwhelming as the Gutenberg press revolution.

01:29:08.000 Gutenberg invented the printing press and Because for the first time in human history, A lecture can have the same reach and the same longevity as a book.

01:29:19.000 And it's a lot easier for people to listen.

01:29:21.000 And the time-lagged publication is basically zero, right?

01:29:25.000 I mean, because you can do it live, I guess, as we are right now, or you can post it in a day or two after publishing it, and you have access to this insanely large audience.

01:29:35.000 And the other thing that's really interesting about YouTube, with regards to my, especially the more academic videos, is there's only one reason that people are watching them.

01:29:42.000 One.

01:29:43.000 It's not the production quality.

01:29:45.000 The audio is okay, and I'm a good speaker, but it's not the production quality.

01:29:49.000 The reason they're watching them is because they want to know.

01:29:52.000 And that's something that's really cool about YouTube.

01:29:54.000 And YouTube also seems to be quite skeptical about advanced production values.

01:29:58.000 You know, the people who are popular are often people like you, who are basically sitting there talking, and everyone's listening.

01:30:07.000 It's like, oh, well, people are actually talking about something, and this turns out to be interesting.

01:30:11.000 It's like the rebirth of genuine journalism.

01:30:13.000 So, yeah, YouTube's a...

01:30:16.000 God only knows what YouTube is, but it's a social revolution.

01:30:20.000 I believe you're right.

01:30:21.000 And I think the Internet in general is this really new thing in terms of the ability to express yourself.

01:30:28.000 I mean, it's only existed for 20-plus years, and in terms of human history, that's a blink of an eye.

01:30:34.000 And it's only really been used, as you've described, over the last couple of years in this form.

01:30:40.000 And I think it also is responsible, I think, for a great deal of the rise of the popularity of the social justice movement.

01:30:48.000 I think it's a double-edged sword.

01:30:49.000 I think these echo chambers and these people that do find these patterns of behavior that they subscribe to.

01:30:57.000 And I think that's a part of the problem with ideologies in general, is that instead of thinking for yourself, you subscribe to a predetermined pattern of behavior, and you lock in, like, this is what I'm supposed to believe, this is what I'm supposed to enforce, this is what I'm supposed to side with,

01:31:14.000 and you go with that.

01:31:15.000 One of the good things about the Internet is that it is potentially possible to see contrary viewpoints I'm sure a lot have come to your videos in anger,

01:31:34.000 mad at you, and then listen to your points of view and listen to how clearly you've established all of these positions and what you actually feel is the problem with these positions in a very...

01:31:45.000 Very calm and very rational and a very well educated point of view.

01:31:49.000 I think these people, they have the potential to be at least informed.

01:31:56.000 I've had lots of letters, obviously.

01:31:59.000 Maybe, I don't know, 2,500 letters maybe to my email accounts now about this.

01:32:04.000 A very large number of them, maybe 200 letters, 150 to 200, have been from people on the radical left who've written to me and said that they can no longer speak.

01:32:15.000 Because the authoritarian types, the PC authoritarians, have got so controlling that they're...

01:32:21.000 Once fashionable position is now being deemed unacceptable and they're alienated and excluded.

01:32:28.000 I mean, you see that happening with feminists like Germaine Greer. 1.00

01:32:30.000 I mean, Germaine Greer, who's been banned from campuses, she's not very happy with the idea that being a woman is something that's been reduced to a whim. 0.99

01:32:41.000 Because she thinks that there's more to being a woman than mere subjective choice. 0.99

01:32:45.000 Well, that's no longer a tenable viewpoint on the left, and so people who hold that viewpoint, many of them are feminists, are no longer giving along with the, say... 1.00

01:32:53.000 Radical, gender-bender activist types who've got center stage at the moment. 0.71

01:32:59.000 Yeah, Christine Summers has the same issue with that. 1.00

01:33:02.000 She's a feminist, and she calls herself the factual feminist, and she pushes back against... 0.51

01:33:07.000 What her perspective is, is instead of embracing these false narratives and running with them as if they're the facts...

01:33:15.000 And just using that to reinforce your ideology, she's saying that does feminism a disservice. 1.00

01:33:20.000 Let's look at the actual reality of the situation and let's look at it from a balanced and objective perspective.

01:33:27.000 And she gets so much hate for that.

01:33:29.000 The idea of being rational and objective Well, that's because as far as the postmodern social justice warriors are concerned, those are just code words for oppression.

01:33:39.000 You've got to remember this with regards to having these sorts of arguments.

01:33:43.000 When you say objective and rational, that's predicated on your implicit belief that there is such a thing as the objective and there is such a thing as rational.

01:33:53.000 And the radical postmodernists, they do not buy that.

01:33:56.000 Not at all.

01:33:58.000 Not at all, as far as they're concerned.

01:34:00.000 That's just another power game on your part.

01:34:02.000 And built into the laws, like Bill C-16 in Canada now, and the same in the laws in New York City that govern the use of these gender pronouns.

01:34:10.000 Built into the law is the idea that there's no biological foundation for your identity, and that it's all purely subjective.

01:34:19.000 They built that into the law.

01:34:21.000 No objective reality.

01:34:22.000 No biology.

01:34:24.000 That's going to unfold over the next 20 years.

01:34:27.000 Or not.

01:34:28.000 I mean, isn't it possible that these kind of discussions and that your videos and that all the people that agree and all the people that are pushing back against this can have some sort of an effect on this movement?

01:34:40.000 I would say yes.

01:34:42.000 I mean...

01:34:44.000 Are you cynical about the future?

01:34:45.000 No, no.

01:34:46.000 No, I'm not at all cynical about the future.

01:34:48.000 I am cynical about my ability to predict the future.

01:34:51.000 Like, when I was younger, much younger, back in the 1980s, I mean, I was very, very concerned about the possibility of nuclear war.

01:35:00.000 As we all were.

01:35:01.000 Yes, as we all were, yes.

01:35:02.000 By about the mid-90s, though, I realized that things were in such a state of chaotic flux That the one thing I could be certain of was that no matter what I was afraid of with regards to the future, that isn't what was going to happen.

01:35:17.000 And so, I'm not cynical about the future, but I do believe that we're in an unprecedented state of indeterminacy and flux, and God only knows what could happen.

01:35:30.000 Having said that, I wouldn't say I'm optimistic about the possibility that the universities will reform themselves, because I think that, well, even with the free speech debate that the University of Toronto hosted, They did three politically correct things during the debate,

01:35:45.000 which I thought was really interesting, because if I would have staged the debate and been working on their side, let's say, I would have said, strategically speaking, no politically correct maneuvering during this debate, because all it's going to do is discredit us.

01:36:00.000 But that isn't what happened.

01:36:01.000 The university opened up by noting that the land on which we were having the debate was once the What was once property owned by the original Native Americans, which is something I find abhorrent because on the one hand we took it and now on the other hand we want to be friends.

01:36:19.000 It's like I don't think you get to have both sides of that moral play at the same time.

01:36:25.000 But that's okay.

01:36:26.000 That's how the university opened the debate.

01:36:28.000 And then the next thing that happened was that they announced that there would be councillors waiting outside for anybody who was too traumatized by the contents of the discussion.

01:36:35.000 And then they closed by announcing the Trans Day of Remembrance.

01:36:41.000 But the reason I'm pointing this out is because it just shows you the fact that those things happened.

01:36:48.000 They weren't even strategic.

01:36:49.000 That's just how things are at the university.

01:36:52.000 And they didn't even notice that people were going to turn themselves inside out, noticing that, saying, well, God, this is so biased, I can hardly believe it, which is exactly what happened.

01:37:01.000 That's how saturated the universities are with this kind of thinking.

01:37:04.000 And I don't have any idea what can reverse that.

01:37:08.000 Collective decisions on the part of citizens, A, to stop sending their children there, B, to stop donating money and leaving it in wills, and C, to pressure politicians.

01:37:17.000 Like, in my wilder moments, I think, cut the funding to the universities by 25%.

01:37:22.000 And let the faculty have a war about what's important.

01:37:27.000 And maybe what would be left over was what the university should be.

01:37:30.000 But I really think it's...

01:37:34.000 With the exception of the science, technology, engineering and mathematics ends of things, I think it's come to that.

01:37:40.000 Don't you think that what you're doing when you're making these videos is, in a sense, branching out away from just a university and teaching online?

01:37:50.000 Because you are.

01:37:50.000 Well, like I said, I think that you could make a case that that's where the university is.

01:37:54.000 Because that's where people are going just to get knowledge.

01:37:58.000 They have no other motivation.

01:38:02.000 And this is a new thing, obviously, but at one point in time, so is the printing press.

01:38:08.000 Right.

01:38:08.000 And this new ability to disseminate information seems to me to be more effective, more accessible, more reasonable.

01:38:16.000 Yeah.

01:38:16.000 And it's entirely possible that what we're looking at is the future of education.

01:38:20.000 Maybe.

01:38:21.000 It could be.

01:38:22.000 I mean, I've been spending a lot of time in the last month or so also I'm concentrating on video editing, and so I spent about 10 hours this week editing about an hour discussion with a Russian Orthodox icon carver, weirdly enough, that I'm going to launch in the next three or four days,

01:38:39.000 and we discussed things that are very image-heavy, and so I've been cutting in a lot of images, and it is a technology that far supersedes what...

01:38:50.000 I mean, I like lecturing, and lectures can be very effective, but...

01:38:55.000 Basically with YouTube you can turn your lecture into a documentary and Then instead of teaching a hundred people you can teach 50,000.

01:39:03.000 It's like that's a lot different That's a lot different and it's up there permanently.

01:39:08.000 Yes, and that 50,000 can grow and grow and grow and as it becomes more spread and shared The also the discussions about it become more varied.

01:39:17.000 Yeah Well, more than three million people have watched some element of this in the last couple of months.

01:39:23.000 And in September, I had about 9,000 subscribers.

01:39:27.000 That took me about two years, three years to build.

01:39:30.000 And one of my ambitions, which was kind of a tongue-in-cheek and comical ambition, is I thought, ha, you know, I bet I can get more subscribers in the next three years than the U of T has students.

01:39:39.000 I thought, well, that's pretty interesting.

01:39:41.000 It's like all of a sudden I could have a body of students, let's say, that's larger than the entire university.

01:39:47.000 It's like, well, just exactly what the hell does that mean?

01:39:49.000 And the answer to that is, I don't know what that means.

01:39:52.000 Who knows what that means?

