Dr. Jordan Peterson is a professor at the University of Toronto and author of many books and posters of many fantastic lecturers. His most recent book, Understanding Myself, has been translated into many languages and has had a phenomenally successful book tour. Dr. Peterson has visited over 100 cities in the past year. In this episode, he talks about how he manages to balance his work and family life, how he stays motivated, and what he does to stay on track with his goals. He also talks about his new series, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson: Man Whisperer, a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. To support this podcast, you can make a donation at jordanbpeterson.org/donations or by following the link in the description of the podcast. And we will let you know where to find that when it's ready. Now and then and start watching the show on Daily Wire Plus now! Go to Dailywireplus.co/TheFemSplainers and start helping to support the podcast by making a donation. Thank you very much, Danielle Crittenden and Christina Hoffs-Sommers. Thank you so much for all the support you ve shown so far, and we re making this podcast possible. Sincerely, Dr. B.B. Peterson - The FemSplainer and . , & (Thank you, ( ) ( ) Thanks, Christina (JORDEN B. P. Peterson (Jordan B. Petersen ) ( ) ( ( ). JORDENB PETERSON ( ) - JORDAN B. PETERSON AND JORDON B.PETERSON (P. PEREKPEER ( ), ( . ( JORDERING AND ANCHORING ) AND JANDREAU ( ) AND (THANK YOU, JANDER B. M. POTTERING AND OTHER THANCHORES ( ) & THE FEMSPLANDS AND A PODCAST ) & JORDY B. SPENCER (JANDREI (EDUCATION)
00:00:00.960Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.800Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:51.040Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.
00:00:59.360To support this podcast, you can make a donation at jordanbpeterson.com slash donate, or by following the link in the description.
00:01:08.560Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, Self-Authoring and Understand Myself, can be found at self-authoring.com and understandmyself.com.
00:01:21.040Welcome to the FemSplainers. I'm Danielle Crittenden.
00:04:07.680And a lot of this is ridiculously positive, you know, like so if I'm going out on the streets now or in cafes or, you know, airports, I meet people all the time.
00:04:18.200And they're always polite and they're always happy to see me and they always have some very touching story to relate.
00:04:26.360And then the audiences themselves are very positively predisposed to whatever it is that we're doing together.
00:04:34.940And so that makes it a lot easier to stay motivated and to continue.
00:04:41.740You know, I mean, it's demanding because everything's scheduled so tightly.
00:04:45.440And I do a different lecture every night.
00:04:51.100Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.
00:04:54.980To support this podcast, you can make a donation at jordanbpeterson.com slash donate or by following the link in the description.
00:05:03.520Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, and understand myself can be found at self-authoring.com and understand myself.com.
00:06:01.840And a note to our listeners, we're recording this in front of a live audience at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., where Christina is a resident scholar.
00:06:12.720And there'll be video of the podcast as well.
00:06:15.400And we will let you know where to find that when it's ready.
00:06:18.520And we're also grateful to AEI every week for the use of its recording studio for the podcast.
00:06:23.740And now for an introduction, though he needs no introduction to the people here.
00:06:28.980But Jordan Peterson is a professor at the University of Toronto and author of many books and poster of many fantastic lecturers.
00:06:38.100And his most recent book has I can't keep track of how many languages it's been translated into.
00:06:44.380And the sales, just a phenomenally successful book tour.
00:06:48.760In fact, my first question is really about your tour.
00:06:52.400You look pretty good for somebody who's visited, what, 100 cities in the past year?
00:09:33.780And it's an excellent intellectual workout.
00:09:37.600And I've been recording the lectures and I've been using some of them to write the first draft of the chapters for my next book and for books after that.
00:09:48.040And so, you know, I'm able to maximize the, what would you say, the utility of doing this at each event.
00:09:54.560And my wife seems to be particularly well suited to traveling like that.
00:09:59.100But she actually enjoys it quite a bit and is a very stable person.
00:10:16.300I don't know how intellectually rigorous we plan to be with you today because we know that whenever you're on one of these platforms, you're talking about your ideas.
00:10:24.480But on the FemSplainers, we want to hear a little bit more about Jordan Peterson, the man.
00:10:30.060Desperately and definitely want to hear about your wife, Tammy.
00:13:15.600I mean, I've lived in lots of different parts of Canada now, and Canada's quite different.
00:13:21.180I lived in, well, Alberta for a while, and it had this particular flavor of existence.
00:13:26.080I mean, mostly in Fairview, I was striving to leave and to move ahead, let's say, or to move, I hesitate to say, up, but somewhere different, somewhere more urban.
00:14:02.420You worked, what I loved, I pulled a passage because I think, as you say, people are born in small places everywhere, and some want to leave and some don't.
00:14:54.400It looked like a suburb that was built mostly, say, between the 1950s and the 1970s.
00:15:00.300The young Jordan and the then young Tammy, and you have to tell us that story, how you met, but wanted more.
00:15:07.720Well, you know, I think that's one thing that is different to some degree about class.
00:15:13.080My father and my mother had both left the towns they were from, and they were forward, future-looking people.
00:15:19.860And, you know, most of my friends who quit school and who didn't attend university, they didn't have that sense, I would say, that more developed sense of a world outside of what they knew.
00:15:33.480And the other thing is that my father took us on long trips when I was a kid.
00:15:38.060He was a teacher, and so he had summer holidays.
