Rex Murphy is a Canadian commentator and author who deals primarily with Canadian politics and social matters. He is best known for working on CBC Radio 1's Cross Country Checkup, writing for the Globe and Mail, and writing for The National Post. He has been a columnist for two of Canada s most influential newspapers, and writes a witty, acerbic style that makes him one of Canada's most well-known figures. In this episode, we discuss Rex's impressive career, Canadian politics, Western culture, the woke culture wars, changes in universities, the crumbling study of the humanities, and more. This episode is sponsored by ReliefBand. ReliefBand is the number one FDA-cleared anti-nausea wristband that has been clinically proven to quickly relieve and effectively prevent nausea and vomiting associated with motion sickness, anxiety, and other symptoms. It s all natural, and you just use it as a wearable device. No sedating anti-Nausea meds necessary. Check out ReliefBand for 20% off plus free shipping! Check out ReliefBand.com and use promo code JBP for $20 off + free shipping. JBP is the only over-the-counter, non-drowsy device that s been used in hospitals and oncology clinics to help people who are sick or nauseous. It helps people who don t know about it. It can make a great gift! And it s a really useful gift people don t need it. And that s really useful! Thanks to Relief Band for making a good gift! JBP, too make sure they don t miss out on it. JBP can make it so they re not only that! -- Thank you JBP by Relief Band by the JBP. -- JBP -- And they ll receive 20% Off + FREE shipping and a no-questions asked, plus a 30-day money-back guarantee, so they ll get it all that you get it, too they get it in the whole thing, too that they receive it, they get the whole service, they can be it, and they re in the rest of the world, they ll have it all of that, they re a good chance of a good deal, they ve got it, that s not even that, you re not even a chance to help you, they say it, you can do it, it s all that they re gonna be that, JBP says it, she s not gonna know that, she gets it, etc.
00:00:00.960Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.800Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:50.980Welcome to Season 4, Episode 27 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.
00:01:00.040This episode features Rex Murphy in discussion with Jordan Peterson.
00:01:05.040Rex Murphy is a Canadian commentator and author who deals primarily with Canadian politics and social matters.
00:01:11.160He's best known for working on and for CBC Here and Now, CBC Radio 1's cross-country checkup, writing for the Globe and Mail, and writing for the National Post.
00:01:22.520He's extremely sarcastic and entertaining.
00:01:25.400He's a very well-recognized and a loved figure.
00:01:28.800Rex Murphy and my dad discussed Rex's impressive career, Canadian politics, Western culture, the woke culture wars, changes in universities, the crumbling study of the humanities, and more.
00:01:40.460This episode is sponsored by ReliefBand.
00:01:46.320You may be living in places where it's getting warmer, and because your areas have been reopening, hopefully, you're going to finally be able to start doing things with your friends and families, swimming, camping, water parks, maybe even amusement parks.
00:01:59.400Nausea in any one of those circumstances will ruin your fun.
00:02:19.960How it works is ReliefBand stimulates a nerve in the wrist that travels to the part of the brain that controls nausea.
00:02:26.820Then it blocks the signal your brain is sending to your stomach, telling you that you're sick or nauseous.
00:02:31.860ReliefBand's the only over-the-counter wearable device that's been used in hospitals and oncology clinics to treat nausea and vomiting.
00:02:40.380ReliefBand is the number one FDA-cleared anti-nausea wristband that has been clinically proven to quickly relieve and effectively prevent nausea and vomiting associated with motion sickness, anxiety, migraines, hangovers, morning sickness, chemotherapy, and more.
00:02:55.740If you know someone who's suffering from nausea or going through chemo or morning sickness, ReliefBand can make a great gift.
00:06:42.380When I was about 10, a much smaller town, but because I was adjacent to the base, I had some American influence, even as a kid in Newfoundland in the 50s.
00:06:52.620And that precipitated after I finally finished walking around universities.
00:06:56.920I actually taught American students, one to 12, in the Naval Station School.
00:07:03.440And I spent a whole year there, back and forth, drawing up curriculum and teaching Canadian studies, believe it or not, to American kids.
00:07:12.800It was an experience that, for the last 10 or 15 years, when American politics has become so dominant, that little visitation to the Argentia School has proved, I won't say useful, but it gives me a deeper context, I think.
00:07:28.940So where did you go to university and what did you study?
00:07:38.020I studied English literature, and I was blessed.
00:07:41.920If you want to talk to what I am pleased to call my life, I think a cardinal experience, and I'm not just saying it, is that the English department at the time of Memorial University, the university was quite small then, 3,000 people.
00:07:56.960And by the time you got to your fourth year, if you were in an honors program, you had maybe 15 or 16 students.
00:08:02.240So you really did get to meet and know the faculty.
00:08:05.200And three or four of them, one of them in particular, Dr. G.M. Story, who wrote over 20 years in collaboration with others, the Dictionary of Newfoundland English.
00:08:17.200And to let you know this is not some silly remark, Dr. G.M. Story was also one of the editorial advisors for the great Oxford English Dictionary, all 22 volumes of it.
00:08:27.140So here was a man of tremendous talent and controlled enthusiasm, but impeccable taste and a knowledge of English literature that I haven't encountered since.
00:08:38.840I know I'm rambling on, but it's the nature of my mind.
00:10:30.860You're not going to tell me that the entire time you spent in Columbia, you didn't have at least one professor or two professors who stood out who really taught you.
00:10:40.520Now, she had told me during the interview that she had encountered George Orwell's work when she was in South Korea, particularly Animal Farm.
00:10:47.980And that was what partly what influenced her to start speaking and writing.
00:10:52.100And so and she had read a lot when she was educating herself in South Korea prior to going to South Korean University and then to Columbia.
00:10:59.200So it's not like she was unfamiliar with the potential impact of, let's say, the classics on on on on on on her life, on her philosophy.
00:11:07.680But when I pressed her, the best she could do was to identify a single biology class which dealt with evolution, which was a complete mystery to her, given her background, because history sort of started when her dynastic totalitarians were born.
00:11:24.420But she said even that took a wicked turn to the politically correct direction by the time she was done.
00:11:29.960So but your experience at university, go into that a little bit more detail.
00:11:33.220Well, well, I'm glad you you elaborated that as you did.
00:11:37.760And I suppose not I suppose I know I brought up that university experience in the hope that we do it now down the road in this conversation.
00:11:47.300I think outside of family that is always principle and will never be superseded outside of family.
00:11:54.380If there's anything that that contributed to the way that I look at things and have given me lasting benefit.
00:12:01.520OK, you may be familiar with Samuel Johnson's remark about literature implies to all the arts that it exists better to help us endure life or to enjoy it.
00:13:12.380They induced you to be grateful to be grateful for what other first rate minds have contributed to the temper of the entire human race.
00:13:22.880And now when I see, you know, I know this perhaps not quite as well as you because you are a professor and you've gone through some of the grinder.
00:13:31.900Universities now at the humanities level, from everything I read, are a disgrace.
00:13:38.300The treason of the clerks, it is, it is, they are so suffocated by these arch and empty philosophies that have no logic and are punitive.
00:13:49.140I would now, I'm a person that was so taken by the university that I almost worshipped it.
00:13:57.140And now I tell people that have younger people, younger children, 20, 21, 22, don't go to the damn university unless you're taking science.
00:14:06.960Go to a trades college or just go out on your own.
00:14:09.600It's the saddest thing that has happened in the Western world that we've allowed second rate minds, political agents, propagandization as instruction.
00:14:21.760We have decimated the soul of the university.
00:14:36.800If the first world, as we're accustomed to calling it, wants to keep its precedence, I often think of students in Asia, in India, in China even.
00:14:47.500They are so intent on really learning something, and they'll, in an Indian school that maybe plays $100 a pupil,
00:14:54.740they're doing so much better than the school, that's the schools that are in this game too, than schools getting $10,000 and $15,000 per student.
00:15:03.540The West is trivializing its main dynamic that has always been intellectual, and it always will be.
00:28:27.620I memorized all of John Donne because his poems, apart from the Immortality and the Soul, those are very long, but all his songs and sonnets, the love poetry and the religious sonnets.
00:28:38.200The divine sonnets of John Donne, by the way, are marvelous things.
00:29:02.500I memorized the ones that most impressed me, and it had impact.
00:29:08.180And I listened to Richard Burton and John Gielgud on record.
00:29:12.220And after listening, by the way, that's the easiest way.
00:29:14.360If you listen five or six times and it lodges in your mind, it will never go out.
00:29:19.160And so the recordings in those days, you get the seven ages of Shakespeare with Gielgud reading it with his infinitely nuanced articulation.
00:29:29.720No one could speak a word better than Gielgud.
00:29:54.640I'll probably stumble now because you're putting me on the spot.
00:29:56.760But I just started with the Milton comment.
00:30:01.320Methought I saw my lady's spouse a saint brought to me like Alcestus from the grave whom Joel's great son to her glad husband gave, rescued from death, though pale and faint.
00:30:10.480And the thing there is, we thought I saw my latest spouse a saint, that was Milton's second wife, brought to me like Alcestus from the grave.
00:30:34.000They were both friends of Hercules, okay?
00:30:36.260And so Hercules came to their house after the wife had died, but he didn't know that Alcestus had died, and he didn't know the house was in mourning.
00:30:47.520And after nine days of feasting, as only Hercules could, the husband came and told him the story that he had been told by the gods that he was going to die young.
00:30:59.100And he went to his parents, and he said to them, you are very old, so therefore, if you take my place, you will not lose many years, but I will be saved.
00:31:10.900And his parents turned him down, and his friends turned him down.
00:31:13.760And Alcestus, his wife, without even being asked, she submitted herself to immortality.
00:31:19.980So when Hercules heard the news, and that he'd been treated so well, he, Hercules, he determined to repay the hospitality by going into the underworld.
00:31:30.100He picked Alcestus away from Dees, and he brought him back.
00:31:34.740I forget the husband's name for some reason, but he would not, he wanted to make it a surprise, so he put a veil over the returned wife's face.
00:31:42.760And when he came to the husband, he gradually undid the veil and gave him back from the dead, his living wife.
00:31:52.200Now go back to the couple of sentences I gave you.
00:31:55.020He thought I saw my late espoused saint brought to me like Alcestus from the grave.
00:32:01.380There's a few lines down, her face was veiled, yet to my fancy sight, love, sweetness, goodness, in her face shine, as in no face with more delight.
00:32:09.320So when Milton throws out Alcestus, there's only one word.
00:32:13.720There's an entire train of secondary thought and mythology just in that one little line.
00:32:19.200This is why you would study him, so that you get in tremendous range and depth.
00:35:48.080Well, it's really interesting to me that you're making a case for it as an advanced form of imitation.
00:35:53.200You know, I mean, when children play, when they play being a dad, for example, when they're playing house, they don't mimic the father.
00:36:01.620But by which I mean, they don't precisely duplicate with their body the actions they saw their father take.
00:36:07.940What they do is they view the father's actions across a broad range of situations and they extract out the gist and then they embody the gist.
00:36:16.760And that play development is incredibly important and it's based on a very complex mimicry.
00:36:21.940And the case you're making is that by embodying the poetry, which is to memorize it, that you're also you're also imbibing the gist, essentially.
00:37:17.720But it's interesting that song and charm are actually synonyms that when we speak of charming, we're speaking of an invisible power of allure.
00:37:31.020And when we speak of a poem as incantatory or a spell, we're doing the same thing.
00:37:35.900There's an aura that you use in slightly different terms.
00:37:38.640Once you absorb it, there's a sheen that propels some some part of the motor of your consciousness.
00:37:47.140But only if you imitate the best because only the best contain this particular.
00:38:00.180So you took an excess load of courses.
00:38:03.860What did your parents think about your choice of university education and how did you manage to how did you manage to fortify yourself psychologically, let's say, to go commit yourself to an English literature degree?
00:38:20.640It was the lowest mark I had in high school.
00:38:23.260So there was there was a little bit of a paradox and it was only in the university.
00:38:27.940But it came on as I might of my own metaphor with very sudden, powerful attraction and action.
00:38:35.760And the more I got into it, the better it was.
00:38:38.100But also here was there was another dynamic factor because you just spoke of parents and seeing that that's the territory that you often enter.
00:38:46.760I'll volunteer what I normally I wouldn't.
00:38:50.020My father, he came from very hard circumstance.
00:39:00.060But he basically got the grade two or three in Newfoundland.
00:39:04.060He was a smart man and he did all sorts of hard work when he was a teenager.
00:39:09.580And when he finally went to work on the base, it was as a dishwasher.
00:39:14.660But he met some people on the American base.
00:39:18.280He knew and he was, again, one of these stoics, which I much more appreciate than the gush merchants of the day and the oprification.
00:39:25.820The thing was, he knew and he never made a point of it, that had he had school, could he have been able to attend a real one, that he had this facility.
00:39:38.000In his case, by the way, it was with language.
00:39:39.840Even though he was not a reader because of reasons I've given you, he had a taste for words and compressed experiences.
00:39:49.460And he met one or two very well-educated Americans.
00:39:52.600And I think just by being there with him, knowing how much I think it must have been a great pain, actually, knowing how much he knew that he had missed.
00:40:07.320And how amputated were his ambitions by the non-education, that it seeped down to me that getting one was just something formidably insistent.
00:40:24.420And I suppose we all, as you say, your parents, I suppose I was trying out of some sort of devotion to kind of, by surrogacy, pick up what he could never have gotten because of time and circumstance.
00:40:41.400Well, it would also imply, I would say, that he, at minimum, didn't interfere with the manifestation of that spirit in you.
00:40:50.660And I suspect would have encouraged it.
00:40:54.020Both parents had great belief in one thing.
00:41:01.860If you don't make it through to school, you'll be digging ditches.
00:41:05.360Marie, my mother, was like Harry, my father.
00:41:07.720They had a justifiably dutiful respect, even in some of the more ignorant instructors that were in those presentation schools.
00:41:16.620But they knew that there was one way up, and I'm not speaking commercially, not speaking, it was something attached to the dignity of the person and the amplitude of the personality only gets release by trying to imitate, listen to, walk your mind around the minds of other people whose minds are better than your own.
00:41:39.440And that's what philosophy, literature, I would expect your specialty.
00:41:45.080It is always those who have thought more deeply, more profoundly, and have a better equipment that give us things.
00:41:52.540That's why, by the way, I'm back now to the university.
00:41:54.380That's why it's so deplorable that this fascist, I'll use their words, this petty fascism of wokeness is suffocating the number one energy of any free society.
00:42:10.700So how do you think your parents, it's interesting, how do you think your parents developed that respect, and why did they hold it?
00:42:18.540Well, Harry, my father, because he was certainly bright enough to know when he heard other people, I'm speaking chiefly now of the Americans, with sophisticated understandings and sophisticated things, he saw the goal in the rift, but he never had a chance to reach for it.
00:42:39.180So, but, and he, and he was willing to admire it rather than to be resentful about it.
00:43:37.800And in a way I couldn't, in some sense, I think I lost the dramatic, dramatic sense of my own life because of the books I'd been exposed to.
00:43:47.480I, I, I, your point, I, I've made this myself.
00:43:50.280You might want to tell us, uh, that there's a whole lot of illiterate Newfoundlanders.
00:43:55.200That may well be your choice, but do not think, do not think that they're not some, the most verbally intelligent.
00:44:02.720I'll, I'll tell you as a fact, I've done, I don't know, a hundred, two hundred documentaries.
00:44:09.040And I did a documentary on the Newfoundland fishery about 25 years ago.
00:44:12.900And I met a guy up in Lancer Meadows, a fisherman, hard case, heavy drinker, I would guess.
00:44:20.920I'd, I'd give him a grade two or grade three, but he walked out of his house on a cold, frigid February Saturday morning on, with the, with the wind coming off the water and the cap, the air flaps out.
00:44:33.200And he gave an answer to one of my questions, a five-minute aria.
00:44:39.560I, you know, I can remember, you see that boat over there?
00:44:43.640It gives me a, there's a knob of me guts and a tear in my eyes, how he began.
00:44:48.140And I tell you, uh, outside of Shakespeare going on.
00:44:52.800But that was the most, that was the most verbally charged anecdote that I ever put on film for, when we brought it back to the, to the national, people were coming into the edit room to watch this guy.
00:45:07.300And as I said, he may have been illiterate, but by God, he knew his words.
00:45:12.720And that's another one, by the way, I always admired.
00:45:16.440I think that we called him uneducated.
00:45:19.700So the smartest people I know probably couldn't sign their name, but by God, if you, if you, if you felt them, if you, if you moved around them, I was always afraid of fishermen because they were always smarter, not all of them.
00:45:33.800But if you do an interview with one of them, you got, you better be on your toes.
00:45:45.840What about your peer group at that time?
00:45:47.700Uh, no, that was, they were more or less, again, they had a bit more, uh, I think commitment to the idea of real education, as I'm calling it, than perhaps today.
00:46:02.760I think there's a lot of just going for the credential, but moving on again, I'll give background to more than particular.
00:46:10.200I would say one thing about undergraduates that I've observed that because I love teaching the undergraduates I had contact with, they would come into class with a veil of cynicism.
00:46:20.620And sometimes that was, well, we're doing this for the grade, or we have a practical reason in mind.
00:46:25.760But if you could get under that and communicate something to them that was genuine, genuinely philosophical and meaningful, they would drop that surface level cynicism and dive into it like people who were starving.
00:46:37.820Well, that, if you will forgive a reference back to you, uh, the explosion that you set off, uh, once the controversy had propelled you into this world arena and the number of otherwise cynical minds.
00:46:55.120I told you when, uh, when you and I had a previous interview on that silly channel that I have, uh, I had this call, I'm not going to name him because it would be embarrassing, a 55 year old, uh, working in a really hard job, no big money.
00:47:14.140And he called me up to say that, you know what, I've been reading Jordan Peterson.
00:47:17.520Listen, this is, if, if the teacher, if the, the guide offers something that is real, uh, depth, dignity, spirit points towards, you know, you are better than you are, uh, speaks honestly.
00:47:34.920Well, that's the advantage to something of higher value.
00:47:37.460It's like, of course you're lesser in relationship to it, but it's what you could become to offer people what they could become is the best possible thing you can do for them.
00:47:47.520Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:47:53.940Most of the time you'll probably be fine, but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:48:01.620In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:48:06.560Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:48:15.940And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:48:18.940With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:48:26.700Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:49:23.560Starting a business can be tough, but thanks to Shopify, running your online storefront is easier than ever.
00:49:33.380Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business.
00:49:37.640From the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage, Shopify is here to help you grow.
00:49:44.240Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise, and we love how easy it is to add more items, ship products, and track conversions.
00:49:52.720With Shopify, customize your online store to your style with flexible templates and powerful tools, alongside an endless list of integrations and third-party apps like on-demand printing, accounting, and chatbots.
00:50:04.180Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout, up to 36% better compared to other leading e-commerce platforms.
00:50:12.020No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level.
00:50:19.020Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp, all lowercase.
00:50:24.980Go to shopify.com slash jbp now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in.
00:50:36.640When a woman experiences an unplanned pregnancy, she often feels alone and afraid.
00:50:41.380Too often, her first response is to seek out an abortion, because that's what left-leaning institutions have conditioned her to do.
00:50:48.880But because of the generosity of listeners like you, that search may lead her to a pre-born network clinic, where, by the grace of God, she'll choose life.
00:50:56.940Not just for her baby, but for herself.
00:50:59.120Pre-born offers God's love and compassion to hurting women, and provides a free ultrasound to introduce them to the life growing inside them.
00:51:06.860This combination helps women to choose life, and it's how Pre-born saves 200 babies every single day.
00:51:13.220Thanks to the Daily Wire's partnership with Pre-born, we're able to make our powerful documentary, Choosing Life, available to all on Daily Wire Plus.
00:51:20.860Join us in thanking Pre-born for bringing this important work out from behind our paywall, and consider making a donation today to support their life-saving work.
00:51:30.000You can sponsor one ultrasound for just $28.
00:51:32.820If you have the means, you can sponsor Pre-born's entire network for a day for $5,000.
00:51:55.800I don't think it's deliberate, but insofar as there is a standing champion leading something of a counter-rebellion against a degradation of analysis and thought and the casting aside of cultural verities, you're it.
00:52:13.080And you have, by example, and also true to great tribulation, you've given solace to a hell of a lot of people.
00:52:22.360And I think it has a lot to do with something general in the air.
00:52:25.680There's a lot of suffocated minds because they feel the walls coming in.
00:52:33.920And then someone comes by and says some, in some cases, nothing insulting, some very obvious things, but with a lot of thought and energy and commitment behind it.
00:52:42.760And as you know, half the world's arenas are filled waiting to hear an honest voice.
00:56:19.320The one thing I will remark, and I don't care how pretentious it sounds, in one area, I was a little disappointed.
00:56:27.120I thought because of the reputation of the university that it would have a surplus.
00:56:32.180It would have an excess of over-bright people who listened to the late quartets of Beethoven as they got out of bed.
00:56:40.200But I had a false notion that reality is often just day-to-day, and while there will be great exceptions, and there were, and people are so bright that they embarrassed you if you were standing in front of them.
00:56:53.440But a lot of it was, apart from the architecture and the grounds, which is first class, it was nice to be there as a kind of a visitor.
00:57:02.540But the intellectual level, as I said, I probably didn't get out as much as I should.
00:57:09.180But once I got near the libraries, I became enthralled.
00:57:12.920And that's the same word as enchanted and charm.
00:57:15.840I keep reminding people that the art has magic.
00:57:20.540Well, I think it's really useful to point out the connection between those words, because they all point to the possession, to the capacity to be possessed by this spirit.
00:57:29.860And it is the spirit that inhabits the university when it's properly conducted.
00:57:34.180It's the spirit that manifests itself as the creative and communicative conversation that's gone across centuries that you can now immerse yourself in and become a part of.
00:57:44.780And there isn't anything better than that.
00:57:48.640That's also why it's so wonderful often to be a university professor or teacher is because you can play a role in transmitting that to young people who will benefit immensely from it in all possible ways.
00:58:29.100They're almost always in a kind of personal cloister.
00:58:33.080But there's one or two or three in the course of a lifetime, and you say there's almost priestly about the human being that gives to inquiry, to learning, to the development and fulfillment of mind.
00:58:47.860And you just know you're in a very special place.
00:58:51.640Well, when I went to teach at Harvard in the 90s, and I was privileged to have a position there for five years, six years, I guess.
00:58:58.700And Harvard pulled in senior professors from everywhere who were at the top of their profession.
00:59:04.980And so there was a handful of senior psychology professors there when I was there.
00:59:10.800And it was wonderful to talk to these people.
00:59:13.900I had never been anywhere where there wasn't anything I could say that they weren't familiar with.
01:00:21.980Well, here's the other thing for the people today, that if the universities become proselytizers and semi-political agitprop wokeness and all this garbage, they're stealing a lot of joy.
01:00:36.200I mean, a real university, as you just said, in dealing with people that are better than you.
01:02:13.460I went on the American base and taught some American kids.
01:02:16.240And then, literally, and I know the meaning of literally, I stumbled into a radio station in St. John's when I was doing some work on a master's thesis, just idle work.
01:05:19.640And obviously, once I came to Toronto in the middle 90s, this is about 23 or 24 years.
01:05:27.840This has been the kind of most furious commitment to the cause, because I'm very lethargic in thinking of it in terms of any great seriousness.
01:05:40.580I like to think that, I just as soon as you were amused with something I said, as to think I was right.
01:05:46.560Well, often there's not that much difference between those two things.
01:08:41.620Well, I know where I grew up was a working-class culture.
01:08:44.380And like the verbal barbs and exchanges were quite brutal, generally very, very funny, but quite brutal.
01:08:51.640So when you – in my case, because you got really well-known in the island, if you said something the previous night and you went out the next morning, I almost got chased a couple of times.
01:09:02.500But to go back to this one point about communication, I did this savage thing, attacked mercilessly, a lot of phone calls before the internet registering reaction.
01:09:12.060When I came into CBC, one of the cleaners was there, and he looks at me, Rex, he said, why, he said, that was some going over there last night.
01:09:41.660Manner of delivery gives an index of where it's going.
01:09:47.500I've had people from Pakistan – and don't give me any old racist bullshit – Pakistan and Africa, meaning the cabs of Toronto, and I know they can't understand this because they haven't yet picked up the English.
01:10:05.660It always reminds me that even what hyperverbal might be in certain ways, that it is a deeper communication, especially in the mass media, that has never taken into account.
01:10:17.120So what I was, by their standards, doing a little bit of high style, you're communicating by your manners, by your eyes, by your tone.
01:10:24.620Well, that's one of the things I think that makes you somewhat singular among Canadian journalists is that not only are you very able with your words and witty with them and powerful with them, but you're also markedly a dramatic character.
01:10:43.280And I don't know exactly how to separate the character from the person, and maybe there is no separation, but I watched you on CBC and listened to you, and there's always drama in your presentation.
01:11:00.920So it's romantic, I suppose, is the right way of thinking about it, because that's the effective union of emotion and rationality, and you embody that.
01:11:11.760So it's like watching someone put on a performance, although it's, well, and then I suppose you've been doing this for so long.
01:11:18.080I don't know how much of it is a performance and how much of it is you.
01:11:23.940Well, I know one thing that long use has given.
01:11:29.020I found the hardest, and this was the only conscious part, I think the hardest thing to do if you're in the television business, don't go into it now.
01:11:38.640But if you're in there, it's to gradually reduce to extinction, the gap between, I used this phrase in the column recently, preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet.
01:11:51.660The gap between, oh, I'm on a camera, and I've got to do this, and I've got to say it this way, and all this stuff.
01:11:56.340But when you can bring the prepared remark identically with a totally relaxed being, and if you mean it, I used to say this, five or six columns a year are commentaries that I really meant.
01:12:16.160And if you really mean it, you could go on stammering, and people would listen to you.
01:12:21.220I'm reducing the gap between the posture or the posturing, and I'm talking to a neighbor.
01:12:27.280Okay, so one of the things I've really observed, because I've done a lot of television interviews now, and I've done a lot of this sort of discussion, which I radically prefer, which I think is immensely superior.
01:12:40.680But so in the typical television interview, I would walk into the studio, and I would meet the interviewer, and we would have a cordial and professional conversation.
01:12:51.160But I was actually talking to the person, more or less.
01:12:54.760And then the cameras would go on, and the person was no longer there at all.
01:13:00.560So then I was trying to figure out, well, what's exactly there?
01:13:02.980Well, part of it was, the person, in some sense, didn't dare to be there, because the bandwidth was extremely expensive.
01:13:12.100And if you're there, being spontaneous, you can make spontaneous errors, and that can be very costly to you, and to your network.
01:13:20.060And so frequently, I was just talking to whoever it was acting out the role of the journalist they thought their station demanded.
01:13:29.520And so there was no conversation, and some of the conversations, interviews that I've had that have gone viral were exactly like that, where it wasn't a conversation.
01:13:38.920Whatever it was, was something completely different.
01:13:42.100But there's something essential about what you said with regards to this diminishment of the gap between the persona and the person.
01:13:51.240And so the persona, this is from the psychology of Carl Jung.
01:13:57.180Jung thought about the persona as a crafted presentation that you used for expedient purposes.
01:15:00.180I always knew, it's intuition, that when you showed up on television, especially in the role of commentator and interview, incidentally, that if I was pretending, it bled out through the screen.
01:15:16.160Now, of course, there are times you're having fun, and you're not being serious.
01:15:18.820The ones I used to like to say, the ones that really count, if you put on a face, the radar of human beings, the radar of every human being, especially, again, in this public thing, they know it's wrong.
01:15:36.800Politicians, I remember I did a thing on the National, every time a politician comes to an election, this was true of Mr. Harper, whom I like, as it was of Mr. Trudeau in particular, that the voice that starts to come out of them in their commercials is like something that's never been heard on heaven or earth before.
01:15:56.700They actually change their vocal tone when they give out their property.
01:16:04.020They may as well hang a sign around their neck saying, I'm lying to you now, because you can hear the way I talk.
01:16:09.700In the cases that you're describing, there's so much in television and media interviews that's simply dishonest.
01:16:17.540These little conversations you described having before you started the interview, and I know you must have experienced this.
01:16:23.340I know a lot of journalists who use those as kind of a setup for a sucker punch.
01:16:28.840Put the smiley face on, oh, I love you, Jordan, et cetera.
01:16:33.380Then as soon as the lights go on, the lack of integrity in these things is just savage.
01:16:39.680But those people, maybe intellectuals, something like Orwell's famous thing, the only intellectuals who believe it, is sometimes it's only intellectuals who can't see the point.
01:16:50.520Educate it in a formal sense, but not in a real sense.
01:16:55.940There's something so stupid that you had to be extremely intelligent to perform it.
01:17:01.120And news guys and news ladies who think that they can out-cute the guest and get them.
01:17:08.200See, they're not even not going for a conversation.
01:17:11.940They've decided in advance that they're constructing a moment.
01:17:15.640Factitious is the recovery word for that.
01:17:20.300And they only want that so you can be passing off the wisdom of Plato, Socrates, and Jesus in a single sentence, and they're still grinding in their heads.
01:18:06.260I used to say that when, especially doing political interviews in Newfoundland, I remember one captain minister in particular said, well, he said, you asked me a lot.
01:18:14.740He said, but you never got me to say it.
01:18:16.880And I told him, I said, you're not saying it was the interview.
01:18:22.980And unfortunately, now in public communications from when I started, and this is not nostalgia to the present moment, the press have completely, not completely, so many of the press organs have just dropped all the essential attributes of news gathering and information.
01:18:44.640And they've become partisans, have become propagandists, are advancing agendas, all under, oh, we are the guardians of the democracy.
01:18:54.800Well, so from the postmodern perspective, at least how it's generally put forward with its neo-Marxist surround, there's, the proposition is something like all language games are games of power.
01:19:10.700And so whether you think you're doing it or not, you're putting forward an agenda.
01:19:14.600And if you can't see that, that's just a sign that you're completely.
01:19:37.880But we talked at the very beginning of this for a long time about education.
01:19:43.460And what education is, in another domain, is fashioning, deliberately fashioning your mind to be able to stand beside itself, to be able to stand outside and look at those things that by temperament or disposition or social situation, you have automatically come to accept.
01:30:09.520You, that being you is a very strange idea because it, it, it, it happens of its own accord in some sense.
01:30:17.740The book I was referring to way back, and I said I wouldn't quote the title by Kessler, called The Act of Creation.
01:30:25.540And it was an analysis of, uh, literary insight or literary inspiration, uh, humor, uh, the discovery of a punchline and mathematical, the eureka moment.
01:30:57.160Uh, I go out and sloppily make a cup of tea.
01:31:00.020And as I'm stirring the first cube of sugar, oh, I got the answer.
01:31:03.640What was the difference between the two minutes before and the time that this thought exploded in your,
01:31:08.360you had to have your mind prepared for the thought to have a place to pop out of.
01:31:12.380Okay, so you just used that phrase explosion again.
01:31:14.800You talked about the benign explosions that introduction to literature set off.
01:31:18.880Okay, so there's a thematic relationship between those two ideas.
01:31:22.220And we already talked about the idea of mimicry.
01:31:25.000And so, you know, what you do in part when you're educating yourself by pursuing what's, see, what appears to you to be meaningful and true is you build that spirit inside of you.
01:31:57.260And so, you know, when we have a conversation like this that's spontaneous, what I'm trying to do when I have a conversation like this is to become transparent in some sense.
01:32:08.020I don't want my concerns about the podcast, let's say, the quality of the podcast, the audience, any of that.
01:32:15.040I don't want those proximal concerns to interfere with my immersement in the conversation.
01:32:20.800And if I do that correctly and open myself up, then there's a spontaneity about the dialogue.
01:32:25.280And that seems to be associated with the search for and the discovery of some additional truth.
01:32:32.660We have to, persona was one of the words, that classic phrase, prepare the face to meet the faces that you meet.
01:32:40.500Anytime we artificially or self-consciously construct ahead of time some personal interaction, which is what a conversation really is.
01:32:49.700If we go in with the scaffolding already prepared in there, it's kind of an armor.
01:33:34.640That we have to allow some channel for the impulses that we don't understand, call them the unconscious, call them sensibility.
01:33:45.160The impulses that we don't command, but they are there and occasionally they emerge, solving the problem, having a conversation, making a quick joke in the middle of a live conversation.
01:34:17.240What, what is it that's magical about that conceptualization?
01:34:21.120Well, two things, in that it is ineffable, that's the first thing, that it is a sheen or a halo effect, but it is not to be seen by the eye.
01:34:31.320But there is, from some center, or maybe it's not a center, maybe it's an eye, but from some place, we derive psychological and intellectual energy that we can't command,
01:34:44.820but that in some ways we can prepare for, as you have said, by stocking the mind as best you can.
01:34:49.720There are elements in our areas of the highest thought that are structured logically and research and all of these, but there's one other thing besides.
01:35:03.160And I call it aura mainly because of its insubstantiality, its invisibility, but also its link to something that's close to magic or close to religion.
01:35:14.560And you can choose either of those two terms.
01:35:16.300So there's, the phrase that leapt to mind when you were describing that was the preparation of the temple for receipt of the divine revelation.
01:35:27.500And, well, I studied, I spent a lot of time reading Carl Rogers.
01:35:31.860Carl Rogers, a psychologist, a counselor, clinical psychologist, a humanist, but originally a Christian seminarian, deeply influenced by Protestantism.
01:35:41.200And he, he wrote very deeply and practically about listening and talking to clients.
01:35:48.940And, and he insisted upon a certain kind of genuineness that if you were operating properly as the therapist, that there were no persona tricks.
01:35:58.180You were fully there, you were integrated, body and mind integrated.
01:36:21.680Eradicate the dross and the deadwood and, and the impediments to that movement of thought upward.
01:36:28.720And so while you're reading all the time and pulling in these great thoughts and the spirit that animates the great thoughts as well, you're also feeding that part of you that responds when you call upon yourself to answer.
01:36:41.280It's why I've stressed in my writings, honesty and speech, because you, you have to rely on this capacity for creative revelation to, to guide you through the darkest possible times of your life.
01:36:54.300When you have nothing else to guide you, if you've corrupted yourself with deceptive speech and therefore deceptive thought, you won't, that, that won't be, there won't be anything there that's reliable when you call on it desperately.
01:37:08.520Yeah, I saw that you, you made that point, I think in one of your, uh, recent comments, it doesn't matter where, but where you point out that some people go to university and they say, okay, I'm going to bend, uh, to the current dilapidated regime.
01:37:23.220I'm going to pretend that I, uh, I, uh, adore all their sanctities, but as soon as I get out of university and I got the goddamn piece of paper, uh, then I'm going to start fighting back.
01:37:32.660And you wrote back or replied, if you start lying and you make a habit of it, I'm paraphrasing, obviously, uh, you won't walk out as easy as you think.
01:37:41.740And you either, you either start from that point or you don't.
01:37:44.700And if you, if you make that your persona, sometimes the persona takes over the person, uh, that Oscar Wilde is familiar with that.
01:37:52.060Uh, one other thing I'd like to add to just throw in there when you talk about getting so close to truth, remember also words themselves as words.
01:38:02.400Uh, if there is a place for enchantment and enthrallment and charm, uh, Orpheus with his loot made trees.
01:38:10.940Remember that he could communicate with inanimate music in that case, but language also, I think one of the highest or hardest sentences in all writing is the very first one there in the beginning was the word.
01:38:41.760They are magical, uh, hence poetry, hence Ecclesiastes, Book of Job, you know them better than I.
01:38:49.060Uh, I don't know if we ever penetrated that, but I do know that language in its individual terms, in its actual words, uh, has latencies of, of, of, of disposition and force.
01:39:03.980Yes, it's right to think of them as active agents.
01:39:09.440So you watch every word and you watch every phrase and you watch every sentence and you try to get the rhythm right and you try to get the harmony right and you, you, then you attack what you wrote and you see if it can withstand the assault that you can bring to it.
01:39:24.700And maybe you do that 50 times to see if you can craft something that you cannot improve, no matter how hard you try and that you can't break, no matter what you bring to bear upon it.
01:39:36.280Well, again, as I said, I, I, I, sometimes a very simple sentence.
01:39:42.220I mean, I, I, how can I, how could I explain or explicate would be better.
01:39:47.540That particular sentence in the beginning was the word.
01:39:51.780They're all single syllables, prepositions, a definite article.
01:39:59.340There's always, again, there's, there's always that extra outside, uh, contribution that comes from the language itself and putting, I, I sometimes think the Kabbalists, the great tradition of the Kabbalists, the minute examination of the, of the intrinsic terms, uh, the individual letters.
01:40:19.920Uh, it may seem like a superstition, but I, I, I, I think, I'd think of it less as superstition than as a kind of mildly encouraged path to a certain insight.
01:40:32.500There, there is more things in heaven and earth than I dreamt of in our philosophy.
01:40:36.940Uh, I, I wish the universities, again, go back to our theme here, it seems to go through.
01:40:40.660Uh, in dealing with literature in particular and history, those kinds of subjects, uh, would, would pay much more attention to also giving their, their students the capacity, uh, to imitate those writers.
01:40:55.880The best writer in America, uh, in certain ways is Abraham Lincoln.
01:41:02.000Uh, his inaugural addresses, oh, my Lord.
01:41:04.320They had power enough that when Martin Luther King came by some hundreds or so years later, that they were operating in his brain.
01:41:13.600They were, they were a living dynamic.
01:41:15.880Every drop of blood drawn by the lash should be paid for one drawn by the sword.
01:41:19.920Uh, it, you know, once we acknowledge that words continue to have their, some of their original dynamic, if they had been placed, uh, in the mind and if they're kept up.
01:41:32.300Anyway, I, I know I'm rambling and I'm slightly more than incoherent.
01:41:38.000We should tell our students just what you're telling them now, which is that you watch your reaction to the words and you note the awe that's generated spontaneously.
01:41:48.540And you take note of the worship that you've just participated in, uh, despite yourself as the marker to what constitutes truth.
01:41:57.820Well, I think, I think you have it, uh, uh, we will never fully comprehend the operations of, of our own full consciousness, uh, either it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's beneficial or unbeneficial.
01:42:14.940But we do know that spirit, the spirit, whether religious or however you want to describe it, that there are elements that will not be put down in the account book because they cannot be tabulated and they cannot be named, at least at this point.
01:42:30.420Uh, you're in a, in a, in a clinical circumstance, uh, you're partly a scientist and you will, we will go as far as the evidence can lead you in the physical properties, but there are aspects and dynamics of all human action.
01:42:43.420That come from inspiration, uh, the, the, the, the, the word put in inspiration to breathe, uh, the demon that you refer to in all creation.
01:42:53.140We, we, we, the ancient poets sought that, or ancient philosophy that the poets were possessed.
01:43:42.900It's a terrifying thing that a real university education or real education introduces people to because there's some terrible fire that's associated with the best.
01:43:51.940Because it does burn off everything in you that isn't worthy.
01:44:43.340Uh, I dreaded, uh, accepting the political appointment, but I wasn't working, so I did.
01:44:50.140And in hindsight, it was one of the most useful things I've ever done.
01:44:55.560Because apart from being the guy on the mountainside with binoculars staring at the bird, you're actually in the damn room.
01:45:01.880I, I heard what politicians think of journalists.
01:45:04.860I heard what journalists, obviously, think of politicians.
01:45:08.380Uh, there's a 30% ignorance ratio on both sides and never been cured.
01:45:14.860But it also really educated me, sensitized me, uh, to what, what are the buttons that you press if you were, if you go back to the journalism.
01:45:24.780Uh, then I ended up writing some stuff.
01:45:28.240And I did this, I, the piece I did on Newfoundland in particular, the fisheries.
01:45:32.180This, this was the, uh, somehow understruck a chord rather widely.
01:46:00.580It is, it is the entire reason that it exists.
01:46:04.040The language comes out of the fishery.
01:46:06.220This, this, the nature of the settlements, all those small places where they went there because it was a beach and a place to fish.
01:46:12.800The sense of humor, the stoicism that you will find in some, uh, certainly the inventiveness in song and chat because you were, you were really isolated and people met only on the water.
01:49:46.520Their grandfathers had received salt fish from the Newfoundlanders in the Dirty 30s when the Prairie Dust Bowls and all the drought was going on.
01:49:55.980Newfoundland, which was then just a country, somehow got barrels of salt fish over to the Prairie farmers.
01:50:57.960And because most Canadians, this is again, despite the apologetics that come out every single damn day from Ottawa about how miserable and hateful we are, the national disposition in the main, it's not confined to any group either, is a reasonably lively interest in the bearings of other people.
01:51:21.400And when they're having a hard time, if there's any way we can intercede or at least offer you verbal comforts, we're going to do it.
01:51:29.880And when the farmers, farming and fishing are very much like in some ways, small farm, inshore fishery and the family farm.
01:51:36.340They saw it and their native, their identity as citizens.
01:53:16.440But I ended up in so many places, addressing so many different groups, everything from fishermen to academics to nurses to librarians.
01:53:25.040And over a 20-year period, this dropped me in and out of a hell of a lot of places and met a tremendous host of different people, different occupations.
01:54:57.100And while I don't dump on Toronto, per se, if you get within its charm circle, you become one of the mental herd.
01:55:05.940The set of synonymous attitudes among the cognoscenti and journalists in this city is appalling.
01:55:13.580I think that's reflective of something that happens in North American culture, at least as far as the United States and Canada are concerned.
01:55:22.500That also happens at the level of the intellectual elite.
01:55:26.040And there seems to be something like a very distinct sense of contempt that emanates from that.
01:55:32.080It's certainly something that people who aren't in Toronto react to, identify with Toronto and react against.
01:55:41.700And it is the kind of irritation that drives the populism, for example.
01:55:57.780I think I have viewers and watchers and readers.
01:56:00.140And even if they were the people they're parodied to be, I don't see any real sin in communicating with them in whatever capacity I can manage.
01:56:10.260But there's always a dripping contempt that is that is associated with the hoi polloi, let's say, who, you know, need such bromides and so forth.
01:56:37.520I haven't read as much, don't know as much, but it is a verification of their standing within this little particular guarded sect.
01:56:46.820And the opinions here have to be the only opinions.
01:56:50.160It's almost like Bloomsbury at a heavily discounted level.
01:56:57.040I was, I offered here, I wondered in your case too, in the very, very beginning, when the University of Toronto was sending you those letters,
01:57:03.920I kept asking, what's the point of tenure?
01:57:08.160If all these great tenured professors at the University of Toronto, when one of their own is being disparaged and to some degree threatened, at least in employment terms,
01:58:10.140You've, you've been observing our country and the culture for a long, long time.
01:58:14.420And you don't have any particular axe to grind, as far as I can tell.
01:58:18.140So what, what's happening in the cultural sphere, as far as you're concerned, over the last, say, well, pick a point and move forward.
01:58:25.560I'd say that, I would say the last 10 or 15, we know origins and I won't go through all that.
01:58:29.840We know what the 60s, but in terms of visible, evidentiary impact, it's the last 10 or 15.
01:58:36.600The first thing that I've seen that I resent is the idea tacitly held, never explicitly made public, that there are certain perspectives on the world that are okay, and we hold them, and therefore we're better.
01:58:52.500And any dissent from them or disagreement with them or an alternate set is not to be, not to be allowed.
01:59:00.200Half the reason, I'll give it an illustration, half the reason the CBC audiences collapsed and shrunk to such a vast extent they did, is that CBC was only interested in talking to the people who agreed with it.
01:59:10.880And that's a much more narrow bunch than ever.
01:59:14.020Well, I've watched my parents and their reaction to CBC.
01:59:17.120I mean, we were avid CBC listeners when I was a kid, especially to FM.
01:59:21.420And it was everywhere in Canada, but also, of course, television as well.
01:59:26.020But radio, we'll concentrate on radio.
01:59:28.280It was always of high quality, and it did seem to speak to the whole country.
01:59:33.380It did a credible job as a national broadcaster.
01:59:36.520And then all of a sudden, and it is probably 15 years ago, everyone I know in the West just stopped listening.
01:59:44.040It was like, no, this isn't us anymore.
02:03:38.460I had one hour session, but I'm not basing the remarks on that.
02:03:42.840What I will base it on is that, and I'm not trying to be harsh without cause,
02:03:48.500that if for some reason it was fashionable to have exactly the other set of opinions, the opposite.
02:03:56.080They would be just, I think he, the one thing that in his biography that makes sense is at least that little inclination towards dramatics.
02:04:05.060He's not a very good actor, but he knows what roles are playing best.
02:04:09.920And because the conservatives are such a self-contradictory and disorganized and leaderless bunch, it's enough to be half good on the proscenium to maintain it.
02:04:22.580But the worst thing about it, and I should say this, we have fractions in the West.
02:04:30.040We have economic ruin facing some problems after this COVID thing.
02:04:34.720We have a generational tension set up between the woke and a lot of other people.
02:04:41.120And he is so much on one side of all of these things.
02:04:45.460And there emerges from his government and his ministers a smugness about any opposition.
02:04:51.220I can't think of a time when Canada, in a kind of soft way, was in such a possibility of losing its own confidence and of shoulders back, as you say.
02:05:06.560This country, bit by bit by bit, is shedding the sense of its own integrity and drifting.
02:05:14.300And politics is so shallow these days.
02:05:17.020I wish, I wish, I wish, you could ever hear, there's no oratory because there's no truth.
02:05:24.560You can't build a great speech around something you don't really believe in.
02:05:28.760And by the way, I'll toss it back to you.
02:05:33.360When was the last time you heard a national address, you know, meant to underline and give emphasis?
02:05:39.600If there's no national identity, what's to address?
02:05:43.180Or if the national identity is essentially something like tyrannical power and oppression and to be fought at every possible, what every possible corner by every possible means, what can you possibly address?
02:06:12.280In the name of anti-racism, I see some of these tactics and some of the demonizations and some of the insults as provoking the very cause that they seem to be against.
02:06:24.440We got to stop fascinating on the color of people's skin, which is what identity politics sometimes just turns into.
02:06:33.380I have never seen a time when our country in 2021, I wrote a column about this, it's not systemically racist.
02:06:41.860I was in Newfoundland when the Americans landed in 9-11.
02:07:14.560That's why, that's just my deepest problem with Mr. Trudeau.
02:07:17.200He's not as large as the nation that he seeks or seems to think he's governing.
02:07:25.120Well, I'm still struggling constantly to understand this, to see, to see, because it does seem to me to have accelerated in the last few years, whatever this is that is accelerating.
02:07:36.740I mean, it's increasingly the pathology that has decimated the humanities in particular, which is the core of the university.
02:07:46.780And, you know, it's self-punitive in some sense because enrollment in the humanities is plummeting, right?
02:07:54.260And so you might say, well, if the motivation was resentment of the creative process that produced the great classics, then victory has been attained.
02:08:04.040Classics have been decimated and everyone, no one will attend to them anymore.
02:08:10.660But it means the death of the universities as far as I'm concerned.
02:08:13.400And then, but worse than that, and I could see this happening five or six years ago, is that this is starting in a very major way to percolate out into the broader culture.
02:08:34.760And you see this in the corporations, too.
02:08:36.940I see these corporations, they fall over themselves, kowtowing to their HR departments to bring in a philosophy that is explicitly anti-capitalist.
02:11:39.460I think that, barring some Easter-scale miracle, he will win it.
02:11:47.920Mr. O'Toole, the most recent thing he did was to embrace this superstitional folly of apocalyptic global warming and promise his own carbon tax.
02:11:58.040All of his MPs are from Alberta and Saskatchewan.
02:12:04.240And there's one or two people in the Conservative Party of real talent.
02:12:09.720Rhetorically, there's no one matching, I think he just suddenly slipped away, Pierre Polymer.
02:14:58.280I mean, stupid in the sense that they had to work hard to get as stupid as they are.
02:15:04.520And then you have the newspapers who decide, well, Trump is such an evil that we have to change the entire doctrine of what a newspaper is.
02:16:00.260I know that journalists in the higher altitudes, national journalists especially, they now see themselves as procurators, as persons as prestigious, to some degree at least, as those they report upon.
02:16:15.460They also have invested themselves with a clerical view of things, that they have a wisdom that perhaps even the people they're reporting on are incapable of receiving.
02:16:53.880Suddenly, in three days, they can put this particular issue, which at best exists at a micro level in terms of the whole population, and make that the new litmus test for whether you're politically correct or not.
02:17:11.860They endorse all ideological programs of the hard left.
02:17:16.180And I also—I'll say this—many journals and journalists don't like their own audiences or the people who read them.
02:17:26.800Don't—like I said about the humanities, if you're thinking about becoming a journalist, please look around a bit more before you do.
02:17:36.240Although, those that do it very well, as I said, Glenn Greenwald, Molly Hemingway, Melanie Phillips.
02:17:41.820I'm going around the globe with these.
02:17:44.340These are sterling examples of what we would hope.
02:17:46.640Well, it seems that people like that are increasingly, I would say, going out there on their own.
02:17:52.800Melanie Phillips, I do know, has her own thing set up.
02:17:56.420Greenwald got tossed because he wasn't subscribing to the current philosophy, but he had enough standing that his intercept—I think it's the intercept—is now—and he gets a lot of airtime.
02:18:06.920Because, again, he is—I hate the term—a celebrity journalist, but he's a good journalist.
02:18:12.300I disagree with him 95 percent of what he thinks.
02:18:14.960But I see him covering the press lately, the last five or six months of some of his columns.
02:18:23.840And Barry Weiss's letter, that's also good stuff.
02:18:27.360So there are good people there, but I think the weight culturally with the universities, the corporations, the news media itself, the trend towards the enforcement, tacit or by mob, of a certain set of thoughts is so deep.
02:18:42.860And it's so unresisted by so many that I think we're in for a long haul.
02:18:48.380And if we have a bad economy coming out of COVID and all the spending, it's going to be a terrible two or four years.
02:18:54.840There are so many people, and it's not being reported.
02:18:57.980Lost shops, lost jobs, lost hope, saw life enterprise collapse.
02:19:31.720I'm not as convinced that some of the brilliant writing that is being done in analysis and opposition,
02:19:38.840is reaching enough people, but I am encouraged that there's a lot, I can't go through the whole span.
02:19:45.800There's a lot out there if you, if you search it out.
02:19:49.640I don't know if this would be classified as optimism, but when societies get really challenged, I mean, really challenged,
02:19:58.000inevitably they revert to the genuine virtues.
02:20:01.800If this current malaise has set us back really badly, and if Canada is no longer a place that has instant access to almost everything it wants,
02:20:15.940maybe it's citizens will learn again, the eternal values of intercommunication, of commonality, of goals and values, not skin colors or ideologies.
02:20:31.180And that getting closer to reality, if we are forced to it by economics or other things, we will dispense with, we will be both, all this is hollow and useless.
02:20:43.160But it's like, you know, you can afford to play if you've got everything else taken care of.
02:20:48.900If we're driven back to actually having to work for things, think about things, take time and avoid falsity, these will blow up in the day.
02:21:00.340Whether that's going to happen, I kind of doubt it, but maybe that is the cynicism of senescence creeping up on me.
02:21:08.520You've had a stellar career as a journalist.
02:21:13.840You've had the sort of career that I would say every journalist would like to have.
02:21:18.360You've been prolific and influential and well-regarded and controversial, and you've had a long life doing it and done all sorts of interesting things.
02:21:27.860What advice would you have for someone who wants to write?
02:21:51.040I know your veneration of Solzhenitsyn, and I also know you know that Malcolm Muggeridge was the very first prominent Western journalist who wrote of the terror and the famine.
02:22:05.040He did it at the time when Walter Durante was lying to the New York Times and getting Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes for it.
02:22:12.140I would advise them to read Flann O'Brien.
02:22:38.720The other thing, to write, there's only one thing, Jordan, if I may use your first name, that anyone who seriously wants to write or wants to write stuff that is serious as opposed to some victim's diary, read.
02:22:59.380There's nothing that will help you more in the art of writing than reading.
02:23:04.200And you could also have one more thing if you read, say, The Great Gatsby, you read a paragraph, sit back or read a poem, and ask yourself, if I were to write this, if I had to communicate this thought, how would I have said it than compared with what Scott Fitzgerald did?
02:23:20.600Anyway, I think I've probably dragged you, sir, to the point of perhaps mortal tedium, so I'm going to stop it right there.