01:39:54.000 But one of the other perverse things that happened while I was being warned and...

01:40:02.000 Cautioned by the university was that my subscriber base grew from 9,000 to 65,000.

01:40:08.000 So now I have more YouTube subscribers than the University of Toronto has students.

01:40:12.000 It's like...

01:40:12.000 So then I think, well, hell, you know, I could do a whole series on Solzhenitsyn.

01:40:16.000 I could do a whole series on George Orwell.

01:40:18.000 I could do a whole series on Aldous Huxley.

01:40:20.000 I could do a whole series on archetypal biblical stories.

01:40:24.000 And half of me thinks, well, if 50,000 people are going to watch each of those, and I can turn them into documentaries instead of just lectures...

01:40:33.000 Maybe that's what I should be doing.

01:40:35.000 I couldn't write a book with that much reach.

01:40:37.000 That's crazy reach.

01:40:39.000 It's crazy.

01:40:40.000 Yeah, it's revolutionary.

01:40:43.000 I believe that.

01:40:44.000 I believe it's revolutionary.

01:40:46.000 I believe it is too, and I believe no one saw it coming.

01:40:48.000 And I think it's such a new thing that we're all just sort of starting to get a handle on how to use it and what it's capable of.

01:40:54.000 Yes.

01:40:54.000 Well, it was like the internet was for pornography.

01:40:57.000 Well, that changed quick.

01:40:58.000 And YouTube was for cute cat videos.

01:41:00.000 And that changed quick, too.

01:41:02.000 You don't know what the technology is going to do.

01:41:04.000 Well, it's also...

01:41:06.000 I don't know how much you've paid attention to virtual reality or how much you've experimented with it.

01:41:11.000 But my good friend Duncan Trussell has one of those HTC Vives.

01:41:16.000 And I put it on over his house.

01:41:18.000 He runs a podcast.

01:41:19.000 And we played with it for about an hour and a half.

01:41:22.000 And then we did a podcast.

01:41:23.000 And...

01:41:24.000 I'm thoroughly convinced, especially now with new phones.

01:41:28.000 There's a phone that I just got called the Google Pixel, and it comes, you can buy it with this headset.

01:41:35.000 You slide the phone into the headset.

01:41:37.000 You put on this virtual reality If you're watching a virtual reality show on your phone, a regular phone that fits in your pocket, just slides into this headset, you could do not just a two-dimensional thing where you're showing a lecture and showing images and having a discussion and putting these images in the background or in the foreground and have the audio over it,

01:42:00.000 but rather you could have three-dimensional things where you could Show a city, a village, a mountain range.

01:42:06.000 You could show geometric patterns.

01:42:09.000 You could get involved.

01:42:10.000 I mean, it could be used for a million different things.

01:42:13.000 And not just for entertainment, but also for education.

01:42:17.000 And I think that's the next step, I think.

01:42:21.000 I mean, it's an unbelievably fascinating new world.

01:42:25.000 Well, you must be shocked to some degree at how popular your podcasts have become.

01:42:30.000 I mean, you have...

01:42:31.000 I don't know how many people on YouTube have a larger subscriber base than you, but it's not that many.

01:42:36.000 So, I mean, how do you account for that?

01:42:39.000 And does that surprise you?

01:42:41.000 It's surprising, but it's...

01:42:43.000 This whole podcast thing is very surprising, but the YouTube is only a small fraction of the amount of people that actually listen to the podcast.

01:42:52.000 The downloads are insane.

01:42:55.000 Jamie, what was last month's numbers?

01:42:57.000 YouTube was around 12 million for the month, and audio was at 60 million.

01:43:01.000 Wow.

01:43:02.000 Yeah, and I haven't played anywhere near enough with turning my online lectures into podcasts.

01:43:09.000 You definitely should.

01:43:10.000 You definitely should.

01:43:11.000 I mean, a lot of it you could listen to when you're in a car.

01:43:13.000 Right, or when you're exercising or that sort of thing.

01:43:15.000 I know, I know.

01:43:16.000 You're not glued to a screen with the podcasts.

01:43:18.000 No, I was doing some work around my office when I was listening to one of yours, one of your things on YouTube, and I found that it was just as interesting if I was doing some other things around my office.

01:43:28.000 It's a very good passive, like podcasts themselves are a very good passive form of education.

01:43:33.000 Yes, absolutely.

01:43:34.000 Or entertainment.

01:43:34.000 Well, and that makes them different than reading.

01:43:36.000 Because reading is faster if you're a good reader, but you can't do anything else while you're doing it.

01:43:41.000 But people are much more naturally attuned to listening than they are to reading.

01:43:45.000 Because we've only been reading, really, human beings have only been reading, roughly speaking, in any large numbers for 500 years.

01:43:52.000 It's a blink of the eye.

01:43:53.000 Whereas we've been listening for a very, very long period of time.

01:43:56.000 And all this new technology puts us right back into tribal mode, basically, except with this incredible technological enhancement.

01:44:07.000 It wouldn't be difficult at all to extract the audio from any of these YouTube videos and just start putting it online as a podcast.

01:44:13.000 And again, you know, people could listen to it when they're in traffic, when they can't look at anything.

01:44:17.000 On planes, on the bus, you know, wherever you are where you can just sit down and you can close your eyes and you don't have to be paying attention to it visually.

01:44:28.000 Yeah, well, about four or five months ago, I emailed the University of Toronto because they have a kind of a massive online course branch which they're toying with.

01:44:38.000 And I said, look, I've got a million people who've watched my videos.

01:44:42.000 Like, maybe you guys should give me a hand.

01:44:44.000 We should do something about this because...

01:44:47.000 I got a million people who are watching these videos.

01:44:49.000 It's like, that's a significant number of people.

01:44:52.000 It's worth attending to.

01:44:53.000 But perhaps I contacted the wrong people, but I never did get a response.

01:44:57.000 But it's something I'm...

01:44:58.000 Well, I'm doing it actively right now, and I think the quality of my videos has improved substantially in the last month.

01:45:03.000 And I really like doing the video editing, although it's very painstaking.

01:45:07.000 But it's definitely...

01:45:09.000 The universities better be careful because they're dumping their content online as fast as they can.

01:45:14.000 They're going to make themselves completely superfluous.

01:45:16.000 And some smart person, I've been thinking about this for 20 years, is going to take over the accreditation end.

01:45:22.000 Because, you know, all you'd have to do is set up a series of well-designed examinations online and only let a minority of people pass.

01:45:31.000 You have instant accreditation credibility.

01:45:34.000 It's like, here's an entire...

01:45:37.000 Three years worth of psychology courses.

01:45:40.000 Here's the exams.

01:45:41.000 You take them.

01:45:42.000 Only 15% of the people pass.

01:45:44.000 Why only 15%?

01:45:45.000 Why would you limit the number?

01:45:47.000 Because it makes the accreditation valuable.

01:45:50.000 But you would limit the number based on, what if you had a much larger group than 15% that were effectively absorbing the information?

01:45:59.000 Well, fair enough.

01:46:00.000 You'd have to toy with the accreditation mechanisms.

01:46:05.000 But, I mean, part of the utility in accreditation is that It's inequality.

01:46:10.000 If everyone gets accredited, then the accreditation is worth nothing.

01:46:14.000 But wouldn't you just make it difficult?

01:46:15.000 Yeah, that's what you do, is make it difficult.

01:46:17.000 It's just a proxy for difficulty.

01:46:19.000 Right, okay.

01:46:20.000 So you wouldn't necessarily be limiting the number, you would just make it so difficult that the number would be limited almost naturally.

01:46:26.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:46:26.000 Well, I think I'd probably make it...

01:46:27.000 Yes, that's exactly right.

01:46:30.000 I wouldn't limit the number of times people could take the exams.

01:46:35.000 That's a great idea as well.

01:46:37.000 So as long as you hit threshold, I mean, that's what happens often, say, if you're trying to pass the bar or something like that.

01:46:45.000 You get to take it a number of times, but you have to hit threshold.

01:46:49.000 Well, Thaddeus Russell, who's a history professor at Occidental, he's doing that very same thing.

01:46:55.000 He talked about it here, that he's building right now an online university.

01:47:00.000 He is planning on giving out degrees in history through his online university because he's been teaching at universities for a long time and he has a huge problem also with the politically correct movement and He was speaking out against this really crazy story where these two kids adults got intoxicated and had sex and And because they were both intoxicated,

01:47:26.000 for some reason, the boy was described as the attacker and he was being accused of sexual assault, even though it was consensual, completely consensual, even though they were both...

01:47:40.000 Not only did she send him texts saying, do you have condoms?

01:47:43.000 Come on over.

01:47:44.000 We're going to do this. 0.95

01:47:45.000 But he – because they were intoxicated, he was the one that was the rapist, which is insane. 0.97

01:47:51.000 It's sexist. 0.96

01:47:52.000 It's 100% sexist.

01:47:53.000 That kid is suing, and Thaddeus Russell came on here and discussed it, but that politically correct ideology where – I mean, it's essentially, it's prejudice against men.

01:48:06.000 So he's stepping outside of the university.

01:48:09.000 Yeah, he's slowly moving.

01:48:10.000 Yeah, Gad Saad is doing that at Zincordia, too.

01:48:13.000 And he gets 100,000 people watching each video.

01:48:17.000 Yeah, he's been on here a few times.

01:48:19.000 I love that guy.

01:48:20.000 And again, he's another one who, like yourself, has stuck his neck out and spoke out about what he thinks is this preposterous movement.

01:48:28.000 Towards denying facts, denying reality, and forming these narratives that are based on their ideologies, and sticking within this box, and then seeking to find people that agree with it, and then reinforcing these ideas in this echo chamber.

01:48:44.000 For someone who's outside of it, like myself, it's a fascinating thing to watch.

01:48:49.000 For someone who's inside of it, like yourself, it must be maddening.

01:48:52.000 Well, we've tried other online interventions too, so I have these YouTube videos up.

01:48:58.000 But we also designed...

01:48:59.000 I worked with some corporations a while back because I've done some consulting, and I designed tests to help people hire better employees, which I still do.

01:49:09.000 And in fact, I work with this company up in California called the Founder Institute, and it's the world's largest stage early technology company incubator.

01:49:17.000 It's created 2,500 companies in the last four years, and we test now in 135 cities.

01:49:23.000 But when I was marketing these tests to companies, they kept asking me what could be done about their poorer performing employees.

01:49:30.000 And I said, well, I didn't know because it's not that easy to...

01:49:34.000 If you have someone who's problematic, who's troubled, it's not that easy for a manager to figure out how to straighten them out.

01:49:39.000 And they just don't have the time.

01:49:42.000 They don't have the time, they don't have the manpower, and they don't have the training usually to do that.

01:49:46.000 But I designed this set of programs called the Self-Authoring Suite.

01:49:50.000 And one of them, the Future Authoring Program, helps people write out a plan for their life.

01:49:55.000 So it helps them.

01:49:56.000 It asks you some questions about six dimensions of your life.

01:49:59.000 You know, your health, mental and physical, your use of drugs and alcohol, your wishes three to five years down the road for intimate relationships, for family, for career, for education, and so on.

01:50:10.000 It asks you, what could your life be like three to five years down the road if you set it up for you like you were someone you were taking care of?

01:50:17.000 So it asks you those six questions.

01:50:20.000 Then it asks you to write for 15 minutes about your vision for your life.

01:50:25.000 You get to have what you want and what would be good for you.

01:50:28.000 What would that be? 0.88

01:50:29.000 And then it asks you to write for 15 minutes about what your life would be like three to five years down the road if you let your bad habits and your, you know, idiocies and your foolishnesses and your weaknesses take the upper hand and auger you into the ground. 0.86

01:50:41.000 Because everyone knows about that.

01:50:43.000 And so it's like you get to design a little heaven to strive for and a little hell to avoid.

01:50:48.000 And then you write for, then you basically turn that into an implementable plan.

01:50:52.000 That's the second part of the program.

01:50:54.000 We've used that with about 5,000, 5 to 7,000 university students now, mostly in Europe, at the Rotterdam School of Management.

01:51:01.000 And we've raised their grade point average of their kids 25%, dropped their dropout rate the same.

01:51:07.000 And it's had a walloping effect on men and on non-Western ethnic minorities. 0.92

01:51:12.000 It's moved the non-Western ethnic minority student population Performance at Rotterdam School of Management from 70% below the average to above the female Dutch natives.

01:51:27.000 And so the other, the reason I'm telling you this, apart from the fact that it's a very good program and...

01:51:33.000 We did it at Mohawk College in Canada a year ago, and we dropped their dropout rate in the first semester, 50%.

01:51:39.000 And that especially, again, worked well for men, because men are at more risk of dropping out now, and especially for men who didn't have good grades in high school.

01:51:47.000 So, not only is there the possibility for the net to provide tremendous dissemination of intellectual material, but there's also the possibility for the net to provide dissemination of Psychological interventions that have major impacts on people's mental health and productivity at almost extraordinarily low cost.

01:52:08.000 So that's really been fun too.

01:52:10.000 Well, I think providing that sort of a structure and a framework, giving people the tools just in form of asking them questions.

01:52:18.000 What would you like to do?

01:52:20.000 Please describe this.

01:52:21.000 When you do that, you sort of allow them to help themselves outline what they would like to accomplish, which most people don't do.

01:52:30.000 No, our education system was designed in Chicago in the late 1800s to produce factory workers because it was set up when rural people were migrating to the cities en masse because their kids, first of all, were likely to get factory jobs and second of all,

01:52:46.000 if you were working in a factory, your kids needed to be taken care of.

01:52:49.000 And so the purpose of the schools was to train factory workers, which is why everyone's lined up in rows and why there are bells.

01:52:56.000 It's a factory model.

01:52:58.000 The problem with that is that now people's careers basically have to be self-determined, but that's never part of the education system.

01:53:05.000 Part of the reason I developed these programs was because I realized this is the same course where I'm teaching students that if they would have been in Germany in the 1930s, they would have been Nazis. 0.53

01:53:16.000 I'm trying to get them to design their lives.

01:53:19.000 It's way better to have someone articulate their own plan.

01:53:24.000 You actually neurologically rewire people by having them formulate their own thoughts, which is why, you know, your school teachers used to say, put it in your own words.

01:53:32.000 It's actually very good advice if they would explain what that means.

01:53:35.000 It's like, if you have to conjure up the thoughts and you have to articulate them, then they change you.

01:53:41.000 And so, well, and so this program has had...

01:53:48.000 The effects have been absolutely overwhelming for us as researchers, because it's very, very difficult to produce an intervention that actually has a positive effect on people.

01:53:57.000 You know, you hope it does, but generally when you test it out, it's like, nah, it doesn't do what you thought it did, or sometimes it even has the reverse effect.

01:54:04.000 That sounds fascinating.

01:54:06.000 Can a regular person have access to this?

01:54:09.000 Yeah, it's called self-authoring.

01:54:11.000 So that's S-E-L-F, authoring, like writing a book, selfauthoring.com.

01:54:17.000 I gave away the future authoring program.

01:54:19.000 I think it might still be free.

01:54:22.000 It was...

01:54:23.000 Yeah, it is till the end of November.

01:54:24.000 I did a video called Message to Millennials where...

01:54:27.000 Because one of the things Jonathan Haidt said about...

01:54:31.000 He called Karl Marx the patron saint of the social justice warriors and John Stuart Mill the patron saint of people say who stood for objective truth and freedom of expression.

01:54:41.000 And I thought that was really smart.

01:54:43.000 He said Brown University is number one for social justice warrior universities and Chicago for truth universities.

01:54:50.000 But...

01:54:51.000 One of the things that Marx has over John Stuart Mill is that Marx is a social revolutionary, and young people like to think about ways to change the world, right?

01:54:59.000 And that's actually a positive part of their development.

01:55:01.000 It's a stage that the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget called the messianic stage, and he associated that with late adolescence.

01:55:08.000 It's like, while young people want to change the world, the problem is that that's been harnessed into attempts to change other people.

01:55:16.000 But that isn't what you should do.

01:55:17.000 If you want to change the world, you should change yourself.

01:55:19.000 And I don't mean that in some cliched sense.

01:55:21.000 I mean it in the sense that Alexander Solzhenitsyn said when he analyzed the Soviet Union.

01:55:26.000 He said, don't be thinking that the line that divides good from evil runs down a political spectrum or countries or something like that.

01:55:35.000 It runs right down the middle of your soul.

01:55:38.000 And if you want to sort out the world, then what you do is you sort yourself out.

01:55:42.000 It's a serious business, right?

01:55:44.000 They say it's more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city.

01:55:47.000 And that's the truth.

01:55:48.000 Because you're complicated and there are horrible monsters inside of you that need to be tamed and to be brought into alignment and submission so that you can be a powerful and useful person.

01:56:02.000 I gave away the future authoring program as part of this video I made suggesting to millennials that instead of rushing out there to change the world by changing other bad people that they should look inward and sort themselves out properly and I think we've given away about four or five thousand of those programs so far.

01:56:20.000 I'm thrilled about that.

01:56:21.000 It's free till the end of November and then what happens with it?

01:56:23.000 Well, the future authoring program is regularly $14.95, and the whole self-authoring suite, which involves...

01:56:30.000 It's a program that helps you write an autobiography, so it helps you sort out things about your past that are still burdening you.

01:56:36.000 You can tell, eh?

01:56:37.000 If you have a memory that's more than 18 months old, approximately, and when you pull that memory up to mind, if you still have an emotional reaction, that means you haven't fully articulated...

01:56:50.000 The memory.

01:56:51.000 You haven't analyzed it causally.

01:56:53.000 You haven't freed yourself from its grasp, and you're carrying it like a weight.

01:56:58.000 And your brain responds to that.

01:57:00.000 Like, the more weight you're carrying like that, more baggage, let's say, the more of the stress hormone cortisol your brain produces.

01:57:08.000 And cortisol makes you old.

01:57:10.000 Some of this work has been done by James Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin because he started to pioneer these sorts of writing programs and he found that if people wrote about uncertain things, past, present or future, so they could be traumatic things, they could be uncertain things,

01:57:26.000 that their physical health improved and he did a lot of detailed research trying to figure out why that was and basically came down to the Explanation that it was something like an uncertainty reduction mechanism at work because your brain is always figuring out how well situated are you in the world?

01:57:42.000 How much do you not know compared to how much have you mastered?

01:57:46.000 And you can tell that you've mastered things because when you go somewhere and you act things turn out the way you want them.

01:57:52.000 That's an indication of mastery and your brain is sort of keeping track across your whole life of How many places you've been where things haven't worked out compared to how many places you have been where they have worked out?

01:58:03.000 And if all those places in your past where things haven't worked out, you need to map and master.

01:58:10.000 And that decreases the existential load on you, but that actually decreases your psychophysiological load.

01:58:17.000 It makes you healthier.

01:58:18.000 It makes you less stressed.

01:58:19.000 And so we've put all that together in this self-authoring suite to help people write about their past, to sort it out in a detailed autobiography.

01:58:27.000 It asks you questions about your past.

01:58:29.000 It says, divide your life up into six epochs.

01:58:33.000 And then divide each of those...

01:58:34.000 That might be, say, birth to kindergarten, and then maybe elementary school, and then maybe junior high school, however you want to do it.

01:58:41.000 And then to write about the emotionally significant events in each of those epochs, and then to describe their effects on you, and then to analyze...

01:58:50.000 How you did in those situations, what you might have done differently, what you might do differently in the future, to straighten out your past.

01:58:57.000 And I've done that with my students in my Maps of Meaning class for about the last 10 years, and some people have written 15,000 words.

01:59:03.000 It's not that uncommon for students to write 15,000 words in their autobiography.

01:59:08.000 Wow.

01:59:09.000 That's such great advice.

01:59:10.000 That's such great advice about reconciling with your past, because so many people just carry it around.

01:59:15.000 Yeah, well, if you're thinking about your past, What it means is you haven't analyzed the causal change.

01:59:21.000 Because you might say, well, why do you remember your past?

01:59:24.000 Well, you might say, well, it's in order to have an objective, you know, record of the past.

01:59:28.000 It's like it has nothing to do with that.

01:59:30.000 There's only one reason you remember the past.

01:59:33.000 And that's to be prepared for the future.

01:59:35.000 That's why you remember the past.

01:59:37.000 And so what you're supposed to do is take the past and extract out from it wisdom.

01:59:42.000 And wisdom is the ability to avoid...

01:59:45.000 Stumbling blindly into ditches.

01:59:47.000 And so you think, well, here's a time in my past I stumbled blindly into this horrible ditch and terrible things happened to me.

01:59:54.000 It's like, okay, you need to take that apart.

01:59:56.000 You need to figure out how was it that events conspired with your participation, voluntarily or involuntarily, so that that terrible consequence emerged.