00:15:40.240And we drove all over western Canada and down into the U.S., long driving trips, thousands of miles.
00:15:46.460And, you know, that also gave us the sense that the world was a bigger place.
00:15:50.380But I knew way before I was 12, I believe, that I was off at least to university.
00:15:55.120And I think generally in your family, if you're liable to go to university, people don't even really talk about it.
00:16:01.840It's just a given that that's what's going to happen.
00:16:04.340It's something that you take in with every breath almost.
00:16:14.520And maybe people make casual reference like, well, when you go to college, but it's not like there's a question about it.
00:16:20.920Whereas if you're from a working class background, especially if your family hasn't pursued post-secondary education, that isn't in the realm of unspoken or spoken expectation.
00:16:32.300And it wasn't like lots of my friends, including many of them who dropped out before they hit high school.
00:16:37.320They weren't, they were by no means the dimmest people in the class.
00:16:41.540Like they were plenty smart, but they weren't oriented towards the idea of, of pursuing a career that, that involved intellectual, what intellectual engagement wasn't in their worldview.
00:16:56.700And, you know, when you hear people on the, let's say, more socialist end of the distribution talk about barriers to education, they often talk about cost.
00:17:05.460And sometimes cost is a barrier and it's more of a barrier, although there's still plenty of community colleges and state colleges where you can get educated for a perfectly reasonable amount of money.
00:17:17.500But for my friends, it was never a reason that money was never a reason they didn't pursue post-secondary education.
00:17:24.980It was more like a truncated view of time, I would say.
00:17:30.260You know, there was more of an emphasis on the here and now.
00:17:37.820Like, it wasn't obvious that you were in better shape economically to go to university than you were to, oh yeah, well, especially if you were doing something like working on the oil rigs.
00:19:13.760Yeah, and then she'd laugh and, you know, so she, she always had a good sense of, a good vicious sense of humor.
00:19:20.880It's one of the things I actually admire about my wife when, when, when we've had our verbal disputes, which, you know, have certainly happened.
00:19:27.400And she can string together a sequence of insults that's so hair racing that you, you have to laugh.
00:19:43.360Girls with brothers can seem to, can get along with guys because guys, they, they, they, they show love and affection by insults and jabs and jeers.
00:19:52.840And, and if you, and I had a brother and I sort of learned, okay, I can, but if you don't have brothers, girls are like, oh, that's so rude.
00:20:57.320Well, I think if you're fortunate, some of it's, some of it's good fortune.
00:21:01.700Um, you know, and I would say this is true.
00:21:03.540I've watched people in their relationships, you know, personally for a long time, but also as a professional, because I've done a lot of clinical counseling.
00:21:10.660And I mean, there's some things that need to be a given about the relationship, I would say.
00:21:15.800It doesn't hurt to find the other person very attractive, you know, and that's a mysterious thing.
00:21:21.840We're not exactly sure what it is that produces, let's say, chemistry between people, although chemistry is definitely part of what produces it.
00:21:29.460There's subtle things that attract people to one another that are way below the level of consciousness.
00:21:33.500So, for example, women don't like the odor of men who have RH blood factors, who, if they had children with, would be likely to produce a stillborn infant.
00:21:46.460Well, that's definitely a category on match.com.
00:22:24.620I mean, I've always found her very attractive, and that continues.
00:22:27.440And I, I liked her combattiveness, you know.
00:22:31.240Like, I think that there's, you want someone, I think, in a relationship that you can spar with.
00:22:38.860And it's partly because you have hard problems to solve.
00:22:43.600And if the person that you're with isn't willing to put forward their opinion, then you only have half the cognitive power that you would otherwise have.
00:22:54.600You know, and hopefully you find someone who's interestingly different from you.
00:22:59.140Like, not so different that you can't communicate, and you have to be careful of that.
00:23:02.900But interestingly different, and then hopefully they have the ability and the will to express their opinion.
00:23:09.220And, and then, well, then it's, you know, then, then your interest stays heightened.
00:23:14.340And there has to be that tension in a relationship.
00:23:16.980You know, people think, well, I, I want to get along perfectly with my partner.
00:23:21.640It's like, no, you, you probably don't.
00:23:24.780You just get bored, and then you go looking for trouble.
00:23:27.600And so you want a little bit of trouble in the relationship, and a little bit of mystery, and a little bit of combativeness, and, and the ability to exchange opinions forthrightly.
00:23:38.360And, and I trust her, which is a huge element.
00:23:42.580I mean, when, when we finally did decide to get together permanently, we were both in our later 20s.
00:23:48.820And, you know, one of the things that I had learned by that point, and insisted to her about, was that we had to tell each other the truth.
00:23:58.220And she took to that wholeheartedly, you know, and for better and for worse, because truths can be harsh.
00:24:07.620Does that include, like, does this outfit make me feel like that?
00:24:12.280Yeah, well, the truthful answer to that is I don't answer questions that are likely to get me in trouble.
00:26:50.580Well, and you have to work at that too, you know, and, and that's something that people also don't understand because they tend to think that, well, that, that all romantic interaction should be spontaneous.
00:27:02.000It's like, well, if that's your theory, then you might as well just give up right now if you're going to get married because that, like, the only reason you can think that is because you don't have enough responsibility to make romantic entanglement virtually impossible.
00:27:15.940And what happens when you're married, especially when you have little kids is that, and, and you both have a job, let's say, is you're so busy that the probability that you're going to find time for spontaneous mutual interaction is decreases to zero.
00:27:29.440And so if that's what you're hoping for, then you're never going to have it.
00:27:33.020And so what you have to do is you have to make time for each other.
00:27:35.840And, you know, if you're dating when you're establishing a relationship, well, you put some effort into it.
00:27:41.820You know, you, you decide that you're going to go out for dinner and you dress up to some degree and, you know, you try to present yourself to each other in some half ways, mutually acceptable manner.
00:27:50.940And you hope that there's going to be a positive consequence of that, that you're going to find each other attractive.
00:27:56.180But then people somehow think that once they're married, that the same amount of effort isn't necessary.
00:28:09.260It's like, you know, if you don't want to be bitter about the intimate element of your relationship, how much time do you have to spend together each week?
00:28:18.820And my, my rule of thumb sort of derived from clinical observations is that you need to spend 90 minutes a week with your partner talking.
00:28:27.820And that means you're telling each other about your life and staying in touch, you know, so that you each know what the other is up to.
00:28:35.620And you're discussing what needs to be done to keep the household running smoothly.
00:28:39.340And you're laying out some mutually acceptable vision of how the next week or the next months are going to go together.
00:28:45.520Right. So that that keeps your narratives locked together like a like the strands in a rope.
00:28:50.300You need that for 90 minutes or you drift apart and you need to spend intimate time together at least once a week and probably more like twice.
00:29:00.700And if you don't negotiate it and if you don't make it a priority, then it won't happen in all likelihood.
00:29:05.700And then, well, well, then you don't have it.
00:29:09.160And that's a catastrophe because there's not that many things in life that are, you know, intrinsically, what would you say, engaging and meaningful and pleasurable and also bonding, all of that.
00:29:20.480And if you let that go, then, well, part of you dies and part of the relationship dies.
00:29:25.920And, well, then there's always the possibility of becoming attracted by alternative entanglements, which which you would do if you had any spirit left.
00:29:34.600Right. I mean, that's the thing is if well, if you're not if you're if your relationship at home is entirely unsatisfying sexually, what are you supposed to do with that?
00:29:44.200Nothing. You're supposed to just bear it.
00:29:46.620I mean, in one way, the answer is yes, because it's your marriage.
00:29:49.600But another way is, well, what, that's all the fight you've got in you, you're going to just let the erotic element of your life die and accept everything that goes along with that, because you're not willing to cause a bit of trouble to ensure that it's maintained.
00:30:06.500And, you know, and we're not very good at thinking these things through consciously.
00:30:10.020And I mean, people are bad at negotiating, period, as far as I can tell.
00:30:14.080But they're particularly bad at negotiating things that are deeply private.
00:30:17.260But how much do you want your partner to know about you anyways?
00:30:21.180It takes a lot of trust to have a real conversation about what you need and want.
00:30:28.120Now, you have in the press, people read that you are you have a following of young men.
00:30:37.880And I went to hear your lecture in Washington, D.C., and there were a lot of women there.
00:30:42.260And your book, first of all, men don't buy books that often compared to women.
00:30:48.880So I'm presuming you have a lot of female readers.
00:30:51.220And I found it, Danielle and I found it completely readable.
00:30:59.060It's more like a delusional desire on the part of the radical leftists that the only people that could possibly be attracted to me are angry men.
00:31:45.960Well, that's supposed to be a good thing.
00:31:48.200So, yeah, and I mean, there's been 250,000 people, as I said, come to the lectures, and there hasn't been a single negative incident, not one.
00:31:55.400This is what I find fascinating, is that I found you early on.
00:32:10.120And we were covering a lot of the same topics later on, and wow, and then, you know, I found out who you were.
00:32:17.760What is astonishing to me is that there's this amazing, just split between the positivity of your audience, the diversity of your audience, the intellectual content of your message, and then you get with a snarky journalist with an agenda.
00:32:36.560And I'm not mentioning names, but this.
00:33:13.320Camille Paglia says that a whole generation of some of our most talented young women are incapable of thought because of this ideology.
00:33:20.680Or a different thought, maybe you mean.
00:33:22.380Or just, just an openness to, she couldn't, and you were saying completely, like interesting, fascinating, original things, even to me who've studied these topics.
00:33:54.220And I showed up to the, to the hotel room where this was all occurring.
00:33:58.080And, you know, what you expect, generally speaking, even from journalists who aren't, you know, who are more of the attack dog variety or who maybe aren't positively predisposed to you ideologically or personally.
00:34:11.300You expect a certain modicum of professional politeness.
00:34:15.820You know, because while you don't have to be there and you came and you, you accepted an invitation and all of that.
00:34:22.620And so, and so even with the Channel 4 journalist, Kathy Newman, she was quite polite and forthcoming in the, in the green room before the interview, you know.
00:34:33.560So, so she would have had at least that professional persona, which is, it's not nothing, right.
00:34:38.340There's something to be said for, for going through the motions professionally in an appropriate manner.
00:34:44.600But when I walked into the hotel room in Baltimore, it was obvious that this interviewer had already made up her mind about me 100% and that she was absolutely, you know, negatively predisposed to me with a personal animus.
00:35:00.300And animus, and animus is exactly the right word.
