The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - An Incendiary Discussion

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00:00:51.000 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

00:00:58.000 This is episode 16, an incendiary discussion at Ryerson University.

00:01:03.000 Originally published to YouTube on March 2nd, this podcast is a recording of a conversation between Dr. Peterson and Dr. Oren Amitay, who invited Dr. Peterson to speak to his students at Ryerson.

00:01:19.000 The discussion covers freedom of speech, ideological possession, unconscious bias, and the implicit association test, and other issues germane to psychology and the modern world.

00:01:34.000 To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, the link to which can be found in the description.

00:01:41.000 Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at self-authoring.com.

00:01:49.000 So I've been talking about your cause, I guess, since you started your videos and since you started having troubles with, you know, with human rights tribunals or threats by U of T.

00:01:59.000 And I just think it's common sense, as I said, that promoting critical thinking, helping people to be able to tolerate subjects that they may not feel comfortable about, but that they should be able to hear and process.

00:02:12.000 Not based on emotions, but based on an actual analysis of the facts, the evidence, the reality, versus some agenda being shoved down their throat.

00:02:19.000 Whether it's through the media, through the professors, and anyone teaching in academia knows that there are professors who have no problem with basically teaching their truths as fact.

00:02:28.000 And so I've been promoting this, I've been promoting it within my own organization, the Ontario Psychological Association.

00:02:34.000 I got a lot of flack from other psychologists who thought, no, we can't allow this type of speech to happen.

00:02:40.000 That discussion that you're supposed to have had, the travesty really, it was October, I believe, when you had those other professors coming in and talking about, you know, the issue.

00:02:49.000 Some psychologists wrote pieces in national media publications saying this kind of discussion should not happen.

00:02:57.000 Yeah.

00:02:58.000 And this is from psychologists, the ones who are supposed to be best trained to be able to tolerate the discomfort that goes along with, you know, discussing uncomfortable topics.

00:03:07.000 So I was hoping for you to be able to share with, you know, the audience, your experience in the last few months in trying to promote this, you know, what you're basically trying to promote.

00:03:18.000 Which I think, I'll let you describe in your own words.

00:03:20.000 Okay.

00:03:21.000 So let me think about those videos for a minute.

00:03:28.000 Well, I think there were two things that, oh, I should give you some background on the videos, I guess.

00:03:34.000 I mean, I just made them in my office at home.

00:03:38.000 I wasn't, I had no idea what the consequence would be.

00:03:42.000 I was just trying to sort out my thoughts about, partly about, not so much Bill C-16 as the background policies that surround it.

00:03:49.000 Especially on the Ontario Human Rights Commission website.

00:03:52.000 Because the bill itself looks rather innocuous.

00:03:55.000 It's only about two paragraphs long.

00:03:56.000 The only part of it that isn't innocuous is the insistence that, the insistence on transforming the hate speech codes, including harassment and discrimination based on gender, what was it, gender identity and gender expression in the hate speech codes.

00:04:16.000 I thought, that's weird, there's something out there.

00:04:19.000 Anyways, I started digging more into the background on the Ontario Human Rights Commission website.

00:04:23.000 And the policies surrounding Bill C-16, to call them appalling, is barely to scratch the surface.

00:04:28.000 They're unbelievably badly written and internally contradictory and over-inclusive and dangerous.

00:04:35.000 And, I mean, they do things, for example, like make employers responsible for all the speech acts of their employees.

00:04:42.000 Whether they have intended or unintended consequences.

00:04:45.000 That's completely, the only reason you would write a law like that is to get as many employers in trouble as you could possibly manage.

00:04:52.000 Because there's no other reason for formulating the legislation that way.

00:04:56.000 And, I've also, a colleague of mine came in recently at the university.

00:05:01.000 And he's starting to teach a little bit about the background for this sort of thing in one of his classes.

00:05:06.000 And he showed me the developmental progression of the policies surrounding Bill C-16.

00:05:11.000 And originally they were written in a much more, in a tighter format.

00:05:15.000 But then they were farmed out for what they called public consultation.

00:05:18.000 Which basically meant, they ran them by a variety of people who I would say were strongly on the activist end of the political spectrum.

00:05:27.000 And they basically, in order to not bother anyone who they had consulted with, they decided, for example, that gender identity should be nothing but subjective choice.

00:05:36.000 Which is, I don't even know what to say about that.

00:05:39.000 If you're a psychologist and you have any sense at all, that's a completely insane proposition.

00:05:44.000 It's, first of all, predicated on the idea that your identity is your subjective choice.

00:05:49.000 And that's never been the case for any sort of identity anywhere.

00:05:53.000 Your identity is two-fold.

00:05:56.000 The first thing that your identity is, is a functional set of tools to help you operate in the world.

00:06:01.000 I mean, read Piaget, you know, just scratch the surface of Piaget, even.

00:06:07.000 And you find out that, you know, children start to construct their identities, really, when they're breastfeeding.

00:06:13.000 Because that's when you first start your social interactions.

00:06:16.000 You start integrating your basic biological reflexes, from a Piagetian perspective, into something resembling a social relationship.

00:06:24.000 Because breastfeeding actually happens to be quite a complex act. 1.00

00:06:27.000 And then, you expand your developing identity out into the small microcosmic social world of the family.

00:06:34.000 Basically starting with your mother, but then you have siblings, and your father, and your relatives, you know, conventionally speaking.

00:06:41.000 And your identity is a negotiated game.

00:06:45.000 And you're not the only one in charge of it, by any stretch of the imagination at all.

00:06:50.000 I mean, one of the things that Piaget pointed out, was that between the ages of two and four, and I think later research has really hammered this home.

00:06:57.000 That even kids who are hyper-aggressive at two, and there's a small proportion of them that are like that, learn to integrate their subjective desires into a broader social game, and become socially acceptable to other children.

00:07:12.000 And they do that through play.

00:07:13.000 You know, and what they're doing is playing their identity into being.

00:07:17.000 And then, once they're older than about four, and they've become properly socialized, so other children actually want to play with them.

00:07:23.000 Because that's the critical issue. It's the fundamental issue.

00:07:26.000 Then, the peer community of children helps them bootstrap their identity up to something that will eventually approximate an adult identity.

00:07:39.000 But that's functional. It has nothing to do with whim. It's a crazy idea.

00:07:45.000 And then, so partly, your identity is the set of tools with which you function in the actual world.

00:07:51.000 And part of it is a negotiated agreement with the other people around you.

00:07:55.000 And that's all being taken out of the...

00:07:57.000 That's all actually, as far as I can tell, that line of theorizing is technically illegal now in Ontario.

00:08:03.000 And I'm not even talking about the potential biological basis of identity, because the idea that identity has no biological basis, that's just wrong.

00:08:13.000 Like, factually wrong. So...

00:08:15.000 And we've written a social constructionist.

00:08:17.000 We've written a radical social constructionist view of identity into the law.

00:08:22.000 But even worse than that, we've gone beyond social constructionism, because Piaget was a constructionist, into just pure whim.

00:08:29.000 Your identity can be, at any moment, what you assume that it's going to be.

00:08:33.000 That's not a tenable solution.

00:08:35.000 There's nothing about that proposition that's reasonable.

00:08:38.000 So I was looking into this, and I thought, this is just beyond comprehension.

00:08:42.000 That we've written that idea into the policies surrounding Bill C-16.

00:08:46.000 So that...

00:08:47.000 So I made that video, I was trying to sort that out, and to figure out even what it meant.

00:08:52.000 The terminology is messy in the extreme.

00:08:55.000 First of all, with regards to gender identity.

00:08:58.000 Gender identity is not a spectrum.

00:09:00.000 It's a modified bimodal distribution.

00:09:02.000 And if you're making law, you don't get to muck around with the words.

00:09:05.000 You have to use the right words.

00:09:07.000 And so it's a modified bimodal distribution, because almost everyone who has a biological identity of male or female identifies as male or female.

00:09:17.000 It's 99.7%.

00:09:19.000 And you could argue that that's a little tighter than it would be if society was more accepting of gender variation, let's say.

00:09:26.000 But even if it went down to 99%, which would be an increase of, like, what?

00:09:32.000 Well, it would be almost an order of magnitude increase.

00:09:36.000 You still have the overwhelming number of people whose gender identity matches their biological sex.

00:09:42.000 And then you can stack on top of biological sex, gender identity, virtually perfect match.

00:09:48.000 Then gender expression.

00:09:50.000 Almost everyone who is biologically male or female, who identifies as biologically male or female, expresses themselves as male or female.

00:09:59.000 And then the vast majority of them have a sexual orientation that's in keeping with their, you know, in traditional keeping with their biological sex, gender identity, and gender expression.

00:10:09.000 So now we have a law that says those are independent.

00:10:12.000 Guess what?

00:10:13.000 That's not the definition of independence.

00:10:15.000 And you can't just play mucky games with your legislative terminology.

00:10:20.000 It gets people in trouble.

00:10:22.000 So it's not a spectrum.

00:10:24.000 And that's that.

00:10:25.000 It's a modified bimodal distribution.

00:10:27.000 And there are obviously exceptions.

00:10:29.000 And I never argued once in the videos that I put out, despite how people reacted to them, that there weren't exceptions.

00:10:36.000 Of course there are exceptions.

00:10:37.000 And if you look at temperament, for example, you know, the big differences between men and women are agreeableness and neuroticism.

00:10:44.000 Fundamentally, women are about half a standard deviation, more agreeable. 1.00

00:10:48.000 That's compassion and politeness.

00:10:49.000 And they're about half a standard deviation, higher in negative emotion.

00:10:53.000 And that's cross-cultural, by the way.

00:10:55.000 And it also accounts for the reasons why women are about three to four times more likely to suffer cross-culturally from depression and anxiety.

00:11:02.000 Whereas men are more likely to be aggressive in prison than to drink.

00:11:06.000 And low agreeableness is actually the best predictor of incarceration among men.

00:11:11.000 Those are solid biological differences.

00:11:13.000 But if you try to segregate men and women using only those two dimensions, you only get it right about 75% of the time.

00:11:19.000 So there's a substantial overlap.

00:11:21.000 But that still doesn't mean that it's not a spectrum.

00:11:24.000 And the idea that there are no biological differences between men and women is such a preposterous claim that I can't even believe that we would ever have that discussion.

00:11:32.000 I mean, men have wider jaws.

00:11:35.000 Men are taller.

00:11:36.000 They have broader shoulders.

00:11:38.000 Women have more endurance in endurance sports. 1.00

00:11:41.000 Women have a subcutaneous layer of fat. 1.00

00:11:43.000 The shape is different.

00:11:44.000 The way the arms are placed is different.

00:11:46.000 The voice is different.

00:11:48.000 And that's just gross morphology.

00:11:50.000 I'm not even talking about genitalia.

00:11:52.000 And then you can look at microstructures.

00:11:54.000 There's differences between men and women at every level of the human microstructure from the cellular all the way up to the social.

00:12:02.000 So, like, what in the world are we talking about?

00:12:05.000 What's going on here?

00:12:06.000 It's crazy.

00:12:07.000 So that was video number one.

00:12:09.000 Video number two was the bloody human resources department at the University of Toronto has adopted an equity position.

00:12:17.000 Okay, so what equity means is that it doesn't mean equality of opportunity.

00:12:21.000 It means equality of outcome.

00:12:23.000 And that is...

00:12:26.000 So this is the idea.

00:12:28.000 The idea is that you take a social institution like a university.

00:12:33.000 And then you look at the organization of that university at every single strata from the executive level all the way down to the student level.

00:12:41.000 Then what you do is you do an analysis of each level by community demography.

00:12:46.000 Right?

00:12:47.000 You get to define the demographic characteristics that you're going to discuss, however, which is actually a big problem.

00:12:52.000 Then you make the presupposition that unless that organization at every level matches the demographic representation of people at every level, then it's corrupt, oppressive, and discriminatory, and it needs to be changed.

00:13:07.000 Okay, so you think, well, what's wrong with that?

00:13:10.000 Every level should have 50-50 men and women, let's say. 0.78

00:13:12.000 It's like, you're really sure about that, are you?

00:13:14.000 You're so sure about that.

00:13:15.000 You don't think there's any natural differences in interest between men and women.

00:13:19.000 Well, if you don't think so, then why are most psychology classes 80% women? 0.96

00:13:24.000 And that differentiation is accelerating rapidly, like I've seen it over the course of my career, from maybe 60% men at the beginning of my career to like 80% women now.

00:13:36.000 And men occupy more of the positions in the STEM fields, at least for now.

00:13:42.000 It's the same in bloody Scandinavia. 0.84

00:13:44.000 It's twenty-to-one nurses, twenty-to-one women-to-men nurses in Scandinavia, and twenty-to-one men-to-women in engineering.

00:13:54.000 And that's in Scandinavia.

00:13:55.000 And so what's happened in Scandinavia, as they've made this society more egalitarian in terms of its legal and social structures, is that the gender differences in personality between men and women have got bigger, not smaller.

00:14:07.000 So what that means is that social constructionism is wrong.

00:14:12.000 That's what it means.

00:14:13.000 Wrong.

00:14:14.000 Disproved.

00:14:15.000 It's exactly the opposite of what the theory would have predicted, because the theory predicted, and God only knew how it was going to sort itself out.

00:14:22.000 It's not like people knew this to begin with.

00:14:25.000 The idea was that as you equalize the social structure, that the differences between men and women would disappear.

00:14:34.000 Guess what?

00:14:35.000 That didn't happen.

00:14:36.000 And it's not studies of just a few hundred people in a few locations.

00:14:40.000 Those are population-wide studies, and they've been replicated multiple times.

00:14:44.000 And the funny thing is that there are temperamental differences between men and women.

00:14:50.000 And neuroticism and agreeableness are not the only temperamental differences.

00:14:55.000 So if you fragment extroversion, it fragments into assertiveness and gregariousness.

00:15:01.000 Women are more gregarious, men are more assertive.

00:15:03.000 If you fragment conscientiousness into orderliness and industriousness, women are more orderly and men are more industrious. 0.95

00:15:10.000 If you fragment openness, which is the creativity dimension, into interest in ideas and interest in aesthetics, you find that women are more interested in aesthetics and men are more interested in ideas. 0.76

00:15:20.000 Because you can fractionate the big five into ten.

00:15:23.000 You get gender differences across all of them.

00:15:25.000 And they're not trivial either.

00:15:26.000 They make a difference. 0.99

00:15:28.000 So, okay, so anyways, back to the equity thing of all the preposterous and idiotic ideas. 0.98

00:15:35.000 So, first of all, to make gender equity across every dimension of an organization, you have to assume that men and women have identical interests and temperaments. 0.98

00:15:48.000 And that if they don't, the state should intervene to bloody well ensure that they do, which is something for all you women to figure out. 1.00

00:15:54.000 Because now there's many, many, what, positions in society that women preferentially occupy. 1.00

00:16:04.000 So what are you going to do about that?

00:16:06.000 And what are you going to do about the Asians? 0.78

00:16:08.000 Because they occupy preferential positions as well.

00:16:11.000 You know, they're over-represented in all sorts of professional institutions.

00:16:14.000 And the probability is that that's going to increase.

00:16:17.000 What are you going to do about that?

00:16:18.000 What about the Jews?

00:16:19.000 What are you going to do about them?

00:16:20.000 Because they're in the same position as the Asians. 1.00

00:16:23.000 Are you going to put quotas on all those people? 1.00

00:16:25.000 What kind of stupidity is that? 1.00

00:16:28.000 And then it's worse, too, because let's say you equalize women, just for the sake of argument, across all these different dimensions of society. 1.00

00:16:35.000 Well, then what are you going to do?

00:16:37.000 Are you going to equalize for black women and Latino women and Asian women? 0.98

00:16:42.000 Are you going to subtype black women?

00:16:44.000 Because it's not like they're all the same.

00:16:46.000 Are you going to ensure that women from lower classes are represented just as much as women from upper classes?

00:16:53.000 And how many generations back are you going to go to check that?

00:16:56.000 What about intelligence?

00:16:57.000 What about attractiveness?

00:16:59.000 How about height?

00:17:00.000 How about weight?

00:17:01.000 So the problem with the fractionation by group identity is that it's endless.

00:17:06.000 There's no way of ensuring equality across groups because there's an infinite number of groups.

00:17:11.000 You can fragment group identity all the way down to the level of the individual, which is exactly what you should do.

00:17:17.000 Which is what we already did in the West.

00:17:19.000 We figured, well, the ultimate diverse population is a population of individuals.

00:17:24.000 So you let the individuals sort it out.

00:17:26.000 No, no.

00:17:27.000 We're going to replace that with group.

00:17:28.000 Well, what that means for the bloody social activists is that they'll be able to play this game forever. 0.78

00:17:33.000 Because you can continually fractionate group identity ad nauseam.

00:17:37.000 And so the system will never be equal.

00:17:39.000 And you can bloody well be sure that as we implement social policy to make sure that all outcomes are equal,

00:17:45.000 that the amount of space that you personally are going to have to maneuver in is going to shrink and shrink and shrink and shrink.

00:17:51.000 We've already seen that happen in many societies.

00:17:54.000 You'd think we would have learned from the 20th century.

00:17:56.000 So that's the equity issue.

00:17:58.000 And then worse even, this is the HR and equity people, they're actually mucking about with people's unconscious biases.

00:18:05.000 So this is what we want, right?

00:18:07.000 We want your employers and the state to re-educate you so that your perceptions,

00:18:12.000 because that's what we're talking about with regards to unconscious bias,

00:18:15.000 so that your perceptions fall into accordance with their demands.

00:18:19.000 And not even your voluntary perceptions.

00:18:21.000 By the way, your involuntary unconscious perceptions have to be retrained.

00:18:27.000 Okay, so maybe that's not so good.

00:18:29.000 Especially when you look at that bloody implicit association test.

00:18:33.000 Mazarin Banerjee from Harvard and Anthony Greenwald from the University of Washington.

00:18:38.000 So, Banerjee is an avowed Marxist.

00:18:41.000 And Greenwald and Banerjee both bloody well know and have written

00:18:45.000 that their implicit association test has neither the reliability nor the validity

00:18:49.000 to be used as an individual diagnostic test.

00:18:52.000 They know it.

00:18:53.000 Sorry, just jump in.

00:18:54.000 I've lectured about that in my class, but not everyone is aware of that.

00:18:57.000 Do you want to just give a... I could bring up a PowerPoint slide or do you want to...

00:18:59.000 Yeah, why don't you do that?

00:19:01.000 Do you want to do that?

00:19:02.000 Yeah.

00:19:03.000 So, I'll let you take over when you do that.

00:19:05.000 So, despite the fact that...

00:19:07.000 Sorry, this will...

00:19:08.000 Forget all of it.

00:19:13.000 You'll take a few minutes, so...

00:19:14.000 Yeah, well, despite the...

00:19:16.000 Okay, so the implicit association test in principle is this word association game.

00:19:21.000 It's actually predicated, I would say, on psychoanalytic ideas.

00:19:25.000 Most particularly on Jungian ideas.

00:19:27.000 Because Jung developed the association test many, many, many years ago.

00:19:30.000 But it purports to investigate whether you are unconsciously biased towards one group

00:19:36.000 or against another group.

00:19:37.000 Could be gender, could be ethnicity, could be race, could be attractiveness, whatever. 0.97

00:19:41.000 But the problem is, is that when you give the same person the damn IAT twice, they don't 0.98

00:19:47.000 get the same results. 0.96

00:19:48.000 So, there's a rule for diagnostic tests.

00:19:50.000 And the rule is the reliability, test-retest reliability, has to exceed something like

00:19:56.000 .8 or .9.

00:19:57.000 .8 at least.

00:19:58.000 So, the big five does that. 0.77

00:20:00.000 IQ tests do that.

00:20:01.000 There's a damn few tests that pass that reliability criteria.

00:20:07.000 And the IAT is only reliable, I don't remember precisely, but I think it's about .5.

00:20:11.000 Which isn't even...

00:20:12.000 It's not even near close enough to be used as a diagnostic test.

00:20:16.000 Plus, it's not valid.

00:20:18.000 So, what does that mean?

00:20:19.000 Well, let's say I assess your unconscious bias and give you a diagnosis.

00:20:23.000 Well, there's no evidence that it predicts your behavior.

00:20:26.000 So, what good is it?

00:20:29.000 What good is it?

00:20:30.000 Well, it's good if you want people to send you to retraining exercises so that you can

00:20:35.000 have your perceptions adjusted in the direction that your organization and the state thinks

00:20:40.000 is proper.

00:20:41.000 And that's happening everywhere.

00:20:42.000 I got letters this week already from people at CBC.

00:20:45.000 It's becoming mandatory there.

00:20:47.000 St. Mike's Hospital, same thing.

00:20:49.000 And they've decided that all of their micro-institutions within the hospital will be equitable.

00:20:55.000 There will be 50% women and 50% men at every single level of the organization.

00:20:59.000 Or the organization is corrupt and oppressive.

00:21:02.000 It's like...

00:21:03.000 And that...

00:21:04.000 It's spreading so fast you can't believe it.

00:21:06.000 I wrote Mazarin Ben-Azhi and Anthony Greenwald yesterday and sent it off to some of my colleagues.

00:21:11.000 Saying, are you going to come out and make a public statement about the fact that your 0.99

00:21:15.000 damn test is being used by pathological people for nefarious purposes? 0.99

00:21:20.000 It's like, well, we'll see what they have to say about that. 0.99

00:21:22.000 I was a bit more polite in my letter than that.

00:21:24.000 But there's no excuse for it.

00:21:26.000 There's absolutely no excuse for it.

00:21:28.000 And as far as I'm concerned, it's part of the broader corruption of social psychology.

00:21:33.000 You guys may know or may not that social psychology has been rife with controversy and scandal over the last three or four years. 0.98

00:21:42.000 And a big part of the reason for that is it's damn corrupt discipline. 0.60

00:21:45.000 And the use of the IAT for political reasons is a perfect example of that. 0.96

00:21:49.000 There is no excuse for it.

00:21:51.000 And the people at St. Mike's, you know, they say, well, this is scientifically validated.

00:21:56.000 It's like, no, it's not.

00:21:58.000 And worse, let's say you do have unconscious bias, just for the sake of argument, and you can measure it reliably.

00:22:04.000 Which you can't, and that it was valid.

00:22:07.000 Which it isn't.

00:22:08.000 Let's say all of those things were in case. 0.98

00:22:10.000 There's no evidence whatsoever that those damn unconscious bias training programs, retraining programs, 0.92

00:22:15.000 have the effect that they're supposed to have, and there's some evidence that they actually have the reverse effect. 0.97

00:22:21.000 And maybe that's because people don't really like being marched off to re-education by their employers

00:22:26.000 after they've been diagnosed as racist, even if there's no evidence that they in fact are.

00:22:32.000 So it's an absolute misuse of psychology, and it's politically motivated.

00:22:37.000 It's politically motivated.

00:22:38.000 It's an assault on freedom.

00:22:40.000 Anyways, I made those two videos, and I tried to take the HR and equity people at U of T to task,

00:22:47.000 because they made that training mandatory for their HR people.

00:22:49.000 I thought, you don't have the right as an employer to invade the unconscious structures of your employees' minds

00:22:55.000 and alter their political perspective, even though you can't do it.

00:22:59.000 You don't have the right to do that, and to think about it as something you should do as a matter of course,

00:23:04.000 as part of your ethical duty is,

00:23:07.000 you really want that? You really want that?

00:23:10.000 That's what you want your employers to be able to do.

00:23:13.000 Figure out, independently of your behavior, whether or not you're a racist, or a classist, or a misogynist,

00:23:21.000 or whatever that happens to be.

00:23:23.000 And you really think that the bureaucrats at the university, for example, or bureaucrats anywhere for that matter,

00:23:30.000 are actually capable and qualified of doing such a thing properly.

00:23:34.000 You know, doing far more damage than any possible good.

00:23:38.000 Well, so anyways, I made those two videos trying to sort this out and to investigate it,

00:23:43.000 and then, for whatever reason, you know, the proverbial, well, you know what happened.

00:23:48.000 I, within two months, there was 180 newspaper articles written about it,

00:23:52.000 and I don't know how many millions of people have watched these things online now, but it's plenty.

00:23:56.000 And so what that also means is I put my finger on something,

00:23:59.000 because who cares what a dim-witted professor from the University of Toronto does with his spare time at midnight? 0.93

00:24:04.000 No one should care. 0.84

00:24:06.000 I should have had my 15 minutes of notoriety, if that.

00:24:09.000 But that isn't what happened.

00:24:11.000 It was major news in Canada for three months, and I'm still talking to people all over the world about it.

00:24:16.000 I've got a hundred letters a day, at least, I can't keep up with them, 1.00

00:24:19.000 from people who are being cornered in all sorts of ways by their idiot employers 0.99

00:24:26.000 and these safe space propositions at universities and the restrictions on their speech. 0.99

00:24:31.000 They tell me constantly, well, I really agree with you, but I'm afraid to say anything about it.

00:24:35.000 It's like, oh good, that's a wonderful position for us to be in,

00:24:39.000 where people are afraid, they're afraid to speak their minds. 0.82

00:24:43.000 What the hell?

00:24:45.000 And it's not getting better.

00:24:46.000 And if we don't do something about it, it's going to get a lot worse.

00:24:49.000 You saw what happened at Berkeley.

00:24:51.000 That's just a taste of what's to come.

00:24:53.000 You know, one day there's going to be an anti-fast demonstration with a little bit of violence,

00:24:58.000 and the bad guys on the other side are going to come out.

00:25:01.000 And we're not going to like that very much.

00:25:04.000 So maybe we should get our acts together and stop that from happening before it actually happens,

00:25:08.000 unless that's what you want.

00:25:09.000 And I wouldn't recommend it.

00:25:10.000 We have a pretty sophisticated society.

00:25:12.000 And it wouldn't take much to put a spanner into the spokes and flip everybody on their forehead.

00:25:17.000 So, wake up for Christ's sake.

00:25:21.000 This is not good.

00:25:22.000 You know, the bloody federal government has decided that they won't let people pick the judiciary anymore

00:25:29.000 unless they take unconscious bias retraining.

00:25:32.000 Right? 0.91

00:25:33.000 What the hell? 0.96

00:25:35.000 It's crazy. 0.93

00:25:37.000 So, anyways, that's what happened.

00:25:42.000 In addition to, you know, this ideologically driven, in addition to that, do you think,

00:25:46.000 and I'm always quite cynical, do you think it's also a make-work project for a bunch of people

00:25:50.000 that they figure, you know, we can create these tests that aren't valid, aren't reliable,

00:25:53.000 but we've got an industry, you know, that's going to keep going forever now.

00:25:57.000 You'd never expect social psychologists to be careerists, would you?

00:26:01.000 Yes, yes, definitely.

00:26:03.000 Well, I mean, it got out of hand, too.

00:26:05.000 It's not, you know, people don't necessarily plan these things.

00:26:08.000 I'm sure that the Ontario Human Rights Commission, when they were talking about preferred pronoun

00:26:13.000 use, had no idea whatsoever that, you know, within four years of introducing the policies,

00:26:18.000 that there would be 71 different gender identity categories.

00:26:22.000 No one saw that coming.

00:26:24.000 How could you possibly see that coming?

00:26:26.000 And I don't think Banaji and Greenwald had any idea that their test would be transformed

00:26:31.000 into an implement of public policy so rapidly.

00:26:34.000 Right.

00:26:35.000 Okay, and just for those who are interested, the implicit associations or implicit attitudes test,

00:26:40.000 my students, I always give a link to that.

00:26:43.000 And if anyone's interested, I can give you a link where you can go to the test

00:26:46.000 and actually do it yourself and find out.

00:26:48.000 Because the assumption is that if you are implicitly racist, 0.99

00:26:51.000 so explicitly racist, you would say, I hate blacks, let's say. 0.99

00:26:54.000 Implicitly racist, oh no, some of my best friends are black. 0.99

00:26:58.000 When you do this test, the idea is that if you're shown a black person's face, okay, 0.97

00:27:05.000 versus a white person's face, you're more likely to associate that black person with, let's say, violence. 0.57

00:27:10.000 So you're basically being primed unconsciously.

00:27:13.000 So when you see a black face, if you subsequently see a weapon, 0.51

00:27:16.000 and you're asked to decide whether this is a weapon or a tool,

00:27:19.000 you're more quickly going to say weapon, because you're already thinking dangerous, violence, weapons,

00:27:23.000 because you have this negative association of blacks with weapons. 0.97

00:27:27.000 And you'll do that faster than when you see a white face. 0.95

00:27:29.000 Because with a white face, it should be more neutral.

00:27:31.000 So whether you see after the white face, a gun or a weapon,

00:27:35.000 in theory, it should take equal time to determine whether it is one or the other.

00:27:40.000 Things like that. This is the kind of test that they do.

00:27:42.000 And they've associated, or they've done this test, as Dr. Peterson said,

00:27:46.000 with countless other types of constructs.

00:27:48.000 And again, the reliability, the validity, it's not just suspect, it's just non-existent.

00:27:53.000 And as I said, if you'd like to try it out, if you're a student, check out on the Brightspace page.

00:27:59.000 If you're not, email me, Facebook me, and I'll give you the link.

00:28:03.000 And they've done it to, I think, 50 different, at least.

00:28:06.000 You know, Democrat, Republican, vanilla, strawberry.

00:28:12.000 There's all these different things that you can do and see where your implicit or unconscious biases are.

00:28:16.000 And as Dr. Peterson is saying, it's getting out of hand.

00:28:18.000 And it's all I get with the gender pronouns, because during the debate that you had,

00:28:22.000 or whatever that was, at the U of T, one of the people that I think she was a lawyer,

00:28:28.000 very condescendingly...

00:28:29.000 Cosman.

00:28:30.000 Sorry?

00:28:31.000 Brenda Cosman.

00:28:32.000 You think, oh, this kind of thing would never happen.

00:28:34.000 You don't know what you're talking about.

00:28:35.000 Well, first of all, on the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal page,

00:28:38.000 they specifically say that you have to identify people by their preferred identity or expression,

00:28:45.000 which includes pronoun usage.

00:28:47.000 It's there on their page.

00:28:48.000 It's not explicitly stated in Bill C-16, but the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal,

00:28:53.000 who will, in fact, enact any type of action against somebody who's violated these policies.

00:29:00.000 It's on their very page.

00:29:02.000 And I know you spoke about your own experience.

00:29:04.000 I hope that's...

00:29:05.000 Because not everyone saw the debate.

00:29:06.000 Can you just talk about that part where, speaking to other professionals who don't seem to be ideologically driven like Cosman,

00:29:12.000 what they said about the risk?

00:29:14.000 Oh, well...

00:29:15.000 This is so important.

00:29:16.000 Well, it was...

00:29:17.000 Cosman was interesting.

00:29:18.000 I mean, she's definitely not looking at this the same way that I do.

00:29:22.000 But, you know, one of the things she said, in a rather condescending manner, was that I wouldn't be sent to jail even though I wanted to be.

00:29:30.000 I'm paraphrasing, but that's roughly what she said.

00:29:33.000 But that, you know, the Human Rights Tribunal could take away my property and my wages and all of that.

00:29:39.000 But that seemed to be okay for her as long as it didn't extend to jail.

00:29:42.000 But that's also nonsense because if you're found guilty by the Human Rights Tribunal and you don't pay,

00:29:49.000 then that's contempt of court and that goes to a different court and then they put you in jail and that's already happened.

00:29:54.000 So it's crooked lawyer hand-waving, fundamentally.

00:29:59.000 And it's an attempt to play down the significance of the law.

00:30:03.000 You go read about...

00:30:04.000 You go online and read about the powers of the Human Rights Tribunal and then see how safe you feel.

00:30:09.000 So here's one of the things they can do.

00:30:11.000 This is section 1.6.

00:30:13.000 It's in a document about powers of the tribunals.

00:30:17.000 They call them social justice tribunals in Ontario.

00:30:19.000 They actually call them social justice tribunals.

00:30:22.000 It's mind-boggling.

00:30:23.000 They can suspend precedent, normal legal precedent and jurisprudential tradition in the pursuit of their aides.

00:30:33.000 That's one of the...

00:30:34.000 It's actually documented as one of their powers.

00:30:36.000 Think about that.

00:30:37.000 Like, we live in a society that's essentially bound by the restrictions of English common law.

00:30:42.000 English common law is one of the most remarkable developments of civilization ever, period.

00:30:50.000 Because what...

00:30:51.000 See, in the English system basically the presupposition is that you have all the rights there are.

00:30:56.000 They're not enumerated.

00:30:57.000 You just have all of them.

00:30:59.000 Except when one of those rights imposes a restriction on someone else.

00:31:03.000 And then they get irritated at you and take you to court.

00:31:06.000 And then the judge sorts out who has which micro-right.

00:31:09.000 And then that's laid out as precedent.

00:31:11.000 And so English common law is this tremendous body of evolved doctrine about how the infinite number of human rights that each individual has interacts with everyone else's rights.

00:31:22.000 And, like, back when Trudeau, when the first Trudeau brought in the Human Rights Code, the Bill of Rights, the Canadian Bill of Rights, there were lots of people who were upset by it.

00:31:32.000 Because it's a different form of legal reasoning.

00:31:35.000 The Bill of Rights says, here's the rights you have that the government is granting you.

00:31:38.000 That's not how it works under the English Code.

00:31:41.000 The English Code is, you have all the rights there are, but they rub up against other people's rights, so we have to sort that out.

00:31:47.000 We do that with court and precedent.

00:31:49.000 And that's what the Human Rights Commission and Tribunal in Ontario can dispense with if they want.

00:31:56.000 And the reason there, I know the reason that they put that line in there, it's because the social justice hypothesis is that the legal structures of Western civilization are oppressive and patriarchal.

00:32:11.000 And so it's perfectly reasonable to toss them over if you're in pursuit of something like social justice.

00:32:16.000 It's like, that's fine, people.

00:32:18.000 Sure, go ahead and do that.

00:32:19.000 But if you think that you can transform what we have already now into some kind of utopia, then you're dangerous.

00:32:28.000 Because that isn't how the world works.

00:32:29.000 And utopians would be more dangerous than any other people for the last hundred years. 0.98

00:32:33.000 That's for sure.

00:32:34.000 Like, there's all sorts of things wrong with Western society.

00:32:37.000 Always, and there always will be, but compared to 85 to 90% of the rest of the planet, this is bloody heaven.

00:32:46.000 And that's why people want to move here.

00:32:48.000 So, you can say, well, it's corrupt compared to my imaginary utopia.

00:32:52.000 It's like, yeah, that's for sure, it certainly is.

00:32:55.000 But if your imaginary utopia was realized in hardcore politics over a 30-year period, everyone would be out in the streets starving to death.

00:33:04.000 We already know that because it happened multiple times throughout the 20th century in societies that were, well, they weren't as sophisticated as our society is now, but they were plenty sophisticated for their time.

00:33:15.000 And you'll hear the neo-Marxist types, this is the most annoying argument anyone ever makes, they say, well, what happened in the Soviet Union?

00:33:23.000 That wasn't real communism.

00:33:24.000 It's like, first, oh, yes, it was.

00:33:26.000 That's why it also happened in China, which was a very different society.

00:33:30.000 But what they really mean when they say that is, well, you know, that Stalin character, he wasn't such a good guy.

00:33:36.000 He didn't really know how to implement the Marxist doctrines.

00:33:39.000 But me, I'm pretty pure of heart, and if you would have made me dictator for 20 years, then the utopia would have arrived as promised.

00:33:46.000 It's like, first of all, if you think that, there's something wrong with you.

00:33:50.000 You're dangerous.

00:33:51.000 And second, let's just say for a minute that some saint did get a hold of the tools of power and try to implement from each according to his ability to each according to his need,

00:34:02.000 and actually did that in a pure and saint-like manner, here's what would happen.

00:34:07.000 The next people in the revolutionary string, like Stalin, would come along and stab them in their bed in the middle of the night, and that would be the end of that.

00:34:16.000 So, well, so there's absolutely no excuse whatsoever for that sort of thinking.

00:34:21.000 And if you read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, which you should do, like everyone should, because it's like the definitive document of this sort of thing that emerged from the 20th century.

00:34:32.000 Solzhenitsyn laid out with extraordinary clarity, first in his writings on Lenin, and then in his writings on the Soviet Union more broadly, exactly how the pernicious and pathological Marxist doctrines were transformed logically and systematically into the sorts of laws that killed millions of people, millions of people.

00:34:54.000 There were people starving so badly in the Soviet Union by the 1920s that they had posters telling them not to eat their children.

00:35:04.000 So we've been down that road already. So what the hell are we doing? We're going down that road again under the guise of equity, right? And equality.

00:35:15.000 Well, that was the doctrines that promoted those laws to begin with. Not good.

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00:39:27.000 So, when Dr. Peterson, when you talk this way, some people are going to say either you're blowing things out of proportion,

00:39:37.000 or you've made a huge leap from where we are now to where we should be,

00:39:41.000 and so I think there's a lot of room for misunderstanding for people,

00:39:43.000 especially if they have certain ideologies that they'd like to protect.

00:39:46.000 So, one of the reasons I wanted to invite people over was to be able to ask questions.

00:39:51.000 You've heard some of Dr. Peterson's tenets that he's trying to, you know, convey.

00:39:57.000 And he said, you know, and I don't know how many videos each person has watched,

00:40:01.000 but you have an opportunity right now if that's okay.

00:40:03.000 If someone has a specific question, either from something that Dr. Peterson has said today,

00:40:08.000 or things you've heard that videos have been nagging at you,

00:40:10.000 you go, like, I really want to ask them face-to-face, straight up,

00:40:12.000 what do you mean by this, or what is your solution to that.

00:40:15.000 Please, I'm opening up the floor.

00:40:17.000 Just talk really loud, please, so that Mike can pick it up,

00:40:19.000 and then everyone can hear.

00:40:20.000 Does anybody have a specific question that you'd like to ask?

00:40:23.000 Okay?

00:40:24.000 Oh, sorry, I'll let go.

00:40:26.000 Sure, okay.

00:40:27.000 Barbara Kaye?

00:40:28.000 Okay, it's a little bit of a sidebar, but I've watched several of your videos.

00:40:32.000 They're brilliant, and some of your longer ones, and explaining,

00:40:35.000 and I'm intrigued by your, I know that Solzhenitsyn is one of your heroes.

00:40:39.000 I know that Solzhenitsyn was a great man.

00:40:41.000 I'm a little disturbed, and I would love to know, why was he anti-Semitic?

00:40:46.000 You know, the book that he wrote, in which he was accused of anti-Semitism,

00:40:51.000 has not been yet translated into English.

00:40:54.000 You mean there was only one place?

00:40:56.000 Well, one of the things that he did, he certainly,

00:40:59.000 there's certainly no sign of anti-Semitism in the Gulag Archipelago.

00:41:02.000 Not as far as I could tell.

00:41:03.000 And I don't think, in the other books I've read, I haven't seen that either.

00:41:07.000 He did write a book, near the end of his life, on the role that Jewish intellectuals played

00:41:12.000 in the establishment of the Soviet Union.

00:41:14.000 But you can't get it in English, so I don't know what to say about that.

00:41:17.000 I know that it's been criticized from both sides, I would say.

00:41:22.000 One side saying, well, this was a story that needed to be told,

00:41:25.000 and the other side saying, well, this veers into anti-Semitism.

00:41:29.000 So, but, you would ask that question.

00:41:32.000 That's a really hard question, man.

00:41:34.000 Okay, so, I'm going to venture out on a limb.

00:41:39.000 Because I've been thinking about this for a while.

00:41:42.000 Am I going to venture out on a limb?

00:41:45.000 No, I haven't got my thoughts formulated well enough.

00:41:56.000 The leftist doctrines tend to be very attractive to intellectuals.

00:41:59.000 And so, any group that's over-represented in intellectuals is likely going to be over-represented

00:42:05.000 on the leftist end of the spectrum.

00:42:07.000 And there are temperamental reasons for that.

00:42:09.000 We know that if you lean left, it's because you're higher in openness and lower in orderliness.

00:42:14.000 And that seems to be associated with IQ, at least in part.

00:42:19.000 But I don't want to go into it any more than that, because I haven't thought it through sufficiently.

00:42:26.000 But I also haven't been able to get a copy of Solzhenits' last book, because you can't get it in English.

00:42:30.000 It hasn't been translated for one reason or another.

00:42:33.000 But I don't think you'll see anything like that in the Gulag Archipelago. 0.79

00:42:36.000 Okay, thank you.

00:42:38.000 There's another question.

00:42:39.000 Before, we're going to have you ask the question, but afterwards, I want to get back to this,

00:42:43.000 because you mentioned this a number of times, about the correlates between IQ and the left,

00:42:48.000 and that the people who believe in, or who support thought police are not actually just,

00:42:53.000 they're not leftists, they're a whole other category.

00:42:55.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:42:56.000 There's such an important distinction I'd like you to turn to in a few minutes.

00:42:58.000 Okay.

00:42:59.000 But first, this question, please.

00:43:00.000 So, if the current proposition is too extreme, do you have a theory with regards to how we

00:43:07.000 do expand equality without going to such extremes?

00:43:13.000 I think we're doing a good job of that right now.

00:43:16.000 I mean, how fast do you think things, how fast could you even hope for things to change?

00:43:20.000 Look at what's happened to the situation with women since 1970. 1.00

00:43:24.000 That's changed so fast that people can't even keep up.

00:43:27.000 It's not obvious, by the way, either, that it's been particularly good for women.

00:43:32.000 Now, you could make a case that it was good for society, maybe.

00:43:35.000 It's a tough one, eh?

00:43:36.000 Because the birth rate has plummeted.

00:43:38.000 And so, you know, maybe you don't care about that.

00:43:41.000 Maybe you think there's too many people on the planet already, whatever.

00:43:43.000 But, you know, it isn't that easy to figure out when something is working properly.

00:43:48.000 One of the things we do know, we seem to know, is that to the degree that rights are extended

00:43:53.000 to women, economic prosperity follows. 0.98

00:43:56.000 So, you can see worldwide that the societies that have extended the rights to women most

00:44:01.000 extensively are also the societies that seem to be flourishing economically.

00:44:05.000 And there does seem to be a causal relationship.

00:44:08.000 But women have paid a big price for that. 1.00

00:44:10.000 So, what's happened in part is, first of all, for, say, women who are middle class or 1.00

00:44:16.000 lower, their lives have essentially fallen apart.

00:44:19.000 Because marriage is now restricted to the rich, which is also something to think about.

00:44:23.000 For those of you who think marriage is an oppressive, patriarchal institution, it's like, okay, then, why are only the rich people getting married?

00:44:30.000 They're oppressing themselves?

00:44:32.000 I don't think so.

00:44:33.000 And so, the women who are in the lower socioeconomic stratus are suffering madly. 0.96

00:44:38.000 And so are their children.

00:44:40.000 And they have terrible jobs most of the time, like jobs in retail, where, you know, they're called in every day for the next day.

00:44:47.000 They don't have a schedule that's set out ahead of them.

00:44:50.000 They get paid very badly.

00:44:51.000 They've got kids to take care of.

00:44:53.000 And so they have no free time. 0.99

00:44:54.000 It makes them really easy targets for useless, predatory males. 0.95

00:44:58.000 And it's really hard on the kids. 0.95

00:45:00.000 And that's like 40% of the female population, something like that. 1.00

00:45:03.000 And you guys, you know, well, I don't know about all of you, but you're in university.

00:45:06.000 You're part of the privileged cognitive elite, you know.

00:45:09.000 So, these sorts of things don't really touch you the same way they touch other people.

00:45:14.000 And so women are much unhappier, if you look at national polls, than they were, say, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. 1.00

00:45:21.000 And I think that's partly because freedom and happiness, those are not the same thing.

00:45:26.000 They're not even close.

00:45:28.000 And, you know, I see young women all the time struggling to figure out what to do with their lives,

00:45:32.000 because they have no idea how to have a job slash career and a family.

00:45:36.000 So, and there's no answer to that.

00:45:38.000 It's a really difficult problem.

00:45:40.000 You know, and there's all sorts of ideas.

00:45:42.000 Like, I did a lot of consulting for law firms for a long time, about a decade.

00:45:46.000 And I had a lot of clients who were extremely high-functioning female lawyers, younger ones, 1.00

00:45:51.000 trying to figure out how to balance their career with their desire to have a life.

00:45:56.000 And, you know, you hear all the time about women being denied access to positions of power. 1.00

00:46:00.000 And that that's the consequence of prejudice and oppression.

00:46:04.000 It's like, yeah, yeah, everything is caused by the same thing first.

00:46:08.000 Right.

00:46:09.000 You have got one causal principle.

00:46:10.000 Wonderful.

00:46:11.000 Now you're a philosopher.

00:46:12.000 You can figure out everything with it.

00:46:14.000 It's like, the law firms cannot keep their women in their 30s. 1.00

00:46:17.000 They cannot keep them, the big law firms.

00:46:20.000 They all leave.

00:46:21.000 Why?

00:46:22.000 Because the women hit 30. 1.00

00:46:24.000 They're brilliant.

00:46:25.000 Conscientious.

00:46:26.000 Intelligent.

00:46:27.000 They were deadly in high school.

00:46:28.000 Deadly in university.

00:46:29.000 They nailed law school.

00:46:30.000 They whipped through their articling.

00:46:32.000 They made partner by the time they were 30.

00:46:34.000 It was like they were in a rocket to the top position.

00:46:36.000 What do they find when they get there?

00:46:38.000 80-hour work weeks.

00:46:39.000 Right?

00:46:40.000 Because that's one of the things you want to think about.

00:46:42.000 You know, you think that the people who run things are sitting at home smoking big cigars

00:46:46.000 and like telling their minions what to do.

00:46:49.000 It's like that is not, that's like the 1920s millionaire that's on the cover of the Monopoly game.

00:46:55.000 That's no sociological analysis.

00:46:57.000 I know lots of people like that and they work all the time.

00:47:01.000 All the time.

00:47:02.000 From the second they wake up to the second they go to sleep.

00:47:05.000 And they don't just casually work.

00:47:07.000 You know, because I know some of you go to the library for six hours and you say,

00:47:10.000 well I studied in the library for six hours.

00:47:13.000 Like, no you didn't.

00:47:14.000 You studied for half an hour.

00:47:16.000 You had coffee and you looked through Facebook.

00:47:19.000 And you know, you went home and you said,

00:47:20.000 well I studied for six hours and you're happy about it.

00:47:22.000 But you know bloody well you didn't.

00:47:24.000 Partly because you can't.

00:47:26.000 You know, I can only read for about three and a half hours until I'm done.

00:47:29.000 And I'm pretty good at it.

00:47:31.000 So these people who are running things,

00:47:33.000 there's corrupt people obviously,

00:47:34.000 but the vast majority of them first are self-made and second. 0.85

00:47:38.000 They're so bloody efficient and smart you cannot believe it.

00:47:41.000 And they work 80 hours a week.

00:47:43.000 And most of them happen to be men.

00:47:45.000 And why is that?

00:47:46.000 Because there are a small number of insane men who will do nothing but work 80 hours a week.

00:47:53.000 And no matter where you put them,

00:47:54.000 if you put them in the middle of a forest with an axe,

00:47:56.000 all they would do is run around chopping down trees.

00:48:00.000 So the issue isn't why aren't there more women in positions of power. 1.00

00:48:05.000 It's why are there any men insane enough ever to occupy those positions.

00:48:10.000 You know, because we also know, and the data on this is very clear,

00:48:14.000 what's the relationship between money and well-being?

00:48:17.000 Once you have enough money to keep the bill collectors from your door,

00:48:22.000 so once you have enough money to stave off misery,

00:48:25.000 which is sort of lower middle class, something like that in our society,

00:48:28.000 maybe a little lower than that,

00:48:30.000 extra money does not help you.

00:48:32.000 It does not improve your life.

00:48:34.000 So why bother with it?

00:48:36.000 Well, that's what the women in the law firms think. 1.00

00:48:38.000 It's like most of them, by the time they're in their 30s, are married.

00:48:42.000 Almost all of them are married to men who make as much money or more than they do

00:48:46.000 because that's what women go for cross-culturally, 1.00

00:48:49.000 four to five years older, equal or higher in the socioeconomic status.

00:48:54.000 So their husbands already make $350,000 a year. 0.61

00:48:59.000 It's like they think, well, I don't need much more money.

00:49:02.000 The men use money to keep track of the competition, by the way,

00:49:05.000 because all the male lawyers that I talk to are usually real hard-ass guys,

00:49:09.000 really low in agreeableness, really high in conscientiousness,

00:49:12.000 like conservative types, low in openness as well.

00:49:15.000 And they want to win. 0.98

00:49:16.000 And the reason they care about their damn bonus at the end of the year 0.97

00:49:19.000 isn't even so much because of the money. 1.00

00:49:21.000 It's because they got a much bigger bonus than the other son of a bitch sitting beside them, 0.99

00:49:25.000 and they're happy about that. 0.99

00:49:26.000 So there's a real, like a real brass knuckles competition that drives these sorts of things.

00:49:32.000 But we get things backwards so often in psychology and in sociology.

00:49:37.000 It's not why there aren't more women in positions of power. 1.00

00:49:40.000 It's why do any men want those positions. 1.00

00:49:43.000 You just have no idea the amount of responsibility that comes along with that.

00:49:47.000 You just imagine for a minute trying to run a billion-dollar corporation.

00:49:50.000 You can't even bloody well balance your checkbook,

00:49:53.000 and there's dust bunnies underneath your bed.

00:49:55.000 How in the world would you ever run a billion-dollar corporation?

00:49:58.000 Those things are complicated.

00:49:59.000 And you have enemies, and they're trying to take you out all the time.

00:50:03.000 You look at Apple and Samsung, man.

00:50:05.000 They're just torturing each other in the courts non-stop.

00:50:08.000 You know, if you're running a big corporation, you'll be handling two or three hundred lawsuits at a time.

00:50:14.000 And that's just nothing compared to the complexity of what you actually have to do.

00:50:20.000 Stay on top of the technology.

00:50:22.000 Constantly interact with your large customers.

00:50:25.000 Travel all the time because you have to maintain the relationships.

00:50:29.000 You have to regulate the politics inside the business.

00:50:33.000 You have... believe me, it's no picnic.

00:50:36.000 And you think, well, they get a lot of money.

00:50:38.000 It's like, what makes you think that's such a good thing?

00:50:41.000 You know? 0.91

00:50:42.000 Like, if you're half crazy and you have a lot of money, you're going to be crazy a lot faster. 0.99

00:50:46.000 I can tell you that. 0.67

00:50:47.000 Because it frees you from all sorts of constraints.

00:50:50.000 You know, we know the data on lottery winners.

00:50:53.000 They're no happier a year later, and some of them are done.

00:50:56.000 Especially if they had, like, a bit of a cocaine problem to begin with.

00:50:59.000 Because, you know, being broke stops you from dying if you're a cocaine addict.

00:51:04.000 You get enough money, and the way you go.

00:51:06.000 And you think to yourself, you know, you've got all sorts of bad habits and weirdnesses.

00:51:10.000 Somebody dumped an infinite amount of money on you.

00:51:12.000 What makes you think you wouldn't unravel completely?

00:51:15.000 It's highly probable.

00:51:17.000 So, anyway, so back to these women. 0.99

00:51:19.000 You know, what they do when they're 30 is they look around, and they've hit partners,

00:51:23.000 so they've hit the pinnacle of their profession.

00:51:25.000 They think, what the hell am I doing this for?

00:51:28.000 Why would anyone in their right mind want to be woken up at 3 in the morning on Sunday

00:51:32.000 by their irate Japanese client who wants them to work for the next five hours nonstop 0.93

00:51:37.000 to fix this damn problem which is going to cost them $100 million right now? 0.79

00:51:43.000 Or we'll find someone else to pay $750 an hour or two to fix it right now. 0.99

00:51:48.000 And you think, well, that's, you know, a masculine form of value.

00:51:51.000 Because that's one of the criticisms.

00:51:53.000 If the law firms just adopted a more feminine structure of value, it's like, what kind of 1.00

00:51:58.000 bullshit is that? 0.97

00:51:59.000 The reason that you get up at 3 in the morning on Sunday to talk to your Japanese client who's 1.00

00:52:05.000 freaking out about their contract is because if you don't jump the hell up and do it right

00:52:08.000 now, there's some starving associate who's unbelievably ambitious in New York who will

00:52:14.000 pick up the pieces in two tenths of a second.

00:52:16.000 And they're smart and aggressive and they'll take you out.

00:52:19.000 So it has nothing to do with masculine structures of values. 0.99

00:52:24.000 All the foolish ideas. 0.73

00:52:26.000 And, you know, it's not just law where this happens, you know. 0.99

00:52:29.000 We know, for example, that female doctors work far fewer hours, too. 1.00

00:52:32.000 So the more female doctors you have, the more doctors you have to have. 1.00

00:52:35.000 And I'm not complaining about women's priorities. 0.99

00:52:39.000 I'm not saying that women are wrong. 0.94

00:52:42.000 Not at all.

00:52:43.000 It's like, the older I get, the more I understand that marriage and family are of primary importance.

00:52:48.000 And the more I see women in particular, you know, they hit 35 or 40 and they're not married 0.96

00:52:53.000 and they don't have kids and they are not happy.

00:52:56.000 Because what the hell are you going to do from the time you're 40 till the time you're 80?

00:53:00.000 You got no family?

00:53:01.000 You got no relationships?

00:53:02.000 What are you going to do?

00:53:04.000 Go run your company.

00:53:06.000 Yeah, well, if you're one in a thousand, that'll satisfy you.

00:53:11.000 So you bloody well better make sure you're that one in a thousand.

00:53:14.000 And you're probably not.

00:53:15.000 Because those people are rare.

00:53:17.000 So...

00:53:18.000 So then, because Dr. Peterson, one of the natural responses to what you just said would be,

00:53:24.000 okay, well, the priorities are, it's a rigged game because only women are the ones who are 1.00

00:53:29.000 able to procreate.

00:53:30.000 So what do you answer to that?

00:53:31.000 Of course it's a rigged game.

00:53:33.000 Obviously it's a rigged game.

00:53:34.000 Women have complicated lives and the pill has made them more complicated. 1.00

00:53:38.000 Well, that's not...

00:53:39.000 I wouldn't say that exactly because, you know, a hundred years...

00:53:42.000 In 1895, the average person in the Western world lived on one dollar a day in today's

00:53:47.000 money.

00:53:48.000 Okay.

00:53:49.000 So those people worked so hard and slaved away to such a degree that you can't even

00:53:52.000 imagine it.

00:53:53.000 And all their kids died.

00:53:54.000 Right?

00:53:55.000 So the death rate among kids below five was beyond comprehension.

00:54:00.000 And so, like, women had a terrible time at the time. 1.00

00:54:02.000 Well, so did men. 0.59

00:54:03.000 They got to be coal miners and soldiers.

00:54:05.000 Because that wasn't exactly entertaining.

00:54:08.000 You know?

00:54:09.000 So life was very, very, very, very, very hard before we got rich.

00:54:13.000 And we're rich.

00:54:14.000 Even those of you who are in this class who think you're poor.

00:54:16.000 It's like, huh, no you're not.

00:54:18.000 You're in the top one-tenth of one percent by historical standards and probably there by

00:54:23.000 current world standards as well.

00:54:25.000 Of course, you can just compare yourself to the few people who are richer than you and

00:54:28.000 feel sorry for yourself. 1.00

00:54:30.000 But that's pretty pathetic in my estimation. 0.99

00:54:32.000 And it's certainly historically uninformed. 1.00

00:54:35.000 So, yeah, women have it rough. 1.00

00:54:38.000 Obviously.

00:54:39.000 Now, there's other things to consider.

00:54:41.000 You do live eight years longer.

00:54:43.000 So that's not trivial.

00:54:45.000 Testosterone kills men.

00:54:47.000 That's basically why men die earlier. 0.94

00:54:49.000 You know, men are much more likely to be killed in dangerous jobs.

00:54:52.000 They do almost all the dangerous jobs.

00:54:54.000 They do almost all the outside work.

00:54:56.000 And there's lots of reasons that men get paid more than women that have nothing to 0.61

00:54:59.000 do with prejudice.

00:55:00.000 It's because they take awful, horrible jobs like working in the oil rigs in northern

00:55:05.000 Alberta when it's bloody 40 below.

00:55:07.000 And come out of that after five years with two or three fingers missing and all warped

00:55:12.000 up.

00:55:13.000 Because you really want to wrestle pipe when it's 40 below and it's filthy with a bunch

00:55:17.000 of ornery men who are hungover beyond belief.

00:55:21.000 It's like, that's not very entertaining.

00:55:24.000 So, yeah, I mean, each gender, each sex has its own unfairness to deal with.

00:55:30.000 But to think of that as a consequence of the social structure, it's like, come on,

00:55:34.000 really?

00:55:35.000 What about nature itself?

00:55:37.000 And this is something that seems to be completely invisible on the left side of the political

00:55:43.000 spectrum.

00:55:44.000 It's like, of course you're bloody oppressed and your life is full of suffering.

00:55:47.000 Obviously. 0.99

00:55:48.000 But to think about that as a direct consequence of unjust social structures is just moronic. 0.97

00:55:53.000 It's like, that's part of the reason. 0.94

00:55:55.000 A small part.

00:55:56.000 But look where you're sitting, people.

00:55:58.000 It's pretty warm in here.

00:56:00.000 And you're so privileged you can come here on Saturday morning and listen to an intellectual

00:56:04.000 lecture.

00:56:05.000 It's like, you should be happy about that because by historical standards you should

00:56:08.000 be out lifting rocks in your skeletal form about five foot three with no teeth.

00:56:15.000 So...

00:56:16.000 Fighting of cougars.

00:56:17.000 Yeah.

00:56:18.000 Cougars and lions.

00:56:19.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:56:20.000 So, you know, there's no gratitude.

00:56:22.000 That's the thing.

00:56:23.000 There's no gratitude for what our society is capable of doing.

00:56:26.000 So...

00:56:27.000 Uh, three?

00:56:28.000 Yeah, Dr. Peterson, tell me what you think about this, because I was thinking about

00:56:33.000 what happens when the forces of the gender identity, gender expression clash with the

00:56:40.000 capitalist market forces?

00:56:41.000 For example, sports is a multi-billion dollar industry and if some women start saying we 0.99

00:56:46.000 express ourselves as men, we think we're men and the law is on their side, do you think

00:56:51.000 that this billion dollar industry is going to put up with some women wanting to be, you 1.00

00:56:56.000 know, on football teams, on the Toronto Maple Leafs?

00:56:59.000 I don't think so.

00:57:00.000 So I'm wondering if some of the market forces will clash with this and then somebody has

00:57:06.000 issues might resolve that way, what do you think?

00:57:10.000 Well, market forces will be a constraining factor.

00:57:15.000 Partly because the market tends to punish things that don't work in the market very,

00:57:20.000 very rapidly.

00:57:21.000 You know, and that's another thing with regards to thinking about, say, equality or equity in

00:57:26.000 the workplace.

00:57:27.000 If you believe that there is a equivalent distribution of talent across all possible categories, that

00:57:36.000 you have some reason to wait for the market to sort itself out because, you know, even

00:57:41.000 if you're an anti-capitalist, you at least have to understand that the people that you

00:57:47.000 despise are motivated by greed.

00:57:50.000 And so they're going to try to find people who will make them the most money and they

00:57:54.000 basically do that. 1.00

00:57:55.000 It's a pretty stupid employer who won't take someone talented when they come along. 1.00

00:57:59.000 You might say, well, they're prejudiced and they're not doing such a great job of, 1.00

00:58:02.000 like, sorting out the applicants.

00:58:04.000 It's like, that's fine.

00:58:05.000 They'll be stopped real good by people who are much better at it.

00:58:08.000 Because, like, talent is unbelievably rare.

00:58:10.000 I don't know if you guys have talked about the Pareto distribution at all.

00:58:13.000 But, well, productivity is not normally distributed.

00:58:18.000 You know, you learn in psychology that everything is normally distributed.

00:58:21.000 It's like, no, it's not.

00:58:24.000 Random things are normally distributed.

00:58:27.000 But productivity isn't random.

00:58:28.000 And so what you see, productivity is actually governed by something called Price's Law,

00:58:33.000 which is a variation of another principle called the Pareto Principle, which was discovered

00:58:37.000 back in the late 1800s by Vilfredo Pareto, who was an economist.

00:58:41.000 What Price showed, Price actually studied scientific productivity.

00:58:45.000 And so what he showed, it's quite cool, at the time when he did this, this was in 1960,

00:58:50.000 the typical PhD student had one publication on graduation.

00:58:54.000 Okay?

00:58:55.000 Half as many had two.

00:58:56.000 Half as many as that had three.

00:58:58.000 Half as many as that had four.

00:59:00.000 Massive step-down in productivity.

00:59:03.000 And you see this in scientific productivity period.

00:59:06.000 So what happens is that in any given scientific domain, there's a clump of people sort of

00:59:12.000 on the left side of the distribution, the less productive side.

00:59:15.000 And in that clump, men and women are equally productive. 0.91

00:59:19.000 But then there's a tiny percentage of people who publish like all the papers.

00:59:24.000 And they're all men.

00:59:25.000 And they're those insane men that I was telling you about before that do nothing but work for 80 hours a week.

00:59:30.000 And the thing is, if you want to rise to the top of a profession, you think about it.

00:59:34.000 What do you need to rise to the top of a competitive profession?

00:59:37.000 You better be smart.

00:59:39.000 Because smart makes you fast.

00:59:41.000 And you're not going to get to the next place faster than anyone else unless you're faster than them.

00:59:46.000 You bloody well better be conscientious.

00:59:48.000 Industrious in particular.

00:59:49.000 So it should make you feel horrible every second of your life you spent doing something that involves leisure.

00:59:56.000 And there's going to be some people in here that know that because they're hyper-conscientious.

00:59:59.000 I can't stand sitting around doing nothing.

01:00:01.000 I've got to find some work to do.

01:00:03.000 And you'll do whatever you have to that's work because you feel guilty and horrible if you're sitting around.

01:00:08.000 So you need to be hyper-conscientious.

01:00:10.000 And so maybe you need to be in the top 1% for intelligence and maybe the top 5% for industriousness.

01:00:17.000 So that's 1% of 5%.

01:00:19.000 So you're looking at it.

01:00:21.000 I think that's 1 in...

01:00:22.000 What is that?

01:00:23.000 1% of 5%.

01:00:24.000 Yeah, it's 1 in 100.

01:00:26.000 1 in 20.

01:00:28.000 1 in 2000?

01:00:29.000 I think that's right.

01:00:30.000 Anyways, you're a rare bird if you're going to be in that position.

01:00:34.000 And so, because of the Pareto distribution and because of the concentration of productivity in a very small number of people,

01:00:43.000 there's tremendous economic incentive to identify those people no matter where they're from.

01:00:48.000 No matter who they are.

01:00:49.000 And employers who have any sense know that.

01:00:51.000 And they're hungry.

01:00:52.000 Like, these law firms, you know, you have no idea the knots they tie themselves in trying to keep their qualified women. 1.00

01:01:00.000 Because those women are worth a bloody fortune. 1.00

01:01:02.000 You know, they pay them a lot. 0.96

01:01:03.000 But they bring in way more business than...

01:01:06.000 They bring in far more economic resources than they take.

01:01:10.000 The law firms want to keep them.

01:01:12.000 Now, that doesn't mean the men...

01:01:14.000 All the men in the law firms don't have their problems with highly qualified women. 1.00

01:01:19.000 Because they don't know what to do with them.

01:01:21.000 You know, like, if you're a guy and you're assertive and competitive, then you're going to be asserting yourself and competitive with other guys.

01:01:28.000 But it's a lot harder to do that with a woman.

01:01:30.000 Because you think, well, what am I...

01:01:32.000 How am I going to be?

01:01:33.000 Am I going to be, like, hyper aggressive around her?

01:01:35.000 Because that just doesn't work out.

01:01:37.000 And so the guys really don't know what to do about that.

01:01:40.000 And I would say there's some residual trouble in law firms and other high-end industries because of that.

01:01:45.000 They just don't know how to sort it out.

01:01:47.000 But mostly the employers are thinking, I don't care if you're green.

01:01:51.000 If you're smart and you can bring in business and you're reliable and you can solve problems.

01:01:56.000 Like, we don't have anybody like you.

01:01:58.000 We need you.

01:01:59.000 Please stay.

01:02:00.000 It doesn't happen.

01:02:02.000 So, yes, the market forces will...

01:02:04.000 But the market forces, I think, are already going to push things hard in the direction of maximizing the utility of talent.

01:02:12.000 Because you just have no idea how much more productive a productive person is than a non-productive person.

01:02:17.000 It's crazy.

01:02:18.000 It's crazy.

01:02:19.000 I just want to juxtapose that with a publication, which is not to get your blood boiling.

01:02:24.000 It's something that somebody sent me.

01:02:26.000 Glaciers, Gender, and Science.

01:02:28.000 A Feminist Glaciology Framework for Global Environmental Change Research.

01:02:32.000 You want to talk about productivity?

01:02:34.000 And then there's academia. 0.99

01:02:36.000 Not to denigrate all of academia, but unfortunately, this is a profession in which people have killed trillions of trees for bullshit, basically. 0.98

01:02:46.000 So, I just thought that would be a nice ironic twist. 0.98

01:02:49.000 Yeah, well, you know, the postmodernists, they don't believe in...

01:02:52.000 I don't know how much you know about postmodernist philosophy.

01:02:55.000 You're at Ryerson, so probably quite a bit.

01:02:58.000 But, not that the U of T is any better, because it's not.

01:03:01.000 But, the postmodernists don't believe in science.

01:03:04.000 There's lots of things they don't believe in.

01:03:06.000 They don't believe in logic.

01:03:07.000 And I'm not making this stuff up.

01:03:08.000 Like, you can go read it for yourself, Derrida in particular.

01:03:11.000 They think that logic is part of the oppressive patriarchy, and that there's no point in dialogue, because all there is is different power groups identified by their groups, and they can't really talk.

01:03:20.000 It's just a power struggle.

01:03:21.000 And that's why the radical leftists stop people from speaking on campus.

01:03:25.000 That's why I couldn't find anybody to debate me, roughly speaking, at the University of Toronto.

01:03:29.000 Right.

01:03:30.000 And I went to Queen's University two weeks ago, to the law school there, because I was invited by a group called Runny Bean Association.

01:03:35.000 And they asked six professors if they would debate me.

01:03:38.000 It's like, no.

01:03:39.000 So, why not?

01:03:40.000 I'm not even a lawyer.

01:03:41.000 And lawyers can debate.

01:03:42.000 Like, they're good at that.

01:03:43.000 That's what they're trained to do.

01:03:45.000 No, they wouldn't debate me.

01:03:46.000 So, they had to get somebody to play devil's advocate.

01:03:49.000 And he did a good job.

01:03:50.000 You know, he did a very credible job, I thought.

01:03:52.000 But, you think, well, why wouldn't they come out and debate me?

01:03:55.000 That's easy.

01:03:56.000 They don't believe in dialogue.

01:03:58.000 Period.

01:03:59.000 It's part of the philosophy.

01:04:01.000 Because you have to believe in logic, first of all, to believe in dialogue.

01:04:04.000 You have to believe that people can communicate, like, as individuals, fundamentally.

01:04:09.000 And not that you're just locked in your identity as group member against all the other identity groups that are struggling for power in the kind of Hobbesian landscape.

01:04:18.000 That's all part of postmodernism.

01:04:21.000 So, and this, well, this is just an extension of that.

01:04:24.000 It's like, science is just a patriarchal, oppressive patriarchal structure.

01:04:28.000 And so, we need to reconstitute it from the bottom up. 0.97

01:04:32.000 It's like, they type on their computers while they say this, not noticing that by the fact that they're using the damn computer, which wouldn't work.

01:04:42.000 You know, people had to figure out quantum mechanics before they could make computers. 0.70

01:04:47.000 They use the computer.

01:04:49.000 Science doesn't, science isn't real.

01:04:51.000 Tap, tap, tap, tap.

01:04:53.000 Like, they do the same thing when they're in jet planes.

01:04:55.000 Science isn't real.

01:04:56.000 And here I am, 600 miles an hour, typing on my computer.

01:05:00.000 It's like, that's called a performative contradiction from a philosophical perspective.

01:05:05.000 And that's the same as a logical paradox.

01:05:08.000 You don't get to say one thing and do another and say that you've got it right.

01:05:12.000 Well, you do if you're a postmodernist, because you can do whatever you want if you're a postmodernist.

01:05:16.000 And the reason the damn postmodernists are Marxists, as far as I can tell, because inevitably they are, is because the problem with postmodernism is it doesn't even leave postmodernists anything to do. 0.86

01:05:28.000 Because postmodernists don't believe in overarching directional narratives. 0.98

01:05:32.000 And the problem with that proposition is, if you don't have an overarching directive narrative for your life, you don't know what to do.

01:05:39.000 And it's really important that you know what to do, because you're alive and you need to do things.

01:05:44.000 Well, we'll just turn back to the original Marxism, and we'll say, well, we'll just group ourselves up in oppressed groups, and we'll have wars between the oppressed groups.

01:05:52.000 That'll give us a sufficient overarching narrative.

01:05:56.000 It doesn't matter that it contradicts the postmodernist thesis, because they don't care about contradictions.

01:06:01.000 So, well, so, hence this, you know, feminist glaciology. 1.00

01:06:07.000 Okay, so I've got a few questions that you've been watching, Hans, pop up.

01:06:10.000 So there's one back there first. Okay, Felix?

01:06:13.000 Yeah, so first I can tell you, you've created a conflict, or described a conflict, really between determinism and choice, right?

01:06:25.000 That, you know, represent psychological and biological determinism.

01:06:29.000 It's a good, it's a good question. No, I don't think so. Even though I think your question is well formulated and intelligent. I don't think it's that dichotomy is that straight.

01:06:47.000 Because there's a tremendous amount of deterministic thinking on the social justice warrior end of the distribution, too. Because they regard you as the deterministic product of your environment.

01:06:59.000 So it's more like the localization of determinism. So it's more like the localization of determinism.

01:07:13.000 So you might say that for the more biologically oriented people, there's more biological determinism.

01:07:19.000 So I think that the conflict between free will and determinism basically runs across the entire political spectrum.

01:07:27.000 But then I would also say, it's probably an ill-formed argument. Because there isn't an absolute paradoxical contradiction between free will and determinism.

01:07:39.000 Quite the contrary. You actually need elements of determinism, I think, for a system to operate freely.

01:07:45.000 So, for example, think about playing chess. You can do a lot of things when you're playing chess. Or think about composing music. You can do a lot of things when you're composing music.

01:07:55.000 But there's an underlying rule structure that sets up the environment within which all of those choices manifest themselves.

01:08:04.000 It's the same with online video games, which are a really good example, I think, because they are micro-worlds.

01:08:10.000 And they're determined in some sense because they have an underlying rule structure. That's the rules of the game. But they're free in many other ways.

01:08:17.000 And so, I don't think there's anybody, pretty much on any side of the political spectrum, who would regard people as entirely possessed of free will.

01:08:27.000 You know, we have constraints and limits. And we're also pretty good at adjusting those on the fly.

01:08:33.000 You know, so, for example, you'll be much less irritated if a three-year-old runs into you carelessly while tricycling than you will if an adult man runs into you with his scooter.

01:08:44.000 Because you'll take the constraints of the individual into account very, very rapidly.

01:08:50.000 So, I think, so well, so that's, it's not as simple as free will versus determinism mapped onto the political spectrum.

01:08:57.000 When a woman experiences an unplanned pregnancy, she often feels alone and afraid.

01:09:04.000 Too often, her first response is to seek out an abortion, because that's what left-leaning institutions have conditioned her to do. 1.00

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01:10:15.000 Okay, let's start. Joey?

01:10:17.000 You mentioned that if somebody thought that socialism was done wrong because it was done by Stalin, that frequently they're saying that I would have done it right, and that there's something wrong with that person.

01:10:39.000 I see what you're saying, but I wonder, I asked her to say once in a video about twisted compassion, about how people get their compassion all twisted, and that you appeal to the individual.

01:10:52.000 It seems that like attacking on that level, it's not that that's not your mojo or that's not how you do things really, but it seems like you'll get people on their heels, sort of.

01:11:01.000 You know, I see, like, some hatred for Americanism or something like that, or Muslims, and I think that just makes people, they naturally feel identified with their land or their category. 0.99

01:11:12.000 It'll just make them defend that stance even more, instead of reaching for the individual, like, understandings about compassion, right?

01:11:20.000 Okay, so I have to take that apart a little bit, because there's a bunch of issues in the question.

01:11:28.000 How many people in here are in your psychology course, are taking psychology? Are most of you taking psychology courses? How many people are taking psychology courses?

01:11:35.000 Okay, so a goodly number. Well, one of the things you want to do with a conception like compassion is you actually want to start thinking about it like a psychologist or like a scientist.

01:11:45.000 Because compassion is actually definable. And I think the easiest way to approach it is to think about it in big five terms, because it maps onto agreeableness.

01:11:55.000 And especially, you can break agreeableness down into compassion and politeness. And the liberal types, especially the social justice types, are way higher in compassion.

01:12:04.000 It's actually their fundamental characteristic. And you might think, well, compassion is a virtue. It's like, yes, it is a virtue.

01:12:12.000 But any unidimensional virtue immediately becomes a vice. Because real virtue is the intermingling of a number of virtues and their integration into a functional identity that can be expressed socially.

01:12:27.000 And compassion is great if you happen to be the entity towards which it is directed. But compassion tends to divide the world into crying children and predatory snakes.

01:12:40.000 Right. And so if you're a crying child, hey, great, man. But if you happen to be identified as one of the predatory snakes, you better look the hell out.

01:12:49.000 Right. And so, you know, compassion is what the mother grizzly bear feels for her cubs when she eats you because you got in the way.

01:12:57.000 Right. Exactly. So we don't want to be thinking for a second that compassion isn't a virtue that could lead to violence. Because it certainly can.

01:13:07.000 And the other problem with compassion, this is why we have conscientiousness. Right. There's five canonical personality dimensions.

01:13:16.000 Agreeableness is pretty good if you're dealing, again, in a kin system. You want to distribute resources equally, for example, among your children.

01:13:23.000 Because you want all of them to have not only the same chance. You even want them, roughly, to have the same outcome. A good one.

01:13:29.000 But the problem is, is you can't extend that moral network to larger groups. Not as far as I can tell. You need conscientiousness, which is a much colder virtue.

01:13:39.000 And it's also a virtue that's much more concerned with larger structures over the longer period of time. So, and you can think about conscientiousness as a form of compassion, too.

01:13:51.000 It's a strange form. It's like, straighten the hell out and work hard and your life will go well. It's like, I don't care how your feelings, how you feel about that right now.

01:14:00.000 And, like, someone who's cold, low in agreeableness, say, and high in conscientiousness, that's what they'll tell you every time.

01:14:06.000 Don't come whining to me. I don't care about your hurt feelings. Do your god damn job or you're going to be out on the street.

01:14:12.000 Think, oh, that person's being really hard on me. It's like, not necessarily. They might have your long-term best interest in mind. 0.99

01:14:18.000 And you're fortunate if you come across someone who's, like, not tyrannically disagreeable, but moderately disagreeable and high in conscientiousness, because they'll whip you into shame.

01:14:28.000 And that's really helpful. I mean, you'll admire people like that. You won't be able to help it.

01:14:34.000 You know, and you'll think, oh, wow, this person's actually giving me good information, even though, you know, you feel like a slug after they've taken you apart.

01:14:43.000 So, okay, so that's the compassion issue. It's like, you can't just transform that into a political stance.

01:14:49.000 And I think part of what we're seeing is actually the rise of a form of female totalitarianism. 0.98

01:14:55.000 Because we have no idea what totalitarianism would be like if women ran it, because that's never happened before in the history of the planet. 1.00

01:15:03.000 And so we've introduced women into the political sphere radically over the last 50 years. 0.98

01:15:09.000 We have no idea what the consequence of that is going to be, but we do know from our research, which is preliminary, that agreeableness really predicts political correctness.

01:15:18.000 But female gender predicts over and above the personality trait, and that's something we found very rarely in our research. 0.70

01:15:25.000 Usually the sex differences are wiped out by the personality differences, but not in this particular case.

01:15:30.000 And then, you know, women are getting married later, and they're having children much later, and they're having fewer of them.

01:15:37.000 And so you also have to wonder what their feminine orientation is doing with itself in the interim, roughly speaking. 0.78

01:15:46.000 And a lot of it's being expressed as political opinion.

01:15:48.000 Like, fair enough, you know, that's fine.

01:15:51.000 But it's not fine when it starts to shut down discussion.

01:15:56.000 You know, also, if you think about politics from a temperamental perspective, it gets to be extraordinarily useful.

01:16:02.000 So, if you're conservative, you're high in conscientiousness, particularly orderliness, and you're low in openness.

01:16:09.000 Okay, so what good are you?

01:16:11.000 Well, you're not great if you want to have a wonderful philosophical conversation about ideas, and then go hit an art movie.

01:16:18.000 It's like, no, conservative's your wrong date for that particular bit of business.

01:16:24.000 But if you want someone to run a company that's already been established, or to make sure that algorithmized processes are being undertaken properly, you want conservatives.

01:16:35.000 They're very good at managing, and they're very good at administering.

01:16:38.000 Conscientiousness is the best predictor of those two domains, apart from IQ.

01:16:43.000 Okay, so, fine. 0.99

01:16:44.000 What do you need the damn liberals for? 0.99

01:16:46.000 Well, you don't want them running anything, but you want them thinking up new things. 0.99

01:16:52.000 Because the entrepreneurs and artists are high in openness and low in conscientiousness, especially orderliness.

01:16:59.000 And they have to be, because if you're starting something new, you don't want to have everything in the neat little boxes.

01:17:04.000 You have to break rules.

01:17:05.000 You have to take things apart.

01:17:07.000 And so, the liberals need the conservatives to run enterprises, and the conservatives need the liberals to start them.

01:17:13.000 And it makes sense from a temperamental perspective, if you think about it, too.

01:17:19.000 There's five basic personality dimensions.

01:17:21.000 They're all normally distributed.

01:17:22.000 And what that implies is that there's a niche for every personality type in proportion to the frequency of the occurrence within that normal distribution.

01:17:34.000 There's some places for really extroverted people.

01:17:37.000 There's more places for people who are moderately extroverted and moderately introverted.

01:17:41.000 But there are places for everyone in that dimensional structure.

01:17:45.000 And there's utility for all of those people.

01:17:48.000 And so, that's why you have to keep the dialogue going. 0.99

01:17:50.000 It's like, if you're hyper-liberal, you have to talk to the damn conservatives, because sometimes they're right. 0.99

01:17:55.000 Sometimes you're right. 0.99

01:17:57.000 But sometimes they're right.

01:17:59.000 And so, if you don't talk, then the system tilts off to the extreme that's represented by that temperament.

01:18:07.000 And so, what you'd have is a bunch of liberals talking about new things while the buildings were falling down around them.

01:18:12.000 So, we need each other.

01:18:15.000 And that's, see, part of what's happened in the West is we figured that out a long time ago. 1.00

01:18:19.000 And we figured out, oh, well, yeah, I've got to talk to those stupid people who don't think the way you do. 1.00

01:18:23.000 Because sometimes, despite the fact that they're annoying and nowhere near as smart as you, they're actually correct. 1.00

01:18:30.000 And so, here's another way of thinking about it.

01:18:33.000 Imagine the environment does this, like a snake.

01:18:37.000 It's always moving, right? 0.99

01:18:38.000 You don't know where the damn thing's going. 0.98

01:18:40.000 And you want to be in the middle. 0.99

01:18:42.000 It's like two cliffs.

01:18:43.000 It keeps shifting.

01:18:44.000 You want to be in the middle, far from the cliffs.

01:18:46.000 It keeps moving around.

01:18:48.000 And you're trying to walk forward.

01:18:50.000 Well, sometimes it's over here, so the conservatives, they have to pull it back.

01:18:55.000 And sometimes it's over here, so the liberals, they have to pull it back.

01:18:58.000 But because it keeps changing, you don't know who's right.

01:19:01.000 And so you have to keep talking.

01:19:03.000 And that's what a democratic society actually allows for. 0.98

01:19:07.000 Exchange the opinions, move the damn polity, so that we can stay in the middle of the snake, roughly speaking. 0.98

01:19:13.000 And so, you've got to have some respect for people who aren't like you. 0.98

01:19:17.000 They're actually not like you.

01:19:20.000 So, I figured out recently, I think, that I couldn't figure out why openness and conscientiousness are the dimensions that are determining political belief.

01:19:28.000 Because they're not even correlated.

01:19:30.000 So, why the hell do they clump for political belief?

01:19:33.000 And I think I figured it out.

01:19:35.000 I think it's because of borders.

01:19:37.000 I think the fundamental political issue is how open versus closed borders should be.

01:19:44.000 And I don't just mean borders between states.

01:19:46.000 I mean borders between states.

01:19:48.000 I mean borders between institutions.

01:19:51.000 Borders between genders.

01:19:53.000 Borders between sexes.

01:19:54.000 Borders between ideas.

01:19:56.000 The conservatives say, keep everything where it belongs because it's working.

01:20:01.000 And the liberals say, yeah, it's working for now.

01:20:04.000 But unless we make some adjustments, it's not going to keep working.

01:20:07.000 And they're both right.

01:20:09.000 So, we better have the dialogue.

01:20:12.000 Because otherwise we wander off the cliff.

01:20:14.000 On the left or the right.

01:20:15.000 And we know where that goes.

01:20:17.000 That goes, there's flames down at the bottom of those cliffs.

01:20:19.000 And people die horribly down there.

01:20:22.000 And we've seen that on the right and the left.

01:20:24.000 And we've had plenty of evidence for that.

01:20:27.000 So.

01:20:28.000 I have like a bunch of smart sort of friends who have leaned to the left.

01:20:32.000 And I have like, it feels like their compassion got twisted somehow.

01:20:37.000 And I have compassion for that.

01:20:39.000 I don't, like I want to speak to that.

01:20:41.000 Like these are people that I love and stuff like this.

01:20:43.000 And I think that they are kind of ideologically twisted.

01:20:45.000 So, I just think it's important.

01:20:46.000 Well, one of the things I've also spent a fair bit of time thinking about is the role

01:20:51.000 that resentment plays in political ideology.

01:20:54.000 And I have recommended in my lectures.

01:20:57.000 But I'll recommend it here too.

01:20:58.000 There's a great book by George Orwell called Road to Wigan Pier.

01:21:01.000 Which I would, W-I-G-A-N. 1.00

01:21:03.000 Which I would highly recommend.

01:21:05.000 But Orwell did.

01:21:06.000 He was a leftist.

01:21:07.000 He went and fought on the communist side in the Spanish Civil War.

01:21:10.000 Against the fascists, roughly speaking.

01:21:11.000 I mean, Orwell was a tough guy.

01:21:13.000 Very, very smart.

01:21:14.000 Super smart.

01:21:15.000 And he went up to visit the coal miners in the 1930s in the northern UK.

01:21:23.000 And I mean, those people then, they had to crawl to work for two and a half miles in

01:21:28.000 a tunnel that was like three and a half feet high just to get to their shift.

01:21:32.000 And then, you know, that meant breaking rock for seven and a half hours.

01:21:36.000 Then they had to crawl back.

01:21:37.000 And they didn't get paid for the commute.

01:21:39.000 You know, so they had rough time.

01:21:41.000 They had no teeth by the time they were 30.

01:21:43.000 And, you know, they were done and old by the time they were 40.

01:21:46.000 It was rough.

01:21:47.000 And so, you know, Orwell went up there and said,

01:21:49.000 Jesus, the industrial nightmare is just killing these poor oppressed people. 0.95

01:21:53.000 He's like, yeah, that's for sure.

01:21:55.000 And he lays it out.

01:21:56.000 You can't read that without thinking,

01:21:58.000 A, thank God I'm not a coal miner.

01:22:01.000 And B, yeah, it's pretty rough at the bottom of the industrial revolution.

01:22:05.000 Like, seriously rough.

01:22:07.000 But in the second half of the book, he did an analysis of socialist philosophy.

01:22:11.000 And one of the things he pointed out was that his observation was that the sort of middle-class,

01:22:17.000 ideologically bound socialist types didn't care for the poor at all.

01:22:20.000 They just hated the rich.

01:22:21.000 It's like, yes, that's right.

01:22:24.000 Not everyone.

01:22:25.000 Not everyone.

01:22:26.000 I worked for the NDP when I was young.

01:22:28.000 And I met a number of the leaders of the NDP, including Grant Notley.

01:22:32.000 I knew him quite well.

01:22:33.000 He was Rachel Notley's father.

01:22:35.000 Because we come from the same town.

01:22:37.000 And I had a lot of admiration for the leaders of the, back then.

01:22:40.000 Because they were really trying to give a voice to the working class.

01:22:43.000 It's like, you better give a voice to the working class, or you end up electing Trump, for example. 0.99

01:22:48.000 But, you know, the socialists have abandoned the damn working class. 0.98

01:22:51.000 It's like, no, we'll go play identity politics instead. 0.99

01:22:54.000 It's like, that worked out really well for Hillary Clinton, I noticed. 1.00

01:22:57.000 So, because it was identity politics that certainly shifted the election towards Trump.

01:23:02.000 She lost the working class people. 0.98

01:23:05.000 Well, someone has to give them a voice.

01:23:08.000 So there are genuine, there are people on the left who are genuinely working to better

01:23:12.000 the lot of people who, because of situation, haven't had the opportunity they might have.

01:23:18.000 But, so many people are resentful.

01:23:21.000 It's like, no, there's some people out there that have more than me.

01:23:24.000 That's a terrible thing for a North American to think.

01:23:27.000 It's like, we're so god damn privileged that, you know, we should spend at least one extra 0.96

01:23:32.000 day in hell after we die for every time we complain about how poor we are. 0.97

01:23:36.000 Right.

01:23:37.000 Oh, there's some people who are richer than me.

01:23:40.000 Yeah, that's pretty rough, man.

01:23:42.000 That's a rough break for you.

01:23:44.000 You're still...

01:23:45.000 It's the funny thing you hear about the 1% all the time in North America. 0.91

01:23:48.000 It's like, oh, the 1%.

01:23:50.000 First of all, that's a moving target.

01:23:52.000 The people in the 1% shift like crazy. 0.82

01:23:55.000 You have, I think, about a 10% chance of being in the 1% at one point in your life.

01:24:00.000 And about a 40% chance of being in the top 10% for at least one year of your life.

01:24:04.000 So, there is a 1%, but it's moving. 0.95

01:24:07.000 But, you're the bloody 1%. 0.95

01:24:09.000 All you have to do is compare yourself with the rest of the world. 0.89

01:24:12.000 So, like, what are you complaining about?

01:24:15.000 These tiny proportion of people have more than you.

01:24:18.000 Like, what's up with you?

01:24:21.000 How can you be so clueless that you would do that? 1.00

01:24:24.000 How can you be so ungrateful and arrogant and blind? 1.00

01:24:28.000 It's terrible. 0.98

01:24:30.000 I mean, people have rough lives in the rest of the world.

01:24:32.000 I mean, we're making people richer very fast.

01:24:35.000 You know, 300,000 people a day now get connected to the electrical grid.

01:24:39.000 And about 250,000 people are lifted out of abject poverty.

01:24:42.000 We're wiping out abject poverty faster than ever before in human history by a huge margin.

01:24:48.000 So, that's all for the good.

01:24:50.000 It's really impressive.

01:24:52.000 But a huge chunk of that twisted compassion is just resentment.

01:24:57.000 There's a few people who are better off than me maybe if I compare them to myself across one dimension.

01:25:03.000 Jesus, dismal.

01:25:04.000 But that's what's getting lost in the discussion today.

01:25:06.000 It's all, it's so deflecting outward.

01:25:08.000 It's all trying to, you know, it's, as I say, it's like, it's this resentment.

01:25:13.000 It's this wanting and stuff like that.

01:25:15.000 It's this lack of gratitude for just how lucky we really are.

01:25:18.000 And it's this complete lack of insight and reflection.

01:25:21.000 I think that's a big problem.

01:25:22.000 Well, it's partly lack of historical knowledge.

01:25:24.000 Exactly.

01:25:25.000 It's like, people, it's easy to take what we have for granted.

01:25:29.000 Here we are, the lights are on. 1.00

01:25:30.000 It's like some stupid, poor son of a bitch is out there climbing some power line in the 1.00

01:25:35.000 freezing rain, you know, with this damaged arm to make sure that we can all sit here and 1.00

01:25:40.000 complain about how oppressed we are. 0.99

01:25:42.000 You know, it's pretty pathetic. 0.99

01:25:44.000 But it's no wonder we take it for granted. 0.99

01:25:46.000 That's the funny thing, because your minds are organized so that if something always works,

01:25:51.000 you aren't.

01:25:52.000 Because, well, why would you pay attention to it, right?

01:25:54.000 It always works.

01:25:55.000 You don't have to pay attention to it.

01:25:56.000 So, as soon as something is predictable, you zero it out.

01:26:00.000 And so then you think, well, of course it's like this.

01:26:02.000 This is just how it is.

01:26:03.000 It's like, no, this is not how it is.

01:26:05.000 It's a bloody miracle that this stuff works ever.

01:26:08.000 It's crazily improbable.

01:26:11.000 And it always breaks, right?

01:26:12.000 Everything is always breaking, all the time.

01:26:14.000 And somebody's out there beetling away, trying to fix it.

01:26:17.000 Yes.

01:26:18.000 So we're ungrateful partly because we take things that work for granted.

01:26:22.000 If our systems worked only 99% of the time, our society would probably be better.

01:26:27.000 Because when the lights went off, everyone would go, and the heat, they'd go, oh yeah.

01:26:31.000 You can't see in the dark, and you get cold, and there's no furnace.

01:26:35.000 Then it comes back on, and you think, oh yes, that's much better.

01:26:38.000 But it always works, so.

01:26:40.000 Okay.

01:26:41.000 That's our question.

01:26:42.000 Yes.

01:26:43.000 Speaking of envy and resentment, would you care to comment on the apparently well-established

01:26:47.000 neo-Marxist idea that men have a common collective interest, and women have a separate common collective

01:26:54.000 interest, a class interest, and that these interests are, they come into conflict, that

01:26:59.000 there's a competition, in some sense, on a collective level?

01:27:03.000 Well, I think there is competition between men and women, but it's nested inside a broader 0.94

01:27:09.000 arena of cooperation.

01:27:11.000 You know, this is another thing that you learn from reading Piaget, if you're careful,

01:27:15.000 is that, because Piaget was smart enough to understand that there is no dichotomous opposition

01:27:21.000 between cooperation and competition.

01:27:23.000 So, you know, one of the sort of tenets of the kind of leftist mumbo-jumbo that I hate

01:27:28.000 is that you should, kids shouldn't play competitive games.

01:27:33.000 Right?

01:27:34.000 It should be cooperative games.

01:27:35.000 It's like, okay, let's take that apart.

01:27:37.000 Let's take hockey.

01:27:39.000 Is it competitive or cooperative?

01:27:42.000 Well, it's competitive.

01:27:43.000 Well, wait a second.

01:27:44.000 No one brings a basketball to the hockey game.

01:27:47.000 Right?

01:27:48.000 No one brings a chess board.

01:27:50.000 Everyone that comes to the hockey game comes there to play hockey.

01:27:53.000 That constitutes cooperation.

01:27:55.000 We'll mutually define the aim.

01:27:57.000 Right?

01:27:58.000 It's Piaget and cooperation.

01:27:59.000 We'll mutually define the aim.

01:28:00.000 We'll assign each other roles.

01:28:02.000 We'll all agree to stick to the roles.

01:28:04.000 Well, that's cooperation.

01:28:06.000 And if you break the rules, what happens?

01:28:08.000 You get stuck in the penalty box.

01:28:09.000 You're not playing hockey.

01:28:11.000 Off you go.

01:28:12.000 And people go off.

01:28:14.000 They go sit in the penalty box.

01:28:15.000 They don't go kill the referee with a stick.

01:28:17.000 They go and sit in the penalty box.

01:28:20.000 You know, six foot seven, three hundred pounds.

01:28:23.000 So, okay.

01:28:24.000 And then you think, well, what about within the team?

01:28:28.000 Is that cooperation or competition?

01:28:30.000 Well, each team member is trying to be the best player.

01:28:34.000 But try not passing to your colleagues and see what happens. 0.90

01:28:38.000 You know, even if you're really good, you're just a diva.

01:28:41.000 And no one's going to be happy with you.

01:28:43.000 You know, they'll put horrible things in your beer after the game.

01:28:46.000 So, it's cooperation there as well.

01:28:49.000 And then there's a meta level of cooperation, which is that everybody's trying to improve

01:28:53.000 their skills simultaneously.

01:28:55.000 And so that serves a higher order good.

01:28:58.000 And everyone's trying to learn how to be a good player so that they can play many games.

01:29:03.000 It's like, well, we shouldn't play competitive games.

01:29:05.000 It's like, you must have been educated at OISE.

01:29:12.000 It's sad.

01:29:13.000 It's very sad.

01:29:14.000 And it's so, so ignorant for people who know something about child development to say something 0.92

01:29:21.000 like that. 0.98

01:29:22.000 It's just, what is with you?

01:29:24.000 Where were you educated?

01:29:25.000 Or where weren't you educated is the right response.

01:29:28.000 And then, so with men and women, well, there is group competition.

01:29:33.000 For example, you're competing, roughly speaking, with all your classmates, right?

01:29:37.000 And some of the women are going to outshine you. 1.00

01:29:39.000 And so that's tough for men.

01:29:41.000 It's particularly tough for men.

01:29:43.000 Because it isn't obvious how you compete full-board with women.

01:29:48.000 It's not obvious.

01:29:50.000 And we don't know how to solve that problem.

01:29:52.000 And then, of course, status in relationship to the male hierarchy is more important for

01:29:58.000 men than it is for women. 0.93

01:29:59.000 Because women pick their mates based on their position in the social hierarchy. 1.00

01:30:03.000 And so that puts men also in an awkward way.

01:30:05.000 It puts women in an awkward position, too. 1.00

01:30:07.000 Like a lot of you women, let's say there's a fair number of you here who have an IQ of 1.00

01:30:11.000 more than 130.

01:30:12.000 Which puts you in, like, maybe the top, you know, you're one in 20, 95th percentile.

01:30:17.000 And then, you know, you've got pretty good career propositions.

01:30:21.000 So, like, your pool of eligible mates is minuscule.

01:30:25.000 And the data shows that clearly.

01:30:28.000 I'm going to remember correctly.

01:30:29.000 A 15-point increase in IQ for a woman decreases her probability of finding a partner by about 1.00

01:30:34.000 40%.

01:30:35.000 It's something like that.

01:30:36.000 It has zero effect for men, by the way.

01:30:38.000 Because men mate across and down dominance hierarchies. 0.67

01:30:40.000 Not across and up.

01:30:41.000 So if you're a smart woman, and you're attractive, and you're young, and you're hard-working, and

01:30:46.000 you have a good career.

01:30:48.000 It's like you need a man who's smart, hard-working, young, who has a good career.

01:30:52.000 But he has to be a little better at those things than you.

01:30:55.000 It's like, good luck.

01:30:56.000 Good luck.

01:30:57.000 It's going to be rough.

01:30:58.000 Because there just aren't that many people like that.

01:31:00.000 And so there's another problem that faces women, too. 1.00

01:31:03.000 Which is, you're not going to be smart, hard-working, with a good career until you're

01:31:07.000 30.

01:31:08.000 Well, then you have to compete with 25-year-old women. 1.00

01:31:11.000 And so that's also an insoluble problem.

01:31:14.000 Because the thing about 25-year-old women is they put less stress on men. 0.99

01:31:18.000 Why?

01:31:19.000 Why?

01:31:20.000 Because they can have babies for an extra five years.

01:31:23.000 So every guy thinks, yeah, yeah, I'll have kids sometime.

01:31:26.000 Because he can think that.

01:31:27.000 He can have kids until he's 80. 0.55

01:31:29.000 What the hell does he care? 0.98

01:31:30.000 Women? 1.00

01:31:31.000 No, no.

01:31:32.000 35, 40.

01:31:33.000 You better get it together by then.

01:31:34.000 And so when you're 30 and you've got your act together, you've got those 25-year-old

01:31:39.000 women to compete with. 1.00

01:31:40.000 And men don't care about your damn status. 1.00

01:31:43.000 So it's rough. 0.99

01:31:44.000 It's rough.

01:31:45.000 So there is lots of competition between men and women.

01:31:48.000 But it's nested inside a much broader domain of cooperation.

01:31:51.000 Marriage is the fundamental solution to that.

01:31:54.000 And I think the evidence for that is also clear.

01:31:57.000 It's like it's better for women. 1.00

01:31:59.000 You have a better sex life.

01:32:01.000 You're healthier.

01:32:02.000 Your kids are better off.

01:32:04.000 You're not nearly as likely to plummet into a lower socioeconomic category.

01:32:08.000 Which almost always happens to women who get divorced. 1.00

01:32:11.000 Because it's hard.

01:32:12.000 You've got one income.

01:32:13.000 You've got kids.

01:32:14.000 Good luck.

01:32:15.000 Like, you're poor.

01:32:17.000 And if you're not, it's because you're working. 1.00

01:32:19.000 So often the only time you have to have a date is with some psychopathic man who's useless 0.98

01:32:24.000 and can bend his schedule around yours. 0.99

01:32:26.000 Yeah, well, I've seen plenty of this, man.

01:32:29.000 I'm not talking through my hat.

01:32:31.000 I know exactly what the hell happens when you're a little older and a little poorer

01:32:36.000 and a little more desperate.

01:32:37.000 It's not exactly fun.

01:32:39.000 So I wouldn't recommend that you end up there.

01:32:42.000 So...

01:32:43.000 Okay.

01:32:44.000 I'm not happy Valentine's Day.

01:32:45.000 No.

01:32:46.000 It's a two part question.

01:32:49.000 You mentioned, you talked earlier about English common law.

01:32:52.000 About 20 years ago, I read an article from a constitutional expert who warned against the negative repercussions

01:33:03.000 that would come from the way we wrote the Charter of Rights in three years.

01:33:07.000 And particularly codifying select victim groups.

01:33:12.000 And that we've turned our back on 800 years of English common law.

01:33:22.000 And effectively stepped away from the rule of law.

01:33:25.000 And the second part that relates to that is there was an excellent question last Saturday

01:33:30.000 from the great granddaughter of Robert Baldwin who talked about the lack of stories,

01:33:36.000 which I thought was a really important question.

01:33:38.000 And how those two relate in my mind is my in-laws escaped from a communist country.

01:33:45.000 And I've had, you know, dinner time conversations for decades now with my father-in-law, both of them,

01:33:53.000 about what that looked like and what that felt like.

01:33:56.000 And I think where Baldwin's great-granddaughter's question was important was that we don't have the stories that would inform us.

01:34:08.000 And you touched on that.

01:34:09.000 Because some of the stories from their experience are really horrible, horrible.

01:34:14.000 I know there's all kinds of Canadians.

01:34:17.000 And they actually are fearful for where we are in society right now.

01:34:21.000 But they're frightened to speak out.

01:34:23.000 And I think bringing that back around to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms,

01:34:28.000 we've codified preferred victim groups.

01:34:33.000 But we've overlooked them that most trauma and abuse happens within groups.

01:34:40.000 And also, going back to Barbara Case's point earlier, we sort of overlooked that someone,

01:34:46.000 because, just because someone's in a victim group, doesn't mean that they're also not a perpetrator.

01:34:52.000 And that doesn't get a lot of press.

01:34:55.000 So...

01:34:56.000 Yeah, whenever anyone claims victim status without simultaneously claiming perpetrator status,

01:35:00.000 you should run away from that person.

01:35:02.000 It's like, I'm a saint and everyone's been hurting me.

01:35:05.000 No, probably not.

01:35:06.000 Sorry.

01:35:07.000 You're a saint?

01:35:08.000 Really?

01:35:09.000 I don't think so.

01:35:10.000 I doubt it.

01:35:11.000 I imagine you have your fair share of abstract blood on your hands.

01:35:16.000 Just like everybody else.

01:35:17.000 And so people need to take responsibility for that.

01:35:20.000 I mean...

01:35:21.000 Okay, so...

01:35:22.000 With regards...

01:35:23.000 Just one more thing.

01:35:24.000 So, I'm wondering if what you're taught to writing now is basically what I didn't understand

01:35:30.000 two decades ago without learning about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

01:35:33.000 Oh, yeah.

01:35:34.000 That was a catastrophe.

01:35:35.000 To lay that bit of logical rationality on top of the English common law system was a catastrophe.

01:35:41.000 It was unnecessary.

01:35:43.000 And it is resulting in much of what we're seeing today.

01:35:46.000 The problem with the codified Bill of Rights is the rights conflict.

01:35:49.000 Right? 0.98

01:35:50.000 Now, English common law dealt with it by just saying, forget we're not enumerating your damn rights. 0.98

01:35:55.000 You have all of them. 0.97

01:35:56.000 Okay?

01:35:57.000 What problems is that going to solve?

01:36:00.000 We don't care.

01:36:01.000 We'll solve them one by one as they emerge.

01:36:04.000 Brilliant.

01:36:05.000 It's an evolutionary approach to law, essentially.

01:36:07.000 English common law is phenomenal.

01:36:09.000 And we made a huge mistake codifying our rights, I think.

01:36:13.000 And that is part of what's put us here.

01:36:16.000 And then building in the victimhood of groups.

01:36:18.000 That's a hell of a thing to tell someone, too.

01:36:20.000 You're part of a victim group.

01:36:22.000 It's like, it's so clueless historically, too.

01:36:25.000 You know, the serfs in the USSR, who were pretty much all Caucasian, they weren't emancipated 0.97

01:36:32.000 until the late 1800s.

01:36:33.000 Like, you don't have to go very far back in anybody's racial history to find the equivalent

01:36:39.000 of slavery.

01:36:40.000 I mean, okay, serfs weren't slaves.

01:36:42.000 Yeah, yeah, they were.

01:36:44.000 They were.

01:36:45.000 They were sold with the property.

01:36:47.000 You know?

01:36:48.000 And so that's 150 years ago.

01:36:50.000 Slavery was not some exception perpetrated on the world by the United States. 0.67

01:36:55.000 Every damn society, virtually, that ever existed up until we invented machines, ran on slave 0.99

01:37:01.000 labor. 0.98

01:37:02.000 So, saying, well, you know, some groups have been affected more by slavery in the recent

01:37:10.000 past than others.

01:37:11.000 I think that's fair to say.

01:37:12.000 But the problem is, well, what exactly do you do about that, then?

01:37:15.000 And who defines it?

01:37:16.000 And it's a big mess.

01:37:18.000 And besides, none of it's to be trusted anyways, because all it is is postmodern neo-Marxist

01:37:24.000 sleight of hand.

01:37:25.000 You know?

01:37:26.000 Marxism got demolished in the 70s.

01:37:29.000 Demolished.

01:37:30.000 Ruined.

01:37:31.000 It was never to rise again.

01:37:32.000 The postmodernists, sneaky French intellectuals, played a little sleight of hand. 0.77

01:37:37.000 Okay.

01:37:38.000 It's not the working class against the wealthy.

01:37:41.000 It's the victims against the oppressors.

01:37:44.000 Great.

01:37:45.000 All we did was move the goalposts slightly.

01:37:48.000 Now we get to play the same game.

01:37:50.000 Yeah, well, it's a lot easier than thinking.

01:37:52.000 So, yeah.

01:37:53.000 And because we've had so many people who've escaped communism, why do you-

01:37:59.000 That's what they thought.

01:38:00.000 Well, exactly.

01:38:01.000 Exactly.

01:38:02.000 So why do you think those stories aren't getting out, because-

01:38:05.000 God, that's a good question.

01:38:06.000 I teach about the Gulag Archipelago in my personality class of all the dopey places to teach it. 1.00

01:38:11.000 It's like, at the beginning of the class, I say, well, how many of you know that 30 million

01:38:16.000 Soviet citizens were destroyed through internal repression between 1919 and 1959?

01:38:22.000 It's like four people put up their hands.

01:38:24.000 I say, well, how do you know?

01:38:25.000 I watched your lectures on YouTube.

01:38:27.000 You know, that's not taught in schools.

01:38:30.000 Why?

01:38:31.000 I know why. 0.97

01:38:32.000 Because the bloody intellectual leftists have never apologized for their complicity in the 0.74

01:38:37.000 catastrophes of the 20th century. 0.88

01:38:38.000 The Germans apologized. 0.85

01:38:40.000 Sorry about the Nazis. 0.53

01:38:42.000 Well, the left-wing intellectuals, they say, well, that wasn't real Marxism.

01:38:46.000 It's like, oh, okay.

01:38:47.000 How many corpses have to pile up around you before you're willing to question your beloved ideological

01:38:55.000 presuppositions and face your resentment and your narcissism and your desire for destruction?

01:39:01.000 You don't like people anyways.

01:39:03.000 The planet has too many of them.

01:39:05.000 So, like, a nice war might clear that up well. 0.98

01:39:08.000 Then all the plants can grow again.

01:39:10.000 You know, the Club of Rome, when they talked about the population explosion that was going

01:39:15.000 to wipe out the planet by the year 2000, they said outright that human beings were a

01:39:19.000 cancer on the planet. 0.69

01:39:20.000 Lots of people think that.

01:39:21.000 It's like, oh boy, let's put the atom bomb phone in your hands. 1.00

01:39:26.000 Human beings are a cancer on the planet. 1.00

01:39:29.000 What a hell of a thing to say. 1.00

01:39:31.000 You can say that to a four-year-old.

01:39:33.000 I saw a bloody professor at Queen's University tell a whole room full of 18-year-olds that

01:39:37.000 if they had an ethical fiber in their body, they wouldn't have any kids.

01:39:42.000 Or they'd only have one. 0.98

01:39:43.000 Because all they're doing is going out there and raping the planet. 0.98

01:39:46.000 It's like, what, you know, what the hell? 0.98

01:39:49.000 I don't understand that.

01:39:51.000 It's like, human beings are hard on the planet, but it's pretty damn hard on us in return.

01:39:55.000 You know, it's like we're just sort of trying not to die too miserably.

01:39:59.000 And we make a bit of a mess while doing it.

01:40:01.000 It's like, yeah, Christ, we've only known for 50 years that we were disrupting the oceans.

01:40:06.000 How fast do you think we can learn?

01:40:08.000 You know, a hundred years ago, Thomas Huxley, who was a great biologist, said the oceans

01:40:14.000 are so plentiful that there's not a chance we could ever put a dent in them.

01:40:19.000 So that was only a hundred years ago.

01:40:21.000 Fifty years ago we thought, oh man, there's more of us and we're better at this than we

01:40:24.000 thought.

01:40:25.000 It's like, okay, how fast do you expect people to learn?

01:40:28.000 You know, one generation, one year.

01:40:31.000 We're trying to do our best.

01:40:33.000 Most people are trying to do their best.

01:40:35.000 Some people are trying to do their worst, but most people are trying to do their best.

01:40:40.000 And so we should have a little compassion, a little sympathy for human beings instead 0.89

01:40:43.000 of considering ourselves like raping, patriarchal, oppressive destroyers of the world. 0.96

01:40:50.000 Jesus! 0.96

01:40:51.000 You don't like that label?

01:40:53.000 What?

01:40:54.000 It's so cruel.

01:40:55.000 It's so mean.

01:40:57.000 It has just no sympathy there.

01:40:59.000 It's like most of the people I know are struggling hard to get by.

01:41:03.000 Usually, the other thing about people that's so interesting, and you really learn this

01:41:07.000 if you're a clinical psychologist, is that every single one of you in this room has at

01:41:11.000 least one serious problem that you're laboring under.

01:41:15.000 And that's why the whole handicap thing is a big problem as well.

01:41:18.000 It's like, okay, you're not mentally ill this moment.

01:41:21.000 But you will be.

01:41:22.000 You'll be depressed or anxious or you'll hit some trauma in your life that'll take you

01:41:26.000 out.

01:41:27.000 Even if you happen to be in the small minority of people who are physically healthy their

01:41:30.000 whole life and emotionally healthy, you're going to have a family member, a child, a

01:41:34.000 parent, a parent with Alzheimer's, a child who's got some illness.

01:41:38.000 You know, you're going to be carrying some vicious burden for most of your life. 0.99

01:41:43.000 And most of the time you're going to stumble off to work anyhow and do your damn job and 0.99

01:41:48.000 contribute to society. 0.98

01:41:49.000 It's like, I can't even believe that our system works because you just have to talk

01:41:55.000 to someone for five minutes and they tell you, well, here's the three horrible things

01:41:59.000 that happened to me in the last year.

01:42:01.000 And they're horrible things.

01:42:02.000 Their mother died of, like, you know, some degenerative neurological disease.

01:42:07.000 Those are particularly entertaining.

01:42:09.000 And their father was alcoholic and used to beat them up.

01:42:11.000 And their sister's schizophrenic. 0.84

01:42:13.000 It's like, ugh.

01:42:15.000 But away they go and do their minor heroism for the day and the lights stay on.

01:42:19.000 It's like, you know, human beings, we're admirable creatures despite the fact that we're,

01:42:24.000 you know, finite and useless and vicious and all of those things.

01:42:28.000 David?

01:42:29.000 If I'm head of the HR of a large corporation, I'll have a senior manager of diversity

01:42:36.000 included in reporting to me.

01:42:38.000 Now, I can't eliminate the position because I'm injured of suicide.

01:42:41.000 So what should I tell them to do?

01:42:45.000 Well, you should pay very careful attention to their definitions of diversity.

01:42:50.000 And then you have to pay careful attention to the criteria by which you choose people.

01:42:56.000 You know, it's very...

01:42:58.000 That's an extraordinarily difficult question because it's a personnel selection decision.

01:43:03.000 But one of the things I would say is, well, if you're looking for managers and administrators,

01:43:07.000 screen them for conscientiousness.

01:43:09.000 You get about a .25, .3 correlation.

01:43:11.000 You think, well, that's nothing.

01:43:13.000 That's wrong.

01:43:14.000 It switches your probability of hiring an above average employee from 50-50 to 67.5, 32.5,

01:43:21.000 if it's a .30, let's see, sorry, 65-35, if it's a .30 correlation.

01:43:29.000 And because there's massive variability in the productivity of individuals, tilting

01:43:34.000 your selection up to that degree will have massive, massive economic payoffs.

01:43:39.000 I've done the calculations.

01:43:41.000 They're crazy.

01:43:42.000 And there's no bias in a conscientiousness test.

01:43:45.000 Yeah, and so that's something that you hold to saying that a bias for a test for a higher

01:43:52.000 age, that the university would be responsible for that.

01:43:54.000 What happens when the board says, which I found, what do you mean for women? 1.00

01:43:58.000 When the court says it?

01:43:59.000 The board.

01:44:00.000 The board.

01:44:01.000 The board.

01:44:02.000 The CEO says, oh, by the way, you're in the diversity officer.

01:44:05.000 What do you mean for men?

01:44:06.000 Well, one of the things you might do is track the shifting ratio of men versus women in the

01:44:12.000 corporation.

01:44:13.000 But that's the sort of thing that requires a micro-analysis.

01:44:15.000 You know, like, there's going to be, and increasingly there are, many disciplines where

01:44:20.000 women are over-represented at every single level. 1.00

01:44:22.000 That's happening in universities so fast. 0.90

01:44:24.000 There won't be a damn man left in the Faculty of Arts and Science in ten years. 0.75

01:44:27.000 It's like, so for all you women who are looking for mates, you better be thinking about that. 0.95

01:44:31.000 Because when men are bailing out of university so fast, you cannot believe it. 0.99

01:44:35.000 Like, I've watched the curves for fifteen years.

01:44:38.000 It's linear up for women, linear down for men. 1.00

01:44:41.000 And so, you can think, well, that's really good for women. 1.00

01:44:44.000 It's like, that's so clueless.

01:44:47.000 There can't be anything that's bad for men that's good for women.

01:44:50.000 And vice versa.

01:44:51.000 You know?

01:44:52.000 Another thing, too, that's, okay, so back to the board.

01:44:55.000 You have to say, well, what's the industry?

01:44:57.000 How does that map onto the valid natural interests of men and women? 0.99

01:45:02.000 Is there any evidence that we're hiring stupidly?

01:45:05.000 And the mere fact that you don't have as many women or as many men in one place versus 0.98

01:45:10.000 another doesn't indicate, therefore, that you're prejudiced.

01:45:13.000 You have to buy the equity argument to buy that.

01:45:16.000 And if you buy the equity argument, well, you're done with it anyway.

01:45:19.000 So, because you're going to fall down that spiral, you'll never get out of it.

01:45:23.000 You'll never hit equity.

01:45:24.000 Not a chance.

01:45:25.000 Now, a lot of these corporations are doing it out of guilt.

01:45:29.000 And fear, you know, you said that people are afraid to speak up.

01:45:33.000 Jesus, you just have no idea how afraid people are to speak up.

01:45:36.000 And it's actually no wonder.

01:45:37.000 I mean, I made those videos.

01:45:39.000 It was like I got hit by a time wave.

01:45:41.000 You know?

01:45:42.000 It freaked me right out.

01:45:43.000 It still does.

01:45:44.000 I can't believe what happened.

01:45:45.000 Like, it's been, I would say, overall, it's been good.

01:45:48.000 But it's not necessarily the kind of good you would wish on someone.

01:45:52.000 I kind of would like to have my old life back.

01:45:54.000 But whatever, you know?

01:45:55.000 I knew what was coming, so it was only a matter of time.

01:45:59.000 But people are so afraid to speak up.

01:46:01.000 You just cannot believe it.

01:46:03.000 Tenured professors, those are the most protected people in the universe.

01:46:08.000 And they're afraid to speak up.

01:46:10.000 And that tells you a lot about what people are like.

01:46:13.000 But I should tell you, you should be afraid to speak up.

01:46:15.000 But I'll tell you something else.

01:46:16.000 You should be more afraid not to speak up.

01:46:19.000 That's the thing. 0.97

01:46:20.000 It's like you're screwed both ways. 0.95

01:46:23.000 Pick your poison.

01:46:25.000 You can either suffer the consequences of having a voice.

01:46:29.000 Or you can suffer the consequences of not having a voice.

01:46:32.000 And I would highly recommend that you don't pick the suffering that goes along with not having a voice.

01:46:37.000 That's dreadful.

01:46:39.000 And so, you might say, well, if I don't speak up, I'm safe.

01:46:42.000 It's like, yeah, you are, for the next 15 minutes.

01:46:45.000 But you've sacrificed a bit of your soul.

01:46:47.000 You might need that thing to get through life without getting all bitter and twisted and resentful.

01:46:52.000 So, if you've got something to say, maybe even to your board, you say it.

01:46:58.000 And you don't know what's going to happen.

01:47:00.000 It might be bad.

01:47:01.000 It might be good.

01:47:02.000 But silence has exactly the same consequences.

01:47:06.000 And Dr. Peterson's hiring.

01:47:08.000 So, when they get rid of you, David...

01:47:10.000 Or they're hiring to replace me.

01:47:12.000 They're not, by the way.

01:47:14.000 The university has backed off completely.

01:47:16.000 And I'm sure that was a big part of, because of all the public support.

01:47:20.000 Right.

01:47:21.000 You know, not that...

01:47:22.000 I mean, I'm not trying to paint them as evil villains, because they're not.

01:47:26.000 But also, the students were very welcoming to me when I came back to class.

01:47:29.000 Which was a big deal, because I was very nervous when I came back to class.

01:47:32.000 Like, very nervous.

01:47:33.000 I didn't know what the hell was going to happen.

01:47:35.000 Or even if I was going to come back.

01:47:37.000 So...

01:47:38.000 But...

01:47:39.000 Well...

01:47:40.000 Okay.

01:47:41.000 There's at least one more question, or two questions, and then we're going to probably

01:47:45.000 wrap up.

01:47:46.000 I listened to you on the Joe Rogan podcast, which is one of my favorite episodes.

01:47:50.000 But, um, you mentioned that, despite it being difficult for you to say, you would not

01:47:55.000 recommend that today's youth attend university in the traditional sense.

01:48:00.000 Um, so I wanted to know what advice you would have for people who are aspiring to be clinical

01:48:05.000 psychologists, or want to pursue any form of further education.

01:48:10.000 Don't take any nonsense. 1.00

01:48:18.000 Read the damn classics. 1.00

01:48:20.000 You know now, in clinical psychology programs, they're reading that bloody wing Daryl Tsu, 1.00

01:48:25.000 or whatever his name is.

01:48:27.000 That micro-aggression guy.

01:48:29.000 You know, it's like, here's how you do cross-cultural counseling.

01:48:32.000 It's like, no, that's a bunch of things you don't do.

01:48:35.000 Like, I mean, that's what the books are.

01:48:37.000 Here's things that you shouldn't do if you're doing cross-cultural counseling.

01:48:39.000 That's helpful, but what are you going to do?

01:48:42.000 Read Freud.

01:48:43.000 Read Jung.

01:48:44.000 Read Adler.

01:48:45.000 Read Rogers.

01:48:46.000 Read Maslow.

01:48:47.000 These people knew what the hell they were talking about.

01:48:49.000 Read the behaviorists.

01:48:51.000 Get yourself educated with regards to neuroscience. 1.00

01:48:54.000 There's lots of great things out there to read, and if your professors are too stupid 0.99

01:48:58.000 to teach you what they should teach you, then you've got to educate yourself in university 0.99

01:49:02.000 anyways.

01:49:03.000 You know, and so that's what I would recommend.

01:49:07.000 And any institution is corrupt, always.

01:49:09.000 And so, you know, you're lucky.

01:49:11.000 You're lucky if you're in graduate school if one in five classes is really worth taking.

01:49:16.000 You know, but you can't get too cynical about that.

01:49:20.000 Things don't necessarily work all that well.

01:49:22.000 But there are great things to read.

01:49:24.000 I mean, read Jung.

01:49:25.000 That'll turn you inside out.

01:49:27.000 You know, read Nietzsche.

01:49:28.000 There's lots of great thinkers there.

01:49:30.000 And, you know, you have to read them intelligently.

01:49:32.000 People squawk about Nietzsche because he was slightly misogynistic.

01:49:35.000 But, I mean, God! 0.96

01:49:37.000 He was sick.

01:49:38.000 He could hardly even see.

01:49:39.000 He could only write, like, one sentence at a time.

01:49:41.000 He lived alone.

01:49:43.000 He didn't get along with women.

01:49:44.000 They were always rejecting him.

01:49:46.000 You know, not that that has anything to do with the women. 0.86

01:49:49.000 And he didn't know if anyone ever was ever going to read what he wrote.

01:49:52.000 He sold, like, 500 copies of Beyond Good and Evil.

01:49:55.000 It's like, so, now and then he got annoyed and wrote something snippy.

01:49:59.000 It's like, Jesus, give the guy a break.

01:50:01.000 You know?

01:50:02.000 And so, when you read, Freud as well.

01:50:05.000 You know, the stuff's dated, so you have to adjust your reading for the context.

01:50:09.000 But when someone comes across, say, a misogynistic statement and says,

01:50:14.000 Oh, well, I'm not reading this person. 1.00

01:50:16.000 All they're saying is, they're too stupid to separate the wheat from the chaff. 1.00

01:50:19.000 Or too lazy. 1.00

01:50:20.000 It's like, oh, I don't have to read Nietzsche.

01:50:22.000 Well, that's a relief.

01:50:23.000 That's for sure.

01:50:24.000 That's a relief, man.

01:50:26.000 So, I was thinking more about parents who were trying to make a decision to send their kids to university.

01:50:32.000 It's like, so much of it is corrupt.

01:50:37.000 Social work, anthropology, social psychology, education.

01:50:43.000 Like, English literature.

01:50:46.000 A huge chunk of the humanities, which is an absolute catastrophe.

01:50:49.000 The humanities go, the universities are done.

01:50:51.000 Because they're the soul of the universities.

01:50:53.000 You can get technical training.

01:50:55.000 You can be trained technically in all sorts of other ways.

01:50:58.000 And corporations are starting to figure this out fast.

01:51:01.000 So, we lose the humanities, the universities are gone.

01:51:04.000 And we're losing them fast.

01:51:06.000 Because all they do is teach you identity politics.

01:51:09.000 Jesus, you can learn the rules to that game in one day.

01:51:14.000 Right?

01:51:15.000 Divide the world into oppressed and oppressor. 0.54

01:51:17.000 That's easy.

01:51:18.000 Man, that's a snap.

01:51:19.000 Assume the oppressors are the bad people and the oppressed are the good people.

01:51:23.000 That's easy.

01:51:24.000 Make noise about it and feel good.

01:51:29.000 That's basically that.

01:51:31.000 And, you know, don't pay any attention to your role.

01:51:35.000 So, if you get...

01:51:37.000 Just save yourself $200,000.

01:51:38.000 Very good.

01:51:39.000 Well, there's that too.

01:51:40.000 Yeah.

01:51:41.000 Well, and the universities are in for a big shakeup.

01:51:43.000 Because they don't know what's going to hit them with YouTube and online lectures.

01:51:46.000 They've got no idea what's coming down the pipes.

01:51:49.000 So, because online lectures are powerful beyond belief.

01:51:54.000 And someone who's going to sort out the accreditation problem in the next four or five years

01:51:58.000 and cut the universities off at their knees.

01:52:00.000 So, it's certainly going to come within the next ten years.

01:52:04.000 My question for you is, as a training therapist and a post-modern partner, how do you think

01:52:10.000 that that might affect the process of therapy?

01:52:15.000 Well, it puts you in there with all sorts of a priori axioms.

01:52:19.000 You know, one of the things...

01:52:21.000 I really like Carl Rogers.

01:52:23.000 And one of the things Rogers does is listen.

01:52:26.000 That's what you do as a therapist.

01:52:29.000 The better you are at listening, the faster your clients will get better.

01:52:32.000 And you have to listen without prejudice.

01:52:34.000 And I mean that in the technical sense.

01:52:36.000 It's like, okay, so I'm listening to you.

01:52:38.000 It's like, I don't know what you're going to say.

01:52:40.000 And I don't know if you're right.

01:52:42.000 And I'm not going to tell you what to do.

01:52:44.000 Because I don't know what you should do.

01:52:46.000 And that's something about being a therapist.

01:52:48.000 It's like, you do not want to tell people what to do.

01:52:51.000 Because that's their life.

01:52:52.000 And you might screw it up.

01:52:54.000 So, what you want to do is listen to them very, very carefully.

01:52:57.000 And let them unwind their story.

01:52:59.000 And most of it, they'll take care of themselves.

01:53:01.000 You know, because no one's listened to them.

01:53:04.000 And so they don't even know what they think.

01:53:06.000 Their head is full of jumbled mess of thoughts and experiences.

01:53:10.000 It's like a tangling of knots.

01:53:13.000 And maybe the person needs to talk for like three years to sort it all out.

01:53:18.000 And what you should do is listen to them from a different culture or whatever.

01:53:22.000 Like there's going to be friction because of that.

01:53:24.000 Because you'll come at it, at least to some degree, with different assumptions. 1.00

01:53:27.000 But read the damn therapists. 1.00

01:53:31.000 Those people were smart, man. 1.00

01:53:33.000 They tell you things about...

01:53:34.000 It's like each of them gives you a different toolbox.

01:53:36.000 They're not scientific theories exactly.

01:53:38.000 But as a clinician, you're not a scientist.

01:53:40.000 You're an engineer of the soul.

01:53:43.000 That's a better way of thinking about it.

01:53:45.000 Because it's an applied...

01:53:46.000 It's like engineering.

01:53:47.000 It's an applied science.

01:53:49.000 So that makes it not a science exactly.

01:53:51.000 You can use scientific knowledge.

01:53:54.000 But you're still aiming at the good.

01:53:56.000 Right?

01:53:57.000 That's what you're doing as a therapist.

01:53:59.000 With the other person.

01:54:00.000 You say, look.

01:54:01.000 You already know that things aren't as good for you as they need to be.

01:54:04.000 We're going to work on that.

01:54:06.000 And you're here to make things better.

01:54:08.000 And I'm here to help you figure out how to make things better.

01:54:11.000 Then I'll listen to you.

01:54:12.000 And we'll move towards some place that's lighter and better.

01:54:16.000 And then you have tools that you can use in that kind of analytic and listening process.

01:54:21.000 And the great psychotherapists, man.

01:54:24.000 Most people have their 10,000 hours, you know.

01:54:27.000 They all come at it from slightly different temperamental perspectives.

01:54:30.000 Like Jung's work is really useful for dealing with people who are high in openness.

01:54:34.000 So his whole philosophy is, you have an open client, Jung works.

01:54:38.000 If you have a conservative client, forget it.

01:54:41.000 It's a whole different thing.

01:54:43.000 What I'm hearing from you is that the post-modern stance is helpful for the field of psychotherapy.

01:54:50.000 From what you're saying is to listen and that you're not giving an absolute truth to these clients.

01:54:56.000 Yeah, but the problem is that the post-modern thing works out pretty well.

01:54:59.000 But they keep nesting it in Marxism.

01:55:01.000 It's like, oh yeah, but their primary identity is like sex or gender or ethnicity or race.

01:55:08.000 It's like, no, sorry, we're not going there.

01:55:11.000 So, and it's not exactly post-modernism.

01:55:14.000 Because the post-modernists are misinformed about the nature of scientific theories, I think.

01:55:20.000 And they don't really see them as tools.

01:55:22.000 But I see them as tools.

01:55:24.000 And so you can have a diverse range of tools.

01:55:27.000 They don't, each one doesn't have to claim epistemological or ontological priority.

01:55:33.000 But that means that you have to view those sorts of theories as tools.

01:55:37.000 That makes you a pragmatist, not a post-modernist.

01:55:39.000 Sure.

01:55:40.000 All right.

01:55:41.000 And speaking of patients, I've got to go see some in an hour.

01:55:44.000 So a few things I want to wrap up.

01:55:46.000 Now, just to that point, I said this earlier today.

01:55:49.000 And first of all, one of the reasons I really wanted to have Dr. Peterson come,

01:55:52.000 and first of all, Serena, thank you very much for arranging that.

01:55:55.000 You know, I would have preferred to have broadcast this widely and then have said,

01:55:59.000 look, you know what, I want all the Peterson haters to come in.

01:56:02.000 I want you to have a chance to be able to actually face to face, confront what you're afraid of. 0.99

01:56:08.000 Don't be ignorant.

01:56:10.000 Don't just impose your own beliefs and your biases and everything onto what you're saying, 0.95

01:56:13.000 but actually hear it, process it, come to a reality and fact-based conclusion

01:56:18.000 about the things that you're trying to promote.

01:56:20.000 Because in today's society, truly, everything you've been talking about,

01:56:23.000 I don't think this is hyperbole.

01:56:24.000 I think that we are going down a dangerous path.

01:56:26.000 We're seeing the consequences of it.

01:56:28.000 And I mean, you know, all my students know this.

01:56:30.000 I have been promoting this in therapy, in my classes, in my family,

01:56:34.000 this idea that you need to be able to expose yourself to things

01:56:37.000 that make you uncomfortable, that you're not aware of.

01:56:40.000 And again, that's kind of a ground rule of good psychotherapy.

01:56:43.000 It might be the ground rule of good psychotherapy.

01:56:46.000 That is speaking honestly.

01:56:48.000 And being honest.

01:56:49.000 And honest about yourself.

01:56:50.000 Honest about your biases, your fears, your flaws.

01:56:54.000 You can't grow without that.

01:56:56.000 So this to me was a metaphorical manifestation of that desire.

01:57:02.000 I wanted to bring you here.

01:57:04.000 And I really do appreciate you taking the time.

01:57:06.000 I know you've got many speaking engagements.

01:57:08.000 I do appreciate that.

01:57:09.000 And I'm glad that so many people had very poignant questions

01:57:12.000 that you were able to address.

01:57:14.000 Thank you very much again for coming.

01:57:15.000 And thank you everybody for coming.

01:57:17.000 Thank you for listening to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

01:57:32.000 To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account,

01:57:36.000 the link to which can be found in the description of this episode.

01:57:41.000 Dr. Peterson's self-development programs can be found at selfauthoring.com.

01:57:48.000 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - May 01, 2017

An Incendiary Discussion

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