02:00:07.000 You need to know why that happened and how you could react differently in that situation.

02:00:12.000 And as soon as you do that, Your brain will leave it alone.

02:00:15.000 It won't obsess you about it anymore because the anxiety-producing parts of your brain are basically trying to tell you where there are obstacles in your environment.

02:00:24.000 It's like, look out.

02:00:25.000 Don't go there.

02:00:26.000 Don't go there.

02:00:26.000 It's like, well, don't go there.

02:00:28.000 There's fire.

02:00:30.000 Well, maybe you could master the fire, right?

02:00:33.000 Then you're a wielder of fire.

02:00:34.000 You're not just a victim.

02:00:36.000 And lots of situations Are dangerous or not dangerous depending on your level of mastery, right?

02:00:42.000 Life is like that.

02:00:44.000 And so a negative emotion that's associated with a memory is something that's crying out for mastery.

02:00:50.000 And writing can really help with that.

02:00:53.000 So you're reorganizing your brain when you write, autobiographically.

02:00:57.000 You're basically...

02:00:58.000 The emotions...

02:01:00.000 Imagine emotion...

02:01:01.000 Memories can be stored at different levels of your brain, from sort of primordial, reptilian, image-laden areas that are very emotional, up to...

02:01:11.000 Finally articulated plans for your future life.

02:01:14.000 Well you want to take everything that's negative and emotional and transform that into a fully articulated vision for your future.

02:01:23.000 And that frees you of your past.

02:01:25.000 You shouldn't be thinking about your past.

02:01:28.000 Maybe if you're 80 and you're going over a well-spent life, that's a whole different thing.

02:01:32.000 But if you're 30, 35 or 20 and most of the time you're thinking about your past, it's like your soul is trapped back there.

02:01:39.000 And you need to free it through investigation.

02:01:42.000 And the metaphysical language is appropriate because that is in a sense what you're doing.

02:01:46.000 You're trapped in the past.

02:01:48.000 It's like you've got to break free of that so you can use all your resources to move ahead into the future.

02:01:53.000 Anyways, in these programs, the Future Authoring Program, like I said, has had walloping effects on people.

02:01:58.000 That's fantastic advice.

02:01:59.000 I mean, it's just so logical and it sounds so great.

02:02:03.000 I mean, I think that's one of the gigantic problems that a lot of people have with education, that you're learning facts, you're learning information, but you're not learning how to use your own mind.

02:02:14.000 Yeah, well, here's something that's really interesting about that.

02:02:17.000 So I spent a lot of time, I'm a scientist, but I'm also, I would say, I'm also a religious person.

02:02:22.000 I'm a deeply religious person.

02:02:24.000 How do you reconcile those?

02:02:26.000 Exactly.

02:02:27.000 Well, that's, and I spent, literally, I've spent 40 years thinking about that.

02:02:30.000 And for 20 of those years, I did almost nothing but think about that all the time.

02:02:36.000 And I realized something, partly from reading Carl Jung, and what I realized was that Even the fundamentalists have the wrong idea about religious truth.

02:02:48.000 Religious truth is not scientific truth. 0.94

02:02:51.000 Like the stories in Genesis, which are very old stories, maybe tens of thousands of years old.

02:02:55.000 They're obviously not scientific theories because the people who wrote them weren't scientists.

02:02:59.000 We didn't have science until about 500 years ago.

02:03:02.000 So the idea that the stories in Genesis are scientific theories is It's just false on every possible front.

02:03:09.000 So then you might say, well, there's no other truth but scientific truth.

02:03:13.000 It's like, well, wait a minute.

02:03:14.000 That's not true.

02:03:16.000 Because what scientific truth tells you is what things are.

02:03:21.000 But genuine religious truth tells you how you should act.

02:03:27.000 And those things are not the same.

02:03:29.000 And so a great story, like a great novel, which is a quasi-religious construction, because it's like a distillation of ordinary life into its most important elements, that's a map about how you should comport yourself in the world.

02:03:43.000 And you might say, well, what do you mean by should?

02:03:46.000 Because that's the question the moral relativists ask.

02:03:49.000 And there's an answer to that, too, as far as I can tell.

02:03:52.000 And I got this partly from reading Jean Piaget.

02:03:54.000 So imagine that here's how you should act.

02:03:57.000 You should act so that things are good for you like they would be for someone you're taking care of.

02:04:03.000 But they have to be good for you in a way that's also good for your family.

02:04:07.000 And they have to be good for you and your family in a way that's also good for society.

02:04:12.000 And maybe even also good for the broader environment if you can manage that.

02:04:16.000 So it's balanced at all those levels.

02:04:18.000 And then That has to be good for you and your family and society and the world right now and next week and next month and a year from now and ten years from now.

02:04:30.000 And so it's this harmonious balancing of multiple layers of being simultaneously.

02:04:35.000 And that's a Darwinian reality, I would say.

02:04:40.000 Your brain is actually attuned to tell you when you're doing that.

02:04:43.000 And the way it tells you is that it reveals that what you're doing is meaningful.

02:04:49.000 That's the sign that your nervous system is adapted to do this.

02:04:53.000 It's adapted to exist, I would say, on the edge between order and chaos.

02:04:58.000 Chaos is where things are so complex you can't handle it, and order is where things are so rigid that it's too restrictive.

02:05:05.000 In between that, there's a place, a place that's meaningful, where you're partly stabilized and partly curious, and you're operating in a manner that increases your scope of Of knowledge.

02:05:17.000 So you're inquiring and growing.

02:05:20.000 And at the same time, you're stabilizing and renewing you, your family, society, nature, now, next week, next month, and next year.

02:05:30.000 And when you have an intimation of meaning, then you know you're there.

02:05:34.000 And I can give you an existential demonstration of that.

02:05:36.000 So imagine that each of these levels of existence, the way I just laid them out, are like patterns.

02:05:42.000 There are patterns within patterns within patterns within patterns, and there's a way of making all that harmonious.

02:05:47.000 That's what music models.

02:05:49.000 That's why music is so meaningful.

02:05:51.000 You know, you take a beautiful orchestral composition, and all the instruments are doing different things at different levels, but they all flow together harmoniously, and you're right in the middle of that as a listener, and it fills you with a sense of, it's almost like a sense of religious awe, even if you're a punk rock nihilist,

02:06:07.000 you know?

02:06:08.000 And the reason for that is because the music is modeling the manner of being that's harmonious.

02:06:13.000 It's the proper way to exist.

02:06:15.000 And religious writings in the deepest sense, so those archetypal writings, are guidelines to that mode of being.

02:06:23.000 So they're not true, like scientific truth is true.

02:06:28.000 I think of them as hyper-true or meta-true.

02:06:33.000 It's like we take the most true things about your life and then we take the most true things about ten other people's lives and we amalgamate them into a single figure and that would be like a literary hero.

02:06:45.000 And then we take a thousand literary heroes and we extract out from each of them what makes the most heroic person.

02:06:53.000 That's a religious deity.

02:06:55.000 That's what Christ is.

02:06:57.000 He's a meta-hero.

02:06:59.000 And that sits at the bottom of Western civilization.

02:07:02.000 And his archetypal mode of being is true speech.

02:07:10.000 That's the fundamental idea of Western civilization.

02:07:13.000 And it's right.

02:07:16.000 Now, when you say...

02:07:18.000 When you talk about this harmonious frequency that's achieved...

02:07:25.000 What how do you reconcile all the stories that were like say in the Old Testament that were extremely violent or they're ridiculous like Who is the guy that could they made fun of these children made fun of them?

02:07:36.000 So God sent a bear to kill the children because they made fun of them for being bald or there's a bunch of stories and Ridiculous tales in the Bible that obviously have the hand of man on them.

02:07:48.000 How do you separate those from?

02:07:52.000 The beautiful concepts that are outlined in religion, like, you know, treat everyone as if they are your brother, you know, love and let love...

02:08:03.000 No, it's very difficult, because in the Old Testament, let's say, I mean, the Old Testament was obviously written by people who were deeply tribal.

02:08:11.000 Right.

02:08:11.000 And of course, we're also deeply tribal, and some of the problems that those people were trying to face, trying to sort out, was, well, how do you...

02:08:18.000 Organize yourself within your own tribe, justly and mercifully, and at the same time defend yourself against the barbarians who constitute other tribes. 0.99

02:08:29.000 Well, that was the problem that humanity was trying to solve when it was amalgamating all of its tribes.

02:08:35.000 A process that obviously still hasn't finished.

02:08:38.000 And some of the ways that you protect your own tribe rapidly become horrifying.

02:08:44.000 And so many of the stories in the Old Testament that have to do essentially with tribal protection are immediately horrifying.

02:08:50.000 But there's also a developmental pathway through the combination of the Old and New Testament that show, I would say, How that morality that was fundamentally tribal to begin with transformed itself over thousands of years into a morality that transcended tribal distinctions.

02:09:11.000 And so part of the imposition of the New Testament onto the Old Testament was the imposition of a morality that transcended tribal morality onto a morality that was fundamentally tribal in origin.

02:09:24.000 But the New Testament, of course, was constructed by Constantine and a series of bishops.

02:09:29.000 They took things out.

02:09:31.000 They added things.

02:09:33.000 It's not much different.

02:09:35.000 Here's a way of thinking about it.

02:09:37.000 I have a friend who's a comic book writer, and I've talked to him a fair bit about archetypes in comics, for example.

02:09:43.000 He was a student of mine at Harvard a long time ago.

02:09:45.000 And the comic book universe is a very interesting one because obviously these fictional characters were thought up by single people.

02:09:53.000 And then the fictional characters were transformed into stories.

02:09:57.000 And then the stories were sent out into a broader community.

02:10:00.000 But then what started to happen was the broader community started to...

02:10:05.000 We're good to go.

02:10:28.000 We're good to go.

02:10:49.000 Or maybe I'm elevating comic book characters beyond the status that they normally attain.

02:10:53.000 But if you think about this, for example, with regards to something like the construction of the recent Marvel Universe, I mean, those Avenger movies are among the most expensive technological artifacts that human beings have ever made.

02:11:06.000 And they drive our computational capacity to its absolute limit.

02:11:11.000 And the reason for that is because we're using that fictional space To lay out an archetypal and mythological view of the universe.

02:11:18.000 It's a practice domain for modes of being.

02:11:21.000 And I mean, in the Marvel universe, obviously Tony Stark, Iron Man, is a technological man, right?

02:11:27.000 He's trying to develop a real relationship with his partner, Pepper Potts, who's, you know, her own sort of independent woman.

02:11:34.000 And he's attempting to use technology to build himself up into something that has the status of approximately a god, to transcend mortal limitation and all of that.

02:11:45.000 So there's a deity-like aspect, the growth of a deity emerging there.

02:11:49.000 And then, of course, Thor and Loki, they're not comic book deities at all.

02:11:54.000 They're actual deities.

02:11:55.000 They're the hostile brothers.

02:11:56.000 It's an archetypal pair, like Christ and Satan, or Batman and the Joker, or Superman and Lex Luthor.

02:12:03.000 And that's the good part of the individual against the evil part of the individual, roughly speaking.

02:12:08.000 That's played out in these myths.

02:12:10.000 And so that collective process that you described Whereby an entire group of people comes together to decide what the central religious text is.

02:12:19.000 I mean, on the one hand, you can think of that as the gerrymandering of a religious process.

02:12:24.000 Maybe that's something that's only devoted towards the acquisition of power, like that would be a Marxist analysis.

02:12:29.000 But on the other hand, you can think of it as...

02:12:32.000 The collective imagination attempting to build a dramatic...

02:12:37.000 to build an exemplary drama that everyone can act out.

02:12:44.000 And it's in acting out that exemplary drama that we're actually able to interact in a civilized and productive manner.

02:12:51.000 Like, look at this discussion that we're having to the degree that it's working.

02:12:55.000 We're both trying to articulate our notions of reality.

02:13:01.000 And I do that, you listen, and maybe you have some comments, and then you do that, and I listen, and maybe you have some comments.

02:13:07.000 But together, we're building something that's different from what we both came in here with, right?

02:13:12.000 And in a sense, what we're doing is we're participating in the process of articulating each other's spirits.

02:13:18.000 And I mean that most technically.

02:13:20.000 Like, part of your spirit is an amalgam of the information that you've encountered, and a lot of that's articulated wisdom.

02:13:26.000 And so it's soul construction.

02:13:28.000 If you're having a good conversation, and that's also a conversation that is meaningful, and you can tell that when you're having it, it's that you're decomposing parts of yourself, your false presuppositions, you're letting them die, and you're letting something new be born.

02:13:46.000 As an alternative.

02:13:47.000 And you're participating in this process of death and rebirth constantly when you're having a meaningful conversation.

02:13:52.000 It's like, oh, that was wrong.

02:13:53.000 I'm gonna let that die.

02:13:54.000 Ooh, that's a little painful.

02:13:56.000 I was kind of attached to that concept.

02:13:57.000 But I'll let it go.

02:13:58.000 I'll let it burn off.

02:13:59.000 And a new part of you will emerge.

02:14:01.000 And then another part dies, and a new part emerges.

02:14:03.000 And that's this process of eternal death and rebirth that's part of the general mythology of redemption.

02:14:11.000 You see that all the time, too, in the Harry Potter series, for example.

02:14:14.000 At the very end of the Harry Potter series, Potter undergoes a literal death and rebirth, and that's how he finally defeats evil.

02:14:21.000 These stories are deeply built into people.

02:14:24.000 There's a reason that J.K. Rowling became the richest person in England by, she's richer than the Queen.

02:14:30.000 She got rich by telling the story properly.

02:14:33.000 You know, and the second volume of Harry Potter, when there's the basilisk underneath the castle that turns you to stone when you look at it.

02:14:40.000 That's everything that people are afraid of.

02:14:42.000 That freezes you like a rabbit freezes when it sees a wolf.

02:14:46.000 And the story in Harry Potter is you go underneath the castle.

02:14:50.000 To where the thing that frightens you the most resides, and you face it down.

02:14:56.000 And in doing that, you free the Virgin, right?

02:14:58.000 That St. George, he frees Virginia in the Harry Potter story.

02:15:01.000 And maybe you half die because of that, because he gets bitten by that basilisk and just about dies.

02:15:06.000 And then it's the phoenix that saves him, because the phoenix is the spirit of death and rebirth.

02:15:11.000 These stories, they come up everywhere.

02:15:13.000 There's no avoiding them.

02:15:14.000 And it's because they're true. 0.57

02:15:15.000 But they're not true like scientific truths.

02:15:18.000 They're a different, they're a behavioral truth, or a pragmatic truth, or a dramatic truth.

02:15:23.000 And part of the reason that our society is so damn unstable now, and part of the reason all this weird chaos is emerging, this is a consequence of Nietzsche's observation back from the late 1800s about the death of God.

02:15:34.000 We blew the metaphysical foundations out from underneath our culture, and the whole thing is shaking and twisting, and it's vacillating between The horrors of the extreme right and the horrors of the extreme left has been doing that for 140 years and we're in the throes of that again.

02:15:49.000 We blew the metaphysical foundations out from underneath our culture.

02:15:52.000 And we need to get them back.

02:15:54.000 Part of the reason that people are so obsessed by things like the Avengers movies and the superheroes and Harry Potter and all of that is because, and Star Trek and Star Wars, is because our collective imagination is trying to regroup at the level of drama and reformulate our fundamental metaphysics.

02:16:13.000 I was reading this thing that was talking, they were equating CrossFit and yoga to religion.

02:16:19.000 And they were saying it's essentially religion for people that have abandoned traditional religions.

02:16:24.000 The idea is that what we're seeking is camaraderie, order, and...

02:16:29.000 Discipline?

02:16:30.000 Discipline and some sort of a shared community experience.

02:16:35.000 So what you're talking about when you're saying your religion, you're not talking about a literal translation like a guy actually came back from the dead.

02:16:42.000 What you're talking about is the concepts and the thoughts and the harmonious frequency that is achieved when people follow the tenets of that religion and live By these laws, as you're saying, of stacking on these ideas.

02:16:58.000 Is this good for you?

02:16:59.000 Is it good for the community?

02:17:01.000 Is it good for the community in five years, in ten years?

02:17:03.000 And that's what you're saying when you're talking about your belief in love of religion.

02:17:09.000 Well, but the other thing about that is that, like, imagine that there's a pathological mode of being that's so terrible that when you enact it, you just die.

02:17:17.000 A good drug addiction will do that for you if you pursue that.

02:17:20.000 Meth addiction. 0.91

02:17:20.000 Pursue that for about 10 years, you know, and you'll descend to the lower levels of hell and then you'll die. 0.91

02:17:26.000 Right.

02:17:26.000 Well, so then you might say, well, what's at the opposite end of that?

02:17:31.000 What would be the final manifestation of a mode of life that was revivifying and healthy?

02:17:37.000 How redemptive and rejuvenating would that be?

02:17:41.000 And I would say the answer to that is that we don't know.

02:17:43.000 We have no idea.

02:17:45.000 And these ideas of death and rebirth are definitely true on the micro level.

02:17:50.000 So the developmental psychologist Piaget said, for example, that when you incorporated new information, however you did that, learning or conversation, that that new information would exist in contradiction to something that you already presumed.

02:18:03.000 And so that thing you presumed would have to disintegrate and die.

02:18:07.000 And then something new would be born.

02:18:09.000 That can happen at different levels of analysis.

02:18:10.000 So sometimes you learn something minor.

02:18:13.000 And sometimes you're shook to your bloody core, you know, and you undergo a descent into the underworld fundamentally, sometimes even a descent into hell.

02:18:21.000 That's where you get genocidal and resentful.

02:18:23.000 And then maybe you're lucky and you pop up reborn.

02:18:26.000 Well, those exist as constant metaphysical truths.

02:18:31.000 That's how human beings transform.

02:18:33.000 We don't know the upper limits of that transformation.

02:18:36.000 We have no idea what that might be.

02:18:38.000 Because I don't know, for example, how healthy you could be if you were as healthy as you could be.

02:18:42.000 If you straightened yourself out completely.

02:18:44.000 I don't know what limits you could transcend, and neither does anybody else.

02:18:49.000 So we don't know the upper limits of the truth of these religious stories.

02:18:53.000 Now, we do know what happens if you let go of them too badly.

02:18:57.000 You end up with something like the Soviet Union or Mao's China.

02:19:01.000 Which were both based on...

02:19:03.000 I mean, they were atheist...

02:19:06.000 Yeah, they were secular.

02:19:07.000 They were, yeah, they dispensed, you know, for Marx it was, religion was the opiate of the masses.

02:19:12.000 It's like, it's not like I don't understand that.

02:19:14.000 I understand that.

02:19:15.000 But it's another one of those situations where it's like, religion is the opiate of the masses.

02:19:20.000 Yeah, and it's also 50 other things.

02:19:23.000 And you don't want to forget those, like, really we know, for example, from anthropological studies, religious belief is a human universal.

02:19:30.000 And the reason for that in part is because there is a distinction between good and evil.

02:19:35.000 And there is a distinction between good and bad.

02:19:38.000 Otherwise, you wouldn't do anything.

02:19:39.000 Like, you're always striving for the good, I mean, unless you've taken a malevolent turn.

02:19:43.000 It's a natural impulse in human beings to make what is better.

02:19:48.000 Well, it means we have a deeply inbuilt sense of what constitutes better.

02:19:53.000 And we're all aware of that harmonious state that's achieved in community.

02:19:57.000 Well, yeah, the thing that's interesting about it, like, one of the things that Nietzsche thought was, after he announced the death of God, was that people would be able to create new values.

02:20:05.000 And Carl Jung took issue with that.

02:20:07.000 He was a student of Nietzsche's, and he pointed out, basically, that, well, wait a minute.

02:20:11.000 Who says you can create your own values?

02:20:14.000 You can't even get yourself out of bed to go exercise in the morning.

02:20:17.000 You're not under your own control.

02:20:20.000 Maybe we could discover, maybe we could rediscover the values that we once held, and that's the descent into the underworld and the resurrection of the father.

02:20:28.000 That's what happens in Pinocchio, for example, you know, when Pinocchio goes down into the depths to face Monstro and revitalize his dead father.

02:20:36.000 There's a reason that movie was made in the 1930s.

02:20:39.000 And why it was so popular. 1.00

02:20:41.000 It's like, you want to get rid of your damn strings and stop being an erotic jackass. 0.99

02:20:45.000 That's what the story's about, is you go down to the bottom of the ocean, you find the thing you're most afraid of, you face it, you rescue your dead father from the depths, and you rise back to the surface with him. 0.99

02:20:57.000 That's what our culture has to do.

02:20:59.000 That's what our culture has to do.

02:21:02.000 Now, when you say that you're a religious person, though, people automatically assume that you, especially in this country, the religious right.

02:21:10.000 There's a very dogmatic and very simplistic view of what God wants, and it's lumped into no homosexuals, certain restrictions on the behavior of women. 0.68

02:21:28.000 If you look at the Bible, and the Bible is obviously a reflection of the people that lived at the time where it was constructed, although even trying to figure out when that is, you know, it was an oral tradition for thousands of years before it was ever written down, written in ancient Hebrew, translated to Latin and Greek and Roman,

02:21:45.000 or in English, rather.

02:21:47.000 Well, there's always a tension in religions between the dogmatic element and the spiritual element.

02:21:51.000 Right.

02:21:52.000 And conservatives, technically speaking, tend to The dogma is necessary because it conserves the structure But the

02:22:22.000 spiritual aspect is necessary because it updates the structure.

02:22:25.000 And there's always this tension, and there's a tension in people.

02:22:28.000 It's like, you have to believe things or you couldn't exist, you couldn't act.

02:22:32.000 You have to hold on to the dogmatic structure of your belief.

02:22:35.000 But you have to be open for its update on a continual basis.

02:22:38.000 And that's, well, that's basically what consciousness is for.

02:22:42.000 Seriously speaking, consciousness is the thing that attends to the unknown and to the anomaly.

02:22:49.000 And integrates it with the structure.

02:22:51.000 And there's meaning to be found in that, too.

02:22:53.000 That's to boldly go where no one has gone before, you know, in the words of the Star Trek writers.

02:22:59.000 Something that deeply appeals to young people when they watch that sort of thing.

02:23:04.000 So what the fundamentalists are doing is they're trying to hold on to their tradition.

02:23:08.000 And it's no bloody wonder, because if the tradition falls apart, you end up isolated and drowning in the ocean alone.

02:23:16.000 But if the tradition gets too intense and restricted, well, then you're just clones in a prison.

02:23:22.000 And that's these two forms of hell.

02:23:26.000 In a sense, they meet.

02:23:27.000 If they get extreme enough, they meet.

02:23:29.000 The hell of absolute chaos and the hell of absolute order.

02:23:33.000 And the conservatives tend towards the hell of absolute order, and the left liberal types tend towards the hell of absolute chaos.

02:23:41.000 There's some point in the middle.

02:23:42.000 That's the line between yin and yang, by the way, because that's order and chaos.

02:23:46.000 And the Daoists say, well, that's life, that's existence, order and chaos.

02:23:51.000 And order is the place you are when what you do works, and chaos is where you are when what you do doesn't work.

02:23:58.000 And no matter where you go, Order and chaos exist, and your job is to be right on the border between those.

02:24:05.000 And that's to live in Tao.

02:24:06.000 That's to live in meaning.

02:24:07.000 And that's that same place where all these things stack up.

02:24:11.000 And so, well, and so with regards to religious tradition, on the one hand, you have to maintain the tradition.

02:24:18.000 It's like maintaining the Constitution in the U.S. On the other hand, you have to be awake and alert because the tradition is a dead thing, right?

02:24:26.000 It was composed by dead people in the dead past.

02:24:29.000 It can't respond as flexibly as it should to the demands of the present.

02:24:34.000 That's up to you.

02:24:34.000 And you do that with your vision, with your capacity to see, and with your capacity to articulate.

02:24:41.000 And forever, forever, really.

02:24:44.000 The major deities that mankind have produced, Marduk for the Mesopotamians, and Horus for the Egyptians, and Christ for the Christians, and Buddha for the Buddhists, these have been people who are noted for their vision, for their ability to watch and pay attention.

02:25:01.000 Because there's nothing more important than the ability to pay attention.

02:25:04.000 Pay attention and speak the truth, your truth.

02:25:07.000 And that's how you keep Everything's stacked up in order harmoniously.

02:25:11.000 That's how you keep the balance between order and chaos.

02:25:13.000 That's how you articulate your being.

02:25:15.000 That's how you revivify the world.

02:25:18.000 That's how you rescue your dead father from the bottom of the ocean.

02:25:21.000 That's how you adopt your responsibility as a citizen.

02:25:24.000 That's how you live a proper life.

02:25:26.000 And a proper life, I know what a proper life is.

02:25:29.000 Because I thought about this for a long time.

02:25:31.000 Life is suffering.

02:25:33.000 And suffering can make you resentful, murderous, and then genocidal, if you take it far enough.

02:25:39.000 So you need an antidote to suffering, and maybe, you know, you could think, well, I'll build walls of luxury around myself, and that'll protect me from the suffering.

02:25:46.000 It's like, well, good luck with that, because that isn't going to work.

02:25:50.000 And maybe you could build a delusion and live inside that, but that's going to fall apart.

02:25:56.000 Well, what is there that helps you fight against suffering?

02:25:59.000 That's easy.

02:26:00.000 That's the truth.

02:26:02.000 The truth is the antidote to suffering.

02:26:05.000 And the reason for that is because the truth puts reality behind you so that you can face the reality that's coming straight at you without becoming weak and degenerating and becoming resentful and wishing for the destruction of being.

02:26:18.000 Because that's the final hell.

02:26:20.000 The final hell is your soul wishing for the destruction of everything because it's too painful and you're too bitter.

02:26:29.000 And that happens to people all the time.

02:26:32.000 Now, as a person who is someone who's extremely critical of ideologies, a lot of people would think it's a contradiction for you to embrace religion, because religion being the biggest, the oldest ideology of all.

02:26:46.000 Ideology is a parasite on religious substructures.

02:26:49.000 You can't... 0.69

02:26:50.000 Look, we can go back to the Harry Potter example.

02:26:53.000 That's a good example.

02:26:55.000 I mean, J.K. Rowling had kids reading like 400-page books, right?

02:26:59.000 She could fill a stadium when she was reading.

02:27:02.000 Why?

02:27:03.000 It's because she got the archetypes right.

02:27:05.000 She got the religious sub-narratives correct. 0.93

02:27:07.000 They're not ideologies.

02:27:09.000 Ideologies work because an ideology is a parasite on top of a religious substructure.

02:27:14.000 And a religious narrative has a particular set of characteristics.

02:27:19.000 It's very balanced.

02:27:20.000 So, for example, there's the feminist idea of the patriarchy. 1.00

02:27:25.000 Well, the religious idea of society has an evil patriarchy notion built into it.

02:27:32.000 That would be the dying king.

02:27:33.000 The once great dying king.

02:27:35.000 You see this in the Egyptian story of Osiris, for example, who's eventually chopped up by his evil brother.

02:27:40.000 You see it in the Lion King with...

02:27:46.000 Mufasa and Simba's father and Simba's evil uncle.

02:27:50.000 Those are the two representatives of the patriarchy, the wise king and the tyrannical king.

02:27:55.000 In a religious story, properly set up archetypal story, there's the natural world, the chaotic world, there's a positive element and a negative element.

02:28:05.000 There's the social world, there's the wise king and the tyrannical king, and there's the individual world, and that's the The adversary and the hero.

02:28:13.000 There's always a positive and a negative at each level.

02:28:15.000 And it stops it from being an oversimplification.

02:28:18.000 Because it says to you, well of course the bloody society has no press of patriarchy.

02:28:23.000 But it's also the wise father that has taught you to speak every word you know.

02:28:28.000 It's like, you don't get to say only this part of the story without having gratitude for this part of the story.

02:28:35.000 And it's true that at each level of the representation, a properly balanced story, Has got the balance between positive and negative always correct?

02:28:45.000 Is that in many ways like a lot of people who are anti-Western capitalism are also the only, they will find that capitalism and Western capitalism in particular is the only culture that has embraced the acceptance of people like transgender people,

02:29:03.000 people who are gay, people who are marginalized.

02:29:06.000 I mean, Western capitalist society is one of the very few cultures that openly abhors racism.

02:29:13.000 Right, right, right.

02:29:14.000 Well, and these people are anti-capitalist on their iPhones.

02:29:18.000 Right, you don't get to do that, right?

02:29:20.000 It's a performative contradiction.

02:29:22.000 That's so important.

02:29:23.000 Yeah, they're on their iPhones while they're flying.

02:29:25.000 Yeah, while they're flying.

02:29:26.000 It's like, I'm anti-capitalist.

02:29:28.000 It's like, well, actually, no, you're not.

02:29:29.000 You're just deeply confused.

02:29:31.000 That's what you are.

02:29:32.000 Just deeply confused.

02:29:33.000 It's not capitalism that's the problem.

02:29:35.000 It's evil that's the problem.

02:29:37.000 Well, it's also a deeper problem.

02:29:40.000 Evil is a problem.

02:29:41.000 So there's a religious scholar named Murcia Eliade who looked at flood myths because there are flood myths all over the world.

02:29:47.000 God gets fed up, floods everything.

02:29:49.000 It's just like in New Orleans.

02:29:51.000 So here's a funny thing about New Orleans.

02:29:53.000 What caused the New Orleans flood?

02:29:55.000 Well, a hurricane.

02:29:56.000 No.

02:29:56.000 Yeah?

02:29:57.000 No.

02:29:58.000 How about human corruption?

02:30:00.000 How about the corruption of the state? 0.99

02:30:03.000 How about the fact that people knew the damn dikes weren't going to hold? 0.98

02:30:07.000 That the levees weren't going to hold. 0.98

02:30:08.000 How about that they knew that for a hundred years and didn't care?

02:30:10.000 How about that they pocketed the money that should have gone for their repair?

02:30:13.000 And so, in flood myths, you always see two things.

02:30:16.000 You see that, I'm paraphrasing, say, there's a storm, there's dikes, and there's people responsible for maintaining the dikes.

02:30:26.000 Well, a storm won't wipe out the city.

02:30:28.000 It could.

02:30:29.000 But if the dikes are high enough, then it won't. 0.99

02:30:31.000 And if people aren't corrupt, then they build the dikes properly.

02:30:35.000 And so God floods the world when the dikes have rotted and the people have become corrupt. 0.98

02:30:39.000 And it's a very old story and it's disseminated everywhere.

02:30:42.000 And the reason is, well, we inhabit a social structure that's old and dead.

02:30:50.000 Our infrastructure has decayed.

02:30:52.000 Our political, economic, and practical infrastructure has decayed.

02:30:58.000 Why?

02:30:58.000 It's old.

02:30:59.000 Everything decays.

02:31:00.000 Okay, everything's already always decaying.

02:31:03.000 That's dangerous.

02:31:04.000 And corrupt people don't do a very good job of keeping in order.

02:31:07.000 And so if things get old and decayed enough, and if people get corrupt enough, then God floods the world.

02:31:13.000 Why?

02:31:14.000 Because that's what happens.

02:31:15.000 Over and over and over and over and over.

02:31:18.000 And you don't mean God in the literal sense of the word.

02:31:20.000 You mean God as these are the consequences to these types of actions.

02:31:24.000 You are not prepared for what you think.

02:31:26.000 You could say transcendent reality.

02:31:27.000 You could look at it that way.

02:31:29.000 I mean, the idea of God is a very, very complicated idea, but you could say, if you were thinking about it merely from an intellectual perspective, is you could say that God is what transcends your knowledge.

02:31:41.000 That's all.

02:31:42.000 It's what you don't know.

02:31:44.000 It's what's outside of your knowledge structures.

02:31:46.000 And there's a very old story, and this goes all the way back to the Tower of Babel, is that one of the things that characterizes authoritarians is that there's never anything outside of their knowledge structures.

02:31:57.000 They make their knowledge structures absolute.

02:31:59.000 So in the Tower of Babel, human beings build this structure that's supposed to reach all the way to heaven so that we can invade the place of the gods. 0.96

02:32:07.000 Well, God has none of that.

02:32:08.000 He just blows it apart and throws people all over the world.

02:32:12.000 And it's a very early, dramatic representation of the danger of human hubris.

02:32:18.000 And the hubris is, we know everything.

02:32:22.000 There's nothing that needs to be left outside of what we know.

02:32:25.000 It's like, no, that's what God is.

02:32:26.000 God is what's always outside of what you know.

02:32:29.000 Is the problem with the term God?

02:32:31.000 People think of God as being a man.

02:32:33.000 They think of it being a person.

02:32:34.000 They even use the masculine pronouns in reference to God.

02:32:39.000 I mean, that's one of the funniest things about God, is calling him a he. 1.00

02:32:41.000 Well, it's a problem.

02:32:43.000 I mean, and that's certainly been a problem.

02:32:45.000 Jung talked about that a lot, about the exclusion of the feminine within the domains of classic Judeo-Christian thought, for example.

02:32:52.000 I mean, you have Mary, who's Who's a kind of a quasi-deity, who pops in sort of like as a fourth member of the Trinity.

02:32:58.000 But the exclusion of the feminine is definitely a conceptual problem.

02:33:02.000 Is the fact that God is conceptualized as a human being or as a man a problem?

02:33:08.000 It's a problem and a solution.

02:33:10.000 I mean, if you remove the human element of God, then God gets so abstract that it's easy for him to float off into space and to never show up again.

02:33:19.000 You lose the human connection.

02:33:21.000 I mean, the way the Catholics solve that to some degree is that they have God who's sort of at the top of the hierarchy, and then they have this hierarchy of saints who are sort of like gods but half human, and then they have human beings at the bottom.

02:33:32.000 And that allows for...

02:33:35.000 What would you say?

02:33:36.000 A continual chain of communication between the highest level of abstraction and the actual, you know, the actual concrete person.

02:33:44.000 But the other thing that's useful about the conceptualization of God in anthropomorphic terms is that, and this is worth noting, there is nothing more complex in the cosmos than a human being.

02:33:57.000 So if you're looking for something to represent the ultimate in complexity, it's hard to beat a human being.

02:34:03.000 So your brain is ungodly complicated, so to speak.

02:34:08.000 So...

02:34:09.000 I mean, these things are obviously too complicated to unpack in a...

02:34:15.000 I didn't expect us to even get into this conversation, but I'm glad we did.

02:34:19.000 Do you think that these stories exist because somewhere in our code, somewhere in our very being, we understand that there is a need for this order, to find this frequency?

02:34:33.000 Sure, they're an expression of our deepest being.

02:34:36.000 They're an expression of how it is that we must live in order to live.

02:34:41.000 In order to reach our full potential.

02:34:43.000 Even more than that.

02:34:44.000 More than that.

02:34:45.000 Even to avoid hell.

02:34:47.000 And you can think about hell as Nazi Germany, if you want.

02:34:51.000 You can think about it as the Soviet Gulag Archipelago or Mao's Cultural Revolution.

02:34:56.000 Like, we can get there, no problem.

02:34:58.000 If you walk down in some of the seedier areas in L.A., you'll see people in hell, no problem.

02:35:03.000 Sure, go to Skid Row.

02:35:04.000 Yes, yes.

02:35:05.000 And you can tell when those people are there because they will get angry if you look at them.

02:35:11.000 And you'll walk a big berth around them.

02:35:14.000 You're not going to come within 10 feet of the, let's call it, psychogeography of their existence.

02:35:22.000 Right.

02:35:23.000 And they're in a place.

02:35:24.000 It's a metaphysical place, but it's... 0.99

02:35:28.000 It's not defined by the damn geography. 0.99

02:35:30.000 Right. 0.99

02:35:31.000 You know, Skid Row is as much of a psychological place as it is a physical place.

02:35:35.000 In fact, it's more a psychological place, but that doesn't make it any less a place.

02:35:40.000 And if you descend into the hell of Skid Row deep enough, you'll get to the point where most of your thoughts are murderous.

02:35:48.000 And that's hell as a suburb of the underworld, fundamentally.

02:35:53.000 That place exists.

02:35:55.000 People visit it all the time.

02:35:57.000 And sometimes they don't get out.

02:36:00.000 It's real.

02:36:01.000 I've been discussing this a lot recently because people like to talk about the concept of apocalypse, that we're headed towards an impending apocalypse.

02:36:08.000 And my thought is that apocalypse is already here, it's just not right here.

02:36:12.000 Yeah, it's always here.

02:36:13.000 Go to Liberia. 0.79

02:36:14.000 Go to Liberia and look at people defecating in the streets and eating human flesh. 0.99

02:36:18.000 I don't know if you've ever seen the Vice piece on Liberia, but it's...

02:36:22.000 It's unbelievably terrifying how people live there.

02:36:26.000 The apocalypse is an archetypal idea, and the apocalypse is always here.

02:36:31.000 And it's here at the micro level.

02:36:34.000 When we have a discussion and our concepts change, those are micro-apocalypses.

02:36:39.000 Little bits of our being are being blown apart and restructured.

02:36:42.000 And that can happen at a small scale or a large scale, or it can get to the point where everything collapses and is destroyed.

02:36:49.000 And life is apocalyptic in that matter because we all get sick, we all die, you know, our families are vulnerable.

02:36:56.000 There's an apocalyptic element to being and we have to face that and confront it and deal with it properly.

02:37:02.000 And the wrong way to deal with it is to generate...

02:37:11.000 More hell than heaven, I suppose.

02:37:13.000 And to do that consciously.

02:37:15.000 And people do that all the time too.

02:37:16.000 There's never a situation that's so bad that there isn't something you can do to make it worse.

02:37:21.000 And there's very seldomly a time when you're not motivated at some level of your being to put the knife in and twist it just one more quarter turn.

02:37:31.000 People are like that.

02:37:32.000 And we have reason.

02:37:33.000 Life is hard.

02:37:34.000 It's no wonder people get corrupted by it.

02:37:36.000 It's not an easy thing to live in a It's not an easy thing to live, let's say, in a truthful manner.

02:37:47.000 But the alternative is hell.

02:37:50.000 I mean, part of the reason that I made these videos to begin with was because...

02:37:55.000 And I learned a lot about the importance of spoken truth as the countervailing force against tyranny and authoritarianism.

02:38:03.000 It isn't an alternative political structure that's the countervailing force.

02:38:07.000 It's spoken truth that's the countervailing force.

02:38:11.000 It's like, well, why would I put my job on the line to have an opinion about compelled pronouns?

02:38:16.000 I know why.

02:38:19.000 Because the ability to speak your truth is the bulwark against hell.

02:38:25.000 And losing your job?

02:38:27.000 That's nothing.

02:38:29.000 That's nothing compared to where things can go when they go badly.

02:38:34.000 For me, it was just preventative.

02:38:37.000 It's like, this isn't going in a good direction.

02:38:39.000 Well, should you take a risk?

02:38:40.000 It's like, you don't have that choice.

02:38:43.000 You're silent?

02:38:44.000 That's a risk.

02:38:46.000 Now, most people don't understand the risks of silence.

02:38:49.000 I happen to understand the risks of silence because I've been studying them for 40 years.

02:38:54.000 Is it frustrating for you to get so little support for these actions and for your protests?

02:39:03.000 Well, I wouldn't say that that's what happened.

02:39:06.000 I don't mean so little support because you get a lot of support outside of the university.

02:39:11.000 It's okay.

02:39:12.000 It doesn't matter where the support comes from.

02:39:14.000 Like, I mean, it's disappointing in the same way that it's disappointing for me to say, I think the universities now do more harm than good.

02:39:22.000 That's disappointing.

02:39:23.000 But it's not surprising to me.

02:39:28.000 It isn't as if intellectuals are characterized by an intrinsic moral superiority.

02:39:33.000 Oh, they're smart, so they'll leap to the defense of what's right.

02:39:37.000 It's like, no.

02:39:38.000 There's no evidence for that.

02:39:40.000 Intelligence and moral wisdom aren't the same thing. 0.81

02:39:44.000 Like, and if you're corrupt and smart, all that makes you is way more treacherous.

02:39:49.000 It doesn't make you less likely to be corrupt. 0.98

02:39:51.000 It just makes you much more... 0.98

02:39:53.000 You're 50 snakes instead of two.

02:39:56.000 Or you're 56-headed snakes instead of two.

02:39:59.000 Like, I've had clients who had very serious personality disorders who were very intelligent.

02:40:04.000 It's like...

02:40:06.000 That's not necessarily a good thing for them.

02:40:08.000 They're just better at arguing for their pathology to themselves.

02:40:13.000 That is a real problem where people automatically assume that intelligent people are going to be healthy.

02:40:19.000 Yeah, well, they're healthy in that often they do better in the world, you know, because their skills are more marketable and so on.

02:40:26.000 But there's no evidence that there's any relationship between intelligence and morality.

02:40:31.000 I mean, God, let me tell you a story, man.

02:40:34.000 One time I had this client.

02:40:35.000 This woman was just ruined. 1.00

02:40:37.000 She looked like a street person, you know, and she had very dirty clothes, and she was so shy that she couldn't even approach you. 0.99

02:40:43.000 She had to shield her eyes from you as if you were emitting light, and she did that to everyone on the street. 1.00

02:40:48.000 Like, she was bent over and humble like a Chinese peasant brought before the emperor, you know? 1.00

02:40:55.000 And...

02:40:57.000 One of the things I was doing with her in behavior therapy was trying to just get her to present herself in a more normal manner so that people wouldn't shy away from her and, you know, be instantly prejudiced towards her. 0.67

02:41:08.000 And she'd come to the behavior therapy clinic and she wasn't bright, this woman. 0.99

02:41:13.000 I think she had only had like a seventh grade education.

02:41:15.000 She was quite intellectually impaired and she lived with her sick aunt who was schizophrenic and who had like a A satanically possessed alcoholic boyfriend that was always tormenting my client. 0.78

02:41:30.000 She lived in absolute hell. 0.94

02:41:33.000 But she had this dog and she used to take it out and walk the dog all the time.

02:41:37.000 And then she'd actually come to the behavior therapy clinic, partly because of her own problem, but But she'd come to this place called the Douglas Hospital and she'd been an inpatient in the Douglas Hospital and in the in the Douglas Hospital there were these long-term psychiatric clients and they looked like something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting or Dante's Inferno.

02:41:56.000 I mean these people were this is way worse than one flew over the cuckoo's nest.

02:42:00.000 These people were seriously destroyed and they couldn't be let back out in the streets during deinstitutionalization like they were lifers. 0.98

02:42:07.000 And she had decided that part of the reason she wanted to come to the hospital was because she had been institutionalized there, and she thought that maybe when she took her dog out for a walk, she could go and get one of those damn inmates and take them out for a walk too. 0.98

02:42:22.000 Now that was a person who was immoral. 1.00

02:42:25.000 Dumb as a post. 1.00

02:42:26.000 Just screwed in 50 different directions. 1.00

02:42:29.000 Nothing going for her. 0.91

02:42:30.000 And she had the bloody moral capacity to decide that there was someone worse off than her.

02:42:36.000 And believe me, that wasn't easy to find.

02:42:38.000 And that maybe she could do them some good if the hospital would let her.

02:42:41.000 Which they didn't, by the way.

02:42:44.000 Yeah, well that's the story of the soul.

02:42:46.000 That's not the intellect.

02:42:47.000 That's for sure.

02:42:49.000 So...

02:42:50.000 So I didn't expect any support from my...

02:42:52.000 from my colleagues.

02:42:56.000 And it isn't that I don't care if I got it, but in some sense it's irrelevant.

02:43:01.000 It's irrelevant to me. 0.99

02:43:03.000 Because my goal was, I'm not saying those goddamn pronouns. 0.99

02:43:10.000 And the reason I'm not saying them is because they're made up by left-wing ideologues. 0.99

02:43:14.000 And I don't like left-wing ideology.

02:43:17.000 I don't like ideology, period.

02:43:20.000 And I know where corruption of speech leads.

02:43:26.000 And I'm not going there.

02:43:27.000 And, you know, one of the things I tried to learn when I was taking apart what happened in Auschwitz and trying to put myself in the position of an Auschwitz camp guard, which, by the way, you can do if you use your imagination a bit.

02:43:39.000 I wouldn't call it exactly the world's most pleasant meditative experience.

02:43:43.000 But you can call up parts of yourself that would be capable of taking someone who just got off a transport train and having them carry a hundred-pound sack of wet salt from one side of the camp compound to the other and back.

02:43:56.000 You can conjure that part of yourself up if you want, and that'll teach you something about what you're like.

02:44:01.000 People don't do it because it's too frightening.

02:44:04.000 But I know perfectly well that I could do that sort of thing.

02:44:07.000 And so once I learned that I could do that sort of thing, and maybe that I could even enjoy it, I thought, okay, fine, I get it.

02:44:12.000 I'm going to see if I can figure out how to live so that if that opportunity was presented to me, I wouldn't take it.

02:44:20.000 And I think that's the lesson that people need to learn from the 20th century.

02:44:23.000 It's like, that's what human beings did, okay?

02:44:25.000 Well, we're all human, okay?

02:44:26.000 So how is it that we should live so that we don't do that again?

02:44:31.000 Well...

02:44:32.000 Part of that is to try to say the truth.

02:44:37.000 No matter what.

02:44:38.000 Because the alternative is worse.

02:44:40.000 And it is worse.

02:44:42.000 The truth no matter what.

02:44:44.000 And that is the real problem that you see with being forced into using these made-up pronouns.

02:44:50.000 Yeah, absolutely.

02:44:51.000 It's my language.

02:44:52.000 I'll take responsibility for what I say.

02:44:55.000 I am not saying your words.

02:44:57.000 And being compelled to say your words by law.

02:45:00.000 Well, that takes it past the point of absurdity to the point of tyranny, in my estimation.

02:45:08.000 And I've seen some criticisms where people are saying, you know, he's talking about this, but really he's grandstanding because no one's doing anything legally.

02:45:15.000 But the potential exists. 0.98

02:45:17.000 Oh, that's such rubbish. 0.82

02:45:18.000 But that is one of the arguments. 1.00

02:45:20.000 Yes, they wouldn't have changed the damn criminal. 0.95

02:45:21.000 They put it in the hate speech category and altered the criminal code. 0.98

02:45:26.000 It's as simple as that.

02:45:27.000 And then you could say, well, no, we didn't really mean it.

02:45:30.000 It's like, oh yeah, you did.

02:45:31.000 You really meant it.

02:45:32.000 Two of the social justice warriors that have debated me in the last two months accused me directly of hate speech.

02:45:37.000 All I had to do was poke them a tiny bit and they came right out with it.

02:45:41.000 And then the university's legal team reviewed everything I said, carefully, believe me, and they decided that, oh...

02:45:49.000 It was not only illegal to not use these compelled pronouns, it was probably illegal to make a video saying that I wouldn't use them.

02:45:57.000 Because otherwise, why would they write me a warning letter and tell me that I violated university policy on the Ontario Human Rights Act?

02:46:04.000 I think they did that lightly.

02:46:05.000 Have they acted on this at all?

02:46:07.000 Well, they've acted in that they sent me two warning letters and told me to stop talking.

02:46:13.000 But you don't.

02:46:13.000 The idea that I was going to be teaching in January again, because I teach all my undergraduate courses from January to May, that was on the table.

02:46:21.000 And I think the only reason that it hasn't happened...

02:46:24.000 One of the reasons it hasn't happened, and I'm not attributing nothing but malevolence to the university administration, because obviously it's very complicated.

02:46:32.000 And they did agree to host the debate, for example.

02:46:34.000 But the idea that I wouldn't be teaching in January, and still might not be, is by no means...

02:46:41.000 That was a perfectly plausible outcome.

02:46:46.000 And had this not caused a firestorm, much of which has emerged in support of me, then...

02:46:54.000 I would say there was a 50-50 chance that I would have had my teaching privileges revoked.

02:46:59.000 It's happened to other professors.

02:47:01.000 So the idea that I'm making it like that this is a tempest in a teapot, it's like, yeah, okay, fine.

02:47:07.000 Why'd you change the criminal code then?

02:47:09.000 And why'd you put it under the hate speech laws?

02:47:12.000 Exactly.

02:47:13.000 So, no, doesn't wash.

02:47:17.000 And the fundamental proof of that is the university's response because for sure their legal team crafted those letters.

02:47:25.000 You know, it was like recalcitrant employee.

02:47:27.000 You're responsible for them.

02:47:28.000 Okay, what do you do with the recalcitrant employee?

02:47:31.000 You write them a letter telling them what they're doing wrong and asking them to stop.

02:47:34.000 Then if they don't stop, you write them a second letter that's more strongly worded.

02:47:37.000 Then if they don't stop, you write them a third letter, even more strongly worded.

02:47:42.000 Then you take disciplinary action.

02:47:44.000 That's like HR 101. That's how you do it.

02:47:49.000 So here we said at the end of November, closing in on December, you're literally a bit more than a month away, and you don't know whether or not you're teaching your courses in January?

02:48:06.000 It seems highly probable that I'll be teaching them.

02:48:09.000 I wouldn't say it's certain, but if I'm teaching them, it's because the cost of having me not teach them would now be too high.

02:48:18.000 It's not because the university believes that what I'm doing is either necessary or acceptable.

02:48:26.000 If someone who's listening to this or watching this feels compelled to act out in your support, how can they do that?

02:48:37.000 I think they could do the future authoring exercise.

02:48:41.000 And that that would be the best way to act on your support.

02:48:43.000 Yes, and I'm dead serious about this.

02:48:46.000 Sort yourself out.

02:48:48.000 Sort yourself out before you try to figure out the world.

02:48:51.000 And that's the primary objective.

02:48:52.000 That's your most important thing that you can do.

02:48:55.000 Sort yourself out.

02:48:56.000 Sort yourself out and marshal your arguments and put yourself in order so that when someone pushes you a little farther than you should go, you can say no.

02:49:06.000 And you know what's going on now.

02:49:09.000 I think that's outstanding advice.

02:49:11.000 That's very, very important advice.

02:49:13.000 And I think this has been one of my favorite podcasts ever.

02:49:16.000 I really appreciate you coming on.

02:49:17.000 I appreciate everything you've done.

02:49:19.000 I appreciate you having the courage to stick your neck out.

02:49:22.000 And I appreciate also your incredibly well-thought-out arguments for those actions.

02:49:28.000 So thank you.

02:49:29.000 Thank you.

02:49:29.000 How do people get a hold of your YouTube page?

02:49:32.000 What is your YouTube page?

02:49:32.000 What's the address?

02:49:33.000 Jordan Peterson Videos.

02:49:35.000 Jordan Peterson videos on YouTube.

02:49:37.000 And do you use Twitter?

02:49:38.000 I know I put your Twitter page out, but you use it.

02:49:41.000 And that is Jordan...

02:49:42.000 Jordan B. Peterson.

02:49:44.000 B. Peterson.

02:49:44.000 Okay.

02:49:45.000 Thank you, sir.

02:49:45.000 Really, really appreciate it.

02:49:47.000 It was an honor.

02:49:47.000 Thank you.

02:49:48.000 Thanks for the invitation.

02:49:49.000 See ya!

02:49:53.000 That was three hours.

The Joe Rogan Experience - November 28, 2016

Joe Rogan Experience #877 - Jordan Peterson

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript