The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Aspen Ideas Festival： From the Barricades of the Culture Wars

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00:00:52.000 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

00:00:59.000 You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon, the link to which can be found in the description.

00:01:06.000 Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at selfauthoring.com.

00:01:13.000 The Jordan B. Peterson with a master's piano music and a new shop

00:01:28.000 to prepare juridically.

00:01:33.000 Thank you, Charlie.

00:01:39.380 So I assume you're all here to talk about the early work of Carl Jung and this man's carnivorous

00:01:51.360 diet and the Soviet art he collects. No, in all seriousness, I'm really excited to be here with

00:01:58.700 you. We've never met before. Your official title is that you are a clinical psychologist and a

00:02:04.960 professor at the University of Toronto. You've written two books, one called Maps of Meaning

00:02:10.120 and the best-selling 12 Rules for Life, which is currently being translated into 40 languages.

00:02:15.540 But this description does not capture what you've become, which is a kind of phenomenon.

00:02:20.720 When I was reading 12 Rules for Life in a cafe in the locker room of my gym, it was sitting out

00:02:27.180 on a bench, people were coming up to me and saying, this book saved my life. And yet there are other

00:02:33.120 people in the country, including some of my fellow journalists, who insist that you are

00:02:37.140 actually a gateway drug to the far right. So I'm excited to be here with you. Not the myth of you,

00:02:43.680 but with the man. And I'm hoping we can use this hour or so to talk about your views on meaning,

00:02:50.660 on gender, on feminism, God, higher education. I'm sure we can solve all of that in under an hour.

00:02:56.540 So I want to start with the book 12 Rules for Life, which I'm hoping some of you have read.

00:03:01.700 Here are some of the messages in that book. Gender isn't a social construct. People should strive

00:03:08.260 for meaning in their lives, not happiness. Life is suffering, but there are ways to transcend it.

00:03:14.320 Stand up straight. Make your bed. Now, all of this to me seems pretty commonsensical. And yet I don't

00:03:22.320 think that there is a Canadian in the world that I've read more think pieces about. I don't think

00:03:27.600 it's a stretch to say that you are sort of the most loved and loathed public intellectual in the

00:03:33.320 Western world at the moment. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about what that's like

00:03:38.980 and your understanding of it. You've just come from two days in Vancouver where, on an event with Sam

00:03:45.480 Harris, talking for over two hours about the question of truth. And 5,000 people showed up to

00:03:51.260 those events, not exactly a sexy Beyonce concert. What's going on? How do you understand it and

00:03:57.120 your place in it?

00:04:00.260 Well, I think you don't want to underestimate the role that technological transformation is

00:04:06.820 playing in this. You know, I've been thinking about YouTube and podcasts quite intensely for

00:04:15.600 about two years. So I started putting my university lectures on YouTube in 2013. And I did that for

00:04:26.140 a variety of reasons, mostly curiosity because, and the drive to learn. And I've found that if I want

00:04:32.640 to learn a technology, the best way to do it is to use it. And I'm always learning new technologies

00:04:37.340 because, well, not that that makes me particularly unique. But, and I had some success with my lectures

00:04:44.560 on public television in Canada. So I did some lectures with a series called Big Ideas on Canadian

00:04:51.220 Public Television. And there's about 200 of those lectures. And I did five of them, 200, done by 200

00:04:58.600 different people. But I did five of them. And they were regularly in the top 10 of the most viewed

00:05:02.900 lectures. And so I knew that there was some broader market for, let's say, ideas. And I thought, well,

00:05:12.800 I might as well put my lectures up on YouTube and see what happens. And then by April of 2016,

00:05:20.060 I had a million views. And I thought, huh. The only reason people are watching these is because they

00:05:27.820 want to watch them because they're actually really hard. And a million of something is a lot. If you,

00:05:34.600 if you sell a million copies of your book, well, first of all, that never happens, right? I mean,

00:05:39.220 it's very, very rare. You're very happy. You never have your paper, scientific papers cited a million

00:05:45.560 times. You rarely have a million dollars. It's a very large number. And I thought, well,

00:05:49.600 this room accepted. Well, fair enough. Fair enough. And it's, of course,

00:05:53.360 it's not as uncommon as it once was, but it's still a significant number. And I didn't really have any

00:05:57.860 way of calibrating that. I thought, well, what am I supposed to do now that I hit a million views?

00:06:01.820 How am I supposed to conceptualize that? What is this YouTube thing anyways that was once a repository

00:06:06.680 for cute cat videos? So what does it mean to have a million views on it? And I thought, and so I

00:06:13.260 really started to think about it because, you know, and there were a lot of people commenting as well.

00:06:17.320 And they were into the lectures and following them avidly. And I thought, okay, so what is this YouTube

00:06:27.000 exactly? And I thought, well, for the first time in human history, the spoken word has the same reach

00:06:36.940 as the written word. And not only that, no lag to publication and no barrier to entry. That's a major

00:06:44.220 technological revolution. That's a Gutenberg revolution. That's a big deal. This is a game

00:06:49.620 changer. And then it was soon after that that I discovered the podcast world, which is about 10

00:06:55.020 times as big as the YouTube world. And the podcast world is also a Gutenberg revolution, except it's

00:07:00.960 even more extensive because the problem with books and videos is that you can't do anything else while

00:07:06.840 you're doing them, right? When you're reading, you're reading. When you're watching a video, you know,

00:07:12.260 you can be distracted, but you have to pay attention to the video. But if you're listening

00:07:16.220 to a podcast, you can be driving a forklift or a long haul truck, or you can be exercising or doing

00:07:23.420 the dishes. And so what that means is that podcasts free up, say, two hours a day for people to engage

00:07:29.860 in educational activities that they wouldn't otherwise be able to engage in. And that's about

00:07:34.960 one eighth of people's lives. So podcasts hand people one eighth of their life back to engage in high

00:07:41.120 level education. So then I thought, well, people actually want to do this. There's a massive market

00:07:50.280 for high level intellectual engagement that's much deeper and more desperate, let's say, than anyone

00:07:55.860 suspected. We really saw that in Vancouver. You know, I mean, the discussion I had with Sam Harris,

00:08:03.160 the two discussions, we talked about the relationship between facts and values, and science and religion

00:08:09.280 more peripherally. But the dialogue was conducted at the level, I would say, approximately at the level

00:08:15.920 of a pretty rigorous PhD defense. And we were only supposed to talk for an hour and then go to Q&A,

00:08:23.060 but the crowd didn't want us to stop. And so we talked the first night for two and a half hours,

00:08:26.500 and the second night for two and a half hours, and the crowd was 100% on board the entire time.

00:08:32.480 And it wasn't because Sam was winning or I was winning. Neither of us, in fact, were trying to win.

00:08:38.080 We were trying to learn something. And we were actually trying to learn something. We weren't just

00:08:42.300 pretending to do that. And, you know, the place erupted at the end. And I think one of the things I've

00:08:49.420 realized in the last couple of days, as I've been thinking this through, is that the narrow bandwidth

00:08:53.340 of TV has made us think we're stupider than we are. And so people have a real hunger for deep

00:08:59.200 intellectual dialogue. And that can be met with these new technologies. And that has revolutionary

00:09:06.160 significance. And that's starting to unfold.

00:09:08.720 I wonder about, you love to quote this line, this Nietzsche line, that anyone who has a why to live

00:09:15.400 for can endure almost any how. What's your why? What is driving you? You are the most busy man,

00:09:23.100 I mean, to get you here. You know, I think you're like, wherever you were last night, in Portland

00:09:27.360 tomorrow. Like, I don't know how you're alive, frankly, right now. What is driving you? Like,

00:09:32.800 what is this relentless drive? What are you pushing toward?

00:09:38.820 I'm trying to, well, when I spent 15 years writing the first book I wrote, which is called Maps of

00:09:46.240 Meaning. And it's akin to 12 Rules to Life, although it's a much more difficult book.

00:09:51.840 The audio version of that book is out now, by the way. It's been out since June 12th. And

00:09:56.560 I would, if you like 12 Rules, or you were interested in it, then you could try that. I think

00:10:01.900 the audio version is much more accessible, because it's a difficult book. Getting the cadences of the

00:10:07.920 sentences right is an aid to comprehension. I spent 15 years writing that book, about three hours a day

00:10:14.580 writing, and a lot more time reading. And I was interested in solving a problem, which was,

00:10:22.420 I was interested in the great atrocities of the 20th century, the ones that were committed on the

00:10:27.940 right, and the ones that were committed on the left. But I was interested in it psychologically.

00:10:33.780 And what that meant was, had I been there, what could have I done to not participate?

00:10:45.540 And so that's what I've been trying to figure out. How, so, because for me, what happened in Nazi

00:10:50.980 Germany, and what happened in the Gulag Archipelago, and in Maoist China, many places, was sufficient

00:10:57.540 definition of hell. Convincing, as well. And I wanted to understand what the opposite of that was.

00:11:06.740 And not sociologically, or politically, or economically, because I think that in the final

00:11:11.460 analysis, those levels of explanation are insufficient. But psychologically. How is it that you

00:11:18.100 must conduct yourself in the world, so that if the opportunity to participate in such things arises,

00:11:25.140 you won't? And, you know, when the Holocaust museums went up, there was, there was a motto that went

00:11:32.020 along with them, which was, never forget. And I thought, yeah, fair enough, but you can't remember

00:11:38.900 what you don't understand. And so I wanted to understand it. But I wanted to understand it.

00:11:43.940 You see, when people read history, they, they either read it as a detached observer, or they

00:11:48.180 tend to read it as, well, maybe the heroic, the heroic protagonist. People like to imagine that they

00:11:55.300 would be Schindler in Schindler's List. But that's wrong. So, because the probability that you'll be the

00:12:02.180 perpetrator is much higher, especially merely the perpetrator who's ensconced in silence, when

00:12:07.700 silence is not the appropriate thing. So I wanted to, having figured out what constituted hell, and the

00:12:13.540 pathway to that, which would be, I suppose, the cowardice that produces, the cowardice and resentment

00:12:20.260 that produces either complicitness in those events, or failure to oppose them when they emerge.

00:12:28.580 I wanted to understand what the opposite of that was. Because I think that's what needs to be learned

00:12:33.460 from what happened in the 20th century. And so that's why I wrote Maps of Meaning, was to understand that

00:12:38.260 and to lay out what the opposite was. And then that turned out to be extremely helpful to me, and then to

00:12:44.740 the people I started to teach about that, because it's useful to know what the opposite of hell

00:12:49.940 is. And I've been teaching those things to people since 1993. So that's 25 years. And the response from

00:12:59.140 the students has always been the same sort of response that I'm getting now, absent some of the

00:13:04.500 negative characterizations, let's say, which have emerged for particular reasons. But the students

00:13:10.660 have always said one of two things. And this is the vast majority of them. This isn't cherry-picked responses.

00:13:17.540 It's been the same everywhere. They tell me, and this is the same response I get from my audiences

00:13:23.780 now too, is they say, you've given me words to explain things, to explain and understand things

00:13:29.940 that I always knew to be true. Or I was in a very dark place for one of the seven reasons that people

00:13:37.700 might be in a dark place. Alcohol, or drugs, or failure of relationships, or lack of vision, or nihilism,

00:13:43.780 or hopelessness, or depression, or anxiety, you know, all the pitfalls that people can encounter.

00:13:49.140 And I've been developing a vision for my life, and trying to adopt responsibility, and trying to be

00:13:54.660 careful with what I say. And things are way better. And that's what drives me. So, you know, it's so

00:14:01.460 interesting watching what's happening, because, you know, you said, I'm the most loathed and the most

00:14:06.660 loved man. It's like, I'm loathed by a very small percentage of very noisy people. And so, and there

00:14:13.140 are people who either don't, or haven't, or won't, or take a look at what I'm doing, partly because it

00:14:21.620 doesn't fit within their conceptual scheme. You know, whenever I'm interviewed by journalists with,

00:14:26.900 with, that have the scent of blood in their nose, let's say, they're, they're very willing, and able

00:14:36.500 to characterize the situation I find myself in as political. But that's because they can't see the

00:14:42.500 world in any other manner than political. And the political is a tiny fraction of the world, and what

00:14:47.380 I'm doing isn't political. It's psychological, or philosophical, or theological. The political element

00:14:54.420 is peripheral. And if, if people come to the live lectures, let's say, that's absolutely self-evident.

00:15:02.500 That's not what they're about. That isn't why people are there. That isn't what they talk to me

00:15:05.780 about afterwards. It's fundamentally irrelevant. The only reason this ever became political is because

00:15:13.300 in Canada, our provincial and federal governments had the unspeakable arrogance to propose compelled

00:15:23.300 speech legislation in a British common law system, where that had never been done ever, even once.

00:15:28.900 And despite the fact that your Supreme Court in 1942 made some such things unconstitutional.

00:15:35.700 Now, and that was...

00:15:36.420 Just explain to people here what, what actually happened, which is that you opposed this law,

00:15:41.860 which was going to compel you, you say, to use preferred pronouns of people that are transgender.

00:15:48.500 Is that accurate? It's, it's accurate, but partial. So there was a, there's provincial laws that were

00:15:55.220 already in place to compel this sort of thing, but a federal law had been generated. And I went and read

00:16:01.300 the policy guidelines within which the federal law was to be interpreted. And those were produced by the

00:16:06.340 Ontario Human Rights Commission, which is a radical leftist inquisition, fundamentally. And they had

00:16:13.380 documented out a very large number of policies that were, that would make anyone sensible's hair stand

00:16:19.540 on end if they read them, which they didn't, but I did. And not only did I read them, I understood them.

00:16:26.020 And having read them and understood them, I made videos, just one night, I got up at about three in

00:16:31.140 the morning because it was really bothering me for a variety of complicated reasons, including the fact

00:16:35.620 that a number of my clinical clients had been bullied into states of ill mental health by radical social

00:16:41.140 justice warriors at their various workplaces. And this was long before I was embroiled in any of this

00:16:45.860 controversy, by the way, so it wasn't a sampling bias. And so, and at the same, and at the same time,

00:16:52.660 the university, my university, had the gall, the unmitigated gall, to mandate, um, unconscious bias

00:17:01.140 retraining for their human resources staff, despite the fact that unconscious bias measurements are not

00:17:06.820 reliable or valid, even by the testimony of their formulators, and despite the evidence that there

00:17:12.340 is no, there's no data whatsoever lending unconscious bias retraining programs, even the vaguest shred of

00:17:19.540 credible outcome. So I made these videos, and because I was annoyed about this, and I thought,

00:17:24.740 well, what'll happen if I make a video? And so...

00:17:28.660 Well, so this is, this is one of the things that I feel, or maybe you can answer it for us. I feel because of this

00:17:36.020 incident, you are often characterized, at least in the mainstream press, as being transphobic. If you had a

00:17:41.860 student come to you and said, and they said to you, I was born female, I now identify as male, I want to go, I want you to

00:17:48.900 call me by male pronouns. Would you say yes to that?

00:17:51.860 Well, it would depend on the student, and the context, and why I thought they were asking me, and what I

00:17:57.620 believe their demand actually characterized, and all of that. Because that can be done in a way that's

00:18:03.060 genuine and acceptable, and a way that's manipulative and unacceptable. And if it was genuine and

00:18:09.620 acceptable, then I'd have no problem with it. And if it was manipulative and unacceptable, then not a chance.

00:18:16.020 So, and you might think, well, who am I to judge? Well, first of all, I am a clinical psychologist,

00:18:22.660 and I've talked to people for about 25,000 hours. And so, and I'm responsible for judging how I'm going

00:18:28.980 to use my words. I judge it the same way that I judge all the interactions that I have with people,

00:18:33.460 which is to the best of my ability, and characterized by all the errors that I'm prone to. So, you know,

00:18:40.260 I'm not saying that my judgment would be unerring, but I have to live with the consequences. So,

00:18:44.740 I'm willing to accept the responsibility. So, but, but also to be clear about this,

00:18:50.820 that never happened. I never refused to call anyone by anything that they had asked me to call them

00:18:57.380 by. And so, although that's been reported multiple times, it's a complete falsehood. And it had nothing

00:19:03.860 to do with the transgender issue, as far as I was concerned. And besides that, if it was, if it had

00:19:09.940 only to do with the transgender issue in Canada, the probability that this would have had the impact

00:19:15.780 that it had is zero. So that wasn't about that at all. It was about something far more, far deeper,

00:19:23.220 and far more insidious. And everyone knew it, which is why it didn't go away. What should have happened is,

00:19:29.220 there should have been a bit of controversy around it, maybe even a protest, and everyone's attention

00:19:33.940 should have gone away like a week later. And that didn't happen even a little bit. So there's more

00:19:39.700 going on here than, as I knew, there's far more going on here than this little bill would have,

00:19:44.100 would have revealed. One of your rules in 12 rules for life is, I hope I'm getting this right,

00:19:50.020 choose your words carefully. Be ironic if I got that one wrong. Be precise in your speech. Okay,

00:19:54.740 be precise in your speech. Which is, you know, you got it right. Okay, sort of. Yeah, well,

00:19:58.820 you got the gist of it. That's the crucial thing. One of the things that's happened to you in the past

00:20:02.820 two years is that every utterance of yours, and Caitlin alluded to this in her introduction,

00:20:08.340 is analyzed, maybe manipulated. How do you live with that reality? Well, how do you even have the

00:20:18.820 confidence to sort of continue to, from my perspective, rush into the breach on all sorts

00:20:25.380 of what have become third rail issues, knowing that so much of what you say is going to be

00:20:31.540 mischaracterized? And then I have a follow-up to that. Well, I mean, about 25 years ago, 30 years ago,

00:20:40.020 maybe 1985. I guess that's how far long ago is that? It's a long time. Some years. Yeah. I decided

00:20:48.500 that I was going to be very careful with what I said. Like, I noticed that when I was thinking

00:20:53.220 through some of these ideas that I already described, trying to understand what tilted

00:20:58.260 people towards vengefulness and cruelty, I was contemplating that personally, you know,

00:21:09.220 what would tilt me towards that, or what did tilt me towards that. And at the same time,

00:21:13.780 I developed a, what would you call, an acute awareness of my speech. It was part of, because

00:21:20.820 I'd asked a question, eh? And when you ask yourself a question, if it's, you really ask a question,

00:21:25.380 is you start thinking up the answer, whether you want to think it up or not. And you, and the answer

00:21:30.020 that might, you might generate, might bear very little resemblance to the answer that you would like

00:21:34.500 to generate. And I'd asked myself a question, which was, well, what's the pathway out of this hell,

00:21:40.660 let's say? And how might I be tangled up in that? And one of the things I started to realize was that

00:21:45.300 I wasn't very careful with what I said, and that that seemed in some way to be related to that.

00:21:49.780 It's not surprising because, you know, it's not really obvious that the Nazis, for example,

00:21:54.100 were all that careful about what they said in terms of its relationship to the truth. Quite the

00:21:59.140 contrary. And the same with the ideologues in the Soviet Union. And so the idea that there was some

00:22:03.700 relationship between carelessness and speech, lies and deception, and that sort of thing,

00:22:08.900 or self-aggrandizement, or any of the things that you can indulge in if you're careless with your

00:22:13.220 speech. And the weakening of your character to the point where you might get tangled up in great

00:22:19.380 and terrible sociological movements, that seemed to me to be reasonable. And many people had commented

00:22:25.620 on that, like Solzhenitsyn, for example. And so I started to experience discomfort with what I was

00:22:32.660 saying. And what seemed to happen was that I started to realize and could feel it. I was reading Carl

00:22:38.180 Rogers at the same time, and he actually suggested that psychotherapists pay attention to exactly this

00:22:43.860 sort of thing. I started to understand that many of the things I was saying weren't true. I didn't really

00:22:50.020 believe them. They weren't really my thoughts. They made me feel weak when I said them.

00:22:55.140 Can you give an example? That's a good question. Can I give you an example? Oh, maybe I would engage

00:23:01.860 in an argument with someone at a bar on an intellectual issue for the purpose of displaying

00:23:08.740 my intellectual superiority, or at least hypothetically displaying it, you know. So, you know, sometimes

00:23:14.420 people like to argue, and they like to argue because, hypothetically, they would like to win.

00:23:19.540 So you don't mean, though, that you were mouthing platitudes?

00:23:22.180 Oh, sure. I was doing that. Yeah, definitely. Oh, yes, all the time. And sometimes they

00:23:26.900 weren't even platitudes, you know. They might have been things that I picked up in books that

00:23:30.740 weren't cliches. But they weren't mine. I didn't have any right to them. Like, just because you read

00:23:38.020 something doesn't mean you have a right to it. You have to understand it. And understanding something

00:23:42.340 that's deep means a deep transformation. It means you have to live it. And so just because you know a

00:23:47.460 philosophical concept and you can say it doesn't give you the right to utter it as if it's yours.

00:23:51.860 You have to earn that. And I was a smart kid. And so my head was full of ideas that I hadn't earned,

00:23:57.540 and I could lay them out. But that doesn't mean they were mine or me. And so there was a falsity

00:24:02.420 in expressing them. And so I couldn't tell for a while because I would say things, and part of me would

00:24:08.180 be all critical about what I was saying. You don't believe that. That's not accurate. It's kind of a lie.

00:24:13.940 It was saying that to almost everything I said. And I took a risk. I thought,

00:24:18.580 okay, I'm going to assume that the part of me that's critical about what I'm saying is right.

00:24:24.100 Even though that was terrible because it really, often it meant I could hardly speak.

00:24:30.660 And then I learned to only say things that didn't make me feel weak. And then I decided that that's

00:24:36.420 what I was going to do. So I've been careful with what I've been saying for a long time.

00:24:40.100 I'm having a hard time with what you're saying right now. Because

00:24:46.260 shouldn't the test be, I'm only saying things that are true? Not, I'm only saying things that

00:24:53.060 don't make me feel weak. What am I misunderstanding in that formulation?

00:24:56.740 Well, what you're misunderstanding in part is how do you know the things that you're saying aren't true?

00:25:01.780 And I would say one of the ways you know is that they weaken you. And you can learn that. You can learn to feel that.

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00:27:55.860 Carl Rogers talked about this a lot in his work in psychotherapy. He said that one of the primary

00:28:01.620 roles of a psychotherapist was to be congruent and what he meant by that was that

00:28:07.620 there was no disjunction between what you felt in a situation, let's say, and what you said. That it

00:28:17.140 was all one piece. And that was an embodied unity, not merely a conceptual unity. So I really do think

00:28:24.100 that there's something to it. So you almost mean psychologically weak, not weak in terms of power.

00:28:29.380 I mean psychologically weak. Okay.

00:28:32.020 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I mean morally weak. I mean, weak in character, that sort of thing.

00:28:37.780 Yeah. That's what I mean. Okay. Yeah. And so, and so, you know, I, I got very careful with what I

00:28:43.780 said. And at the same time, I was spending a tremendous amount of time writing. And so I was

00:28:48.980 very careful with what I wrote. So in maps of meaning, I think I rewrote every sentence in that

00:28:53.140 book at least 50 times. And so that's great. And every sentence I, yeah, well, that's for sure.

00:28:59.700 Oh yeah, that's for sure. And now, you know, I'd take the sentence out and then I'd write

00:29:03.700 a bunch of variants of it. And then I would pick the variant that was best. And then I would try to

00:29:08.260 come up with all the arguments I could about why the sentence was stupid.

00:29:11.060 Please don't tell me you still do this. Yeah. I still do this when I'm writing.

00:29:14.900 Okay. Did you do that 15, 15 versions of every sentence in 12 rules for life also?

00:29:22.100 I said 50. Oh, 50. Excuse me. I was more like,

00:29:25.220 I meant to be precise in my speech. It's okay. It was more like 15 with 12 rules

00:29:29.220 for life. So it was less, but I'm a better writer than I was then. So I didn't have to do it quite

00:29:33.540 as often. So I kept writing it until I couldn't make the sentences any better. That doesn't mean

00:29:38.900 they were good. It just meant that I got to the point where if I was rewriting them, it wasn't

00:29:42.820 obvious that the rewrite was better than the original sentence. So then I had to stop.

00:29:46.420 So my question a few minutes ago was how has knowing that you're going to be intentionally,

00:29:53.940 your words are going to be sort of intentionally torqued, how has that changed you?

00:29:59.220 Well, it's made me even more careful. Okay.

00:30:01.700 You know, it's exaggerated the care, but, you know, I had been quite careful and the evidence

00:30:07.540 for that is quite clear. So, you know, when, when all of this political

00:30:10.740 controversy surrounded me and that swirled around me, well, it still is. Maybe it's even

00:30:18.500 exaggerated to some degree, but it was very intense in Canada for a good six months and

00:30:23.540 people were going over what I had put on YouTube with a fine-tooth comb. And there was 200 hours

00:30:29.620 of videos there. And you think, well, with some creative editing and, and with motivation in mind,

00:30:35.220 you'd think if you went over 200 hours of someone's lectures, you could find a smoking pistol,

00:30:39.780 even if you had to chop out a sentence, no one found anything. And the reason for that was

00:30:44.100 there wasn't anything there. That's why they didn't find it. And so I would, had already been

00:30:49.140 very careful. And I discussed all sorts of unbelievably contentious issues, you know,

00:30:54.900 because my classes were very intense. We, we went, we, like the maps of meaning class in particular,

00:31:00.420 it's like, it's, you know, it, it, it's, it's basic presupposition. Partly what I was trying to do

00:31:06.100 with my students was to convince them that had they been in Nazi Germany in the 1930s,

00:31:12.100 they wouldn't have been on the side of the good, right? That's a hell of a thing to drag people

00:31:17.300 through, but it's statistically overwhelmingly likely. So it was a very serious class and certainly a

00:31:23.780 place where you could step badly at, at any given moment. You know, and I talked about gender differences

00:31:28.820 and, and the biological substructure of consciousness and all these things that could easily become

00:31:33.700 politically contentious. But as I said, there weren't any smoking pistols, but now for the last

00:31:38.740 two years, I've been even more careful and I have people watching me, you know, I mean, my family

00:31:44.180 watches me and what I'm doing, they keep very careful track of it. And if I deviate a little bit

00:31:51.060 from what they think I should have, from how I should have behaved, then they tell me and I have

00:31:56.740 friends who are doing the same thing and I listen to them. Do you feel that you deviated from how you

00:32:01.540 should behave when you said of a, I think it was, um, Mishra in the New York Review of Books?

00:32:07.380 No. That, well, let me just share what you said, which is, uh, I'm trying to be precise in my speech,

00:32:12.260 but I believe you said you're a, what did you say? That you were, if you were in the

00:32:16.180 sanctimonious prick and if you were in the room. I said you're a sanctimonious prick and if you're here,

00:32:17.940 I'd slap you. Yeah, so you don't regret that? Not a bit. Okay. And I'll tell you why. Okay.

00:32:23.300 Well, look, it's really complicated. You know, I have this, I have this friend who's a native carver

00:32:30.980 and he, he's, he, he comes from a very rough background, like way rougher than you think.

00:32:37.300 And, and maybe some of you have come from rough backgrounds or you know people who've come from

00:32:41.460 them, but he comes from a plenty rough background. And I started working with him, buying his art 15

00:32:47.060 years ago. And he was a survivor of residential schools in Canada. And, and we got pretty close.

00:32:52.420 And, uh, he helped me design the third floor of my house. And, and, and anyways, that the long and

00:32:57.940 short of it was that I got inducted into his family about two year and a half ago in this big ceremony

00:33:04.420 up in, uh, in a, uh, native reservation in, in, in northern Vancouver. And, uh, you know, we've been

00:33:11.780 through a lot together and a lot of it's been pretty rough and you know, this, whatever the

00:33:17.700 hell his name was, Mishraj or whatever the hell his name was, had the temerity to say that I was

00:33:22.740 romancing the noble savage. It's like, watch your step, buddy. You don't know what the hell you're

00:33:27.780 talking about. Not even a bit. And so had I been a left leaning, uh, what personage, and he had made

00:33:35.700 a comment like that, there would have been hell to pay. So, which isn't to say that I'm a right leaning

00:33:40.660 personage, by the way. So I don't regret it a bit. I think that what he said was absolutely

00:33:45.380 reprehensible and that he should have been called out on it. And so I don't regret it at all. Now,

00:33:49.860 people said, you know, maybe it would have been better for me not to have made that comment. And

00:33:54.580 it's possible that they're right. But I actually thought about it and I thought,

00:33:59.140 there's no excuse for that. You don't know what you're talking about. You're meddling with things

00:34:02.740 you don't understand. And you're making a casual aspersion, not only on me, but on my noble savage

00:34:08.580 friend. It's like, yeah, no. So speaking of things that people have said, um, sort of to defame you,

00:34:16.100 uh, you're currently suing Wilfrid Laurier University, um, because you'll correct me if I'm

00:34:22.180 wrong, but I think administrators there in their meeting with Lindsey Shepard, who was a TA who

00:34:27.380 showed a clip of you, they sort of interrogated her, accusing her of creating a hostile teaching

00:34:32.980 environment for showing a clip of you in her classroom. And during that interaction, which

00:34:38.260 she recorded, they compared you to Hitler. No, they compared me to Hitler or Milo Yiannopoulos.

00:34:44.740 Excuse me. Right? No, it's important. And the reason it's important is because,

00:34:49.220 look, these people, two, one of them- And just to finish that question,

00:34:53.940 maybe you'll braid this in. You are one of the most outspoken

00:34:57.220 champions, I would say, of free speech right now. I would like for you, if you can,

00:35:02.820 to sort of grapple a bit with being, believing in free speech so strongly, and yet also suing

00:35:10.660 this university for slander. Yeah, well, um, so first of all, they compared me to, they said playing,

00:35:19.220 uh, uh, uh, uh, a clip of Jordan Peterson was like playing a clip of Hitler or Milo Yiannopoulos.

00:35:27.380 And I thought, well, let's go a little easy on the Hitler comparisons there. Guys, we might want to

00:35:32.740 save that for when it's really necessary. Because you don't, you don't use, it's, it's sacrilegious to

00:35:39.140 use an insult like that, except in situations where it's justified. It's not appropriate to use a

00:35:46.180 catastrophe like that casually, especially when you're doing it under the guise of moral virtue.

00:35:51.060 There's no excuse for it. And then the second thing is, you're a professor, both of you.

00:35:57.220 Get your damn words straight. Which is it? My Hitler or Milo Yiannopoulos? Seriously, those are not the

00:36:03.300 same people, in case you didn't notice. One of them was the worst barbarian in the 20th century, with the

00:36:08.900 possible exception of Stalin and Mao. And the other one is, is a, a provocator trickster who's quite

00:36:16.260 quick on his feet and, and, and is, what would you say, is stirring things up in a relatively

00:36:25.220 non-problematic way. They're not the same creature. And so to, to combine them in a single careless

00:36:32.660 insult during an administrative, what would you call, investigation, which was entirely unwarranted,

00:36:38.820 by the way, and was predicated on an absolute lie. There hadn't been a student complaint,

00:36:42.820 as the university admitted. There was no excuse for that. And if they weren't professors, then, well,

00:36:46.980 it wouldn't have been so bad. But they were. And the reason that I sued them, there's a whole bunch

00:36:51.060 of reasons. I mean, that, the Hitler comparison and the Milo Yiannopoulos comparison, were only two

00:36:57.060 of about 40 things that they tarred me with. And, and they're all listed in the deposition. And the

00:37:03.300 only reason I brought the lawsuit forward, what, seven months later, or something like that, was

00:37:08.500 because of what happened with Lindsay Shepard. So, what happened to her at Lindsay, at Wilford Laurier,

00:37:14.500 is absolutely inexcusable. Everything they did to her was predicated on a lie. Then the university

00:37:21.540 apologized, and so did the professor. And then he lied during his, his, his apology, which was a

00:37:28.980 forced apology anyways, and therefore a very little utility. They were subject to no disciplinary action,

00:37:34.260 even though the statutes of the university required it. And they made Lindsay Shepard's life a living

00:37:38.660 hell, even after they apologized to her and told her that she did nothing wrong, and that they hadn't

00:37:42.980 followed their own procedures. So I read her deposition, and I actually read it on YouTube, where it's got

00:37:47.780 about 500,000 views, by the way. And I thought, you people haven't learned anything. You've learned

00:37:53.380 absolutely nothing. And so if one lawsuit doesn't convince you, maybe two will. So, and then with

00:37:59.460 regards to free speech, it's like, free speech is still bounded inside a structure of law. And these

00:38:05.860 people broke the law, or at least that's my claim. So I don't see the contradiction there at all. You can't

00:38:10.580 just slander someone, defame them, lie about them. You can't incite people to crime. There's all sorts of

00:38:16.180 reasonable restrictions on free speech that are already codified, essentially, in the British

00:38:21.620 common law system. So, but Wilfred Laurier learned nothing. But this isn't over yet. But isn't it

00:38:28.100 creating a chilling effect, which is something that those of us care so much about free speech,

00:38:32.980 want to sort of stay away from? You could say that these sort of defamation lawsuits are a really,

00:38:39.780 really dangerous, slippery slope. And I'm sort of surprised you don't see it that way.

00:38:43.620 Well, you know, I do see it that way, which is why I spent seven months thinking about it before I

00:38:49.620 decided to do it. But I thought that there's always risk in every decision. There's the risk of doing

00:38:56.740 something, and there's the risk of not doing something. And both of those risks are usually

00:39:01.540 catastrophic in every decision you make in life. It's like I weighed up the risks, and I thought,

00:39:08.740 nope, the risk here of not doing something is greater than the risk of doing something.

00:39:13.140 And had they shown any sign... Look, one of the things that Wilfred Laurier did in the aftermath

00:39:18.340 of this scandal, which, by the way, was the biggest scandal that ever hit a Canadian university,

00:39:22.500 by a large margin. And it was an international scandal. I rarely go places where people haven't

00:39:27.380 heard about this. And so it was a big deal. And they had plenty to learn. And they learned nothing.

00:39:32.740 They set up a panel, hypothetically, to clarify their position on free speech and its relationship

00:39:39.460 to inclusivity, et cetera. And the only two people on the panel who were advocating for the free speech

00:39:44.900 position resigned in frustration. And I know that because I know who they are. And so, well, that's

00:39:52.020 just one of the pieces of evidence that they didn't learn anything. And then they continued to mistreat

00:39:56.740 Shepard, continually. Like, her deposition, it's like a novel of stupidity. You know? It's like...

00:40:04.900 And my sense was, had there been any sign whatsoever of, let's call it, true apology and procedural

00:40:15.940 rectification, that she would have left them alone, and so would have I. But there was zero. In fact,

00:40:22.420 if anything, what they did was double down and go underground. Here's our apology. Here's our

00:40:29.220 procedures. That's what they showed the world. Here's how nothing at all has changed. It's like,

00:40:34.660 no, not good enough. Since we're on the subject of universities, you recently said that what

00:40:40.420 universities have done is beyond forgiveness. I wonder if you can explain what you mean by that.

00:40:45.940 And a second connected question is, should we... I'll put it starkly. Should we abolish universities?

00:40:54.820 No, they'll do that themselves. Okay. Let's hear a little bit about what they've

00:41:00.180 done that you think renders them beyond forgiveness. Well, they're overwhelmingly

00:41:08.660 administratively top heavy. And they don't spend any more money on the faculty than they did

00:41:16.580 30 years ago. And the cost of that administrative top heaviness, which is well documented, not by me,

00:41:24.340 by other people, and it's been that way, it's been accelerating over the last 20 years,

00:41:28.500 has been a radical increase in tuition fees, especially compared to the radical decrease in

00:41:34.900 price of most things over the last 20 years. Now, so they've become administratively top heavy.

00:41:41.140 The way, and this is especially true in the United States, the way that's been managed is that

00:41:46.660 unsuspecting students are given free access to student loans that will cripple them through their 30s

00:41:53.940 and their 40s. And the universities are enticing them to extend their carefree adolescence for a four

00:42:02.500 year period at the cost of mortgaging their future earnings in a deal that does not allow for escape

00:42:09.220 through bankruptcy. So it's essentially a form of indentured servitude. There's no excuse whatsoever for

00:42:14.660 that. It means the administrators have learned how to pick the future pockets of their students.

00:42:19.700 And because they also view them in some sense as sacred cash cows and fragile, let's say, because you

00:42:26.580 might wonder why the students are being treated like they're so fragile. It's like, well, we don't want

00:42:30.740 them to drop out now, do we? And we can't, if they drop out, then we don't get our hands on their future

00:42:35.860 earnings in a way that they can't escape from. And that cripples the economy because the students come

00:42:40.900 out overladen with debt that they'll never pay off right at the time when they should be at the peak

00:42:45.940 of their ability to take entrepreneurial risks. So they can't do that because they're too crippled by

00:42:50.580 debt. And so that's absolutely appalling. They're gerrymandering the accreditation processes so that the

00:42:56.340 degree no longer has its credible value. They're enabling the activist disciplines,

00:43:01.780 which have zero academic credibility whatsoever in my estimation. And I'm perfectly willing to defend

00:43:07.380 that claim. And by enabling the activist disciplines, they're allowing for the distribution

00:43:15.940 of this absolutely nonsensical view that Western society is fundamentally a patriarchal tyranny, which is

00:43:22.980 absurd on at least five dimensions of analysis, but is becoming increasingly the thing you have to

00:43:28.900 believe if you're allowed to speak in public. Um, well, that's what else, that's, that's a good start.

00:43:35.540 That's, they're, they're not teaching students to read critically. They're not introducing them to

00:43:40.420 great literature. They're not teaching them to write. It's like the list goes on and on and on.

00:43:45.300 Do you think in a way that you are a symbol of higher education's failure? Meaning the reason

00:43:52.500 maybe that people are showing up 5,000 people to listen to you, it's going to be 20,000 in London

00:43:58.500 in July is because there aren't that many people who unironically are talking about what it is to live

00:44:06.580 a good life and asking questions about how to live a meaningful one. If you would say that in most

00:44:12.100 universities, I feel that you would be laughed out of the room. Well, it would depend on how you said

00:44:17.140 it and to who, but if you say it to students, then, then they're so happy to listen to you that

00:44:21.460 they can hardly stand it. Because even the most cynical students come to university hoping that

00:44:25.940 there's something there worth learning. And the reason that they're exposed to great literature,

00:44:31.220 for example, because there is such a thing, it's not all power claims, is because great literature

00:44:37.540 contains the key to wisdom and you need wisdom in order to live without undue suffering. So, yes,

00:44:44.500 I mean, so, but I, what I say that what's happened to me is a reflection of the failure of the

00:44:48.820 universities. It is in part, although I did teach this. And not just you, the whole intellectual dark

00:44:54.660 web. The fact that people listen to Sam Harris talk for hours and Michael, I mean, all of these,

00:45:01.540 these people. Well, I think, I think, well, I think, you know, you, you want to go for the simple

00:45:05.940 solutions before you go for the complex ones. And you want to go for the solutions that are associated

00:45:11.060 with ignorance rather than malevolence first. And I would say that we don't want to underestimate the

00:45:16.740 degree to, to which what's happening in YouTube and with podcasts as the consequence of a technological

00:45:24.020 revolution. Like I've known for years that the universities underserved the community,

00:45:28.900 because for some reason we think that university education is for 18 to 22 year olds, which is a

00:45:34.260 proposition that's so absurd that it's, it's absolutely mind boggling that everyone, anyone ever

00:45:39.140 conceptualized it. It's like, you know, why wouldn't you take university courses throughout your entire

00:45:44.660 life? I mean, what, you stop searching for wisdom when you're 22? I don't think so. You don't even start

00:45:50.260 usually until you're like in your mid twenties. So I knew the universities were underserving the,

00:45:55.380 the broader community a long time ago, but there wasn't a mechanism whereby that could be rectified

00:46:00.580 apart from say books. And of course that, that was part of the rectification. So I think you don't

00:46:05.060 want to underestimate the technological transformation, but then, and then I would also say, I mean,

00:46:10.580 I was teaching this in university, you know, so it isn't like there isn't anybody in university

00:46:15.700 still teaching this sort of thing. There, there are plenty of qualified professors who are still doing

00:46:20.260 a good job, but they're being pushed out very rapidly and terrified as well by the, by the activist

00:46:26.820 disciplines. You speak and write a lot about how masculinity is in crisis. What are some of the

00:46:33.380 main signs of it? And then we'll open it up to questions soon. And is Trump a symbol of that crisis

00:46:41.220 or a corrective to it? Well, I don't really think that masculinity is in crisis. I think that

00:46:45.620 that to the degree that masculinity per se is regarded as toxic, that that will produce a crisis,

00:46:52.180 which isn't the same thing. Um, I think there's a, there's a crisis of meaning, let's say in our

00:46:59.140 culture, but that's not new. That's, that's been the case for quite a long time, but I don't think

00:47:03.620 it's specific to masculinity. That's been a story that's kind of aggregated around me. And the way that

00:47:09.860 happened was, well, the people who don't like what I'm saying, look at my audience and they say,

00:47:14.820 oh, well, he's speaking mostly to men. Therefore he must be speaking to men. It's like, well, no,

00:47:19.300 the baseline rates for YouTube utilization, about 80% male. So the fact that most of the people who

00:47:24.740 are watching me on YouTube were male is an artifact to some degree of the fact that most of the people

00:47:30.500 who watch YouTube are male. Now it may also be that the sorts of things that I'm saying are more

00:47:36.420 pertinent to men. Although I'm not convinced of that. Most of my students throughout my university

00:47:41.460 career have been women because psychology is fun, you know, is dominated by women to a great degree.

00:47:47.060 And ever since I published my book, the proportion of people who are coming to my lectures that is

00:47:52.740 female is reliably increasing. It's probably up to about 35, 35%, I would say now from about probably

00:47:59.140 20. So I don't think it is a message that's particularly germane to men, although it is germane

00:48:05.860 to men. And I don't think, I don't think that there's like an independent crisis of masculinity.

00:48:12.900 There might be a crisis of concepts of masculinity. And I think that's hard on young men in some ways.

00:48:18.660 And the reason for that is, you know, you're, you're, you're supposed to be duty bound as a

00:48:24.580 virtuous person to buy the doctrine of the tyrannical patriarchy. It's like, well, look, first of all,

00:48:30.580 every hierarchical system tends towards tyranny. That's a universal truism. And our structures have

00:48:38.420 the same problem, obviously. And we have to be eternally vigilant so that they don't devolve into

00:48:44.260 tyranny. But that doesn't mean that they are tyrannies and always have been. And of course,

00:48:48.980 also compared to what? Compared to your hypothetical ideological utopia? Yes. Compared to every other

00:48:56.820 society that's ever existed on the planet, including most of the ones that exist now?

00:49:02.420 Definitively not. But anyways, if you buy the, that idiot unidimensional idea, which is a pathological

00:49:08.980 error, and you see your, the, your, your culture as a tyrannical patriarchy, then you see any attempt

00:49:15.780 to move up that hierarchy as a manifestation of patriarchal tyranny. Now, the problem is,

00:49:21.300 is that a lot of the ways that you move up a modern functional hierarchy is through competence.

00:49:27.220 And if you take young men, it doesn't happen as much with young women for reasons we can go into,

00:49:31.620 but if you take young men and you say, every manifestation of your desire to move up the

00:49:36.340 hierarchy is nothing but proof of your participation in the tyrannical patriarchy,

00:49:40.820 then you tend to demoralize them, which is exactly what you're trying to do, by the way,

00:49:44.580 if you, if you take that stance to begin with. Because I really think that at the bottom of the most,

00:49:49.780 of the most, of the most pathological manifestations of the collectivist dictum,

00:49:53.860 is an assault on the idea of competence itself. And that's another unforgivable sin that the

00:49:58.580 university has committed. Like every, look, there's no doubt that human hierarchies are error prone,

00:50:05.220 and they tilt towards tyranny. Obviously. But that doesn't mean that they are unidimensionally

00:50:13.140 patriarchal tyrannies. They're neither patriarchal nor tyrannies. So, but that's received wisdom now,

00:50:18.740 and to question it means that you're a misogynist fascist. So, well, so I tell young men, it's like,

00:50:26.260 no, no, no, no, no, no. It's like, there's something to competence, man.

00:50:30.660 Well, I'll just- Speaking as a, as a woman who has read your book, and I'm with you for,

00:50:35.540 for so much of it, and then you start to lose me when you talk about archetypes. The way you talk about

00:50:43.380 archetypes in the book, and again, forgive me if I'm being slightly imprecise, but I'm trying to gloss it for an

00:50:48.020 audience who might not have read it, is that in this sort of Jungian archetypal world, chaos is

00:50:54.660 feminine, order is masculine, and the subtitle of your book is an antidote to chaos. So as a woman

00:51:02.820 reading that, you know, I'd like for you to explain to me maybe what I'm missing there, because that's

00:51:09.620 when you started to lose me a little bit as a reader. Why does there need to be an antidote to the

00:51:14.980 feminine in that way? Well, there has to be an antidote to anything that's manifesting itself in

00:51:21.380 excess. And it's chaos that's manifesting itself in excess at the moment in our culture.

00:51:29.540 And so, and so that's what I decided to address in this book. And mostly that was because I suppose

00:51:37.380 it was addressed at least in part to younger people. And what younger people have to contend with,

00:51:43.140 generally speaking, is an excess of chaos, because they're not very disciplined.

00:51:47.620 And so you need to, you know, we kind of have this idea that while you're free as a child, and then you

00:51:55.620 let me see if I can, if I can put this properly, that you have a certain delightful, wonderful,

00:52:00.900 positive freedom as a child, and then that's given up as you approach adulthood. But the truth of the

00:52:06.660 matter is, is that you have a lot of potential as a child, but none of that is capable of manifesting itself

00:52:12.580 as freedom before you become disciplined. And discipline is a matter of the imposition of

00:52:17.060 order. And the order is necessary, especially for people who are hopeless and nihilistic. And lots of

00:52:22.260 people are hopeless and nihilistic. Way more people than you think. And part of that is because no one's

00:52:27.620 ever really encouraged them. And so the book is, in part, a matter of encouragement. It's like,

00:52:32.660 lay yourself, lay a disciplinary structure on yourself. Get the chaos in, in, in check. And then you can

00:52:38.980 move towards a state that's freer, because it's discipline first. Like, look, if you're going to

00:52:42.900 become a concert pianist, there's going to be several thousand hours of extraordinarily disciplined

00:52:48.340 practice. That's the imposition of order on your potential, let's say. But what comes out of that is

00:52:53.220 a much grander freedom. And so in virtually every freedom that you have in life that's true freedom

00:52:58.660 is purchased at the price of discipline. And so, because I think that it's, it's nihilism and hopelessness that

00:53:06.500 constitute the major existential threat, especially to young people at the moment,

00:53:11.300 then I was concentrating on the necessity of discipline and order. So, and the issue with

00:53:16.340 regards to the metaphysical or symbolic representation of chaos as feminine, well, that's a very complex

00:53:23.220 problem. And the first thing you have to understand is that there's no a priori supposition that

00:53:30.260 order is preferable to chaos in any fundamental sense. They're both constituent elements of reality.

00:53:36.020 You can't say one's bad and the other's good. You can say that they can become unbalanced,

00:53:40.660 and that's definitely not good. Too much chaos is not good, obviously. Too much order is not good,

00:53:47.860 equally obviously. Those are the two extremes that you have to negotiate between. And I'm not making a

00:53:53.700 casual claim with regards to the idea that reality is an amalgam of chaos and order. I don't think that

00:54:00.180 there is any more accurate way of describing the nature of reality. That's the most fundamental,

00:54:06.820 maybe not the most fundamental truth, but it's certainly, there's, there's two, there's two

00:54:12.820 fundamental truths. Reality is composed of chaos and order, and your role is to mediate between them

00:54:21.700 successfully. That's metaphysical and symbolic truth. But it's more than that, because

00:54:28.820 that's actually how your mind and your brain is organized. Not only conceptually, but emotionally,

00:54:35.780 motivationally, and physiologically. So, and I don't really understand how that can be, because it isn't

00:54:41.540 obvious to me how the most fundamental elements of reality can be chaos and order. But the evidence that

00:54:48.980 that that is the case is overwhelming. I can give you a quick example, which is quite interesting. So,

00:54:55.940 you have two hemispheres. There's a reason for that. The fundamental reason for that is that one of them

00:55:02.740 is adapted for things you don't understand. That's, roughly speaking, the right hemisphere. And the other

00:55:08.260 is adapted for things that you do understand. That's the left hemisphere. And so that's a chaos order

00:55:13.380 dichotomy. And the fact that you're adapted to that, that you're, that the very structure of your brain

00:55:21.940 reflects that bifurcation, indicates, as far as I can tell, beyond a shadow of a doubt, because it's also

00:55:29.700 characteristic of non-human animals, many of them, that that differentiation is fundamentally true in some

00:55:38.820 sense. Now, you might ask, well, why is that conceptualized as masculine versus feminine?

00:55:44.260 Because it's not male versus female. By the way, those are not the same thing, because one's conceptual.

00:55:50.740 That's extraordinarily complicated. I think the reason is, is that we're social cognitive primates,

00:55:56.660 and that our fundamental cognitive categories, a priori cognitive categories, are masculine,

00:56:04.660 masculine, feminine, and child. It's something like that. That's the fundamental structure of reality.

00:56:09.940 Because we're social creatures, and we view reality as something that's essentially social in its

00:56:16.660 nature. And then when we started to conceptualize reality outside the social world, which wasn't very

00:56:21.700 long ago, by the way, and which is something that animals virtually don't do at all, we use those a priori

00:56:27.300 social categories as filters through which we interpreted the external world. And we're sort of stuck with that,

00:56:34.260 in some deep sense. And you might say, well, why do we have to be stuck with that? It's like,

00:56:38.820 well, because some things are very difficult to change. Like, if you go watch a story, and the

00:56:47.220 characters in this story slot themselves into those archetypal categories, then you'll understand the

00:56:52.340 story. And if they don't, you won't. Because your understanding is predicated on application of the

00:56:57.220 archetypal a priori to the story. You wouldn't understand it otherwise. So you can't get under that. There's no

00:57:03.220 under that, not to remain human. So, and I can give you a quick example. I like to use Disney movies

00:57:12.580 for a variety of reasons, mostly because everybody knows them. But it's not accidental that the evil

00:57:18.500 queen, the evil queen in Sleeping Beauty is not an accidental character. She's the way she is,

00:57:23.860 because we understand her. And the reason we understand her is because we see the world through

00:57:28.580 the categories that I just laid out. And you can say, well... But are you saying she has to be a

00:57:32.420 queen and not a king? No, if she was an evil king, she'd be different. She'd be like Scar in The Lion

00:57:37.700 King. Just as evil, man. But not the same character. Right? Yeah.

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00:58:56.420 10% senior or military discount. One discount per household. I guess I'm struck that it seems like a

00:59:02.100 lot of your intellectual project is reasserting difference in an age where we're told that everything

00:59:09.300 is the same. Yeah, but it's stupid. Okay. Well, look, look, I'm sorry to be so blunt, but look,

00:59:17.380 the problem, the problem with some of this, the problem with some of this, some of it's willful

00:59:24.020 blindness, but some of it's just ignorance. So, let me just, let me just lay out a couple of things. So,

00:59:30.100 for example, I've been taken to task along, let's say, with James Damore, who had actually been highly

00:59:35.700 influenced by my videos before he, and my classes before he did what he did at Google. You know,

00:59:42.020 I've studied personality differences between men and women for 25 years and written papers on the

00:59:46.900 topic. And it's actually an area of expertise of mine and substantial expertise too, and not

00:59:52.020 pseudoscience expertise. Thank you very much. I'm not a pseudoscientist. So my publication record puts

00:59:58.580 me in the top 0.5% of psychologists. So I'm not a pseudoscientist by any stretch of the imagination.

01:00:04.980 And I have 10,000 citations. And that's not a million, but it's a lot, and a hundred published

01:00:10.100 papers. So, so let me lay out one of the, the personality differences between men and women,

01:00:15.700 because it's worth understanding. And, and you might say, well, there can't be personality

01:00:19.540 differences between men and women, because that's anti-feminist. It's like, no, it's not.

01:00:24.260 We might have to actually understand that there are differences between men and women,

01:00:27.860 so that we can let men and women make the choices they're going to make without, without

01:00:31.540 subjecting them to undue manipulation. Okay. So one of the reliable differences between men and

01:00:37.060 women cross-culturally is that men are more aggressive than women. Now, what's the evidence

01:00:42.580 for that? Here's one piece of evidence. There are 10 times as many people, men in prison. Now,

01:00:48.820 what's that? A sociocultural construct? It's like, no, it's not a sociocultural construct. Okay.

01:00:54.660 Here's another piece of data. Women try to commit suicide more than men by a lot. And that's because

01:01:00.740 women are more prone to depression and anxiety than men are. And there's reason for that. And

01:01:05.060 that's cross-culturally true as well. They're more likely to try to commit suicide, but men are way

01:01:10.100 more likely to actually commit suicide. Why? Because they're more aggressive, so they use lethal means.

01:01:17.860 Okay. So now the question is, how much more aggressive are men than women? And the answer is,

01:01:25.140 not very much. So the claim that men and women are more the same than different is actually true.

01:01:30.900 But this is where you have to know something about statistics to actually understand the way the

01:01:34.740 world works, instead of just applying your a priori ideological presupposition to things that are

01:01:40.900 too complex to fit in that rubric. So if you drew two people out of a crowd, one man and one woman,

01:01:50.740 and you had to lay a bet on who was more aggressive, and you bet on the woman,

01:01:54.260 you'd win 40% of the time. Okay. So that's quite a lot. It's not 50% of the time, which would be no

01:02:00.580 differences whatsoever, but it's quite a lot. So there's lots of women who are more aggressive than

01:02:05.060 lots of men. So the curves overlap a lot. So there's way more similarity than difference. And this is

01:02:11.460 along the dimension where there's the most difference, by the way. Right? But here's the

01:02:16.500 problem. You can take small differences at the average of a distribution. The distributions move

01:02:25.620 off to the side. And then all the actions at the tail. So here's the situation. You don't care about

01:02:31.940 how aggressive the average person is. It's not that relevant. What you care about is who is the most

01:02:39.860 aggressive person out of 100. Take 100 people, and you take the most aggressive person, because

01:02:46.020 that's the person you better watch out for. And what's the gender? Men. Because if you go three

01:02:53.620 standard deviations out from the mean on two curves that overlap but are slightly disjointed,

01:02:59.860 then you derive an overwhelming preponderance of the overrepresented group. And that's why men are

01:03:06.180 about 10 times more likely to be in prison. Has nothing to do with socialization. So and then

01:03:12.340 and then there are other differences too. So it turns out that differences in aggression and agreeableness

01:03:18.900 also predict differences in interest. And so it turns out that men are more interested on average

01:03:26.580 than in things than women are. And women are more interested in people on average. And that's actually

01:03:31.620 the biggest difference that's been measured between men and women. It's nothing to do with ability.

01:03:36.660 It has to do with interest. And so the way that manifests itself is that women are more likely to

01:03:42.980 go into disciplines that are characterized by the care of others. And you can tell that by the way

01:03:48.500 occupations are segregating. All you have to do is look at the data for like 15 minutes. Women

01:03:53.940 overwhelmingly dominate health care. And that's that's accelerating, by the way. And men dominate

01:03:59.940 engineering, let's say. And so you say, well, that's sociocultural. It's like, no, it's not. And here's the proof.

01:04:08.980 So so now now what you do, because you want to test this hypothesis, right? It's like and believe

01:04:14.660 and the other thing that you want to understand is that left leaning psychologists generated this data.

01:04:21.060 And you think, well, how do you know that? That's easy. There are no right leaning psychologists.

01:04:26.740 Except for you.

01:04:27.860 Well, that's what people say, you know, and so

01:04:30.740 And that's been well documented. And so people have published this data despite their ideological

01:04:38.340 proclivities and despite the fact that this is not what they expected to find or what they wanted

01:04:43.300 to find. So what you do now is you you stack countries by how egalitarian their social policies

01:04:49.700 are, right, from the least egalitarian to the most. And you say, well, the Scandinavian countries are the

01:04:54.820 most egalitarian. And by the way, if we don't agree on that, then there's no sense having this

01:04:59.220 discussion at all because we don't agree on what egalitarian means. If you don't think that what the

01:05:04.180 Scandinavians have done has been a move in the direction of egalitarianism, then I have no idea

01:05:10.020 what you mean by egalitarianism. Now, you could say, well, they haven't done it perfectly. It's like,

01:05:14.340 yeah, yeah, that's true. But it's not relevant to this argument. So what you do is you stack countries by

01:05:20.260 how egalitarian their social policies are, and then you look at occupational and personality

01:05:25.380 differences between men and women as a function of the country. And what you find is,

01:05:32.420 as the country becomes more egalitarian, the differences between men and women increase.

01:05:41.780 They don't decrease. And so what that means is that the radical social constructionists

01:05:48.020 are wrong. And it's not a few studies with a couple of people done by some half-witted

01:05:52.980 psychologists in some tiny little university. It's population level studies that have been published

01:05:58.260 in major journals that have been cited by thousands of people. It's not pseudoscience. It's not,

01:06:04.740 it's not questioned, it's not questioned by mainstream psychometricians and personality theorists.

01:06:10.340 We figured this out back in like 1995. Everyone thought it was settled. And so what's the big problem?

01:06:16.580 Well, who knows what the big problem is? The outcome is not exactly the same between the genders.

01:06:22.980 It's like, well, who says it has to be? And more importantly, and this is something to ask yourself

01:06:27.540 constantly, just who the hell's going to enforce that? And just exactly how are they going to enforce

01:06:32.980 that? And believe me, it's not going to be in some manner that you like. Because there are differences

01:06:37.620 between men and women. And if you leave them alone, those differences manifest themselves in different

01:06:42.260 occupational choices. That's the other finding. This is a newer one. As the societies become more

01:06:47.860 egalitarian, the occupational choices between men and women maximize. And what that means is that fewer

01:06:55.060 and fewer women go into the STEM fields. Now, no one wanted that. No one predicted it. No one was

01:07:01.060 hoping for it. It actually flew in the face of, I would say, the most established psychological theories,

01:07:06.260 because my presupposition certainly was 20 years ago that what would have happened as we made societies

01:07:12.820 more egalitarian would be that men and women would converge. That's not what happened. The biological

01:07:17.220 differences maximized as we eliminated the sociocultural differences. And so maybe you don't

01:07:22.900 like that. It's like, that's fine with me. I didn't say I liked it. But whether or not I like a piece of

01:07:28.340 data has very little bearing on whether or not I'm liable to accept it. You know, I'm trying to look at the

01:07:33.460 damn scientific literature and to draw the conclusions that are necessitated by the data.

01:07:39.700 And then you can say, well, the whole thing is suspect because it's the it's the construction of

01:07:45.700 the patriarchal tyrants who generated the Eurocentric scientific viewpoint. It's like you want to have

01:07:51.300 that conversation, then go to an activist discipline and have it because it's not the sort of conversation

01:07:56.740 that anyone sensible would engage in. So I'd love to open up the room to

01:08:03.300 questions, please, sensible questions, and please keep them short, but genuine questions. Someone

01:08:11.540 with a microphone will find you if you raise your hand.

01:08:20.100 Yes. Yeah, hi.

01:08:24.100 Good evening. My name is Prera. I wanted to understand a little bit of your view,

01:08:28.820 more on the fact that, not fact, but at least observation, that over generations and generations,

01:08:35.540 or at least what I've heard and seen from my family, I can take up that women being told about

01:08:42.660 their position in the home and men being told their position to work and be a little more aggressive,

01:08:50.660 you know, the social conditioning. So how does that play a role? Because I didn't hear that being a

01:08:57.620 being a dimension of reaching these conclusions.

01:09:01.300 Well, I've never claimed that the differences between men and women are 100% biologically determined.

01:09:07.700 They're biologically influenced. The radical constructionists make the opposite claim. There

01:09:11.940 are no biological differences between men and women. It's like, well, first of all, that's so preposterous that

01:09:18.100 it barely even requires an answer. But you might specify it a bit and say,

01:09:22.260 no, there are no biological differences that manifest themselves psychologically.

01:09:26.580 And that's not quite as preposterous, but it's also incorrect. It's obviously the case that all sorts

01:09:31.780 of things about sex roles and gender roles, let's say, are conditioned by sociocultural mechanisms,

01:09:38.500 because human beings are very, very plastic. And so the manner in which those biological differences

01:09:46.100 manifest themselves in a culture is radically influenced by the nature of the culture.

01:09:50.980 But that doesn't mean that the biological influences don't exist. So...

01:09:55.060 But are you saying, should we be countering that sort of traditional,

01:10:02.340 like traditional cultural mores?

01:10:04.100 So what I still didn't understand is like, at one point, you're saying it's not necessarily biological, but...

01:10:14.740 Yeah, at one point, you're saying that it's not necessarily biological or inherent, if I had to paraphrase it.

01:10:20.740 Well, some of it is.

01:10:21.700 Yeah, but it's very unclear in the way, at least maybe one hour is very short, and maybe it needs a larger

01:10:28.500 discussion. It seems that it's easy to deduce that these are inherent differences which

01:10:34.580 exist, and social conditioning wasn't taken as a parameter to arrive at that.

01:10:39.860 Well, that's controlled for by the comparison between societies that have different levels of

01:10:43.540 egalitarianism built into their social structure. That's all taken care of in the analysis.

01:10:49.060 If the biological differences manifest themselves maximally, where the sociocultural influences

01:10:54.020 to equalize gender are maximal, then obviously the biological differences are powerful and profound.

01:10:59.860 It's conclusive. So it's taken into account in the data analysis.

01:11:06.260 So that's why you stack up the countries by the egalitarian nature of their social policies,

01:11:12.020 is to control for the sociocultural influence. And so, you know, you've got to admit,

01:11:16.260 you've got to just think it through for a minute.

01:11:17.780 It isn't even that what you would have expected, theoretically, is that the societies that

01:11:24.900 are the least egalitarian would have the biggest differences between men and women,

01:11:29.380 and that as the societies got more and more egalitarian, those differences would get smaller,

01:11:33.540 and maybe disappear even. But that isn't what happened. It's exactly the opposite is what happened.

01:11:39.700 They maximized in the most egalitarian societies. Therefore, the social constructionist position,

01:11:46.980 the radical social constructionist position is wrong. It's wrong. It's been refuted,

01:11:54.980 which is partly why the radical social constructionists have taken the legislative

01:11:58.900 route to impose their viewpoint. They lost the scientific war, but then, well, then we can just

01:12:03.860 attack science. It's like, well, it's science itself that's suspect. It's like, well, then quit using

01:12:08.500 your iPhones. Right? Well, if you're going to have your convictions, man, lay them out in your life. If you

01:12:15.060 think the scientific process is suspect and tyrannical and oppressive and all that, then quit using the

01:12:21.700 products that it produces. You don't get to have your cake and eat it too. Let's go to this young

01:12:27.860 woman right here. Yeah. And then we'll go to you. Hi, my name's Julia, and I recently read in the New York

01:12:34.020 Times an article about your comments on forced monogamy. What are your comments on how that was perceived by the

01:12:40.340 public and specifically the left? Great question. Well, I think it was enforced monogamy, though.

01:12:48.980 Enforced monogamy. Yeah. Yeah. Enforced monogamy. First of all, that's a technical term, by the way,

01:12:53.300 that's been used in the anthropological literature for 100 years. And the journalist, who was not stupid,

01:12:59.460 knew that perfectly well and reported the story the way she reported it despite that. But what's even more

01:13:06.260 surreal than that about that story is that if you're going to try to undermine someone's credibility,

01:13:13.060 like, and do it effectively, you should attribute them to them an extreme view that some person

01:13:19.940 somewhere actually holds. Okay. And so the view that was attributed to me was something like,

01:13:26.500 I want to... Handmaid's Tale. The road to handmaid's tale. Yes. I want to

01:13:29.780 find useless men and distribute women to them at the point of a gun so that they don't become violent.

01:13:36.020 It's like no one has ever believed that ever anywhere, certainly including me. Except Barbara

01:13:41.780 Atwood. Well, right. That's right. She wrote a book about that. But so, you know, it's just absolutely

01:13:46.980 preposterous. And it's preposterous in a bunch of ways because she interviewed me for two days and we

01:13:52.580 talked about that for about two minutes. And it was a peripheral conversation. And it's an

01:13:58.340 anthropological truism generated primarily by scholars on the left, just so everyone's clear

01:14:04.420 about it, that societies that use monogamy as a social norm, which by the way is virtually every

01:14:10.820 human society that's ever existed, do that in an attempt to control the aggression that goes along

01:14:16.740 with polygamy. It's like, oh my God, how contentious can you get? It's like, well,

01:14:22.180 how many of you are in monogamous relationships? Well, the majority. How is that in force?

01:14:26.820 I think this is a very polyamorous room, try to look around.

01:14:29.700 Yeah. So, so, you know, it was just,

01:14:32.900 it was, it was desperate. That's what it looked like to me. But the problem is it was also desperate

01:14:38.420 and amateurish. It's like she could have done a much better job with a much less extreme

01:14:42.740 characterization. It's like, oh yes, I want to take women at the point of a gun and distribute them

01:14:47.700 to useless men. It's so stupid. Partly because, like, if she, if she would have been reasonable,

01:14:54.180 and she knew this too, one of the things I've told men, specifically, over and over and over and over,

01:15:01.940 is if you're being rejected by all the women that you approach, it's not the women.

01:15:19.220 Right. So, so because, and so that's a, because, you know, these characters who, who, like the guy

01:15:24.340 that mowed down those people in Toronto, he ends up blaming women. And he's blaming more than women,

01:15:29.140 in some sense. He's blaming the structure of being for producing women that reject him. It's like,

01:15:33.860 and so that's part of what makes him violent. It's like, well, what the hell's wrong with him?

01:15:38.100 You know, he's got it completely backwards. If everyone, if you, if everyone you talk to is boring,

01:15:45.140 it's not them. Right. And so if you're rejected by the opposite sex, assuming that you're heterosexual,

01:15:53.460 then you're wrong. They're not wrong. And you've got some work to do, man. You've got some difficult

01:16:01.060 work to do. And there isn't anything that I've been telling, let's say, young men, that's clearer

01:16:07.060 than that. You know, my, the, it's actually something I've been criticized by, by people on the left,

01:16:13.300 because they think I don't take structural inequality, for example, and so forth, into account

01:16:18.180 sufficiently. What I've been telling people is, take the responsibility for your failure onto yourself.

01:16:24.180 And that certainly applies to, well, especially when you're trying to formulate relationship,

01:16:28.580 and you're getting rejected left, right, and center. It's like, that's a hint that you have some work

01:16:34.580 to do. Now, it also might be a hint that you're just young and useless, and why would the hell would

01:16:38.660 any... Absolutely. That, why the hell would anybody have anything to do with you? Because you don't

01:16:43.460 have anything to offer. You know, so, but that's rectifiable, and partly, even maturity rectifies

01:16:50.180 that. But, so, so not only was that, what would you call it, accusation, surreal and absurd, made by

01:16:59.300 a journalist who knew perfectly, knew perfectly well what I was suggesting, and chose to misrepresent

01:17:04.340 it anyways. It's actually the opposite, that the conclusion that people derive from that is exactly the

01:17:10.340 opposite of what I've been suggesting, in particular to young men. So, it's absolutely preposterous.

01:17:15.940 Uh, yes, where the microphone is. Yes. Professor Peterson. Oh. I have... Hi, Barry. Hi. So good to see you up there.

01:17:28.100 You too. I teach students. I teach trans students, and I'm asked often to call people singularly,

01:17:38.020 they. It started probably about four years ago. It struck me as very odd. I'm 52. And some of them,

01:17:48.740 you can tell that it's coming from a very deep place, and that's how they feel, and they deeply

01:17:54.100 need to be called they. Some of them, my horse sense says that they're kind of enjoying giving me

01:18:02.740 a certain shock, and that there's a certain theatrical aspect. It's my horse sense that

01:18:08.020 there's a certain epate, a le bourgeois aspect to it. I kind of feel it, and I'm probably right.

01:18:14.580 But I can't know. I'm a linguist. I'm a person. And my general feeling has been, whatever they ask,

01:18:23.300 just go with it, and let's change our usage of the pronouns, because we have a lot to do. Now, what you

01:18:29.700 said was interesting. You said that the way that you make the difference in deciding these cases

01:18:36.260 is based on the fact that you have psychological training, and you can tell. What I want to know is,

01:18:43.700 for my own elucidation, and also because I think many of us wondered, but then it kind of went by,

01:18:49.220 how do you know? Now, I want to specify. I'd rather you didn't recount the whole episode of how

01:18:57.780 ridiculously you were treated amidst that whole controversy. Sure. Three-quarters of the room

01:19:03.300 knows. I sympathize with you. I thought it was ridiculous. I want to know specifically, because

01:19:10.020 I'm a linguist. You have psychological training. How would you know? And if you hear, I'm almost done.

01:19:16.980 Oh yeah, no problem. If you hear a tiny bit of skepticism in my voice, you're correct. However,

01:19:23.460 I am open to being convinced. Based on your training, which is immense, how would you know

01:19:30.980 which students to discount as opposed to which ones to go along with? Okay. Well, first of all,

01:19:36.500 I wouldn't know, right? Which is partly why your skepticism is justified. But I have to be

01:19:42.820 responsible for what I say based on my willingness to take responsibility for my judgment. So I would be

01:19:48.180 willing to do that despite the fact that I might be wrong. But having said that, in any reasonable

01:19:54.020 situation, I would err on the side of addressing the person in the manner that they requested to

01:19:59.620 be addressed. But that's not the issue for me. The issue is now I'm compelled by law to do so. It's

01:20:05.780 like, no, not doing it. Not now, because it's compelled by law. So that's the end of the game as far

01:20:12.820 as I'm concerned. So because there is no excuse for compelling it by law. That's my my position. And

01:20:19.540 I think I think there's all sorts of reasons for that. I don't think it was an isolated legislative

01:20:24.580 move. I think it's part and parcel of a whole sequence of legislative moves that have been made

01:20:29.700 and that continue to be made in Canada. I think it's an attempt by a certain radical ideological,

01:20:36.500 what would you say, a certain radical ideology to gain the linguistic upper hand, which I think is a

01:20:42.020 terrible thing to do, to allow. So I had lots of reasons for rejecting the legislation. But it had

01:20:47.780 nothing to do with...

01:20:48.740 ...about how your psychological training would make the difference.

01:20:53.940 That's very interesting. We're talking about expertise here. And my ears pricked up when you

01:21:00.100 talked about how there is a way of thinking that would allow us to decide. I know some of my students...

01:21:05.540 No, there's a way of thinking that would allow me to decide for me.

01:21:08.580 No, us to decide for us. Surely you have a larger mission than just what's going on in your own

01:21:14.180 head. And I mean that. No, I had a perfectly straightforward mission, which was there's

01:21:17.620 no damn way I was going to say those words when I was compelled to by law. That was my mission.

01:21:22.260 You weren't trying to model for the rest of us a way of thinking it was really only about you?

01:21:28.180 Well, it was about me and the law. I thought the lawmakers had gone too far. They'd stepped out of

01:21:34.500 their appropriate territory into the domain of linguistic freedom. And as far as I was concerned,

01:21:39.860 I was going to put up with that. And so if people were happy about that and wanted to follow the

01:21:43.940 example, that was fine with them. But for me, it was something... and that was the statement.

01:21:49.780 I'm not doing this. And then if people can draw their own conclusions from that, maybe they want

01:21:54.580 to do it. I mean, and I've spoken with no shortage of trans people. And my proclivity has been without

01:22:00.820 exception so far to address them in the manner that seems most socially appropriate under the

01:22:05.540 circumstances. Now, you asked a specific question, which was, do I have special expertise that I might

01:22:13.780 share with other people? Because you're doing Martin Luther. And I think that these issues are

01:22:19.220 a little subtler than those. And so I'm just waiting. Well, what makes you think that you're

01:22:23.940 doing the kids that are grandstanding any favours by going along with their manipulation? Because I

01:22:28.020 can't decide which ones those are. I just have my gut instincts and that's not good enough.

01:22:31.700 Look, fair enough. But you have a type one and type two error problem. So one error is that you don't

01:22:37.060 call students what they deserve to be called. That's one error. And the other error is that you

01:22:42.900 you call students what they want to be called even though they don't deserve it. And so what you're

01:22:47.620 trying to do optimally is to minimize both those errors. And to do that, you have to take a middle

01:22:52.420 route. Now, what you've decided to do, and I'm not criticizing it, is you've decided to allow for the

01:22:57.700 possibility 100% of one of those errors because you think it's a less significant error. And you know,

01:23:03.860 you might be right, but it's not like you're acting in an error-free manner. You've just decided to

01:23:08.340 minimize one form of error at the expense of the other. Because I would say you're allowing,

01:23:13.460 what would you call it, attention-seeking and somewhat narcissistic undergraduates to gain the

01:23:17.540 upper hand over you in your class. Now, believe me, it's not a criticism. It's not a criticism. I

01:23:23.940 understand why you're doing it. No, but isn't John just erring on the side of

01:23:29.140 generosity and compassion? I have one more thing to say because I'm not going to take up any more

01:23:33.620 space. Okay. Are you saying that psychological theory has nothing to teach us about this? Because

01:23:39.940 you're talking around my question. You're gorgeously articulate. You're smarter than me. Does psychology

01:23:45.780 have anything to teach us or not? Yes or no? On this question. I don't think that it has anything to

01:23:52.340 teach. I don't think it has anything to offer that I could teach you without... let me think. So it's

01:24:00.500 just too complicated? No, no, it's not. No, no, it's not that. Well, it is that in part because it's not

01:24:05.380 easy to articulate out the principles, the unerring principles by which you would make such a categorical

01:24:10.660 judgment, right? Because those are very situation-specific problems. You know, and it's part of

01:24:16.820 the problem of how to make a generic moral truth applied to a very individualistic situation.

01:24:24.740 And the problem in the sorts of situations that you're describing is generally the devil's in the

01:24:28.820 details, right? You have all these students, the ones that you just laid out, they vary in their

01:24:34.740 attitude towards their self-professed gender from the ones who are grandstanding to

01:24:40.500 some degree, let's say, to the ones that are very serious. And you have to make a judgment

01:24:44.580 in the moment that is dependent on the variables that present themselves in a very complex way in

01:24:49.300 that situation. And I understand why you took the pathway that you took, and it's perfectly reasonable

01:24:54.820 to do so. My point was that you don't minimize all the errors by doing so. It's fine. It's still a fine

01:25:01.300 way of approaching. It isn't. My point was that because of my psychological acumen, I would say,

01:25:07.060 that the experience that I've derived is that I would be comfortable in making the judgment and

01:25:12.180 taking the consequential risk. I'm not saying I'd be correct. That's not the same thing at all.

01:25:17.940 I'm willing to suffer the consequences of my error. That's not the same thing as being right.

01:25:23.940 And so if I feel that a student is manipulating me, then I'm not going to go along with it. Now,

01:25:27.860 I might be wrong about that and actually hurt someone who's genuinely asking for something that they need.

01:25:33.780 But I'm also, what would you say, sensitive to the error of allowing manipulation to go unchecked.

01:25:41.700 So, aha, you're back. No, John. Okay. And then there could be a two-hour

01:25:49.220 podcast about this on your wonderful podcast which everyone should listen to.

01:25:52.580 Everything you're saying is very well put, but it's awfully slippery. And I know you can do better.

01:26:00.260 This is too slippery for me.

01:26:02.420 Invite him on. Okay. Hands.

01:26:08.660 Here in the orange and pink scarf.

01:26:10.740 Thank you, Barry. And thank you both for this really interesting conversation,

01:26:19.460 which is not like most of the conversations we've had here at the Ideas Festival.

01:26:24.180 This is my first one, so I have no idea. Great.

01:26:30.500 So, Dr. Peterson, there are a million questions that I'd like to ask you. I'm only going to ask one,

01:26:35.700 obviously. I'm a psychologist. I'm a social psychologist with a clinical background.

01:26:41.300 And the thing that I think I'd like to most hear about right now at this moment is

01:26:50.420 the very noisy, small percentage of people who oppose you. Have you thought about something they

01:26:57.540 might be right about? That they might actually have a point about that you hadn't thought of,

01:27:06.180 but you've started to think they might actually have a point?

01:27:09.460 Great question.

01:27:10.020 Um, I don't know if I've started to think about the point that they have that I didn't think about

01:27:16.340 before. I mean, people have been characterizing me as right-wing. It's like, I'm not right-wing,

01:27:24.580 so the characterization isn't very helpful. And one of the things I do all the time in my public

01:27:30.340 lectures is make a case for the utility of the left. So the case can be made quite rapidly.

01:27:39.860 If you're going to pursue things of value in a social environment, you're going to produce a

01:27:43.460 hierarchy. It's unavoidable, because some people are better at whatever it is that you value.

01:27:50.420 And so when that lays itself out socially, it will produce a hierarchy.

01:27:54.500 The hierarchy has a necessity if you're going to pursue the things of value, but it has a risk.

01:28:01.540 The risk is that we'll ossify and become corrupt. That's risk number one. And risk number two is that

01:28:06.420 when you produce the hierarchy, you're going to dispossess a number of people, because there'll

01:28:10.660 be lots of people in the hierarchy who aren't good at it, and they'll be dispossessed. So you need a

01:28:16.020 political voice for them. That's the left. So I make that case over and over. Now, what the right

01:28:23.140 does is say, yeah, but we still need the hierarchy. It's like, yes, you still need the hierarchy.

01:28:27.860 The reason we need the political dialogue is because we need the hierarchy, and we can't let

01:28:32.340 it get out of control. And the way to balance those two competing necessities isn't by only having the

01:28:41.940 hierarchy or dissolving the hierarchy. You have to live with the tension, because the situation keeps

01:28:49.300 shifting. So the way you live with the tension is by talking. You say, well, here's the current state.

01:28:55.060 The hierarchy needs to be tweaked this much because it's getting too tyrannical, and it's dispossessing

01:29:00.900 too many people. So we need to tweak it so that it's not as corrupt and so that it's a little bit

01:29:05.460 more open. And we have to talk about that all the time. And that's what the right and left, it's not

01:29:09.780 the only thing they do, because they also talk about the necessity of borders. That's the other fundamental

01:29:14.340 thing that they do. The dialogue has to continue so that we can have the hierarchies and utilize them as

01:29:20.420 tools without allowing them to descend into tyranny. Okay, so I made a case. I made a case on the web.

01:29:26.180 I did a talk at the University of British Columbia, a left-wing case for free speech, as if that's so

01:29:32.340 difficult to make. I mean, that's the sort of case that was made until like 2014 or something like that.

01:29:39.140 So the left-leaning types have all sorts of things that are correct to say. Now, the problem is,

01:29:47.460 one of the problems of the left, but this is, and this is another thing that I talk about all the time

01:29:51.140 in my public lectures, by the way, is we have a problem. We know how to put a box around the

01:29:56.020 extremists on the right. Basically, we say, oh, you're making claims of ethnic or racial superiority.

01:30:01.700 You're not part of the conversation anymore. What do we do on the left? Nothing. That's not good,

01:30:08.740 because there's an issue. Can the left go too far? Yes. When? Oh, we don't know. Oh, that's not a very

01:30:20.980 good answer. Now, you could say, well, then it's up to the moderate leftists to figure that out,

01:30:26.180 so they can dissociate themselves from the radicals, and it is up to them, but that's actually not a very

01:30:31.540 good answer either, because it's all of our problem. It's not centrists don't know how to

01:30:36.260 reliably identify the radical, the two radical left. Right-wingers don't know how, and it's partly

01:30:41.780 because I think it's actually conceptually more complex. Like, with the radical right,

01:30:46.260 you can kind of lay it down to one dimension. Oh, racial superiority. Nope. Sorry, you're out of

01:30:51.780 the conversation. But that's Milo, who you mentioned before. Well, I didn't say I was a fan of Milo.

01:30:57.300 No, but you called him a prankster. Well, he is a prankster, mostly. Yeah, but he's also a racist.

01:31:02.500 Well, possibly, yeah. I haven't followed Milo that carefully, you know, so, and it's possible that he is.

01:31:08.500 I mean, it's hard to tell what Milo is exactly. He's a very complicated and contradictory person,

01:31:13.460 destined to implode, which is exactly what happened. Well, there's just no way you can be that

01:31:19.300 contradictory a person and manage it. It's just not possible. He was just too many things happening

01:31:23.860 at the same time for anyone to ever manage. So, but on the left, you know, I don't know what it is.

01:31:31.540 I think the left becomes toxic. One of the things that makes the left unacceptable is demands for

01:31:37.780 equality of outcome. It's like, nope, you crossed the line, man. That's not an acceptable demand.

01:31:42.580 And that's increasingly a moderate leftist demand as well. Now, but I don't know. I,

01:31:46.900 it might be more complex. It might be that there's four things that you have to demand on the left

01:31:51.860 that all of a sudden makes what you're doing unacceptable. And we don't know what those four

01:31:56.180 things are. And so I actually think it's a conceptual problem as well as an ethical problem. We don't know

01:32:00.980 how to bind the, the necessary left so that we don't, so that the radicals don't dominate

01:32:09.300 counter-productively. And if you don't think that the radical leftists can dominate counter-productively,

01:32:14.980 then, well, heaven help you. That's...

01:32:19.300 No, that I agree with, but the idea that it's so clear on the right is not clear to me. I mean,

01:32:24.980 look at, look at the Trump administration. Oh, I don't think that it's necessarily applied very

01:32:30.180 clearly, but at least conceptually it's more... But we can point it out. Well, we can point it out

01:32:35.380 better. So, and it, I mean... Do you think that's because of World War II? Yes.

01:32:42.740 Yeah, that helped quite a lot, actually. Yeah. Yeah. But, but the thing is, is that the communist

01:32:47.700 catastrophes don't seem to have made it any clearer on the left. Yes. And so, and now that's another thing that

01:32:53.140 the universities have done that's unacceptable, by the way, the intellectual class, I would say,

01:32:57.220 is that it's never come to terms properly with the fact that the intellectual class as a whole was,

01:33:02.420 was supportive of the communist experiment. And it was an absolutely catastrophic failure on every,

01:33:09.300 what, measure of analysis. People say, well, that wasn't real communism. It's like,

01:33:13.380 you really shouldn't ever say that. Because what it means is, this is what it means. It's the most

01:33:17.620 arrogant statement that a person can make. It means that, had I been in the position of Stalin,

01:33:22.900 with my proper conceptualization of the Marxist utopia, I would have ushered in the utopia.

01:33:31.140 That's what it means. And it's like, no. First of all, if you actually were that good-spirited,

01:33:36.660 and you're not, by the way, if you were, you would have been eliminated so fast after the revolution

01:33:42.900 occurred that it would have, well, it would have killed you. Because that's what happened. It's what

01:33:48.420 happened. Like, all the well-meaning people after the Russian revolution, the small minority of

01:33:52.900 people that were genuinely well-meaning, they were dead, like, within two or three years. So,

01:33:58.260 that wasn't real communism. I think I'm seeing zero, as in zero questions,

01:34:01.300 zero time, zero something. One more question. Really? Okay.

01:34:07.140 I know, several people do. Can we take a few, and he'll answer them shortly? Like, maybe two more?

01:34:15.780 Okay. Let's go here, and the front row right here. Yes, but make it very, very short.

01:34:21.300 Very short. I just thank you for coming, and I'm honored. Very important. Great mentor, great help to

01:34:31.540 me, and a lot of people that I've been sharing your work with. I have two books here, and I would

01:34:36.900 like you to sign them for me. Okay, you could do that. Yes, he will do that after, I'm sure. Yes.

01:34:43.540 Professor Peterson, this is akin to the question that the young woman over there asked, but over,

01:34:50.260 if you could get in a self-reflective mode over the course of your life and career to date,

01:34:54.580 what could you say, honestly, to us about where you felt you've been most wrong, and what provoked

01:35:03.700 that self-assessment? I'm not thinking about how I've been wronged. You have to...

01:35:08.900 How you've been wronged. Oh, incorrect. Like a mind, like a wrong in your thinking, where you sort of...

01:35:15.300 Oh, I was wrong about the big five personality theory for about five years, so I know that's not

01:35:19.940 very interesting to any of you, but I didn't like it at all. It was brute force, statistically derived.

01:35:26.260 It wasn't theoretically interesting. I didn't like it at all, but I was wrong about that,

01:35:31.220 because the science was well done. What else have I been wrong about? Well, you asked for profound

01:35:38.820 examples of being wrong, and in my field, that's actually a profound example, because that's one of

01:35:42.980 the major theories in the field. You're thinking about more interesting examples.

01:36:01.940 What have I changed radically? Oh, well, you know, when I was a kid, I was an avid socialist.

01:36:07.460 I was wrong about that. But more specifically, I was wrong about that, because I thought that

01:36:15.220 in that doc... that there were questions that I want answered that that doctrine could answer,

01:36:19.220 and it wasn't that it was socialism that didn't make the answers emerge. It was that it was the

01:36:24.900 wrong level of analysis. And so that was a major source of error. It was sort of the source of error

01:36:30.340 that the journalists who are going after me are making. They think everything's political. It's like,

01:36:34.420 no, it's not. There's lots of levels of analysis, and the political is one. And I learned eventually

01:36:39.460 that the political wasn't the right level of analysis for the questions that I was interested

01:36:43.380 in addressing. And that was a major... that was a major error. It took me years to sort that out and to

01:36:51.060 figure out what the consequence was. I was wrong about the significance of religious ideas, because when

01:36:56.900 I was a kid, I... and, you know, 13 or so, and I was smart enough at that point to see the

01:37:03.380 contradiction between an evolutionary account of the origin of human beings in a, say, a scriptural

01:37:08.740 account. And so I just dispensed with that in this sort of new atheist move. And, you know, I threw the

01:37:14.660 baby out with the bathwater, and I was really wrong about that, like profoundly wrong about that. And I'm

01:37:19.620 sure I'm wrong about a bunch of other things, but I'll figure out what some of those are as we go ahead. So that's

01:37:24.740 three things. Those are big things. So, you know, if I thought more, I could come up with other

01:37:31.620 examples, but those are pretty big things that I was wrong about. Thank you all so much. Clearly

01:37:37.540 an hour and a half is not enough with you. But thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much.

01:37:54.420 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - July 06, 2018

Aspen Ideas Festival： From the Barricades of the Culture Wars

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