00:35:02.320And there was about a half an hour photography session because it was GQ.
00:35:23.480And the reason for that is that, you know, it just started off instantly combative.
00:35:28.280And, and what I, what I should have done, you see, it's very, very difficult to be awake enough to do these things properly.
00:35:38.380And, and the interview progressed fine.
00:35:40.560Although by the end of it, I thought that I had maybe done enough interviews for a while because I didn't think I had regulated my temper as well during that interview as I might have.
00:36:52.740Because when I was reading your book, there is nothing about it that is anti-female.
00:37:01.360In fact, you do a lot of examination of the Adam and Eve story, and you have this wonderful passage about, like, Adam being the originally aggrieved man who throws the woman under the bus.
00:37:28.680So is that a fair surmise of why you get so attacked, that just the very fact that you're willing to speak about the sexes as being not unequal, but different?
00:37:43.900Well, you know, I would say that that's part of it, because there's a threat there.
00:37:48.800So one of the things that happened when I was in Scandinavia, I just wrote a column about this, actually.
00:37:53.860It was interesting being in Scandinavia, especially in Sweden, because they've pushed the equality of opportunity doctrine farther than any other country in the world.
00:38:11.200No, no, and so, and the week that I was there was the same week that two articles were published on gender differences in temperament and in interest.
00:38:24.260And the biggest sex differences that we know of that aren't morphological are in interest.
00:38:31.720So women are more interested in people, by and large, and men are more interested in things, by and large.
00:39:12.680Well, and, you know, we're approaching parity in terms of workplace, overall workplace distribution of men and women.
00:39:19.100But there's massive differences in occupational choice.
00:39:22.100Like, it's very interesting, for example, to go to the website of the U.S. Labor Department and look at male and female-dominated industries.
00:39:31.380And, you know, there's the top 10 male-dominated industries have basically zero women in them.
00:39:47.260And the women are, you know, you ask a group of women and men, would you rather spend the next three weeks taking apart a machine and putting it together or helping a group of people work out their problems?
00:39:57.340And the pool of people who want to do the machine, it's just far more men than women.
00:40:02.500Well, and there's more men in women-dominated industries than there are women in men-dominated industries at the extreme.
00:41:22.620That's something that's really useful to know, you know, in terms of your career planning.
00:41:25.900It's really beneficial to an employer that has some...
00:41:28.420Well, it also marks you out, you know.
00:41:29.940Like, if you have 10 employees and they're all doing a reasonable job, let's say, but one of them is working an extra half an hour a day or 45 minutes a day, and you can observe that every day, then that gives them an edge with regards to potential promotion.
00:41:41.420And so, and the return on those edges is non-linear.
00:41:45.700And so, anyway, so I went to Scandinavia, and it was the same week that two studies were released showing what had already been established beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the personality differences between men and women and the differences in interest as well actually get bigger as your society gets richer and as it gets more egalitarian.
00:42:51.160And she can afford to major in odd, low-paying fields, like, I don't know, feminist dance therapy or something.
00:42:58.380Well, the other thing you see, too, is that one of the things that's also interesting, I think, is that there's this idea that marriage is a patriarchal institution that's primarily put there for the utility of the male.
00:43:11.960And you think, well, like, I think that's complete bloody rubbish, and I don't think there's any evidence to support it at all.
00:43:17.920But I think the best counter-evidence is that, well, if that's the case, then rich people shouldn't be getting married, because they don't have to oppress themselves.
00:43:27.160But the truth of the matter is, is that the higher your demographic position, the more likely you are to be married.
00:43:33.020So marriage has fallen apart among, you know.
00:43:35.280And the more likely the wife is staying home and not, I mean, she has all sorts of pursuits, but she's not.
00:43:41.600Well, there's an old saying, anyone, any woman who marries for money earns it.
00:43:51.780Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:43:57.380Most of the time, you'll probably be fine, but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:44:05.040In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:44:10.000Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with the technical know-how to intercept it.
00:44:19.500And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:44:22.700With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:44:30.080Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:47:01.100Yes, Scentbird is our luxury fragrance subscription service, which allows recipients to choose a new cologne or perfume every month from over 450 designer brands.
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00:47:16.300And I've been loving experimenting with so many lovely fragrances.
00:47:20.040I wouldn't have tried them if I had to commit to a whole bottle.
00:47:23.380I know, and my two daughters have been so jealous of my subscription, so this holiday I'm getting them each one of their own.
00:47:29.860Yeah, but I don't see how that's going to help me with my sons.
00:48:23.580We're talking to Jordan Peterson, the author of Twelve Rules for Life, An Antidote for Chaos, and who the New York Times has called the most influential public intellectual in the world right now.
00:48:41.680But now let me just, okay, this is where you might get in a little trouble.
00:48:46.220Because in your book you call men order and women chaos.
00:48:50.580And you say order, the known, appears symbolically associated with masculinity and chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection.
00:51:02.340Because it's from novelty that the new emerges.
00:51:04.900And I think the fundamental association between femininity and chaos is the association between what's unexpected and novel and what's new.
00:51:25.940Yes, and what you're looking for, and this is what the book concentrates on above all,
00:51:31.440is that you're looking constantly to find the balance between those two.
00:51:34.640So, for example, formally speaking, the domain of order is that place that you are when what you're doing is producing the results that you want to have produced.
00:51:45.660So, imagine, think about the preconditions for not being anxious.
00:51:50.920Okay, so the preconditions are that you're constantly making predictions about what's going to happen next.
00:51:55.760And those predictions are tied tightly to your behavioral output.
00:52:00.020So, you act in a certain way, and you presume that a certain thing is going to happen.
00:52:04.380And if your actions produce the results that you desire, then you assume that you know where you are and you know what you're doing,
00:52:11.440and that your plan is intact, and that the environment is secure, and that keeps your anxiety under control.
00:52:17.500And then, you know, maybe you're at a party and you don't know anybody, and you tell a joke, and everybody looks at you like what you said was not only not funny, but also downright offensive.
00:52:28.880And then, all of a sudden, you've moved from the domain of order into the domain of chaos, because you thought you were somewhere, and you thought you were someone,
00:52:36.560and you thought you were with people that were of a certain type, and you got all that wrong.
00:52:56.500So, there is some slightly higher probability that that might be the case.
00:53:00.120But then, I think women are also associated, at least in men's imaginations, with nature, which is part of the chaotic domain, say, as opposed to culture, because they're sexually selective.
00:53:11.440So, you've got to think, what is nature?
00:53:15.520I mean, we have that as a cognitive category, right?
00:53:36.760That's the fundamental definition of nature.
00:53:38.920And it is the case that human females are sexually selective.
00:53:43.500And it's a major component of human behavior.
00:53:46.200So, the evolutionary theory, roughly speaking, is that the reason we diverged from chimpanzees 8 million years ago, 7 million years ago, is at least in part because of the differences between sexual selectivity between female humans and female chimpanzees.
00:54:07.440Female chimpanzees are more likely to have offspring from dominant males.
00:54:12.680But it's not because of their sexual selectivity.
00:54:15.160So, a female chimpanzee has periods of fertility that are marked by observable physiological changes.
00:56:49.520And she watched, she looked at the women very carefully, the females, very carefully, and looked at chimpanzees and gazelles and found that the female, initially, like, male primatologists would look and say, oh, the females, the males are dominant and the females are so cooperative.
00:57:12.440She looked more carefully and saw the females weren't exactly cooperative.
00:57:16.720Like, they would pass around their infant, their baby, you know, whatever they were, and would find, and so the male primatologist would say, oh, they're so kind and caring.
00:57:29.520She found out that when it was not your, it was not hers, they would take, like, little tufts of hair, you know, would come out.
00:57:36.040Or they'd do something to the eyes, and the baby would, like, be injured.
00:57:49.820And she said the great tragedy, well, not tragedy, she said the reality of our species.
00:57:55.420And, in fact, the subtitle for her book is The Woman Who Never Evolved.
00:57:59.680We didn't evolve for niceness and cooperative.
00:58:03.060There's immense competition, and we can, according to her, we are, it's indelibly, you know, marked in our nature to compete for the dominant males.
00:59:57.660Well, I should close off the Scandinavian discussion just by pointing out, and this is something that the Scandinavians are really going to have to wrestle with,
01:00:04.660is that if you institute effective policies to promote equality of opportunity, which the Scandinavians have done,
01:00:13.720you're going to produce some equality.
01:00:15.420So like a 50-50 distribution of men and women in the workplace.
01:00:18.560But you're also going to exacerbate certain kinds of inequality.
01:00:30.120And equality of outcome, the essential equality of outcome doctrine, which is often described with the code word equity,
01:00:36.200is that at every level of every occupation, the people have to be represented by the same number that they're represented in at the population.
01:00:45.060So if it's not 50-50 men and women in each occupation and in each strata at each occupation,
01:00:52.060then that's sort of prima facie evidence for discrimination and for systemic discrimination.
01:00:57.860It's like, nope, sorry, you have to factor in choice.
01:01:01.060And choice actually turns out to be a very important determinant.
01:01:03.720And as the society gets flatter and flatter, choice becomes a more important, a more and more important determinant.
01:01:10.220And so what that essentially means is that the most radical end of the left-wing political agenda is logically impossible,
01:01:20.460apart from the fact that it's impossible for a variety of other reasons.
01:02:23.940A bunch of Republicans here, and I've been talking to Democrats as well, but it was mostly Republicans here.
01:02:28.760And we were talking about abortion, and I made a case that that's really not a very productive discussion because you're talking about a problem way too late in the sequence of problems.
01:02:45.280So by the time the discussion starts to be about abortion, there's 50 problems that have already emerged that no one has addressed.
01:02:52.580And some of those problems are, the fundamental problem is how human beings should regulate their sexual behavior.
01:03:01.480And there's an interesting thing that's happening because, you know, the people on the right would say, well, that's easy.
01:03:07.080It's like, don't sleep around and get married and have sex with your marital partner, and that'll solve the problem.
01:03:13.040So there's strictures on sexual behavior, and those would be the traditional ones.
01:03:16.620And what you see on the left is that there's this weird paradoxical demand, let's say, that people should be allowed to express their sexuality in any manner that they choose whenever they want.
01:03:33.300But that sex is so dangerous that it has to be carefully regulated at every single stage of the interaction.
01:03:40.620And so you know that many state legislatures have now followed the example of university campuses and put it in affirmative consent legislation so that every move you make towards physical intimacy has to be preceded by the instantiation of a verbal contract, essentially.
01:03:59.380It's like, well, can I take your hand?
01:04:58.060It seems to me to mean, the California legislation, that if you have sex with your wife or husband, and either of you is intoxicated, then you're either one of you or both is guilty of rape.
01:05:18.920Actually, I was in a debate a few years ago at the University of Virginia Law School, and I turned to my debate partner and said, so, if what you're saying is right, two people can rape one another.
01:05:42.700Well, okay, so then I would say, well, it's interesting, because I think that a lot of this confusion has emerged fundamentally as a consequence of the birth control pill.
01:05:52.320So, you know, because you've got to think situationally before you think ideologically or psychologically.
01:05:56.860It's like, it seems to me that the 20th century will be remembered for the hydrogen bomb, the transistor, and the birth control pill.
01:06:06.040And those are unbelievably radical technological innovations.
01:07:11.140And so, because one of the questions is, well, once you can regulate your reproductive function, what attitude should you have towards sex?
01:07:20.600And one answer might be, the more of it under the more varied circumstances, the better, because why not?
01:07:27.400And I would say that was actually part of the attitude that emerged in the aftermath of the birth control pill in the 1960s, right?
01:07:35.100And it was a reasonable response in some sense because it's such a cataclysmic change that you don't know what it implies.
01:07:45.500Well, first of all, people aren't reliable enough to use birth control in an entirely reliable manner.
01:07:51.720So, even though it can work at near 100% efficiency, you have to take it extraordinarily regularly and in a disciplined manner for that to work.
01:08:00.060And so, there was still the problem of unwanted pregnancy, let's say.
01:08:04.680And then there was the problem of the proliferation of sexual epidemics.
01:08:09.380And that culminated in AIDS, which, you know, could have easily wiped all of us out, but didn't.
01:08:14.340But there's other sexual epidemics that could have had the same effect, but we've been fortunate enough to escape them.
01:08:19.700And then more recently, there's been this weird inversion, especially on the radical left, that points to the reemergence of something like a set of sexual taboos.
01:08:35.420You know, like I think the idea that sex is casual and that it's a form of entertainment is, I think it's an absolutely preposterous idea.
01:08:44.780I think that it's psychologically shallow beyond belief to hold that as a core proposition.
01:08:54.780Because it forces you to, first of all, if it's repetitive sex with multiple partners, it forces you to treat people as if they're interchangeable.
01:09:04.800And I don't see how that's good for you psychologically or for the people that you're using interchangeably.
01:09:11.780It implies that you can divorce sexuality from play, from the desire for a relationship, from emotional fragility, from love, from family, from responsibility.
01:09:25.980All of those things that are part and parcel of everyone.
01:09:28.300And I don't think you can, and I don't think people's experience indicates that you can, and especially on the emotional front.
01:09:36.100And I think that's partly what's driving.
01:09:39.160And there's also a residual sense that there's something about sex that's fundamentally dangerous.
01:09:44.000And maybe it's dangerous emotionally and personally, and maybe it's dangerous socially and psychologically, which it most certainly is, because it's a powerful force.
01:09:51.980And the way the left is reacting to that is by insisting that all forms of sexual behavior are valid and that it's reasonable to manifest all of them, but that it's simultaneously so dangerous that absolutely every aspect of it has to be state-regulated and in an increasingly draconian form.
01:10:10.540And so I think what needs to happen is that the left and the right have to get together and have a real discussion about what constitutes valid sexual morality.
01:10:20.700And that's the conversation you have to have way before you worry about solving the abortion debate, which is very divisive and very intractable.
01:10:28.920Well, one of the things we talked about actually just last week on the podcast is this cover story in The Atlantic about the sexual recession amongst young people, that despite the advent of the birth control pill, abortion is going down.
01:10:42.640That there's less hookup, fewer hookups.
01:10:51.920Well, if you raise the cost of something, you decrease its prevalence.
01:10:54.720It's, you know, and I think that it's, it seems to be, you know, dangerous now to hook up.
01:11:00.720Well, you know, I kind of think that it's also a reflection of the same thing that Bloomberg reported on just a few days ago.
01:11:07.800They said that across businesses, men are thinking, I'm not spending any time with a single woman that isn't, you know, associated with me in some formal manner, like my wife.
01:11:37.120That there's, it's not just a, you know, most people, I think, are not, we're talking about an elite demographic who is into the consent and political correctness and workplace.
01:12:40.600Well, I don't know the literature on the decline in sexual activity well enough to know if it's valid or reliable.
01:12:46.940But, I mean, I think that, you know, in a stable society, you take lots of things for granted.
01:12:53.640You take the fact that men and women are going to be sexually attracted to one another for granted.
01:12:59.240And even though it's more fragile than it appears, you know, and it's suppressed more easily than you might think.
01:13:06.340And you take the idea that men and women are going to move together towards the establishment of long-term intimate relationships for granted.
01:13:13.760But that's partly because you don't understand what invisible preconditions exist to make that self-evident.
01:13:22.360You know, and when those invisible preconditions are disrupted by rapid technological or sociological change, then things shift underneath you and you don't know why.
01:13:32.200A lot of it is traced to the advent of the smartphone, especially in the Generation Z, that Kate was explaining this to us,
01:13:39.620that you could see it was broadband internet and the smartphone that led to this, you know, increasing fall-off of relationships.
01:13:49.340Yeah, well, maybe the abstract is more interesting than the proximal.
01:13:52.580You see that when you're having dinner with people.
01:16:09.880And, you know, I've heard from a number of women, what written, read blog reports on their frustration with their attempts to be relatively sexually selective.
01:16:20.360Like, let's say they decide that they're not going to sleep with their new partner on the first date.
01:16:27.280You know, they're frustrated by the fact that to the degree that they're being cautious in their sexual behavior,
01:16:34.340which I think is actually an admirable idea, that they're instantly out-competed,
01:16:40.120especially if their partners are somewhat impulsive, by women who will say yes at the drop of a hat.
01:22:02.280I certainly don't see that casual and impulsive sex fits that bill, not in the least.
01:22:07.740And all of the evidence with regards to living together shows that that's actually detrimental to the establishment of a long-term relationship.
01:22:15.780So, first of all, common-law marriage, people who are in common-law marriage are much more likely to be divorced.
01:22:22.960The second thing is people who live together before they get married are much more likely to be divorced after they get married.
01:22:29.520So the idea that, well, you can try someone on for size and see how it works, and then you're going to see if you're compatible, it's like that's one story.
01:22:36.760Another story is, well, how about you and I live together for a little while?
01:22:40.340And, you know, you're not so bad, but maybe I can find someone better.
01:22:44.940And if I do, you know, in the next year and a half or so, because we're not hooked together in any formal way, I can just trade you in.
01:22:53.080But I don't really see that as the sort of complementary mutual interaction that leads to the formulation of long-term trust.
01:23:01.280And I think it's a better story for interpreting what constitutes living together than, well, you know, we're going to try each other out because that's what mature people would do.
01:23:52.000And if you don't see that as a compliment, then I don't think you're thinking, because not only is it a compliment, it's sort of like the ultimate compliment.
01:24:00.100And maybe you don't get to have a marriage that works without that compliment.
01:24:04.160Maybe it's so difficult to establish a long-term relationship that's functional that you have to make a walloping sacrifice very early on in the relationship in order for that to even be a possibility.
01:24:15.660And, you know, maybe not, because what the hell do we know about what binds people together?
01:24:19.220But it's not that easy to stay with someone for a long period of time.
01:24:29.180Yeah, but actually, you're bringing us back to the beginning and your time with Tammy.
01:24:33.500And one of the things about, I think, I'm going to guess this is a bit of an overlooked part in your chapter in your book, but I just, it was like one of my favorites.
01:24:50.120My critics don't read that far into the book, though.
01:24:51.700Well, my mother, when I had my first child, gave me a 1950s copy of Dr. Spock, and he was considered so controversial.
01:24:59.520And yet he was just like the most sensible person, knew children very, very well, was a pediatrician.
01:25:04.200And your rule for parenting is do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.
01:25:11.740And you kind of, in that one chapter, and it's not even one of your longest chapters, just did this wonderful sweeping overview of modern parenting and the problems.
01:25:22.680And in some ways that we're producing maybe some of these kids who are prolonging the markers of adulthood, that you feel that parents, you said, you see today's parents as terrified by their children, not least because they've denied credit for their role as benevolent and necessary agents of discipline, order, and conventionality.
01:25:43.060And then you told some hilarious stories about when your wife ran a daycare center out of your house, and you would get into tests of wills with some of the two-year-olds.
01:25:58.740Yeah, he still doesn't want to do anything he doesn't want to do.
01:26:01.520He's very charming and very emotionally stable.
01:26:04.060So it's like he's easy to get along with, but trying to get him to do something he doesn't want to do, it's like he had my wife defeated when he was nine months old.
01:26:15.220But he would just sit there with his mouth closed and glare at her.
01:26:18.060It's like, I'm not eating that, and I can take more than you can dish out.
01:26:22.560It was really something to see, you know, to see that kind of force of will in someone that small.
01:26:26.760Well, talk a little bit about that and just the modern roles between men and women.
01:26:33.020I mean, we're less, you know, you don't really, you're not really supposed to distinguish between fathers and mothers, even though that seems to inevitably happen in most.
01:26:41.820Well, it happens in large part because the children differentiate between them.
01:26:45.300Like parents are under the delusion that most of what you do with your children is driven by what you want to do with your children,
01:26:50.880when in fact it's driven to a massive degree by what your children want you to do with them.
01:26:56.760And so there were studies done 30 years ago on feminist parents who decided that they were going to raise their children in non-gender differentiated manners.
01:27:06.440And when they were studied, they found that the parents who had that explicit philosophy were just as gender differentiated with their children as the parents who didn't have the philosophy.
01:27:15.400And the reason for that is that if you're a parent that has any sense at all, you don't respond to your children as a rigid ideologue.
01:27:23.740You respond to them as whatever it is the child manifests him or herself as.
01:27:29.940Like, you know, with any individualized relationship, you take your cue from the person.
01:27:35.020And you might think, well, a child has no intrinsic nature.
01:27:37.980But, you know, if you think that, you either don't have children or you've never seen a child or you're so blinded by your ideology that you don't have a child.
01:27:46.960You just have a blank projection screen onto which you project your presuppositions and then heaven help your child.
01:27:54.020You know, so so a lot of the gender differentiation is actually driven by the children's demands.
01:27:59.300And and that's all for the good that chapter.
01:28:02.480I thought I would get into tremendous trouble for writing that chapter because it's contentious right on the surface.
01:28:07.880It's just the rule, because the rule first implies that children can be dislikable.
01:28:12.600And then I would say again, you know, it's like, have you met children?
01:28:32.980So we won't talk too much about Rousseau.
01:28:36.180And and then the next taboo is, well, that parents can dislike their children.
01:28:41.780But if you're a clinician and you don't think that parents can dislike their children, then well, then well, then you're not a clinician.
01:28:49.060Because one of the things you constantly see is that pathology within families is an incredibly common source of psychological destabilization.
01:29:00.360And it's terrible tension between parents and their children and between siblings.
01:29:04.000What I suggest in the in the book, which I think is radical by today's standards, is that your fundamental job as a parent is to ensure that by the time your child is four years old, that they are maximally desirable to other children and to adults.
01:29:23.380Because what happens is that after the age of four, you aren't the primary agent of socialization.
01:29:30.220The social world becomes the primary agent of socialization.
01:29:34.200And if your child is the sort of child that's invited to play by other children because your child is capable of forestalling gratification and taking turns and playing someone else's game when when it's necessary and abiding by the rules and not having a temper tantrum when they lose and not getting too, you know, high on their horse when they win, then many children will invite them.
01:29:57.880You get married when you get married when you have your children and you're flawed and your partner's flawed and hopefully you're flawed in different ways.
01:30:05.000And so you put the two of you together and you make one approximately normal person and then hopefully and then your child has to interact with that dyad that is a reasonable representative of social norms.
01:30:18.100And if you have an ethical obligation to ensure that your child is behaving in a manner that makes them optimally desirable to their playmates and also to other adults because then the kids invite them to play and they get to be socialized, right?
01:30:49.840And maybe what you'd like is that they regulate their behavior well enough so that when you take them places, restaurants, to see your friends, to see your relatives, they behave in a manner that's sufficiently civilized.
01:31:00.920So their intrinsic charm wins over the adults and everywhere they go, people are smiling and welcoming instead of wishing with fake smiles that the damn brat would leave along with their foolish parents, which is not a good, that's not a good environment to have your child constantly exposed to.
01:31:20.400No friends because they're too selfish and immature and irritating to adults so that they're barely tolerated under the mask of false smiles.
01:31:30.920It's like you have an ethical obligation to regulate your child's behavior so that they're optimally acceptable socially.
01:31:36.900And that is not how people look at children in the modern world.
01:31:40.060They think, well, you're raising their self-esteem or you're enhancing their creativity or you don't want to put constraints on their behavior because you're going to interfere with the flowering of their intrinsic self.
01:31:49.900And, you know, it's all Rousseauian nonsense and there's no evidence to support it.
01:31:56.960Oh my God, he was the worst father in history.
01:32:01.420Such a corrupt, and he had these babies with this poor scullery mate and left them all in a, actually a place where they would just languish and die.
01:32:18.140Yeah, well, except for Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
01:32:20.020But I just remember a few weeks ago I was reading about you and somehow I got onto somebody's Twitter feed whom I will not mention because, oh my God, but anyway, a difficult person.
01:32:31.500And she was attacking you and had a selection from your book where you had called two-year-olds little monsters.
01:32:41.700And so suddenly all of these distraught Twitter followers of this feminist were saying, oh, he called them monsters.
01:32:53.440And then occasionally there'd be a parent who would say, two-year-olds kind of are monsters, you know, and then there'd be, ah, and they kind of are.
01:33:03.400And they had taken this out of context and shown it like something to deplore.
01:33:08.540And it was so amusing to me, this little game.
01:33:11.460Hopefully they'll soon be cursed with some two-year-olds.
01:33:13.380Well, they're going to get their own little monsters.
01:33:15.100My son was, I won't say which one, was two years old and had, he was a good boy, but he had an insane meltdown in a supermarket.
01:35:18.300It's like it's a real defeat for the developing integrated individual to be subjugated by those catastrophically powerful emergent emotions.
01:35:28.760And part of your job as a parent is to scaffold the part of the child that can regulate and inhibit those powerful underlying systems.
01:35:37.020So with my son, for example, when he used to misbehave, I would count and say, you're going to go sit on the steps.
01:36:50.080And usually it took him two or three minutes and he'd calm down and then he'd come back out and he'd say, I'm ready to have a good day.
01:36:55.920And he meant it, you know, and I could tell he meant it, too, because whatever resentment I was harboring towards him for his misbehavior, and you have to watch that when you're an adult, would vanish because he'd come and he was done.
01:37:09.420He was ready just, you know, to proceed on a civilized basis.
01:37:13.340And it was really interesting to watch that because it took him, every time he sat on the steps, it took him a shorter and shorter period of time to attain mastery, right?
01:37:21.920Until, you know, it got to the point where he could only have to sit for 15 seconds or so and he would bring himself under control.
01:37:30.780Like, if you imagine the neurological systems developed that are responsible for personality integration, it was a victory for those systems because they were attaining the ability to regulate the lower order spontaneous emotions.
01:37:43.080And, you know, and he turned into an individual who's capable of a tremendous level of self-control.
01:37:50.500And, you know, and he had large demons to fight with.
01:37:55.160And, well, it turned out well for my daughter, too, because she ended up being very ill and he ended up being extraordinarily level-headed and reliable.