The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 388. How Gender Affects Your Ideals ｜ Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott

00:00:00.000 BetOnline has one of the largest offerings and betting odds in the world.

00:00:03.420 Beyond traditional sports, BetOnline gives you the option to bet on political events

00:00:06.700 like the outcome of the presidential election, whether Hunter Biden serves jail time before 2025,

00:00:11.460 or who's going to be the next Republican speaker.

00:00:14.080 Political betting allows you to wager on real-world events outside the realm of sports.

00:00:18.140 Or if you're a diehard sports fan, BetOnline makes sports betting more accessible and convenient than ever before.

00:00:23.660 With just a few clicks, you can place bets on your favorite teams or events from the comfort of your own home.

00:00:27.540 BetOnline prides themselves with their higher-than-average betting limits of up to $25,000,

00:00:32.220 and you can increase your wagering amount by contacting their player services desk by phone or email.

00:00:37.460 So whether you're watching your favorite team or the news surrounding the upcoming election,

00:00:41.020 why not spice things up with a friendly wager at BetOnline?

00:00:44.000 Go to BetOnline.ag to place your bets.

00:00:46.320 Use promo code DAILYWIRE to get a 50% sign-up bonus of up to $250.

00:00:50.700 That's BetOnline.ag. Use promo code DAILYWIRE.

00:00:54.100 BetOnline. The options are endless.

00:00:57.540 Hello, everyone watching and listening.

00:01:13.240 Today, I'm speaking with Greg Lukianoff and Ricky Schlott, co-authors of the new book,

00:01:20.540 The Canceling of the American Mind.

00:01:22.240 We discuss the inception and inspiration of this new book,

00:01:27.360 which seeks to assess cancel culture as it's harshly affecting American universities and other institutions.

00:01:34.100 We break down the difference between feminine and masculine tendencies in regards to free speech, 0.90

00:01:40.480 the entirely real and yet rarely discussed phenomenon of toxic femininity,

00:01:46.720 and why we must prioritize a cultural shift away from the ease of self-described victimhood.

00:01:54.740 So, you have a new book coming out on October 17th.

00:01:59.600 This is recorded in 2023.

00:02:02.220 October 17th, Canceling of the American Mind.

00:02:05.800 Authors Greg Lukianoff and Ricky Schlott.

00:02:08.300 So, congratulations on that.

00:02:11.220 Thank you so much.

00:02:11.980 Why don't you start by telling us a little bit about the book and why you guys are partnering together also to write it.

00:02:19.880 Yeah.

00:02:20.460 Well, I mean, I think it's probably a little unusual for a 48-year-old and a 23-year-old to be writing together,

00:02:25.880 but I couldn't feel luckier than to get to work with Ricky Schlott.

00:02:29.660 She's absolutely brilliant, and it was something that we knew right away when we saw her writing when she was 19 and 20,

00:02:35.800 that there was something very special about this young woman.

00:02:37.760 So, originally, Ricky reached out to us because she read my book with Jonathan Haidt,

00:02:43.160 Coddling of the American Mind, and said, this is exactly right. 0.96

00:02:47.040 This is exactly what I'm seeing in my own environment,

00:02:49.660 that the threats to free speech are also devastating to mental health.

00:02:53.580 And she actually dropped out of NYU in 2020, also during COVID, which I think is exactly the right move.

00:03:01.300 You know, once you're on lockdown, drop out.

00:03:04.200 The defeat's a major point of college.

00:03:05.820 And originally, what we were planning to do was write a book, or what I was considering doing,

00:03:10.840 was writing a book that was a follow-up to Coddling, even though Coddling is a follow-up in a sense,

00:03:16.060 something that was much more directly a follow-up because it's me, you know,

00:03:19.640 the book was written by me and Jonathan Haidt, like two 48- and 60-year-old Gen Xers.

00:03:24.720 But a lot of it's concerned about the terrible injustice we do to young women,

00:03:30.020 teaching them the mental habits of anxious and depressed people.

00:03:32.560 So she wrote me and Haidt to talk about if we thought maybe COVID could uncoddle young people

00:03:40.000 by presenting challenges that they could then overcome.

00:03:43.100 It's a little optimistic.

00:03:44.480 Yeah, probably a little overly optimistic.

00:03:47.700 But I was excited about the premise.

00:03:49.580 And immediately realizing just how brilliant she was from her writing, she became a FIRE fellow.

00:03:54.600 And we talked about the idea of working together on something that would be a follow-up to talk about it from a Gen Z young woman's perspective.

00:04:04.600 But as we were getting ready for that, I started realizing that there are still people out there who are trying to claim that cancel culture isn't real.

00:04:13.320 And I'm like, okay, I'm sorry.

00:04:14.860 Like, FIRE is sitting on a mountain of data.

00:04:16.860 Something absolutely catastrophic has happened on campus in the last 10 years.

00:04:20.760 This is easy to establish.

00:04:22.920 So we decided to do a book that focuses on three things.

00:04:26.180 One, prove it's not just real.

00:04:28.140 It's historic.

00:04:29.720 We don't see the kind of numbers of professors fired in the last, you know, since we mark cancel culture as beginning around 2014.

00:04:37.740 We don't see the kind of numbers of professors fired during cancel culture since the 1950s in the United States.

00:04:44.500 There's nothing even close, about twice as many professors fired than the standard estimates of McCarthyism, for example.

00:04:50.820 So people saying it doesn't exist is just crazy.

00:04:53.920 Then we try to situate it as part of a way of winning arguments without winning arguments.

00:05:00.800 That essentially, it succeeds so well because people realize, well, I could try to refute you an argument and I might fail.

00:05:08.780 But I could also scare you into thinking that you don't have a livelihood going forward to just make the cost so high of dissenting that you win arguments without persuading anybody.

00:05:20.020 And then the last part of it is really trying to point to different potential solutions.

00:05:24.340 Yeah, and I would also add that the difference of our perspective together is really rich because I'm Generation Z.

00:05:31.960 We're decades apart.

00:05:33.420 We have very different political beliefs.

00:05:35.200 But everything in this book in terms of classical liberalism and free speech and pluralism and reinvigorating our democracy and our civic conversation is just like we hold that so near and dear into our hearts.

00:05:47.180 And I think that that cross-generational kind of melding really worked very well to our advantage in the book.

00:05:53.460 Absolutely.

00:05:53.680 And Ricky also made me more of a cat person.

00:05:56.180 No, well, that's always a good thing.

00:05:57.080 I did convince him to get cats in the scheme of, in the time that we did the book together, yeah.

00:06:01.720 Good, good.

00:06:02.240 Well, you're always supposed to pet a cat when you meet one on the street, you know, so.

00:06:06.800 I remember that from your book and I think that's excellent advice.

00:06:09.260 That's exactly right.

00:06:10.160 So, now, you guys said a bunch of interesting things there and we'll go through them.

00:06:13.960 But I want to ask you first, Ricky, you pointed out that you two have different political beliefs.

00:06:19.240 Like you share some core presumptions, but you have different political beliefs.

00:06:22.560 So, how would you characterize both the similarities and the differences in your beliefs?

00:06:27.740 Yeah, I'm a right-leaning libertarian.

00:06:29.940 I don't want to speak for you in terms of how you define your politics, but.

00:06:33.420 I'm left of center, homeless democrat, but definitely, and when it comes to, and that may sound like highly inconsistent to a lot of people these days, but there was nothing inconsistent for someone my age to be really pro-free speech and also think of themselves as a left of center.

00:06:51.000 Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer of us.

00:06:54.180 When I look at what was going on in the 90s, you know, I always thought kind of like the more working class element of the left would win over.

00:07:01.800 And I thought the people who believed in speech codes and, you know, some of the identity politics stuff were just our crazies who would eventually self-marginalize.

00:07:09.500 Because I'm really disappointed to see that they seem to have all the juice on the left at the moment.

00:07:13.840 Yeah, and it seems like, at least in my lifetime, the word liberal was associated with very illiberal actions and things in a way that, you know, true classical liberalism is not a partisan divide in my mind.

00:07:25.840 And I think that that's really where we share our common values.

00:07:29.580 And certainly in terms of free speech and cancel culture, that's like the heart and center of our book.

00:07:35.600 And we pull no punches, you know, when we think the right or left has been wrong, just like we do with fire, we call them out.

00:07:40.940 But when it comes to the phenomenon of cancel culture, the place where it's the most dominant, of course, is in higher ed.

00:07:47.800 And that is a very, you know, disproportionately lefty space.

00:07:51.560 And it's gone really off the rails, as you well know, in higher ed.

00:07:57.140 Ricky, how in the world did you become a right-leaning libertarian?

00:08:02.920 I mean, as, well, Jonathan Haidt's data in particular, although Greg worked on this too, I mean, the data is indicating quite clearly that there's a growing divide among young men and young women in relationship to their political affiliation.

00:08:15.460 With young men increasingly tilting towards where you stand, I would say, right-leaning libertarian.

00:08:20.880 And young women increasingly not only becoming much more miserable on the mental health front, but also becoming much more leftist.

00:08:28.440 So, how is it that you aren't part of that cohort?

00:08:34.240 Since you're not, why do you think it's reasonable in some sense for you to speak for younger women, younger people, younger women?

00:08:42.080 And why did you drop out of university?

00:08:46.140 So, I'm actually 23, but my father is 86.

00:08:49.520 And having that breadth of historical knowledge in my household and so near, I think, made me a little bit more resistant to generational trends.

00:08:56.500 And, you know, the tides and just kind of shifting away from what I think common sense right and left was, which happened.

00:09:04.940 And I think a lot of my parents or my friend's parents were a little bit more lenient towards the nonsense of what my generation would bring home.

00:09:13.320 Whereas, you know, I'd come home to my dad sometimes at dinner and come home with whatever the next politically correct-ism is and say, oh, no, dad, we don't say African-American anymore.

00:09:22.560 We say black. 0.82

00:09:23.300 And my dad would be like, we changed that rule like four times.

00:09:26.100 And what's what I actually, my intent is what matters more than the impact.

00:09:30.060 And I think that those sort of formative lessons definitely grounded me in a different time and space.

00:09:35.780 And I would say, you know, despite that, the coddling was talking about mental health and a lot of the cognitive distortions.

00:09:43.820 And even though my political orientation is different, I did grow up on the internet.

00:09:47.360 I did grow up on Tumblr.

00:09:50.280 I have a bunch of friends I saw firsthand just how ugly and how horrific the mental health crisis has been for my generation.

00:09:58.500 My freshman year at NYU, I remember, like, one of the first nights that we were in my dorm, we were all sitting around about six girls.

00:10:05.100 And every single girl was comparing her self-harm scars.

00:10:08.360 I was the only one that didn't have scars.

00:10:10.060 And I just remember in that moment being like, wow, there's something so wrong with this generation.

00:10:15.120 And I'm here firsthand watching it on the ground.

00:10:18.240 I feel in some ways a part of it, one foot in and one foot out at the same time.

00:10:21.960 But certainly, I mean, it's hard to ignore.

00:10:24.960 Even if your politics are different, you're mired in it.

00:10:27.640 And it's so pervasive.

00:10:29.780 And then lastly, my decision to drop out of NYU, actually.

00:10:33.340 And also, I got into Columbia recently, and I don't expect to be doing that as well.

00:10:38.400 I don't want to finish my undergraduate degree, frankly, because I've had two great years at NYU.

00:10:44.720 But unfortunately, the stifling environment was just so beyond something that I could handle for myself.

00:10:50.000 And I also think, you know, I mean, I had a 4.0.

00:10:53.000 I was succeeding.

00:10:53.880 I was headed to law school.

00:10:55.140 I was on the right track.

00:10:56.720 But I found something that I was passionate about, and I realized that I'd been kind of hoodwinked by a system that was telling me that I needed to fork over enormous amounts of money and spend time fulfilling requirements that weren't important to me and writing essays that, you know, defied my own personal opinions because of the obvious slants of my professors.

00:11:15.240 And so, at a certain point, I realized there are more than one pathway to success, and I'm going to tread my own.

00:11:21.960 And fortunately, people like Greg were there to kind of pick me up and make sure that I ended up on the right track.

00:11:28.240 And so, this is a way cooler place to be at 23 than to have just graduated.

00:11:31.600 So, Greg, I wanted to commend you for something first.

00:11:38.880 You're not a psychologist, but you are the most outspoken psychologist that I know of, pointing out the fact that if we had set up a cognitive behavioral therapy program nationwide to demoralize young people,

00:11:55.320 we couldn't possibly have done it more effectively, speaking strictly from a clinical perspective than we have done.

00:12:02.440 Yeah.

00:12:02.800 Every psychologist there is who's worth his or her salt knows that you don't hyper-protect people because you make them dependent. 1.00

00:12:13.300 You don't inundate them with idiot trigger warnings. 0.99

00:12:17.300 You don't try to infantilize them. 0.99

00:12:19.940 You gradually expose them voluntarily to situations and people and ideas that they're leery of.

00:12:30.200 And by doing so, you fortify them in terms of their own self-concept and their ability to deal with the world.

00:12:37.580 And there isn't anything, there's nothing that therapists who are real know more thoroughly than that.

00:12:45.660 If you don't know that, you're not a therapist. 0.99

00:12:47.860 You're a bloody fraud. 1.00

00:12:49.940 And despite that, there is an absolute dearth of psychologists speaking out against, say, cancel culture, trigger warnings, all of this infantilizing idiocy that characterizes the campuses. 0.99

00:13:02.840 Now, that's partly because, as I found out in Canada, that if you do speak out, and this obviously speaks to cancel culture, 0.71

00:13:10.100 the probability that the mid-level, miserable, resentful bureaucrats who are in charge of doing things like handing out professional licenses will come after you. 0.97

00:13:20.340 And if you can't afford to have your career threatened, well, then you're in trouble.

00:13:24.300 Now, I don't think that excuses people precisely because I think there's a time and a place to speak in some ways, regardless of personal cost.

00:13:31.900 But, and the thing is, you've spoke, so obviously it can be done.

00:13:36.800 Now, I want to talk to you, both you guys, about some psychological ideas that I've been working on.

00:13:43.060 And some of them are quite contentious, and I'd really like to know what you think.

00:13:47.100 So, first of all, there's a very large literature on female antisocial behavior. 0.99

00:13:53.820 Now, it's not as extensive as male antisocial behavior literature, because males who are antisocial tend to be violent physically, and that gets more attention.

00:14:05.140 But there are antisocial females, and they have a very set way of going about destroying their opponents to their own advantage. 1.00

00:14:14.280 And the way they do that is by innuendo, reputation savaging, and gossiping.

00:14:20.640 And this literature all arose before the dawn of social media, and it was very well-established for multiple decades.

00:14:28.800 Now, my observation is that that scales brilliantly on social media, right?

00:14:35.500 Because you can savage reputations, you can use innuendo, you can gossip, you can destroy, with zero cost to yourself.

00:14:43.760 Now, women tend to turn to that because they don't engage in physical fighting, not between each other, very, very rarely, and they certainly can't fight physically with men. 1.00

00:14:53.300 So, if they're going to be antisocial and instrumental, narcissistic, psychopathic, and all of that, they're going to do it in this more subtle manner.

00:15:01.460 Now, I see absolutely no limits to the expression of that sort of behavior whatsoever on social media.

00:15:07.400 In fact, quite the contrary, that leads to an even more dismal possibility.

00:15:13.580 This terrifies me, to tell you the truth.

00:15:16.380 So, you know, the problem of parasitical criminality, parasitism in particular, is so deep that sex itself evolved as a solution to the problem.

00:15:31.020 So, the problem of parasitism is very, very old.

00:15:37.980 And this proclivity of the psychopathic and narcissistic types to denigrate and to elevate their reputation falsely is a form of parasitism.

00:15:51.000 And it has no constraints whatsoever on social media.

00:15:54.600 We know that the troll types and the online criminal types are much more likely to have dark tetrad personality characteristics,

00:16:01.640 Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic, and sadistic because the other three weren't enough.

00:16:07.260 My sense is that we've enabled the psychopaths. 0.95

00:16:12.280 They have free reign to express themselves in this more feminine, antisocial manner. 1.00

00:16:17.100 And we risk bringing down the whole house of cards because of it.

00:16:20.180 So, the first thing I'd like to know is, like, what do you guys think about that hypothesis?

00:16:25.560 This disparity in the virtual versus the real world.

00:16:30.380 Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.

00:16:35.820 Most of the time, you'll probably be fine.

00:16:37.960 But what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?

00:16:43.660 In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.

00:16:47.460 It's a fundamental right.

00:16:48.640 Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport,

00:16:53.100 you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with the technical know-how to intercept it.

00:16:58.120 And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.

00:17:01.320 With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.

00:17:08.700 Now, you might think, what's the big deal?

00:17:10.800 Who'd want my data anyway?

00:17:12.340 Well, on the dark web, your personal information could fetch up to $1,000.

00:17:16.200 That's right, there's a whole underground economy built on stolen identities.

00:17:21.040 Enter ExpressVPN.

00:17:22.780 It's like a digital fortress, creating an encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet.

00:17:27.480 Their encryption is so robust that it would take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to crack it.

00:17:33.100 But don't let its power fool you.

00:17:34.840 ExpressVPN is incredibly user-friendly.

00:17:37.280 With just one click, you're protected across all your devices.

00:17:40.300 Phones, laptops, tablets, you name it.

00:17:42.400 That's why I use ExpressVPN whenever I'm traveling or working from a coffee shop.

00:17:46.620 It gives me peace of mind knowing that my research, communications, and personal data are shielded from prying eyes.

00:17:52.600 Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash jordan.

00:17:57.360 That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash jordan.

00:18:01.240 And you can get an extra three months free.

00:18:04.060 ExpressVPN.com slash jordan.

00:18:05.620 Well, first thing is that we took this, you know, head-on and coddling of the American mind.

00:18:14.220 We said we didn't apologize for the research.

00:18:17.500 And we made the point that when it comes to the different ways that males and females exercise aggression,

00:18:23.520 particularly when they're teenagers but also throughout their lives, that men is much more physical.

00:18:28.640 You know, like I've been in a lot of fights in my life.

00:18:30.900 I've been a bouncer.

00:18:31.560 I've seen that.

00:18:34.500 But I also grew up in a house that was dominated by women. 1.00

00:18:37.080 And that female aggression tends to be relational. 1.00

00:18:41.000 That definitely all these mechanisms that are much more relying on, you know, verbal tendencies

00:18:45.660 and ways of battling things out verbally, you know, are well-established.

00:18:51.480 And I don't think it's any coincidence.

00:18:53.300 And this is a very sad fact.

00:18:55.040 But it comes out very, it's very clear in the polling.

00:18:57.220 Is it in general, and of course, this is, you know, this talking about, you know, polling,

00:19:02.660 women are more skeptical of freedom of speech than men are. 0.93

00:19:08.160 So when you look on campuses, the polling for women's attitudes, this is actually a very funny 1.00

00:19:13.960 statistic that we found, that the schools that tended to have the highest level of students

00:19:21.080 saying that violence is acceptable in response to speech, or that shout downs are acceptable

00:19:26.480 in response to speech, or that blocking doors are responsible, are acceptable speech, or

00:19:33.760 either women's colleges or former women's colleges.

00:19:36.860 So that's a distressing, you know, and that's one of the reasons why we have to, we want to

00:19:41.060 reach more women.

00:19:41.760 Because we know that there are plenty of women, including Ricky and Nadine Strawson, who works 1.00

00:19:45.560 for fire, you know, who are great civil libertarians.

00:19:48.380 And we need to recruit from that.

00:19:50.020 Because as universities become more feminized, it could be a bad, an even worsening situation 1.00

00:19:57.120 for freedom of speech, unless we actually, you know, really bring that argument to more

00:20:01.620 women. 0.81

00:20:02.120 But anyway.

00:20:02.700 Yeah, and I would add to that point that I think, especially in the past couple decades,

00:20:07.100 now that attacks on free speech are tied to emotional harm, and the idea that people need

00:20:12.540 to be protected, and that their feelings are hurt, I do think that it's just an honest,

00:20:17.380 like, truth that that just speaks to the female proclivities a little bit more. 1.00

00:20:21.220 And so, in some aspects, and I suppose some more antisocial people, that becomes a really

00:20:26.460 militant response that they act on when they feel as though they're able to be the arbiters

00:20:32.320 of justice and to protect weaker, more vulnerable people, in just like a pure emotional sense,

00:20:38.420 I would say, as well.

00:20:39.080 Yeah, or they pretend a kind of genuine feminine compassion and use that as a mask to cover 0.99

00:20:48.260 their actual antisocial motivations, right?

00:20:50.540 Because the borderline personality types and the real psychopaths, this is particularly

00:20:55.620 true on the female side in relationships, say, to borderline pathology, they use self-proclaimed 1.00

00:21:02.120 stories of victimization as manipulative techniques.

00:21:05.200 And part of the reason for that is that if you're really serpentine in your capacity

00:21:10.580 to manipulate, you harness the person that you're manipulating, you harness their compassion,

00:21:19.220 right?

00:21:19.560 Because that's a very effective way of hiding from them your predatory proclivities.

00:21:25.040 It's extremely dangerous.

00:21:26.520 And so I have a question for you, a deeper question, Ricky.

00:21:30.240 And so this is a horrible question.

00:21:31.680 I don't think anybody's ever raised it.

00:21:33.340 So I am not convinced that higher education institutions and maybe institutions in general,

00:21:43.380 why should we be convinced that they can survive if females run them? 1.00

00:21:47.980 And here's, I'm not saying they can't, but I'm going to present the counter argument just

00:21:52.760 for the sake of getting myself in all sorts of trouble.

00:21:56.300 Here's what I see happening.

00:21:57.980 I mean, first of all, or what may be happening, childless women infantilize other people because 1.00

00:22:06.060 they don't have an infant.

00:22:07.620 And so female administrators infantilize their students, female professors infantilize their 1.00

00:22:13.140 graduate students.

00:22:14.840 They use that fundamental impetus to protect.

00:22:18.760 They misuse it, misapply it.

00:22:20.720 Now that's well-documented proclivity in the clinical literature.

00:22:23.780 The psychoanalysts documented that starting with Freud.

00:22:26.720 That's the devouring mother fundamentally. 1.00

00:22:29.580 So, and then we have no historical data suggesting that women as such can organize large-scale social 1.00

00:22:37.940 institutions because as the feminists themselves have claimed forever, they were either not doing 1.00

00:22:44.360 that or excluded from it forever.

00:22:46.060 However, and it may be naive to assume that that's just something that women can do, even 1.00

00:22:51.520 though that's, as I said, there's no historical, there's no historical precedent for it.

00:22:57.560 Now, I did research in 2016 before I had to stop, fold up my research enterprise entirely.

00:23:05.700 We were looking at what predicted authoritarian politically correct beliefs.

00:23:10.100 And we did a very careful job.

00:23:12.260 The first thing we did was analyze political beliefs to see if there were a collection of

00:23:17.340 coherent beliefs that you could identify as authoritarian politically correct.

00:23:21.380 And there clearly was.

00:23:22.300 So it's not just a right-wing conspiracy theory that such a complex of ideas exists.

00:23:28.040 And then we looked at what predicted the proclivity to believe in those ideas.

00:23:32.400 And the first predictor was low verbal intelligence.

00:23:36.260 And it was a walloping predictor.

00:23:37.960 It predicted politically correct authoritarianism better than general cognitive ability predicts

00:23:42.740 grades.

00:23:43.400 So that was quite shocking to us.

00:23:45.080 But the next best predictor was being female. 0.99

00:23:47.280 And the next best predictor was having a feminine temperament. 1.00

00:23:51.420 And so, you know, all that together makes up a pretty damn brutal story.

00:23:55.740 And so, you said, both of you said that, you know, you're very much hoping to reach out

00:24:01.320 to women.

00:24:02.860 And fair enough.

00:24:04.660 And obviously, there are women like Ricky who adopt viewpoints that aren't totalitarian 1.00

00:24:11.700 compassionate, let's say.

00:24:13.920 But something's very strange in higher academia and in our institutions overall.

00:24:20.560 And I think toxic femininity is a very much under-discussed phenomenon.

00:24:28.060 So, well, with that, have at it.

00:24:30.840 Because like anything I said that you think is wrong, boy, I'd sure like to hear it.

00:24:36.160 Well, I definitely can only really provide anecdata to the survey data that you have.

00:24:41.200 But I would definitely say that in my experience, the people that have been most militant in circles

00:24:46.640 of higher education have been my fellow students and also professors as well.

00:24:53.100 But I think that, you know, regardless of whether there's on the mean of women is to lean that way

00:25:00.860 further one way or another, like we can't change that aspect of nature.

00:25:04.660 And one thing that I do think that we can change just going into the inevitable future of more women 1.00

00:25:09.620 in these institutions is making sure two things.

00:25:12.680 First, I think from the root of education, just as young as kindergarten, we need to emphasize

00:25:19.760 rationality and stop like feeding into kids' emotions and just saying you're always right

00:25:26.140 and you're totally valid and you do you.

00:25:29.740 And if you're upset about this or if you feel harmed by this, then we need to empower you

00:25:34.680 to accept that reality.

00:25:35.780 I think that we, like that's what the coddling of the American mind talked about.

00:25:38.720 And I think that that really hijacks women's psyches more. 1.00

00:25:42.660 And I think that we need to, from the start of education, emphasize rationality that emotions

00:25:47.660 are a valid part of the human experience, but that they should not lead your rational,

00:25:53.340 common sense kind of mindset.

00:25:55.880 So I think that's one thing.

00:25:57.060 And I think the other thing is also making sure that our universities can maintain a balance

00:26:02.860 that's more healthy than the balance that we have right now.

00:26:04.900 Because like I think of Richard Reeves and his research in boys and men falling behind.

00:26:09.900 And so I think it's a combination of having to make sure that we can foster young men who

00:26:15.280 are able to take up leadership roles in higher education.

00:26:18.860 I think that the education system by and large is fairly feminized and it definitely feeds more 1.00

00:26:24.640 into female strengths than male strengths, especially given the fact that girls tend to develop 1.00

00:26:29.820 a couple of years earlier than boys.

00:26:31.260 And so I think that that's another thing that we, you know, maybe it's as simple as red-shirting

00:26:35.420 boys and making sure that we have more young men who will end up in those leadership positions

00:26:39.640 in the end.

00:26:40.220 Because having a 60-40 split, which I think is what the current situation is in higher

00:26:44.800 education right now, is not healthy, I don't think, for the future or for society.

00:26:48.740 No one side should be falling behind so dramatically and so quickly over the past couple decades.

00:26:53.740 So those would be my two things to point to on that front.

00:26:57.380 Okay, so let's talk about that.

00:26:59.560 So the first question you might ask is, if there is a feminine proclivity to prioritize 0.97

00:27:06.800 emotion, why might that be?

00:27:09.040 And I would say there's two reasons, one which is nested in the other.

00:27:15.780 So women are higher in trait neuroticism, which makes them more prone to feeling negative emotion. 0.98

00:27:20.840 They feel it more frequently and more powerfully.

00:27:23.480 And that's extraordinarily well-documented phenomena cross-culturally.

00:27:27.340 I don't think any psychologist who knows the literature would doubt it.

00:27:30.360 And it's buttressed by the fact that there are sex differences in different forms of

00:27:34.900 psychopathology.

00:27:36.020 So men, for example, are over-represented in alcoholism and in violent antisocial proclivity.

00:27:41.620 But women are radically over-represented in depression and anxiety.

00:27:45.980 And that's also true cross-culturally.

00:27:48.060 So women feel negative emotions more intensely. 0.98

00:27:50.640 Now, then you might ask, well, why is that?

00:27:53.600 And the answer seems to be, well, it has something to do with sexual maturation, because the differences

00:27:59.480 in temperament aren't there in childhood.

00:28:01.480 They appear with sexual maturation.

00:28:03.840 And the reason for that, here's three reasons.

00:28:06.400 One is, well, women are smaller than men at physical maturation. 0.99

00:28:10.900 And so they should be less, they should be more anxiety-prone in a physical conflict.

00:28:17.600 And that should co-occur with puberty, because that's when the size and strength differential

00:28:21.880 kicks in.

00:28:22.920 Then women are much more sexually vulnerable than men, because, of course, they can get 0.60

00:28:26.740 pregnant and they have to bear the cost of that. 1.00

00:28:29.000 And then, probably more importantly, women have to take primary responsibility for early-stage 1.00

00:28:35.860 infant care.

00:28:36.660 And the thing about infants is, all they have is emotion to communicate, and more importantly,

00:28:44.260 possibly, their emotions have to be regarded as 100% valid and correct, right?

00:28:50.940 Because if you're a good mother, and I saw this with my wife, who, by the way, is not particularly

00:28:56.020 agreeable and is very low in neuroticism, she would respond to her infant's distress, like,

00:29:03.040 in a microsecond.

00:29:04.800 And that was extremely helpful.

00:29:07.340 And it is the case that because human infants are born so helpless, so neotenous, that they

00:29:15.800 have to be attended to with great care.

00:29:19.080 And they have to be treated as if their distress is 100% valid.

00:29:24.420 Now, you've got to stop doing that at about nine months of age.

00:29:27.300 And that's a hard transition for women to make. 1.00

00:29:30.460 And so, I have this sinking feeling that the default female ethical proclivity is to prioritize 1.00

00:29:39.840 emotion, to attribute to it 100% validity, because that serves infants best, and that that

00:29:48.060 bleeds out into the relationships that women establish when they produce large-scale social 1.00

00:29:55.020 institutions.

00:29:55.680 Now, you said, and fair enough, you know, possibly we could prioritize rationality over

00:30:02.220 emotionality, and we could start doing that in kindergarten.

00:30:04.980 But I guess the counterposition would be, hey, you know, that's what we were doing.

00:30:11.300 And then the consequence of having women flood into these institutions is that was instantly 1.00

00:30:16.200 inverted.

00:30:17.600 And so, maybe education can do something about that, and maybe not.

00:30:24.640 So, and it's not like I'm happy about this, or even that I believe it, although, you know,

00:30:30.740 it's a hard argument for me to escape from.

00:30:33.220 I'm certainly not happy about it.

00:30:34.660 I think it's completely bloody dismal.

00:30:37.120 But unless, see, Greg, you said earlier something really kicked around in 2014, right?

00:30:43.520 Something shifted.

00:30:44.480 And the biggest shift in the last 20 years is definitely on the sex balance in universities.

00:30:52.960 Like, that's the most stunning transformation.

00:30:56.400 So, have at it.

00:30:58.180 Greg, what do you think about all this?

00:30:59.700 Sure.

00:30:59.940 Well, when it comes to whether, you know, feminization of institutions, it's a fact.

00:31:07.960 Feminization of politics, feminization of corporations or higher education. 0.89

00:31:12.080 And we just have to figure out ways to make, to not give up on these institutions because

00:31:18.220 they become feminized.

00:31:19.160 Now, I do have some hope there, partially because I, you know, I'm, I think that men have been

00:31:26.620 able to reflect on downsides of masculinity, including things like excessive machismo, which

00:31:33.580 can be very destructive.

00:31:35.280 And I've certainly seen that in my own life and among my own friends, that there's a kind 1.00

00:31:40.600 of dangerousness and stupidity that men have as well. 0.99

00:31:42.780 Now, as a society gets more feminized, I don't think it's going to take forever for people 0.99

00:31:49.160 to start realizing that a more feminized society also has its own unique downsides and for people

00:31:53.660 to, especially women, to push back against some of these.

00:31:56.920 And there certainly are women out there who are pushing against it. 1.00

00:32:00.100 I should note that some of the best champions against cancel culture are themselves women. 1.00

00:32:05.160 Alice Dreger, Megan Daum, Bridget Fetze.

00:32:09.620 There's a long list of people who have actually really.

00:32:12.780 JK Rowling, who have really, really stood up against this.

00:32:15.640 Yeah.

00:32:15.800 So I think that, yeah, I think that by nature, you know, different genders, and this is actually, 0.75

00:32:20.900 of course, the fact that saying this is radioactive, I think it's just absolutely ridiculous. 0.65

00:32:25.140 Talking about the different genders have different strengths and weaknesses. 0.82

00:32:27.920 That's a fact.

00:32:29.200 But we, we have, we do have a not bad track record of learning how to recognize what were

00:32:35.600 our strengths and weaknesses and get past them.

00:32:37.980 And, and we're going to have to, because it's not like a higher ed is going to, is going to suddenly

00:32:43.000 have good gender balance, like immediately.

00:32:47.680 But one of the things that we really do try to point out in the book and a major part of the book

00:32:51.180 is we talk about different kinds of rhetorical fortresses.

00:32:54.660 Um, and what we mean by that are really creative and some not very creative ways of getting out

00:33:01.280 of addressing someone's actual argument.

00:33:03.580 And we talk, we, we first go through the ones that left and right, and basically all human

00:33:07.340 entity uses, which we call the minefield and the obstacle course.

00:33:09.840 But then when we get to on the left, we go through this thing that we call the perfect

00:33:13.500 rhetorical fortress.

00:33:14.340 It is just this exquisite maze of dodges, uh, all over the place of ways to not have to

00:33:20.460 address your, your, your, the person's argument.

00:33:22.540 And we even go through that, what we call the, the first one, by the way, is labeling someone

00:33:26.720 conservative.

00:33:27.820 Um, and this worked back when, back when I was in law school, I'm embarrassed to admit,

00:33:31.620 and I, and I, I, I, I'm, I'm very embarrassed to admit it worked on me that essentially

00:33:36.180 if you could label a writer as.

00:33:39.840 Starting a business can be tough, but thanks to Shopify, running your online storefront is

00:33:44.320 easier than ever.

00:33:45.720 Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business

00:33:49.820 from the launch your online shop stage, all the way to the, did we just hit a million

00:33:53.700 orders stage?

00:33:54.920 Shopify is here to help you grow.

00:33:57.200 Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise.

00:34:00.280 And we love how easy it is to add more items, ship products, and track conversions.

00:34:05.120 With Shopify, customize your online store to your style with flexible templates and powerful

00:34:09.640 tools alongside an endless list of integrations and third-party apps, like on-demand printing,

00:34:14.860 accounting, and chatbots.

00:34:16.620 Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout,

00:34:20.880 up to 36% better compared to other leading e-commerce platforms.

00:34:24.960 No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control

00:34:28.800 and take your business to the next level.

00:34:31.360 Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp, all lowercase.

00:34:37.320 Go to shopify.com slash jbp now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in.

00:34:42.640 That's shopify.com slash jbp.

00:34:45.020 Yeah, that if you could label a writer as conservative, then suddenly you took them less seriously.

00:34:52.240 And that that was something that I'm embarrassed to admit.

00:34:55.800 So that's level one. 0.98

00:34:57.000 And that's just ridiculous. 0.97

00:34:57.980 That's the way children argue. 0.93

00:34:59.720 But then we take through the entire demographic funnel.

00:35:02.240 And of course, you can dismiss someone on the basis of gender, on the basis of sex,

00:35:05.800 on the basis of race, on the basis of etc.

00:35:08.540 And we get you down the demographic funnel to about 0.4% of the entire population of the U.S.

00:35:15.340 And then say, and by the way, none of it actually mattered.

00:35:17.520 Because if you have the wrong opinion, like J.K. Rowling, or for that matter,

00:35:21.400 black conservatives, you're still discounted anyway.

00:35:25.280 And one thing that really kind of gave truth to the lies, 0.96

00:35:28.200 I talked to every black conservative writer and black moderate that I know.

00:35:33.060 All of them said they've been told they're not really black for having the wrong opinion.

00:35:38.100 So it's really more of a dogma protection system.

00:35:41.860 So I do think that there is hope that if we basically, even if we can just establish,

00:35:46.800 get back to rules we all know are better for finding truth and get away from this ridiculous

00:35:51.620 way of arguing that literally has no hope of getting you towards the truth and actually

00:35:56.660 waste time to just get to whatever your opinion is, that if you can focus on constructive

00:36:02.200 ways of arguing, there is still some hope.

00:36:04.240 I would also add that I see some hope in alternative educational methods that are popping up,

00:36:10.440 especially post-COVID.

00:36:12.020 And I think part of the problem is the education schools are so politicized in America and so

00:36:18.900 feminized.

00:36:20.060 And also at the same time, you have the vast majority of teachers, especially at younger

00:36:24.800 grades who are women.

00:36:26.200 And so ideological too, the education schools.

00:36:28.260 Absolutely.

00:36:29.100 And I think that those schools tap into those instincts and those negative feminine instincts 1.00

00:36:36.480 that you're talking about, Dr. Peterson.

00:36:37.840 And I think that especially post-COVID, now that we're looking at different models and

00:36:41.660 different educational forms and different ways that parents can be involved or positive male

00:36:47.620 role models can be involved in education from the start, I think that that has the upstream

00:36:53.480 effect, hopefully, of counterbalancing some of the excesses that we see in our universities

00:36:59.540 today.

00:37:00.680 I honestly think that mechanisms that allow people to completely sidestep higher education

00:37:06.780 is actually, in some cases, our best hope for making higher education better.

00:37:10.500 Because right now, you go to Harvard.

00:37:13.960 Who knows if you're...

00:37:15.420 It's a good guess that you're probably pretty smart and work pretty hard in high school,

00:37:18.680 but not necessarily.

00:37:20.260 You could also be kind of a major donor or let in on an athletic scholarship.

00:37:26.240 And the average grade, GPA now at Harvard, is 3.8, which is like an A+.

00:37:33.340 So right now, we have at least an opportunity that schools, like really prestigious elite

00:37:38.360 schools, are no longer very good markers of who are going to be your best hires or who are

00:37:42.840 going to be your best employees.

00:37:44.060 Because they might be smart, they might not be.

00:37:46.240 You can't really tell if they learned anything because they all get 3.8s.

00:37:49.720 And they also are likely to come with them a very difficult to work with kind of idea

00:37:55.280 of, you know, my workplace is oppressive.

00:37:58.140 Meanwhile, if there are ways for hardworking, smart kids to be able to show that they are

00:38:04.220 conscientious, that they're able to read at a high level, and that they are the hardest

00:38:10.400 working and best and brightest, that can be done actually really inexpensively.

00:38:14.900 And if we start actually looking at some of these alternative ways of educating yourself,

00:38:20.820 it will scare elite colleges like crazy.

00:38:24.220 And I mean, and I tried to practice what I preach here because originally, like we had

00:38:27.100 a policy, and I didn't realize this, that we have a policy that we wouldn't hire non-degree 1.00

00:38:31.860 holders.

00:38:33.280 When this was pointed out to me, when we were considering hiring Ricky, I'm like, oh my

00:38:37.460 God, I'm not practicing what I preach here.

00:38:39.280 We have to get rid of this policy.

00:38:40.640 And I think more places should because there's going to be a lot of really super smart people

00:38:45.600 who are smart enough to see that they should opt out of higher ed as it currently exists

00:38:50.200 and try to figure out, to show that they're the best, brightest, hardest working in different

00:38:54.180 ways.

00:38:55.820 We're going to launch a new university in November called Peterson Academy.

00:39:00.180 And I've spent a lot of time researching objective assessment methods for general cognitive ability

00:39:08.040 and for conscientiousness.

00:39:09.520 And the universities have left that all on the table, and it's of unbelievable economic

00:39:14.140 worth.

00:39:14.660 And my sense is, is that a system that would actually provide a genuine assessment and

00:39:20.860 accreditation of people based on their intellectual merit and their ability to work hard would

00:39:25.480 be of incalculable economic value and could supplant the universities very rapidly.

00:39:30.340 That is what should happen.

00:39:31.500 I had no idea you were working on that, by the way.

00:39:33.460 Oh yeah, man.

00:39:34.000 I just completely stumbled into that.

00:39:35.500 We've got 30 great professors already up.

00:39:37.860 We think we can knock the price of a degree equivalent down to $4,000.

00:39:42.380 So, which I think would be absolutely hilarious.

00:39:44.760 Yeah.

00:39:45.300 So, Ricky, I should point out here, you know, I went after women pretty hard, and I think rightly 1.00

00:39:51.640 so in some ways, but I want to point some things out that I know too, just so you know and

00:39:57.200 everybody listening knows where I stand.

00:39:59.620 The data on ability with regards to men and women is pretty damn clear.

00:40:04.300 Men and women have virtually identical levels of general cognitive ability.

00:40:09.680 There might be some additional variability in men, although that's disputable, but fundamentally

00:40:14.980 half the intellectual capital in the world is in the hands of women. 1.00

00:40:18.120 And we'd be absolutely fools not to make full use of that, right?

00:40:22.860 And we know too that countries that have a better record of rights for women and also

00:40:30.940 providing better access to women on the educational front, they do way better economically.

00:40:36.380 It's not even close.

00:40:38.240 And so, it's obviously the case that it would be to the benefit of everyone if we could harness

00:40:43.340 the full potential talent of people, regardless of sex, you know, the old liberal dream.

00:40:50.920 That doesn't solve the problem of the fact that we're corrupting our institutions at a

00:40:55.960 rate that's absolutely beyond comprehension.

00:40:57.740 But it does mean that, you know, we're not going to put the genie back in the bottle,

00:41:02.540 and neither should we.

00:41:03.680 If we can, as we have, if we can free up women so that they can have their families and their 1.00

00:41:10.000 relationships, just like men, and they can produce and explore and create in relative

00:41:17.000 freedom, obviously that would be better for everyone.

00:41:19.360 I just wanted to make that clear.

00:41:21.020 I want to put out one more pessimistic observation that you guys can comment on, and then maybe

00:41:26.700 we'll turn to FIRE for a minute and your recent rankings of freedom on campus.

00:41:31.700 Well, so we have this potential problem of the feminization of the institutions and the rise 0.89

00:41:41.080 of politically correct authoritarian doctrine and the cancel culture that's emerged out of

00:41:47.160 that.

00:41:47.380 We've talked a little bit about that.

00:41:49.620 I guess, I think maybe we're in a perfect storm.

00:41:54.160 Because if it's true that antisocial female behavior in particular scales extremely well 1.00

00:42:01.580 on social media, maybe what we're seeing is this weird, unexpected interaction where we

00:42:07.300 have, you know, the emergence of female-dominated institutions at exactly the same time. 1.00

00:42:12.620 We have this immense technological capacity that we never had before that enables the worst

00:42:18.060 of feminine-like behavior to make itself fully manifest in the public sphere. 0.69

00:42:22.960 Now, I know that lots of trolls online, by the way, are men, and perhaps even the majority

00:42:27.360 of them, but that's not precisely the point.

00:42:31.540 The point is that it's reputation-savaging, gossiping, and innuendo that the net does particularly

00:42:37.040 well, and that puts us all in a, well, it exacerbates, it might be exaggerating substantially

00:42:44.020 the detrimental effects that we're also seeing as a consequence of the rapid sex transformation 1.00

00:42:49.940 in our institutions.

00:42:51.040 So, Greg, I don't know if you have any thoughts about that, if what you think about that as

00:42:55.680 a potential observation.

00:42:58.840 I think that when you pointed to the sex difference being the major change that we saw in 2014,

00:43:06.440 and I know it's almost become a cliche, I really do think that the big change that allowed for

00:43:11.960 cancel culture more than anything else is a massive technological shift.

00:43:15.620 And when I was in law school, I did six credits on censorship during the Tudor dynasty, and

00:43:21.460 because I'm a First Amendment nerd, and our theory of prior restraint in the United States

00:43:27.040 and First Amendment law comes actually out of the old print licensing scheme in Tudor and

00:43:31.060 Stuart, England.

00:43:31.620 And I actually studied a lot of the first person who licensed printers in England, which was

00:43:39.620 Henry VIII.

00:43:40.880 And you can see from 1521 to 1538 this desire to put the genie back in the bottle, as you

00:43:48.180 say.

00:43:48.440 But the simple fact is that when you introduce a huge number of additional people to a global

00:43:56.600 conversation, it is unavoidable that you'll enter an anarchical period.

00:44:02.480 You're going to enter a crazy period because, yes, printing press, long term, great benefits

00:44:08.900 to it.

00:44:09.580 Short term, increase in the witch trials, absolutely crazy bloody wars of religion that it led to 0.87

00:44:16.660 some short term, really horrific results.

00:44:19.920 And what we've just done, particularly with the rise of social media, is we've done something,

00:44:23.720 and people really have to appreciate the scale of this.

00:44:27.260 We just made it possible, due to largely social media and the internet, over an incredibly short

00:44:31.580 period of time, to introduce billions of additional eyes and mouths to a discussion.

00:44:38.700 And when you have that many critical eyes on a problem, you can tear down any person, and

00:44:44.300 that's cancel culture, any idea or any institution.

00:44:48.200 But I think that the pessimism that we have right now is partially because, and my co-author,

00:44:53.620 John Haidt, and so many other people are trying to figure out ways to put the social media genie

00:44:58.080 back in the bottle.

00:44:58.960 And I'm the one telling, I was like, I've got bad news for you.

00:45:02.440 There is no way to avoid this being a crazy period.

00:45:04.800 However, cultures adapt.

00:45:06.140 People do actually learn new cultural ways of adapting to major technological shifts.

00:45:13.480 And over a period of time, it actually turned out that those extra million eyes that the

00:45:18.460 printing press brought onto problems were incredibly good at actually getting towards truth, because

00:45:24.180 you had mass disconfirmation.

00:45:26.420 You had that many more people reading something could actually point out falsity much faster.

00:45:32.460 And that's the way you get to truth, mostly, is just by chipping away at falsity.

00:45:35.500 And I feel like there is, I have not stopped being, at least to some degree, a techno-optimist,

00:45:41.800 because I think once you have an extra billion eyes on a problem, you can actually solve some

00:45:46.800 problems much more thoroughly and much more quickly if you're not using it just to gossip,

00:45:52.640 just to cancel people, just to, if you use it to argue towards truth.

00:45:56.560 And that's something that we really emphasize in the book.

00:46:00.020 It's like, listen, social media as it currently exists, there could be a better way.

00:46:03.240 And I know that they're all small companies trying to actually figure out ways to argue

00:46:06.820 towards truth.

00:46:08.540 So the short-term pessimism that we all feel, it doesn't have to be this way forever.

00:46:13.640 And I think that when you alluded to the idea that there are some reasons to be wildly

00:46:17.140 optimistic as well, you know, like I think we're both there talking about potential technological

00:46:21.960 advances that really could, you know, save the species, so to speak.

00:46:26.220 So I do think that long-term, a lot of the problems that we're seeing right now are the

00:46:32.220 early problems created by something that will ultimately prove to be a positive shift.

00:46:38.420 Yeah, well, your comments about what happened after the printing press was enabled are very

00:46:43.680 interesting.

00:46:44.420 I mean, so what's essentially happening, according to your analysis, is that the territory of public

00:46:53.140 discourse has expanded extremely rapidly twice in the last 500 years, once with the introduction

00:46:59.300 of the printing press and now once with the introduction really, well, of a variety of

00:47:04.880 modes of communication that were not there before, including long-term video and audio and

00:47:09.940 the permanence of those.

00:47:11.260 And then the fact that people can communicate with a pin stroke with millions of people.

00:47:16.820 So we've expanded the polity of free speech dramatically.

00:47:20.920 Now, you could make the case, and I think this is what you're doing, that there's going to be a

00:47:25.260 lag before the institutions catch up, right?

00:47:27.980 And those would be the cultural norm institutions, but also the rules and regulations, the laws.

00:47:33.540 It's the Wild West.

00:47:35.200 And what that means is in the Wild West, while the psychopaths have an opportunity to flourish,

00:47:40.720 at least temporarily, till everybody figures out how to get them back under control.

00:47:45.720 Yeah, the problem I see, that's fair enough, and you could well be right.

00:47:49.640 The problem I see is that, well, there's a bunch of problems, is that the way that psychopaths,

00:47:57.000 the manipulative types, are held responsible is that people eventually learn who they are,

00:48:01.800 right?

00:48:02.420 So, well, first of all, if you're enough of a prick in face-to-face contact with people, 0.98

00:48:07.380 especially among men, you're going to get punched.

00:48:09.300 And so that tends to keep that down as long as you're in embodied form and a few feet away

00:48:14.020 from each other.

00:48:14.660 And, of course, that disappears if you're separated, which is why people are more aggressive

00:48:20.040 when they yell inside their own cars, for example.

00:48:23.280 And it's completely gone.

00:48:24.560 Yes.

00:48:24.820 Well, right, exactly.

00:48:25.760 It's a very well-known phenomenon.

00:48:27.060 And it completely vanishes online.

00:48:29.960 Now, the problem is with online communication is there's no iterability in it, right?

00:48:34.640 Because you can poke someone hard and then run away and never see them again.

00:48:38.700 So there's no constraint of iterability, which is a big problem.

00:48:42.300 And you can do this anonymously.

00:48:44.940 You know, and I've gone after the online anonymous trolls, and I know the literature indicating

00:48:50.540 that online anonymous troublemaking trolls tend to have dark tetrad personality types. 0.74

00:48:56.220 And they all bitch at me because they think, well, we have to be anonymous because, you know, 0.99

00:49:00.700 we're heroic whistleblowers and otherwise we'll be canceled. 0.95

00:49:03.220 It's like, no, one of you in 10,000 is a heroic whistleblower and the rest of you are just

00:49:07.580 the sorts of pricks who sit in their basement and poke at things who would immediately get

00:49:12.340 punched in high school.

00:49:13.880 And that's gone.

00:49:15.600 And so, but I can't see a way, like, one of the things I've thought through is the fact

00:49:21.580 that, you know, the social media companies could separate the anonymous types from the

00:49:26.780 people who had actual verifiable identities.

00:49:29.860 But I'm also afraid of verifiable identity because that takes us down the whole digital

00:49:34.500 identity route.

00:49:35.480 And that's, God, man, look what's happened in China.

00:49:37.960 That's just, that does look like fun to me.

00:49:39.780 Look what's happened in Canada.

00:49:41.060 Well, oh yeah, Canada.

00:49:43.200 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:49:45.260 I know, well, people in Canada, they say, well, you keep warning that free speech is in danger.

00:49:49.580 It's like, no, no, guys, I'm warning you that free speech in Canada is already gone.

00:49:54.500 It's not in danger.

00:49:56.240 It's already gone.

00:49:57.360 And, you know, to the degree that that's the case in places like the U.S., it's debatable.

00:50:02.040 But I don't think it's debatable in Canada.

00:50:04.220 It's just that people haven't woken up to it.

00:50:06.440 Anyways, you are optimistic.

00:50:08.420 But with that optimism, I mean, what do you see?

00:50:11.580 I'm a little mixed.

00:50:12.560 Okay, okay.

00:50:13.320 Well, fair enough.

00:50:14.140 Fair enough.

00:50:14.740 You know, I mean, we're in very, very variable times, let's say.

00:50:20.340 I'd call myself hopeful.

00:50:21.860 Okay, well, what do you see?

00:50:23.080 Not quite optimistic.

00:50:23.460 I mean, you've thought about this a lot, both of you.

00:50:25.600 What do you see that might actually be done concretely to regulate this proclivity towards cancel culture without also, you know, I see what Christopher Rufo and people like him are doing in Florida, you know, and I have some real sympathy for their attempts.

00:50:40.320 But I can easily see that going astray, too.

00:50:43.000 You know, once the politicians enter the fray of ideas, I mean, how could that go wrong?

00:50:49.200 I mean, it's going to go wrong real fast, right?

00:50:52.000 Yeah, real fast.

00:50:52.860 Real fast.

00:50:53.700 Yeah, absolutely, man.

00:50:54.820 Because most of these ideas have to be beat in the realm of ideas, as far as I can tell.

00:50:59.180 Yeah.

00:50:59.500 Right?

00:51:00.140 So what do you see as concrete steps that are positive that we could take moving forward, say, within the universities?

00:51:06.300 Hey, everyone.

00:51:08.720 Real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

00:51:12.960 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.

00:51:19.300 We 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.

00:51:26.560 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.

00:51:33.880 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.

00:51:41.820 If you're suffering, please know you are not alone.

00:51:44.980 There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.

00:51:48.260 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.

00:51:53.920 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:52:01.500 Yeah, no, absolutely.

00:52:03.220 And what's funny is, you know, I end up, you know, arguing with Rufo about reforms.

00:52:09.060 And step number one, and I believe profoundly in higher education reform, but step number one of reform is you have to pass something that actually is legal, is actually not going to be immediately laughed out of court.

00:52:20.660 And so this is what we warned about some of the regulations that they were trying in Florida.

00:52:24.960 Because I'm a First Amendment lawyer.

00:52:27.100 And we looked at the Stop Woke Act that DeSantis, you know, came out with them like, no, no, no, no, no.

00:52:31.960 That's going, that will never survive judicial scrutiny.

00:52:34.640 And by the way, we are principled and nonpartisan and will be one of the ones to sue them.

00:52:38.680 But definitely, even if we didn't, the ACLU is going to sue.

00:52:41.280 And you're going to lose.

00:52:42.540 And you're going to lose very clearly.

00:52:44.320 And you're going to waste oxygen of the reform movement.

00:52:46.720 You're going to achieve nothing.

00:52:47.840 You're going to give them a new boogeyman.

00:52:49.340 It will get you nowhere.

00:52:50.760 And so far, that's exactly what happened.

00:52:54.120 Meanwhile, some of the other reforms that DeSantis was talking about were great ideas.

00:52:58.420 When it came to, you know, for example, having, you know, as part of orientation, debate series where you actually have people argue about the most radioactive topics in the country, that could be amazing.

00:53:10.100 Talking about free speech and orientation could be amazing.

00:53:12.860 I think that reducing the bureaucracy is something I've been saying for decades.

00:53:18.620 A lot of the worst things that are happening for freedom of speech at first, for the first part of my career, they were overwhelmingly coming from the ranks of administrators.

00:53:26.420 And then in 2014, they started coming from the students as well.

00:53:31.960 Now, people sometimes think what I'm saying is it used to be administrators and now it's students.

00:53:36.460 No.

00:53:37.480 Now it's administrators and students and usually and students they like.

00:53:41.980 So like what happened at Stanford, my alma mater, when they, you know, shouted down Judge Kyle Duncan, you know, that very much seemed to be a collaboration between some administrators in the DEI programs and students themselves to do a shout down there.

00:53:56.420 So I think a deep bureaucratized university will have more, will have more free speech.

00:54:02.480 It will have more due process and it will have fewer of these, fewer of these incidents.

00:54:07.060 But I also think we desperately need the kind of experimentation that you're doing and University of Texas at Austin is doing, Minerva University out in San Francisco.

00:54:15.880 Like ways that actually can perform better at much lower costs that can actually tell you who the best and brightest and most hardworking are out there.

00:54:25.160 And your point about the laws going horribly wrong, that essentially if you think you can just get rid of bad ideas on campus through legislation, well, I've got bad news for you.

00:54:36.020 They're already trying to do that all across the country.

00:54:38.620 They're just coming at it from the left rather than the right.

00:54:41.320 And I'm very proud that we were able to find, because we've been looking, Dr. Peterson, we've been looking for this for a long time.

00:54:47.260 We wanted to find a really good, terrible DEI policy to shoot down in court to make it clear that this is compelled speech.

00:54:56.940 This is against academic freedom.

00:54:58.620 This is utterly inappropriate for a place that's supposed to be the marketplace of ideas.

00:55:02.120 And we found that, unsurprisingly, in California.

00:55:06.240 And the California community college system had a system that actually requires you, and this includes whether you're a chemistry professor or an English professor, to incorporate, what is it called, intersectionality, anti-racism, which is Kendi's idea.

00:55:25.080 To incorporate all of these ideological things that a lot of people don't even believe are true to begin with, but that you have to actually incorporate in your classroom, regardless of what you teach, and regardless of whether or not you disagree with them or not.

00:55:38.260 So we brought this in court, and it's been very funny to me, watching people who were totally with us when we litigated against the StopWoke Act, freaking out.

00:55:48.100 They were litigating against the DEI in tyranny, and making the point that, and I just argue back to them, like, no, this is a gross violation.

00:55:58.320 And I always make the point that telling people what they can't say is really bad, and we will always fight it.

00:56:03.140 Telling people what they must say is a thousand times worse, and we will definitely fight that right away.

00:56:09.220 You know, that's what I objected to in Canada, and that's also why my license is on the line now, is because I am being told what I have to say, which is way different than what I can't say.

00:56:21.000 You know, it's a little bit of both, but yeah, it's stunning.

00:56:23.760 It's beyond comprehension.

00:56:25.000 It's totalitarian.

00:56:26.020 The other thing we found, by the way, in that research I referred to, was that if people had taken even one course that had a politically correct orientation, they were also much more likely to be politically correct authoritarian.

00:56:37.720 So this tactic that the radicals on the left have of gaining control of the education system, that's unbelievably effective.

00:56:46.000 Ricky, you mentioned earlier, this is something that's been an absolute bloody mystery to me.

00:56:50.660 I can't believe, you know, I'm not a fan of the Democrats in the U.S. for what that's worth, given that I'm Canadian, but the Republicans and the conservatives have their problems, and one of those problems is kind of short-sightedness.

00:57:03.840 It's like, I cannot believe, and I haven't had anyone explain this to me except Chris.

00:57:08.720 I talked to Chris Christie about this because he went to battle with the teachers' unions in New Jersey.

00:57:14.100 So, you know, the faculties of education have a monopolistic hammerlock on teacher certification, right?

00:57:20.420 And there's, like, absolutely no reason for that.

00:57:22.920 The faculties of education, to call their research dismal and misleading is to barely scrape the surface. 0.98

00:57:29.520 They got to stupid several decades before the rest of the universities. 0.96

00:57:33.880 They generally have the students who perform the worst academically, and so, and everything they teach is ideological and unfounded. 0.99

00:57:43.040 There's no evidence whatsoever that the faculties of education know anything whatsoever about making better students.

00:57:49.160 And yet, they have a hammerlock on teacher certification, and that essentially gives the progressive radicals access to 50% of the state budgets in the U.S.

00:58:01.160 So, it's no bloody wonder that the liberals, the real liberals, and the conservatives are losing the culture war.

00:58:07.380 I mean, they handed the children, and we've handed all the children to the faculties of education.

00:58:14.220 And for the life of me, I can't understand how conservatives can't see that.

00:58:17.900 And I just want to add one thing that we didn't know when Coddling of the American Mind came out, and we should have, is that we've been calling out education schools, you know, since we were founded at FIRE.

00:58:29.480 And one thing that we thought successfully, by the way, was the accreditation body for most education schools tried to have a social justice requirement, saying that you could not graduate with a degree in education unless you proved your commitment to social justice.

00:58:43.600 Which is, we're like, guys, if you don't see this as an obvious political litmus test, then I don't know what to say.

00:58:50.140 So, we got that defeated.

00:58:51.380 But of course, when you have a situation where only FIRE and some other groups are objecting to an obvious political litmus test, and it's considered just fine among other people in the field, then the problem's already gone way too far.

00:59:03.260 One thing we didn't know, though, is how much of the administration at universities come from education schools, and that we were way ahead of the curve fighting at University of Delaware back in 2007.

00:59:16.200 They had this absolutely crazy brainwashing program that involved, you know, people having mandatory meetings with their RAs where they had to confess to, they had to talk about, like, when they discovered their sexual identity. 0.99

00:59:29.040 And this was, in this case, like, one of the examples we had was a young woman, you know, being in a session with a man's room being asked this, and her answer was, none of your damn business. 0.96

00:59:39.080 And she actually got written up for that, and we're like, that's exactly the right call on that.

00:59:44.000 So, we've been fighting this for a long time, but we didn't actually fully understand how much of the distortions we see in higher ed as it currently exists actually come from the fact that the administrators who are enforcing these rules and enforcing the speech codes and enforcing the bias-related incident program policies are actually education school graduates themselves.

01:00:02.520 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, they're responsible also for the worst excesses of so-called psychological research in the last 60 years.

01:00:13.180 It's like the self-esteem movement, that was a complete bloody catastrophe.

01:00:17.300 That was the first time that the universe, or that the schools, set out to actually produce neurotic narcissists, and they did that quite successfully.

01:00:25.380 They pushed whole word learning, which plummeted California from top of the national standings in literacy to bottom within about 10 years, right, predicated on the idea that just because expert readers could read a word at a glance, that we should teach children to do the same, even though we have a phonetic alphabet, which might have been a hint, right?

01:00:46.600 The education schools produced multiple intelligences, which was a complete bloody fraud.

01:00:51.600 They produced practical intelligence, social, emotional learning, like it's just one destructive, counterproductive, anti-scientific fad after another.

01:01:02.080 And that's in addition to the fact that, while they're woke beyond comprehension, incompetent and generally have the worst students and the lowest academic standards.

01:01:10.820 So, the conservatives couldn't possibly have done a worse job of defending their own territory if they would have come up with a plan to do so.

01:01:20.240 So, Ricky, with what you're doing, like my daughter is pretty active on social media, and she has a background similar to yours.

01:01:29.840 I'd say her political leanings are probably approximately the same as yours, somewhat right-leaning libertarian.

01:01:35.260 And what sort of cancellation, et cetera, do you face online?

01:01:44.640 Like, I mean, I've read the comments directed towards my daughter, and I mean, the ones directed to me are pretty brutal, but women do face a level of brutality, especially personal attacks, often appearance-related, that men just don't face.

01:01:59.560 And so, what's that been like for you, and how, has it been a problem, and how do you defend yourself against that?

01:02:06.400 Look at the expression, yeah.

01:02:08.420 Yeah, I think, you know, I'm benefited by the fact that I grew up with social media, and I was on, this is one of the few upsides of that fact, that I've been on Instagram since I was 11, unfortunately.

01:02:18.880 But I do know how to deal with negative comments and negative feedback just from day one, essentially, of being an adolescent.

01:02:27.920 But I would say, yeah, when I did my first real foray into mass exposure and seeing what, you know, I tend to be, like, I kind of roll my eyes at the, like, misogyny.

01:02:41.340 And, like, a lot of my feminist friends who are seeing it in every corner, but, my God, when I did Bill Maher, did I see just, like, the wrath of God come for me in a way that was not coming for my co-panelists?

01:02:51.960 So, that definitely was a humbling experience.

01:02:55.640 I made the mistake of reading the Reddit threads and told myself, never again.

01:02:59.380 Now I know what's out there.

01:03:00.460 I know what they can come at me with.

01:03:02.400 But I would say, yeah, there was that, that definitely, weirdly, all people on the left I've found so far, at least when I am on conservative forums, maybe because they're more friendly to my ideology, I'd get less of that.

01:03:15.580 But certainly, a lot of the more left-leaning Bill Maher fans were less, less fans of mine than, than most of my audience.

01:03:22.840 Jordan, I tweeted out, you know, about, like how, like I said at the beginning, how lucky I felt to work with Rick Inge.

01:03:28.740 And we're, we're a great team, because I'm a, I'm a crazy overrider.

01:03:32.000 Hype was good at helping me with that, too.

01:03:33.780 I'll write 5,000 words that has to be boiled down to 500, you know, like that's, it's a problem.

01:03:38.580 And, and, and Ricky was constantly showing me that the thing that I took three pages to write that could actually be a perfect paragraph that actually was better than my three pages.

01:03:47.900 So, she's absolutely brilliant to work with.

01:03:50.080 And I, I mentioned this on Twitter.

01:03:52.500 And, of course, a lot of people who think of themselves as champion women and, and, and, you know, very progressive on the left.

01:03:58.740 Immediately, we're like, oh, you're just writing with her because she's a, because she's a skinny blonde who works for Fox. 0.93

01:04:03.540 And I was kind of like, wow, so you're just, I'm, I'm writing with her because she's brilliant.

01:04:08.420 And the funny thing is, we, we'd never met until probably like.

01:04:12.140 We met after we signed the book deal, actually, in person for the first time, which is funny.

01:04:16.420 Yeah.

01:04:16.580 So, this is a pandemic, a pandemic meeting of mine.

01:04:19.280 Although, it was kind of funny, like, because I was so impressed with her and my interactions with her was, was just like email and phone calls.

01:04:26.340 When I first saw her, I'm like, oh, my God, you really are a kid.

01:04:29.640 What was my response?

01:04:31.660 And, Dr. Peterson, if I may go back to your question about what we can do to actually solve cancel culture, I do have, you know, my, my expertise is certainly less professional, but more on the ground as a young person growing up in the age of cancel culture for as long as I can effectively remember.

01:04:49.080 And I have to tell you, one thing that I think is just so underappreciated is the fact that just courage is contagious.

01:04:56.880 And when I was at NYU, I learned, I learned the hard way that cancel culture thrives off of making everyone feel alone and as though they're the only person around them that thinks the way that they do.

01:05:07.900 It incentivizes you to close in on yourself, to not, to not share your beliefs.

01:05:12.160 And, you know, you could be sitting next to a roommate who feels the same way or someone across the hall.

01:05:17.300 And I was, when I first decided, my first article that was published was actually in the Daily Wire.

01:05:23.920 And when I first decided to put my name to an article, I was ready for everyone I knew to instantaneously hate me and disown me.

01:05:30.320 And some people, not huge fans of what I was writing, and that's fine.

01:05:34.360 But I found out that there were so many people that I was so close to in so many ways that actually shared a lot of my political beliefs or at least the core principles of classical liberalism or they respected me in a way that I didn't expect.

01:05:47.540 And even at a place like NYU, and I actually say this in our book, but when I was a freshman, I was hiding books under my bed, including your book, 12 Rules for Life, and Thomas Sowell's books.

01:05:58.760 So I had my, like, secret library underneath my bed, which I'm ashamed to admit, looking back.

01:06:03.760 But when you're an 18-year-old in a new place, yeah, exactly.

01:06:07.040 But when you're an 18-year-old in a new place, like, the incentives are to close in on yourself.

01:06:11.960 And as soon as I spoke out, I had administrators, professors, people that lived on my floor in my dorm, people that I was friends with for years.

01:06:19.200 And, like, if we can just prove that this is a tyranny of the minority, which it absolutely is statistically, even with Gen Z, even though our Gen Z politics are so out of control, if you look at what generations have a positive view of cancel culture, the most positive view is millennials.

01:06:35.580 It tapers down as you get older.

01:06:38.560 But the least positive view by far is Gen Z, because we grew up in it. 1.00

01:06:42.340 We know how awful it is to be a teenager with tripwires all around you.

01:06:46.620 And if we could just get more young people to say, you know what, here I am being open and honest and humble and criticize my beliefs, but they're out here and this is who I am, then the courage will be contagious.

01:06:57.460 I feel very confident in that fact.

01:06:58.900 Well, there's something I want to zero in on that, too.

01:07:01.540 So you tell me what your experience was.

01:07:04.020 So you said, you know, you were hesitant when you first started to write.

01:07:09.540 But so one of the things I've realized more clearly in the last five or six years is that the meaning that sustains you in life is certainly not a hedonic meaning.

01:07:25.900 And the reason for that, at least in part, is that, well, hedonism can make you impulsive and make you sacrifice the future for the present.

01:07:34.020 And it can alienate you from other people, because if you're hedonistically inclined, you'll use other people.

01:07:38.980 But there's a deeper reason why it's not reliable as a means of orientation.

01:07:44.300 And that is that if something terrible happens to you, hedonism isn't going to protect you because you're not happy when you're suffering.

01:07:51.520 And so if you're relying on a hedonistic viewpoint, then as soon as you're miserable, you're doomed.

01:07:58.380 So then you might say, well, what do you turn to to sustain you?

01:08:01.740 And you can think, well, you have your relationships, your loves and your interests and all of that.

01:08:05.840 And I think that that's crucial.

01:08:07.240 But there's something else that sustains you, too.

01:08:09.580 And I think this points deeply to what makes life actually meaningful.

01:08:14.000 And that is that adventure sustains you.

01:08:18.420 You know, and I think we're built for the kind of glorious adventures that we like to go watch on movies.

01:08:23.200 Maybe a romantic adventure.

01:08:24.900 That's the pinnacle of adventure, you know.

01:08:27.040 And then you might ask yourself, well, if you wanted to have an adventure, maybe a true romantic adventure,

01:08:33.460 that was even beyond the scope of your wildest dreams, how might you find that?

01:08:39.320 And I would say, well, you find that by telling the truth.

01:08:42.940 Because if you see, if you tell the truth, you have to let go of what you want, right?

01:08:47.600 Because you don't know what's going to happen when you say what you think.

01:08:50.980 If you're crafting your message to gain a particular outcome, you're not telling the truth.

01:08:56.060 You're using your words in a manipulative way.

01:08:58.580 Now, you have experience of this.

01:09:00.600 This is what I've gleaned from what you've told me so far.

01:09:02.940 Is that, you know, you were in a relatively woke environment, to say the least.

01:09:06.940 And then you decided that you were going to actually write what you believe to be true.

01:09:12.080 Okay, what was the consequence of that for you?

01:09:15.960 I mean, I certainly have a few less friendships, but they were not the ones that were meaningful

01:09:21.040 and actually bringing me towards my higher purpose in life, I think, 100%.

01:09:26.340 And I mean, I have to say, looking back, as scary as it was to be on the precipice of deciding,

01:09:31.060 do I want this to forever, you know, Google will exist and that my name is forever in the record with all my political opinions.

01:09:37.240 And it felt very much like a no going back sort of situation.

01:09:41.220 And I have absolutely zero regrets at all whatsoever, because as you're saying, like the authenticity is the most important thing.

01:09:48.040 And I think that there's a real crisis with young people who are growing up online, even if it's not their politics,

01:09:53.660 even if it's just feeling like if they say something unartful or they make a dumb joke and they're a teenager,

01:09:58.920 that it could be screenshotted and sent to everyone or sent to their college or their college might revoke their admissions.

01:10:04.500 Like, I think that we've, the way that our teenage fumbles are just so etched in stone with technology and social media today,

01:10:13.680 I think is really causing a crisis of authenticity with young people.

01:10:17.460 And we need to wake up to that.

01:10:19.800 Well, you know, you said you started writing and that went very well.

01:10:24.680 It propelled you out of university.

01:10:26.800 It propelled you into this career you already have at a very young age as a columnist.

01:10:31.060 It's propelled you into a FIRE fellowship.

01:10:34.600 And now you're about to become the co-author of a book that will probably be a bestseller.

01:10:39.880 And, you know, you got rid of some friends you didn't need because you found out who they really were.

01:10:44.580 And to me, that seems like nothing but benefit.

01:10:47.200 Now, you know, my observation is being if you do say what you think, there's a short-term price to be paid,

01:10:52.780 which is, of course, why people lie to begin with.

01:10:54.940 They want to avoid the price or they want to gain something they don't deserve.

01:10:58.800 So that's the reason to lie.

01:11:01.060 So what's the reason not to lie?

01:11:03.580 Well, the answer is you get to have your adventure.

01:11:06.720 Now, you have to pay the price for it.

01:11:08.380 And that might be that you get raked over the coals a little bit when you open your mouth.

01:11:11.980 But it looks to me like, you know, you're on a pretty good pathway at the moment.

01:11:16.280 And that wouldn't have happened if you wouldn't have decided to take the risk to actually write down what you believe to be true,

01:11:24.540 despite your youth and your lack of preparation for doing so, right?

01:11:29.700 So you have that psychological authenticity, but that's not all that happened.

01:11:33.920 As soon as you did that, a whole series of doors opened to you.

01:11:39.580 And there's no reason to assume at all that that's going to stop.

01:11:42.580 And I think that happens to everyone if they actually abide by and speak the truth.

01:11:47.440 I think that pathway is open to everyone.

01:11:50.040 And Jordan, a major theme of the book and one of the things we try to explain to people is sometimes people say,

01:11:56.640 oh, cancel culture is, of course, real, but it doesn't affect me.

01:11:59.480 I'll never be canceled.

01:12:00.400 I'm not an environment where I'll be canceled.

01:12:01.960 And time and time again, of course, I hear this from professors and within like a year, they're writing fire to ask for our help.

01:12:08.400 But even off campus, one of the ways in which cancel culture is devastating,

01:12:12.400 and we see this in the case of like Carol Hooven, a professor at Harvard who stepped down from her position and then left Harvard for a while,

01:12:21.940 after she just went on Fox News and argued that biological sex exists and got targeted by administrators there. 1.00

01:12:29.280 And argued it so tactfully.

01:12:30.960 So tactfully, compassionately, thoughtfully.

01:12:32.900 Yeah, that was probably her mistake.

01:12:36.800 She's a wonderful person.

01:12:38.940 But of course, what I feel like these people don't get is like, you know that you've completely destroyed any credibility that anybody will have ever debating these topics ever again when it comes from academia.

01:12:49.800 If people know that one Galileo can be sacrificed for arguing that the Earth goes around the sun,

01:12:56.500 they're not going to trust anybody else who says that the sun goes around the Earth again, you know, like that's just the way it works.

01:13:04.000 And from that kind of effect of having the billion extra eyes on the problem, what I feel like is it showed us how shallow our expert class is,

01:13:13.020 how shallow our pundit class is, how, you know, it let more people know about the replication crisis and how much shoddy research comes out of higher ed.

01:13:21.080 And that led to sort of like an epistemic anarchy kind of situation like we currently have.

01:13:25.700 But that's not sustainable.

01:13:27.240 And what happens over time, and I think is happening, is people are looking primarily to individuals who they're like, okay, who has always been honest to me?

01:13:36.680 Who has actually always said what they think is actually true?

01:13:40.280 And I think that one of the reasons why I'm, like I said, I'm not necessarily optimistic, but I am hopeful is that, and particularly on places like Substack, for example,

01:13:47.840 you see some of these experts who have always shown integrity, you know, having, creating audiences around themselves to be the people who raise their hand and say,

01:13:56.340 by the way, one thing I can say is you'll always get the truth from me.

01:13:59.500 Yeah, yeah, like Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford, for example.

01:14:02.900 Yeah, there's lots of examples like that now, and there's more academics like that coming out of the woodwork all the time.

01:14:08.420 Hey, so let's talk about Harvard.

01:14:10.320 You brought up Harvard.

01:14:11.260 I used to work at Harvard, and I loved it there.

01:14:13.300 It was a great institution when I was there in the 90s.

01:14:15.760 You, in a fit of comic accuracy, your organization, FIRE, has just awarded Harvard your coveted, you score below zero on campus freedom score,

01:14:30.440 and which I don't know how you can score below zero on a scale, so I'd like to hear about that.

01:14:34.900 I think you gave them, you actually invented a new category, which was abysmal, and abysmal is not good.

01:14:40.820 Can you explain why is this not just a joke, let's say, and can you justify what you did and let people know what it means?

01:14:52.020 Yeah, I've been kind of amused by some people that I know at Harvard claiming that our survey was arbitrary

01:14:58.560 because it couldn't possibly be true that Harvard scored actually less than zero by our rating.

01:15:05.680 Now, to be clear, we have done, every year we've been doing it, FIRE has conducted, and progressively,

01:15:12.740 the largest study of student opinion about the atmosphere for freedom of speech on their campus ever.

01:15:18.160 Like, from the very, from our very first one, I believe, was the largest one that was ever of student opinion,

01:15:22.820 and now we're up to 55,000 students that we talk to.

01:15:25.760 We create, we work with a group called College Pulse, we create representative panels at each school,

01:15:31.360 we survey them on everything from how acceptable violence is in response to freedom of speech,

01:15:35.580 to whether or not they feel like they can disagree with each other,

01:15:38.420 or whether or not they're afraid to disagree with their professors.

01:15:40.400 We also have the largest database of speech codes ever put together.

01:15:45.400 We evaluate universities according to their written policies.

01:15:48.640 We evaluate them in terms of cancellation of professors and attempts to cancel professors.

01:15:52.900 We certainly think that if you have a huge number of professors who have been targeted,

01:15:57.080 that certainly speaks badly of the environment to begin with,

01:15:59.660 but certainly if you're firing them too or punishing them too, that's even worse, and that's a bigger thing.

01:16:04.320 We have the biggest database of students being targeted,

01:16:07.120 and we combine all of this research together in definitely the most ambitious attempt to rank schools,

01:16:13.800 according to freedom of speech, ever done.

01:16:16.160 And I don't put a thumb on the scale on any of this.

01:16:19.500 And Harvard, when we never did well on our survey, it was always in the bottom fifth.

01:16:25.160 Sometimes it was in the bottom 10.

01:16:27.240 Last year, it was in the bottom fifth.

01:16:30.220 But every year, we try to refine it.

01:16:32.220 We try to make it more and more accurate.

01:16:33.900 So we figured out rigorous ways to actually include things like professor cancellations and that sort of stuff.

01:16:39.160 But the biggest thing we emphasize are what students are actually saying about the environment on campus.

01:16:45.280 And the news wasn't great.

01:16:47.620 Interestingly, Michigan Technological University ended number one.

01:16:50.580 The most elite school that ended in the top 10 was University of Virginia.

01:16:54.880 University of Chicago always does very well.

01:16:57.700 But besides those schools, elite higher education has done terribly.

01:17:01.260 Last year, the dead last one was Columbia, and this year it was Harvard.

01:17:05.240 But Harvard really scored abysmally.

01:17:08.600 Like, it earned that.

01:17:09.700 Because, for example, Penn, University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, has had a really rough bunch of years.

01:17:18.120 I mean, they're targeting Amy Wax.

01:17:19.360 It's just one of the things that's going on.

01:17:21.040 Like, a tenured professor that they're trying to get rid of.

01:17:23.160 But the students themselves are saying, this is an environment where it's really hard to have a discussion about anything important.

01:17:29.680 And, of course, you know, a lot of these schools, you end up, at the same time, having, you know, being kind of soft on violence in response to speech, which might be part of the problem.

01:17:37.700 But University of Pennsylvania, which was 247 out of the 248 schools that we ranked, got a score of, like, 11.63, which is really bad.

01:17:49.960 Harvard's score was negative 10.67.

01:17:53.980 We rounded them up to zero because we thought that was a responsible thing to do.

01:18:00.440 But they actually scored below zero according to all the different environments that we rank, including, again, most importantly, what students are actually saying about the environment at Harvard.

01:18:10.460 How can you score below zero?

01:18:12.260 How do your scales work?

01:18:13.400 I know this is a technical issue, but I'm still curious.

01:18:15.720 I mean, how is that even possible?

01:18:18.500 We give schools scores for whether or not they support students when they're in situations, when they have their free speech challenged, and when they have a speaker disinvited.

01:18:30.460 And you get negatives for things like if you have a disinvitation and the school didn't do anything to stop it, you get negative points.

01:18:38.320 And most schools—actually, sorry, all 247 other schools were able to—we didn't think there was any risk that a school could get an actual negative score because we do these little adjustments here and there very rigorously to try to accommodate for the fact that, one, students sometimes go to schools that they think are actually pretty good for free speech.

01:19:02.820 But actually, if you look at their record, they're firing tenured professors for freedom of speech.

01:19:06.820 So, like, Princeton actually scores surprisingly well, even though they fired tenured—or they forced out Professor Joshua Katz.

01:19:14.640 Now, of course, they said that was for sexual misconduct, but it's really clear the reason why he was targeted was because of his calling, I think, BLM, like a hate group or something like that.

01:19:25.120 That's when the scrutiny started, and that's what they actually got him out for.

01:19:28.300 So they get a ding for forcing out a tenured professor.

01:19:31.020 But the students there themselves—and this comports somewhat with my own experience—actually, I think the environment's not that bad for free speech.

01:19:37.380 Princeton doesn't do great, of course.

01:19:39.800 But in—so we include all of these factors together.

01:19:43.440 And Harvard, you know, Harvard's been on our ten worst schools for freedom of speech list, I think, four times already, and we've only been doing that since 2011.

01:19:51.020 So it shouldn't have come as such a shock to Harvard that they need to fix things.

01:19:57.120 And meanwhile, you know, good friends like our advisory council member, Stephen Pinker, who's been a friend of FIRE forever, he created a group that was to defend academic freedom and freedom of speech at Harvard.

01:20:07.660 I think he got a hundred scholars to join it.

01:20:10.540 And this is something that actually creates an opportunity for them to be taken more seriously.

01:20:15.400 And meanwhile, kind of like we—as far as schools that we interact with, FIRE has a really good track record of convincing schools to do the right thing.

01:20:23.360 Sometimes we have to take them to court.

01:20:24.880 Sometimes it's just public pressure that actually leads them to do the right thing.

01:20:28.160 Harvard won't ever budge on any of this stuff.

01:20:30.940 And the question is, like, will the fact that their own students and that their own behavior has gotten them this ranking, will this make them take the issue of academic freedom and free speech more seriously?

01:20:40.340 And actually, honestly, Jordan, you probably know better than we would.

01:20:43.580 Yeah, well, the question is, is Harvard a university or a hedge fund?

01:20:49.420 No, I'm dead serious.

01:20:50.900 I mean, just because something says it's something—

01:20:52.460 I'm laughing because it's true.

01:20:53.820 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:20:54.660 I mean, you know—

01:20:55.020 I'm laughing because it's true.

01:20:55.660 Like, I worked out that they had something like the GDP of Lithuania, you know, to one side several years ago.

01:21:02.180 And now it's up to many of the Nordic countries.

01:21:04.920 Like, they have, like, $60 billion or something like that to one side?

01:21:08.280 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:21:08.300 Which is insane.

01:21:09.020 Exactly.

01:21:09.520 Well, that's it.

01:21:10.200 And I mean, at some point, the university is a sideshow.

01:21:13.120 And we already might be at that point.

01:21:15.660 So that could easily be the case.

01:21:17.680 You know, I read this great book decades ago called Systemantics by a man named John Galt.

01:21:22.900 And it's a great book.

01:21:23.920 Very, very short.

01:21:24.660 Tongue-in-cheek in a way, but brilliant.

01:21:28.000 And he has a lot of maxims and axioms.

01:21:30.920 It's a list of axioms about how you analyze how a system works.

01:21:34.120 And one of his axioms, which I've never forgotten and has been unbelievably useful to me as an analytic researcher, was the system does not do what its name says it does.

01:21:48.040 And so that when you approach a system, you have to look at, so if you want to, for example, figure out what a system does, you look at where it spends its money.

01:21:55.320 So I learned this when I was working for the Alberta government 30 years ago, 40 years ago, as a junior analyst.

01:22:04.100 I had to gather statistics on how much the social services branch of the government spent on the actual people to whom they were delivering services, right?

01:22:13.720 So that would be people receiving welfare and who are being subsidized for kindergarten and so on.

01:22:19.460 Everything that comes under the rubric of social services.

01:22:21.720 And I found out that there were no stats.

01:22:27.420 The system wasn't set up to actually monitor its own behavior.

01:22:30.880 And that the consulting company that had been hired to produce the report detailing those numbers the year before had just basically made them up.

01:22:37.440 And no one could tell any different.

01:22:39.300 Yeah.

01:22:39.940 And then I realized-

01:22:40.440 There were no stats?

01:22:42.380 No, no, no.

01:22:43.360 Nobody had actually looked at how much the net recipients were receiving, right?

01:22:49.580 You couldn't find the data.

01:22:50.620 No, no.

01:22:51.280 And I'm sure that's still the case.

01:22:52.440 Wow.

01:22:53.000 Oh, yes.

01:22:53.480 It's beyond belief.

01:22:54.360 But it's no different than most charities.

01:22:56.360 You know, most charities spend 90% of their money running the charity.

01:23:01.120 Now, you know, I'm not completely cynical about that because most corporations have about a 5% profit margin.

01:23:07.520 So that means they spend 95% of their money running themselves.

01:23:11.360 You know, it's not that easy to get an enterprise up and running that actually does something other than take care of itself.

01:23:16.680 But when you look at an organization like Harvard and it has that immense storehouse of money, you think, well, why do they care about being a university?

01:23:26.500 What the hell difference does it make?

01:23:27.920 There's $60 billion sitting there.

01:23:29.740 That's got to be the fundamental preoccupation.

01:23:31.960 Now, that doesn't account for why it's become so insanely politically correct.

01:23:36.420 You know, and I've talked to Harvard professors, one from the Kennedy School, which was particularly worrisome given its primary role, let's say, in determining American domestic and foreign policy.

01:23:49.040 And then one from a different department who both told me that one from the business school told me or the Kennedy School told me flat out that the professors there are terrified to say anything they think because the students will skin them alive.

01:24:00.940 And then in the other department.

01:24:01.920 I heard the same thing from a Kennedy School person last month.

01:24:03.780 Yeah, well, isn't that wonderful, you know, when it was the preeminent?

01:24:07.720 Well, it's just so absolutely appalling.

01:24:10.200 And so, yeah, well, we'll see if Harvard responds to any of that.

01:24:13.440 They might and they might not.

01:24:14.700 It was a great institution when I worked there, you know.

01:24:17.660 I mean, the faculty ran the place, the senior faculty, that is, and the senior faculty were top rate.

01:24:24.240 And the second people, the second most important people were the undergraduates.

01:24:28.660 And then likely the junior faculty, then the graduate students, and only then the administration.

01:24:35.780 And the administration actually ran the university.

01:24:39.400 I'll give you an example.

01:24:41.100 So I had a friend who was a professor there, Patrick Cavanaugh, brilliant psychologist investigating vision.

01:24:48.700 And they invited him in, as they did with senior faculty members, with, you know, good bonus and money to set up their lab.

01:24:55.720 And he wanted a shower in his lab.

01:24:58.420 And they said yes.

01:25:00.780 And the reason they said yes was because they were smart. 0.98

01:25:03.760 And they thought, well, if we have professors and students who want to stay in their damn lab so long that they don't go home, 0.99

01:25:09.660 they sleep there and they need a shower. 0.98

01:25:11.380 It's like, okay, if you want to work 17 hours a day, hey, man, we'll build you a shower.

01:25:18.060 Now, you know, at my last institution, the University of Toronto, that would have never happened because they would have just thought of that as a luxury because they weren't, you know, frankly, that bright.

01:25:26.580 But Harvard was the sort of place, I'm dead serious about that.

01:25:30.120 They talked a lot about excellence but had no idea whatsoever how to facilitate it, although they were very good at talking about it.

01:25:36.760 And so they put obstacles in the way rather than clearing them out of the way.

01:25:40.440 And so Harvard was great.

01:25:41.620 And I have no idea what the hell has happened to it in the interim, although, you know, the fact that Pinker felt compelled,

01:25:47.420 and he's a very reasonable person and a liberal by any stretch of the imagination.

01:25:52.800 He's hardly a right-wing, you know, some sort of right-wing conspiracy theorist, not Steven Pinker.

01:25:58.380 And the fact that he felt compelled to set up a whole organization to facilitate free speech at Harvard is another indication of just exactly how dreadful that place has become.

01:26:08.040 Alumni should stop giving, right?

01:26:09.920 Like, that's part of the solution as well, especially if they're entrepreneurial or libertarian.

01:26:14.580 It's like, don't give Harvard money.

01:26:17.380 When we talk about this, how maddening it is for me to run a nonprofit.

01:26:22.980 We defend free speech, you know, off campus as well now.

01:26:26.100 We just, you know, relaunched to expand our mission, but we still focus overwhelmingly on higher ed.

01:26:31.420 And that's still, that's always going to be, you know, central to what we do.

01:26:34.520 And how often I talk to people who are, who they'll complain and complain and complain about the schools.

01:26:39.980 And that's, and then they'll say, it's like, I'm even reconsidering my gift this year.

01:26:43.620 And I'm like, you're reconsidering your gift this year?

01:26:46.520 And a lot of times these are, these are gigantic donors.

01:26:50.760 Yeah.

01:26:51.120 Well, people can't believe it.

01:26:52.580 I mean, this is what I'm seeing in Canada is that Canadians in my situation, I'm being pursued by my accrediting board at the moment who want to take my license or subject me to re-education, which is, you know, just, I just can't even believe that this is the case.

01:27:07.660 And, or how they think that's going to work possibly, because I'm definitely not corrigible by standard re-education techniques.

01:27:14.980 So, but I think Canadians, when they look at my situation, they have a very hard choice to make.

01:27:21.040 And it's the same choice that you're requiring people who are analyzing higher education to make.

01:27:25.480 You had, in the United States, you guys had stellar institutions, man.

01:27:28.820 Those, your Ivy League schools, they were knocking it out of the park for a long time.

01:27:33.520 And the state school system in California was deadly good for a long, long time.

01:27:39.160 And so, it's a complete bloody catastrophe that those institutions have inverted and are now actually peddling hard in the opposite direction.

01:27:46.900 And it's not the least bit surprising that people can't believe it.

01:27:50.740 Like, I'll tell you a funny story about this.

01:27:52.920 So, I was in the UK a while back, eh?

01:27:56.160 And I was talking to some of the members of the House of Lords.

01:27:59.540 And they're pretty elderly people, generally speaking, and all of them virtually have had stellar careers.

01:28:06.500 And they had all been forced to take DEI training.

01:28:14.220 And I asked them, well, what do you mean forced?

01:28:17.300 Like, you guys are actually only responsible to the Queen, technically.

01:28:21.940 No one can force you to do anything.

01:28:24.080 And they said, well, they told us that we would lose our library privileges, we would lose our cafeteria privileges, and we wouldn't be able to park if we didn't take the course.

01:28:37.080 Really?

01:28:37.660 This is actually true. 0.99

01:28:39.060 And I thought, well, why didn't you just tell them to go to hell? 0.97

01:28:42.200 And they said, well, you know, we just thought we'd had a couple of scandals on the sexual front. 0.95

01:28:46.820 And we thought maybe it wouldn't hurt us to, you know, brush up a bit on our conduct.

01:28:51.500 But they had no idea.

01:28:53.260 They had no idea whatsoever that there is an entire ideological enterprise underneath this, pushing everything in this insane progressive direction.

01:29:03.100 They had no concept of that whatsoever.

01:29:05.460 And so I think a lot of people who are looking at the universities and the political institutions, you know, they can either think that me and people like me, and that might include you two, unfortunately for you, are, you know, just noisy conspiracy theorists screeching in the wilderness.

01:29:24.100 Or our major institutions, many of which were world-class and which took hundreds of years to instantiate, have now become virtually irreparably corrupt.

01:29:35.420 Well, it's obviously a lot easier to write off the bearers of bad news.

01:29:41.880 Sure.

01:29:42.760 And unsurprisingly, and in Canada, you really see that, because most of our institutions here, they worked until, well, you say 2014, that's probably about right.

01:29:53.240 Yeah.

01:29:54.100 Yeah.

01:29:54.620 No, it is funny watching the various ways you get dismissed talking about this.

01:29:58.700 And one of the funniest ones is when people point out that in my book, Unlearning Liberty, I talked about 2007 as being the worst year I had seen.

01:30:05.560 And that was one way of the University of Delaware, you know, brainwashing program that I mentioned before, a crazy case involving someone getting, you know, expelled for a flyer, another case in which someone said the epithet wet back in class and then criticized, in order to criticize it and was immediately suspended.

01:30:23.140 All things that are day-to-day occurrences now, and people are kind of like, oh, but you're saying that things have been, you've never seen it as bad, but you said that back in 2007.

01:30:30.660 I'm like, because they kept on getting worse every several years.

01:30:34.420 And you always have the danger, of course, of being dismissed as a kook or unpleasable, but it's particularly difficult when you're saying, like, I've been doing this for 22 years.

01:30:43.160 It was already worse than I thought it would be for free speech on campus.

01:30:46.400 In 2001, and it's definitely had peaks and valleys here and there, but the trend line has overwhelmingly been, it just gets worse.

01:30:53.640 So 2014 was a bad year.

01:30:55.440 2015 was.

01:30:56.260 2017, giant acceleration in terms to get professors canceled.

01:30:59.880 And then that's put in the dust by 2020 and 2021.

01:31:04.380 And to get to the DEI stuff, the idea that in the midst of a situation in which there are departments that have literally no conservatives, particularly in elite higher education, where they have record low, all-time low viewpoint diversity among professors.

01:31:19.220 When they have cancel culture, when they have BRTs, when they have a tenure process that screens out for loud people, when they have all of these, what we call the conformity gauntlet in the book, they have all these mechanisms to shut you up from high school for actually from K through 12 on up, including nature, human behavior, saying that they won't actually publish things that are found to be harmful to groups, which is just like, wow, you can survive all that.

01:31:41.340 And still not, and they decided in addition to this, that they would add DEI statements being required for professors, that they needed an additional political litmus test.

01:31:53.080 It's like, I can't believe any, like only an administrator would look at the world of higher education and see, you know what, there is too much freedom of thought.

01:32:02.120 There's too much heterogeneity among these professors.

01:32:05.160 We need a mechanism to make it even more rigid.

01:32:07.560 You know, I might also add in terms of being dismissed as a conspiracy theorist for pointing out these realities, I think that the people who I've seen to be most amenable to these arguments that higher education is just completely turned on its head are young people who don't remember the model that you both remember of it actually being better at some point in time.

01:32:29.160 When you look at the statistics of faith in higher education with Gen Z, two-thirds of current high school students say that they think that they can tread their own educational path. 0.99

01:32:37.840 Less than half of current high schoolers say that a college degree is necessary for financial success, 100%.

01:32:44.860 It's a necessity.

01:32:45.580 And I mean, just the statistics are staggering and who can, I mean, like who can blame young people for looking at the situation in which people feel like they can't speak their minds.

01:32:57.500 The millennials are just saddled in debt.

01:33:00.320 We have a system in which a third of American colleges produce graduating classes in which the median graduate makes less than the average high school graduate.

01:33:08.660 Like the system has absolutely been filled with federally backed money and student loans.

01:33:14.680 The generation above us is crippled. 0.98

01:33:16.520 The institutions are dysfunctional.

01:33:18.220 And no wonder young people who then were told, oh, not only are you going to shell over an arm and a leg to join this university, but now we're going to do the pandemic.

01:33:26.440 And what NYU did was still charge us full tuition for Zoom school.

01:33:33.600 And that was when my family was like, you have our blessing, you get right out of there.

01:33:38.660 No, that was unbelievable.

01:33:40.900 And like, I really feel for you in a most fundamental way.

01:33:45.220 You know, when I was a kid going to school in Alberta, now Alberta was a rich place at that point.

01:33:50.600 You could make quite a bit of money working in the summer because of the oil industry, essentially, it had, you know, elevated salaries.

01:33:58.140 It took me a month's work to pay my tuition for the year.

01:34:01.540 And I could make enough in four months to pay the whole year, no problem.

01:34:06.800 You know, and I worked part-time during school.

01:34:08.480 And then I would also say, I went to a little college when I first graduated from high school.

01:34:16.380 I'd only had about 700 people, Grand Prairie Regional College.

01:34:19.600 And all the professors there loved to teach.

01:34:22.140 And my first year classes were seminars.

01:34:24.480 And I had a blast.

01:34:25.960 It was great.

01:34:27.020 And I learned so much.

01:34:29.000 I basically became literate.

01:34:30.800 I knew my professors on a first-name basis.

01:34:35.280 I met all sorts of new people.

01:34:36.920 It was great.

01:34:37.720 I was, you know, trumpeting the praise of college to everyone far and wide.

01:34:42.880 And it didn't saddle me with any debt.

01:34:45.200 I graduated debt-free, essentially.

01:34:47.560 And also with my graduate education because I had a fellowship and lived in Montreal, which was also dirt cheap at the point at the time.

01:34:56.080 And so I was, this is no nostalgia.

01:34:58.880 You know, I had an excellent, low-cost, higher education experience.

01:35:05.880 And I had excellent mentoring, in particular, as a graduate student.

01:35:10.000 It was high quality.

01:35:11.280 The clinical psychology program at McGill was, like, extremely effective.

01:35:18.240 And you could do research.

01:35:20.160 It was great.

01:35:20.720 And then when I went to Harvard, I had a blast.

01:35:22.620 The students were great.

01:35:23.680 I loved my colleagues.

01:35:24.760 I thought the university ran like a charm.

01:35:26.520 So it's not just, you know, old guys looking back thinking things were better when we were young.

01:35:31.880 It's that things have become so corrupt and so expensive that it's actually, it borders on what's being done to young people on the higher education front borders on criminal.

01:35:43.920 The bloody administrators figured out how to pick the future pockets of the students.

01:35:47.940 That's really what happened.

01:35:49.540 And so they just elevated tuition fees beyond any reasonable norm.

01:35:53.680 And then to add to that, your observation, I couldn't believe the universities did this.

01:35:58.260 It's like, well, we're just going to teach you on Zoom, which is way worse than a video lecture.

01:36:05.300 Like, way worse.

01:36:06.320 Yeah.

01:36:06.900 And we're going to charge you full tuition.

01:36:09.980 Mind-boggling.

01:36:10.660 Not to mention, like, half the kids in my classes were in completely different time zones.

01:36:14.980 So they're up at like 3 a.m. and they all have their cameras off as well.

01:36:18.360 It was just, it was an abdication of all of the school's responsibility on just a fundamental level.

01:36:23.280 At the same time, all of our lives are being torn apart with these wild cancel culture mobs, which we talked earlier about whether social media made cancel culture go awry.

01:36:32.200 I mean, certainly when you not only have social media as the predominant tool of communication going into a pandemic, but then you require that it only be the primary sole communication between people, where you no longer have to look at your classmate in the eye and stuff.

01:36:46.980 Like, the conversations that I saw on social media, even in Zoom chats during lectures, like, it's just absolutely rampant, out-of-control, antisocial behavior.

01:36:59.160 And I think before the pandemic, we were all kind of complacent for a while and thinking that, you know, cancel culture slowed down after 2016.

01:37:05.080 And people often are very early to champion that it's over and ended.

01:37:09.700 But then we have one little cultural, we have a cultural hiccup, and then we're right back to square zero, and we're burning the whole house down and tearing people down with it. 0.87

01:37:17.620 So I think, you know, 2020 in terms of just the experience of being a young person was really life-changing for all of us.

01:37:26.240 It wasn't great for the olds either.

01:37:27.900 Yeah, yeah.

01:37:29.060 Yeah, well, hence your center-right libertarianism.

01:37:32.100 So let me come back, and maybe we'll close with this.

01:37:35.840 Let me come back to one thing you mentioned earlier.

01:37:38.360 And this touches on the work that Jonathan and Greg have done and that Jonathan is pursuing.

01:37:44.520 I imagine you guys delve into in your new book, too, which, by the way, for everyone listening, is coming out October 17th.

01:37:49.460 Tell me the title again.

01:37:52.040 Canceling of the American Mind.

01:37:53.940 Oh, did you rehearse that?

01:37:57.160 Jinx. 0.85

01:37:57.920 Yeah, that was real good.

01:37:59.500 That was real good.

01:38:00.240 Canceling of the American Mind.

01:38:01.340 Yeah, you mentioned in your, you know, the first discussion that you had when you went off to university that all the girls that you were sitting around had a history of self-harm, you know.

01:38:12.460 And Jonathan has done a very good job.

01:38:14.680 Jonathan Haidt has done a very good job of documenting this cataclysmic rise in self-destructive neuroticism.

01:38:21.980 Hey, here's something that's useful to know.

01:38:24.180 So, you know, in the Neo-PIR personality questionnaire, it's the gold standard for assessing the five dimensions of personality.

01:38:33.700 So, you know, one of the subfacets, one of the subfacets of neuroticism, so that's the proclivity to experience negative emotion, literally one of the subfacets is self-consciousness.

01:38:47.180 There's also a very large body of work now that documents the propensity of people who are either depressed or psychotic, so seriously mentally disordered, in the miserable direction, are much more likely to use pronouns and terms that are self-referential.

01:39:04.440 So they say I and me far more.

01:39:06.560 And so it's literally the truth that the more you concentrate on yourself, the more miserable you are.

01:39:14.140 And, of course, your generation has been taught to identify, to put their own subjective self-identification paramount, to do little else but concentrate on their own feeling, and to do little else but to concentrate on their own feelings.

01:39:28.700 Now, in your personal experience, you mentioned what happened to you in that first group at university.

01:39:35.560 What do you feel has been the consequence of this?

01:39:41.080 What do you see happening around you?

01:39:44.200 In terms of the ongoing consequences of growing up in social media and this depressive sort of environment?

01:39:49.760 Yeah, well, in particular, well, let's say for women in particular, also for the relationship between young women and young men.

01:39:55.080 I mean, I have to say that it feels as though a lot of my cohort is experiencing kind of like a prolonged adolescence.

01:40:04.380 I don't know if that's in part because of the pandemic and our adulthood's launch in just such a bizarre way.

01:40:12.320 But, I mean, I would say it's just, even still now, when I was a teenager, I thought, you know, when we get older, we're not going to be mired in the same sort of, like, depressive malaise.

01:40:23.340 It's the only word I can really use to describe how I feel like my generation is just, like, there's this cloud over us.

01:40:29.660 And it's often very negative to be in groups, particularly of young women together.

01:40:34.900 I mean, it's—I remember that night still.

01:40:37.480 It was just heartbreaking to me.

01:40:38.840 It was unbelievable to me that, like, it was almost like, why was I the one person who in this group was not able to share in that experience?

01:40:47.200 I mean, it's just—it's so common.

01:40:49.140 It's so pervasive.

01:40:50.120 And even as we've gotten older, I've not seen it subside.

01:40:53.740 I mean, I don't have friends that are still cutting themselves like they did when they were teenagers, but there's still this depressive, like, downward pull of my generation.

01:41:03.800 I think it's harming our interpersonal relationships.

01:41:06.820 I see my—especially my female friends.

01:41:08.660 I think that we are certainly more likely to indulge in, like, social contagions.

01:41:15.640 And when they sit around together, it just gets even more miserable.

01:41:18.660 I mean, I completely agree with what you're referencing with the gender relationships.

01:41:24.160 I think that that's completely awry.

01:41:26.440 I mean, I feel like we're growing up in an age where, you know, the relationship between male and female is quite recently changed very dramatically, and we're still trying to get our footing on that.

01:41:38.960 The way that we communicate with each other is completely upended because we're now completely digitized.

01:41:44.200 The political environment around us is so dysfunctional, and it's just, like, I don't really know what to say about the state of my generation besides it's just bleak, and I'm concerned that it doesn't seem to be getting much better.

01:41:57.420 And somehow, we just all seem to be folding in on ourselves.

01:42:00.720 You know, one of the things I've observed traveling all over the world now for five years is that, you know, if you try to demoralize young people for 60 years by telling them that their ambitions are pathological and world-destroying and that everything's predicated on power and oppression, you actually do demoralize them.

01:42:17.720 Especially when you add to that the vision of a necessarily apocalyptic future brought on by that ambition that can only be rectified by having everyone, especially the poor, give up pretty much everything they own.

01:42:32.160 It's like, well, we're pretty much done with that.

01:42:33.780 Oh, and also self-hatred, by the way.

01:42:35.840 Also massive amounts of disfizing yourself. 0.98

01:42:39.420 Justified self-hatred as a parasite on the surface of the planet. 0.95

01:42:44.580 Yeah, I think we've pretty much had enough of that.

01:42:46.400 And we do, to end on a positive note, you know, I mean, your situation is instructive.

01:42:52.900 You know, you took these technological tools that are at your disposal and you're doing that right now and you decided to say what you had to say.

01:43:00.340 And, you know, your future, as far as I can tell from the limited time we've spent together, your future seems to be pretty damn bright.

01:43:07.140 And there's no reason that can't be the case for everyone.

01:43:09.380 And so it is a very sad situation that we've managed to demoralize young people so badly and to split them apart at the level of sexual relationship.

01:43:18.440 And that's a real catastrophe.

01:43:19.980 But by the same token, and you'd mentioned this earlier, there is an increasing space for people who are willing to stand up and to make their case known.

01:43:29.840 And to do that with extraordinarily effectiveness using the tools that are at hand.

01:43:35.000 And so maybe that, and, you know, I think FIRE is one of the organizations that's actually pushing for that outcome to be the one that is going to prevail.

01:43:43.680 I hope your book also tilts things in that direction as your previous book did quite successfully.

01:43:49.320 I mean, it's had a good run and people still talk about it, still sells.

01:43:53.860 And so, and it did draw a lot of attention to what was going on in universities.

01:43:57.820 I know that Jonathan Haidt has got a new book coming out.

01:44:00.600 I don't know.

01:44:02.120 It's, it's relative.

01:44:02.860 It's got to be in March.

01:44:04.380 Right.

01:44:04.720 And you're right.

01:44:05.400 Right.

01:44:05.720 So there'll be about a six month gap.

01:44:08.140 Yep.

01:44:08.900 Yeah.

01:44:09.180 Yeah.

01:44:09.640 Well, so October 17th, tell us the name of the title again.

01:44:12.820 See if you can do it in unison.

01:44:15.500 I'll give it to you.

01:44:16.440 That was creepy the first time.

01:44:18.140 The canceling of the America. 0.90

01:44:19.320 Keep in mind.

01:44:20.140 Yeah.

01:44:20.520 Well, that would be a catastrophe for the world, by the way. 0.91

01:44:23.680 I mean, one of the things you bloody Americans have managed with immense, what would you say? 0.97

01:44:29.860 Panache. 0.90

01:44:30.640 And to the benefit of everyone is you managed to create a culture where for a long time,

01:44:35.940 you aimed at success and you, by and large, you admired it.

01:44:42.260 We're not jealous of it.

01:44:43.460 That's a very, very, very, very difficult thing to pull off.

01:44:47.080 And if it doesn't happen, then no one gets to be successful.

01:44:50.860 And when no one gets to be successful, then everyone gets to be miserable.

01:44:55.100 And that's the situation that we increasingly find ourself in.

01:44:58.460 We don't want that to prevail.

01:45:00.240 So I hope we don't cancel the American mind.

01:45:04.020 I hope your book is one of the things that helps everyone wake up to the fact that that might happen.

01:45:09.580 I hope your generation gets a revitalizing vision.

01:45:12.100 And good luck with your book, October 17th.

01:45:15.540 Very nice to talk to both of you.

01:45:18.040 Thank you, Dr. Beardson.

01:45:19.100 Thank you so much.

01:45:20.200 Yeah, my pleasure.

01:45:21.240 And to everyone watching and listening, thank you for your time and attention.

01:45:24.660 It's always appreciated.

01:45:26.120 I hope you found this discussion useful and engaging and interesting and educational.

01:45:30.640 You know, all the things that universities used to offer.

01:45:33.660 And this can offer now.

01:45:36.720 Thank you to the film crew here in Florence.

01:45:38.980 And I'm going to continue this conversation for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus side.

01:45:44.280 So if you want to join us there, please, you're more than welcome to do so.

01:45:48.500 Bye-bye.

01:45:49.420 Bye-bye.

01:45:50.420 Bye-bye.

01:45:51.420 Bye-bye.

01:45:51.920 Bye-bye.

01:45:52.420 Bye-bye.

01:45:53.420 Bye-bye.

01:45:55.420 Bye-bye.

01:45:56.420 Bye-bye.

01:45:57.420 Bye-bye.

01:45:58.420 Bye-bye.

01:45:59.420 Bye-bye.

01:46:00.420 Bye-bye.

01:46:01.420 Bye-bye.

01:46:02.420 Bye-bye.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - October 16, 2023

388. How Gender Affects Your Ideals ｜ Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript