Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way. In his new series, he provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety: A Guide to Feeling Better. During the Q&A session, you are handed a microphone directly into the microphone, so you can speak directly into it. So, without further ado, join me in Lafayette County, OH! Join me in welcoming me in Jordan Peterson to Lafayette County. This is being recorded online for non-commercial, non-profit purposes, and will be published online for your Non-commercial purposes. You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. B.P. Peterson s "Podcast" - the link to which can be found in the description of the event can be located here. You can also become a supporter of the podcast by clicking the link below. Thanks for supporting the podcast, and let me know what you think of this podcast is working for you. I'm looking forward to hearing from you. me. Thank you so much love and support the podcast. - P.S. . - J. J.B. Dr. P. Peterson is a core, I hope you like it! JBP JB. Peterson. J. Peterson is a great humanist, J. B Peterson - . J. V. Peterson, & J. M. Peterson - A. S. is a good friend of mine and J. E. B., J. SORRY FOR THE PODCASTING - E. W. WOULD YOU? (J. VY. (A. M., A. R. POTTER, R. WELCOME TO ME? (TAYLOR M. WALTER, A. D. DORDS, COURSES)
00:10:35.340They weren't, and not just a little bit wrong, and not wrong in some arbitrary way.
00:10:39.240They were playing a game that human beings cannot play without descending into a murderous catastrophe.
00:10:46.100And there's something about what we've done in the West that's correct.
00:10:50.540And it's complicated because our cognitive structures, that's one way of thinking about it, or our socio-political arrangements,
00:10:59.400they actually parallel one another in an important way, are grounded in a strange set of axioms.
00:11:09.400And the axioms aren't rational precisely, it's more like their narrative, their narrative axioms, their stories.
00:11:17.260And the story of the West is that the individual is sovereign over the group, and that that's the solution to tribalism.
00:11:24.260And I think that's the correct solution.
00:11:27.120Now, what that means metaphysically, because it's also embedded in our religious doctrines, right?
00:11:33.120Because, especially in Christianity, although not exclusively to Christianity, the individual is sovereign.
00:11:39.120The suffering individual is sovereign.
00:11:41.120And there's something about that that's true at least psychologically.
00:11:45.120And I don't know what that might mean metaphysically, because who the hell knows what anything means metaphysically, right?
00:11:52.280I mean, your knowledge runs out at some point.
00:11:55.980Anyways, I worked all these ideas out, and then I taught for a long time courses that were based on the ideas.
00:12:02.720And the courses were very impactful, I would say.
00:12:05.820They had the same impact on the people that I was teaching as walking through the material had on me.
00:12:11.820And, well, it was out of that that all this political controversy arose.
00:12:18.380I mean, I was never focused on political controversy, even though I'm interested in politics, and I thought at many points in my life about a political career.
00:12:29.480I always put it aside for a psychological and philosophical career, I would say.
00:12:35.120And, but things started to shift badly in Canada over the last five years.
00:12:41.680And our government dared to implement legislation that compelled speech.
00:12:47.680And one of the things that I had learned when I was doing all this background investigation was that there isn't a higher value than free speech.
00:12:55.680It isn't free speech, it's not the right way of thinking about it, because it's free thought.
00:13:00.240And even that's not the right way of thinking about it, because thought is the precursor to action and life.
00:13:06.640So there's no difference between free speech and free life.
00:13:10.240And I was just not willing to put up with restrictions on my free life.
00:13:16.240And so I made some videos pointing out the pathology of this doctrine and the fact that the government had radically overreached its appropriate limits.
00:13:27.200And, well then, you know, well, and maybe you don't know, but I've been enveloped in continual scandal since for 18 months as a consequence.
00:13:37.680Which to me, as a clinician, indicates that I got my damn diagnosis right.
00:13:56.880So I wanted my first or my next question to be about Lafayette.
00:14:05.600And so I thought I would read a couple of Facebook posts that certain students who are critical of you read in the lead up to this event and just ask you to respond to them.
00:40:30.560Oh, okay. Fair enough. I just wanted to make that clear.
00:40:32.880So they would more or less agree with what you just said, I think, about it's not okay to say
00:40:38.880those regimes weren't proper communism and that proper communism should be tried. They still dispute,
00:40:43.120though, that socialism as an ideology is on par with Nazism. So I just wanted to make that clear.
00:40:47.680Well, we could say communism, let's say. We could say radical leftist ideology. As I said already,
00:40:54.000there are reasons for the left and the right wing, right? The right wing stands for hierarchy and the
00:40:59.040left wing stands for the, for those who are displaced by hierarchy, right? An endless problem.
00:41:05.920But that doesn't mean, that still leaves it in the camp of the people speaking on behalf of
00:41:12.240egalitarianism to figure out just what the hell went wrong and to take some responsibility for it.
00:41:18.800You know, it's no joke. And we see these things play out continually. Still, look at what happened
00:41:23.600to Venezuela. Here's a fun story. Do you know that it is now illegal for physicians to list
00:41:30.560list starvation as the cause of death for a Venezuelan child in a hospital? That's how they're dealing with the
00:41:38.240fact of starvation, right? You just make it illegal to have that diagnosed as your cause of death.
00:41:44.560That'll solve the problem. It's like, you know, we have a group of, of well-meaning socialists in Canada
00:41:52.080who just produced something called the Leap Manifesto a couple of years ago. And it's a pretty radical,
00:41:58.000it's a pretty radical document. They're trying to move our socialist party, the NDP, New Democratic Party,
00:42:03.520towards the acceptance of this Leap Manifesto, which doesn't look like it's going to happen.
00:42:08.320But they were all radical promoters of the Venezuelan government before everything went,
00:42:13.360like, badly sideways. You know, I think the average Venezuelan now has lost 17 pounds.
00:42:19.760And that's not because they were put on a voluntary dieting program, right? It's not good. And so,
00:42:26.480if you're tilting towards the left, and you're temperamentally inclined that way, and half the
00:42:31.440population is, then you have an ethical problem on your, on your hands. Which is, how do you segregate
00:42:37.920yourself from the radical policies that produce the catastrophes of the 20th century? And you can't just
00:42:43.360say, well, that's not my problem. It's like, well, okay, if it's not your problem now, it certainly
00:42:49.520might become your problem in the future. So, and I would say it's actually everybody's problem. In the
00:42:54.960aftermath of the 20th century, it's everybody's problem. So, so it's, it's, it's, it's complicated.
00:43:04.400Like, there is a genuine desire, like, I worked for a socialist party for quite a while when I was a kid.
00:43:11.280You know, and I saw both sides of it. I saw some very, very admirable people. I, I was privy for,
00:43:18.320for a variety of chance reasons to the leadership of the socialist party in Canada at the provincial
00:43:24.720and the national level. I met the people who ran the provinces, some of the provinces, and who ran
00:43:28.960the party. And a lot of them were really admirable people. Like, they'd spent their whole life,
00:43:33.120I would say, working on behalf of the working class, you know. So they were genuine labor leaders. And,
00:43:38.400and, and, and there was also a lot done in Canada on the left that looks like it was actually pretty
00:43:44.000good. Standard work week, the, you know, the, the establishment of, of pensions, the introduction
00:43:49.920of our healthcare system, which I would say probably overall works better than the American system,
00:43:56.640although not at the upper end. And they were working hard on behalf of people who had
00:44:03.280working class lives. But then I also encountered the sort of low level activist types. And I didn't
00:44:10.240have any respect for them at all. I just thought they were peevish and resentful and irritable. And
00:44:14.400that those two things exist in a very uneasy coalition on the West. There's care for the poor
00:44:20.160and hatred for the successful. And those two things aren't the same at all. And it looks to me like one
00:44:25.520of the things that really happened when the communist doctrines were brought into play. And it also, by the
00:44:30.800way, we did the multinational experiment, right? It doesn't matter where you put these policies into
00:44:35.440play, the same bloody outcome occurred. Didn't matter whether it was Russia or China or Cambodia or Vietnam or,
00:44:42.080to pick a random African country or Cuba or Venezuela for that matter. It was an unmitigated catastrophe.
00:44:49.040And so to me that's experiment plus replication. Enough. Enough. Well, that has to be dealt with.
00:44:57.200And it's not, and the intellectual left in the West has been absolutely appalling in their silence
00:45:03.440on the communist catastrophe. Like, for my students, a lot of my students really haven't heard about
00:45:08.240anything that happened in the Soviet Union in any detail until they take my personality
00:45:12.960class in the second year of university. It's like, well, what the hell? Why are they learning
00:45:17.200about that in a personality class in the second year of university? That's not, that should be
00:45:23.040first and foremost in, in their, in their historical knowledge what happened in the 20th century. I mean,
00:45:28.720it was almost fatal what happened. And we still haven't completely recovered from it, right? I think,
00:45:34.240isn't your president Donald Trump going to talk to like insane totalitarian number one sometime here
00:45:41.120in the near future? But that's still a Soviet era state. Those people are armed to the teeth.
00:45:47.280You know, they have the weapon, they have weaponry that could easily take you out.
00:45:52.000And so we're not, I don't know if you know, do you know what happens if you blast a single
00:45:56.160hydrogen bomb a hundred miles above the United States? Just one. You lose all your electronics.
00:46:03.200Right, they're all done. Tractors, cars, trains, subways, computers, phones, all of them. Burnout.
00:46:12.960And that's it. So we're not done with this yet. And the Korean state, North Korea, is an emblematic
00:46:20.960representative of the communist catastrophe. And everyone there starves. There's millions of people
00:46:27.440died 20 years ago. It's not got any better. So it's not like, it's not like we solved this problem.
00:46:34.800And there's a deafening silence on the intellectual side of the spectrum with regards to what happened
00:46:40.800on the egalitarian left. And there's no excuse for it. So.
00:46:50.560So somewhat relatedly, I think it's fair to say that even though you have criticized segments of both
00:46:56.160the left, social justice warriors, and the right, the alt-right, your critical commentary over the last
00:47:02.880year and a half has focused significantly more on the left than on the right. A lot of people I've talked
00:47:09.040to here at Lafayette, at Lafayette, take issue with that. They say that we're so far from a Marxist
00:47:15.520takeover of our culture and political institutions that to suggest otherwise is to engage in a classic
00:47:22.080kind of right-wing exaggeration and hysteria that we've seen before in Western countries in the early
00:47:27.520to mid-20th century. They also say, and this is important to them, that the nationalist authoritarian
00:47:34.080right poses more of a threat to freedom of the individual than the left does today, as it has in
00:47:40.560the West since the early 20th century. They argue that the left may have sway in the academy and large
00:47:46.240segments of the media, but nationalist right parties, figures, and movements with authoritarian
00:47:52.000tendencies have risen, become potent, and often been victorious in recent years. And they point to Trump,
00:47:59.280Brexit, the national front. Pointing to Trump is rather pointless. I mean, I don't know what Trump
00:48:05.520is, but to think of him as a figure of the radical right is a little on the absurd side. So, I mean,
00:48:12.800we are polarizing. And so, who God only knows where the ultimate danger will come from. If it's the
00:48:18.880ethno-nationalists on the right, or if it's the radical leftists on the left, who knows, right?
00:48:23.760I suspect to some degree that's a matter of happenstance. I mean, that's what you'd expect if
00:48:29.120you looked at 20th century history. But I emerged out of the academy, and the academy, like, there
00:48:35.920aren't right-wing people in the academy, not to speak of. That's completely, that's thoroughly documented.
00:48:42.720And it's certainly not the case in a country like Canada. There's no threat whatsoever in Canada from,
00:48:48.800from the radical right. It's like, I don't know if you rounded up everybody who was in the radical right
00:48:53.600in Canada, you might be able to scrape up, like, what, three or four thousand people. If you really,
00:48:58.960like, if you really worked at it. You know, so, I just don't see that, at least in my own country,
00:49:04.800that's just a non-issue. It's a non-starter. I mean, the last time there was any kind of radical
00:49:11.120right-wingers in Canada was probably in Quebec in the 1950s, and maybe from the 1930s to the 1950s,
00:49:17.520but it's never been a political issue. What about the AFD, or the Italian, I can't remember the name of
00:49:22.880the Italian party, the national front in France? Where would you put, would you...
00:49:27.680Oh, well, I mean, in Europe, it's more, there's more polarization, I would say,
00:49:32.560but the Europeans also have problems that we don't have. You know, they've been, they've been
00:49:37.680struggling with the consequences of non-ending violence in the Middle East, and the wave of
00:49:43.040refugees that has emerged as a consequence of that, and so the situation in Europe is different,
00:49:48.000and I would say, there is more movement and activity on the right. So, but...
00:49:55.440And, you know, I'm not a admirer of identity politics. Well, and that's for the reasons I brought up to begin
00:50:02.800with. I think that you have to decide, conceptually, psychologically, familially, and socially,
00:50:12.080what your vision of a human being is. And if your vision of a human being is essentially tribal,
00:50:18.960so that you're defined by your collective identity in some manner, then you're going to play identity
00:50:24.160politics on the left, you're going to play identity politics on the right. It's like, well, I think the
00:50:28.800identity politics types on the left pose a bigger threat in my country. It's not so obvious in your
00:50:34.160country, because you guys, your political landscape is more balanced, I would say, than ours. If the
00:50:40.560radical right posed a threat to the academy, which they most decidedly do not, then I would be just
00:50:46.560as upset about that. And so, I think, again, it's part and parcel of the radical left's failure to take,
00:50:54.080or the left's in general, failure to take responsibility for the radicals. It's like, oh, well, why aren't you
00:50:58.960criticizing equally on both sides? Well, the threat doesn't exist equally on both sides, not in my
00:51:06.640country. So, I think identity politics is murderous game, no matter who plays it, you know. And on the
00:51:14.320left, it's, well, we've already talked about that, so what's wrong on the right? Well, you stand up and
00:51:20.080wave your flag and talk about your ethnic identity, or your racial identity, and you take pride in that.
00:51:24.800It's like, what the hell did that have to do with you, you goddamn loser? You know? It's like, you're
00:51:30.560one of the great heroes of the past, are you? That's why you're standing up and waving your flag. It's,
00:51:34.640no, you're not. You're identifying with your group because you don't have anything of your own to offer,
00:51:40.000and so it's pathetic. And I've said that many times, and in my lectures too, and people know this if they've
00:51:45.680actually watched my university lectures, I spend a tremendous amount of time, and have for 30 years,
00:51:52.720convincing my students that if they had been in Nazi Germany, there was a very high probability
00:51:57.680that rather than being Oscar Schindler and rescuing the Jews, they would have been a Nazi persecutor,
00:52:03.440because there's like five Oscar Schindlers and like many million Nazis, so you can do the math for
00:52:10.480yourself. And if you don't think that, if you think that you would have been one of the few heroes, then
00:52:15.600you're either someone truly remarkable, or you're unbelievably deluded. And so I would suspect that
00:52:24.640you're in the unbelievably deluded camp, because truly remarkable people are rare. And I've really,
00:52:30.000I've really seen this in the last year or two, because one of the things I have noted, like I knew that
00:52:34.480people were timid, you know, and I knew why. It's dangerous to stick your head up above the rest. I mean,
00:52:40.320it's predator avoidance strategy to keep your head down. And I mean that technically, it truly is. To
00:52:46.240blend in with the crowd is a predator avoidance strategy. That's what fish do in schools of fish.
00:52:52.240Like, it's very low-level behavior. And if you stick your head up, there's some real danger. And
00:52:57.120the advantage to that is that people are pretty civilized, and they go along with the group, and that's
00:53:01.440a good thing, because, you know, we should be civilized and go along with the group, but it's a really bad
00:53:05.760thing when the group goes sideways. And I've had many people, colleagues, but many other people,
00:53:11.520too, say, well, really, we agree with what you're doing, but we can't really take the risk of standing
00:53:17.040up and saying so. It's like, well, now and then, so most people fall into that camp. When I went to
00:53:22.320Queen's University a month ago and was subject to that chilling demonstration, I would say, where the
00:53:28.960radicals climbed up into the stained glass window wells and pounded, you know, unendingly for 90
00:53:36.480minutes while we were all inside, I had a professor write me the day before and say, look, my wife and
00:53:42.160I work at the university. We really support what you're doing, but we can't even risk coming to the
00:53:47.360talk, because what if the students see and complain? It's like, well, yeah, there's courage for you, man.
00:53:53.440There's courage for you, you know. And so, but that's par for the course, and it's unsurprising to some
00:53:59.200degree. But, well, but anyways, on the right, it's like, it's an excuse by people on the left not to take
00:54:10.000the things that I'm saying seriously. That's what it is. It's like, well, he's not attacking the right
00:54:14.960as much. It's like, well, they're not after me. They're not trying to close down my speech.
00:54:20.800So, I took that personally. So, had it been right wingers coming after me, well, it would have been
00:54:28.080the same thing. So, it's a foolish objection, I think.
00:54:40.560For decades, ethnic groups have, on average, scored significantly differently on IQ tests.
00:54:46.800According to psychology professor Richard Heyer, whom you interviewed on your channel,
00:54:51.280YouTube, there is no scientific consensus on the causes of these average differences in IQ test
00:54:56.400scores. Yet, according to Heyer, psychologists do generally agree that general intelligence exists,
00:55:03.440that IQ measures it well and in a non-culturally biased way, that IQ is highly predictive of success
00:55:10.560in educational and professional terms, and that for decades, ethnic groups have, on average,
00:55:15.760scored significantly differently. So, assuming this is true, should we talk about it? Sam Harris raised
00:55:22.480this question in a podcast conversation with Charles Murray. Some argue that we should not talk about this,
00:55:29.040as doing so could fuel the racial supremacist movements that you mentioned, with potentially
00:55:34.320horrific consequences. Others, mainly on the intellectual dark web, and to a very limited
00:55:40.720extent in academia, think we should talk about this topic. Because average differences in IQ scores have
00:55:46.640existed for decades. They may have played a role in generating the disparate educational and professional
00:55:53.200outcomes that we observe and care about, and thus that we cannot properly analyze these disparate
00:55:59.360outcomes unless we do talk about this subject openly. Geneticist David Reich recently argued in the New York
00:56:06.240Times that if scientists do not openly discuss the biological basis of race, pseudoscientists could fill the
00:56:13.600vacuum with dangerous consequences. Furthermore, you, Professor Peterson, are highly critical of the
00:56:20.480oppression narrative that permeates segments of the academy and activist left. And knowledge about
00:56:27.360average differences in IQ scores between ethnic groups, while tough to assimilate, could puncture this
00:56:33.840narrative. So the question is, what is your view on all that I've just said? Jesus, you guys already did
00:56:40.640take a long time to prepare these questions, didn't you? All right, so when I went to Harvard, I came from McGill,
00:56:53.440and I had spent a lot of time with my advisor there and a research team that he had trying to understand the
00:57:02.240genesis of antisocial behavior. And among adolescents mostly. So well, as kids as well, antisocial behavior is very persistent. So if you have a child whose conduct
00:57:14.400disordered at the age of four, the probability that they will be criminal at the age of 15 or 20 is extremely high. It's unbelievably stable. It's a very dismal literature because you see these early onset aggressive kids
00:57:29.120and it's persistent. And then you look at the intervention literature and you throw up your hands because no interventions work. And believe me, psychologists have tried everything you could possibly imagine,
00:57:41.520and a bunch of things that you can't, in order to ameliorate that. So we were really interested in trying to understand, for example,
00:57:49.280if you're antisocial by the age of four, then there isn't an intervention that seems to be effective.
00:57:54.720So, and the standard penological theory is really quite horrifying in this regard, because what you see is that male aggression peaks around the age of 15,
00:58:04.560and then it declines fairly precipitously and sort of normalizes again by the age of 27. And standard penological theory essentially is this cold-hearted.
00:58:14.560It's like, if you have someone who's a multiple offender, you just throw them in prison until they're 27.
00:58:19.920And then they age out of it. And that's all there is to it. That's what we've got. Now there's some downside to that,
00:58:27.840because there's a corollary literature that suggests that the worst thing that you can do with antisocial people
00:58:32.400is to group them together, which is what we do in prisons. So that's a whole mess. Anyways, one of the things
00:58:39.280we were doing was trying to see if there might be cognitive predictors of antisocial behavior. And so we used
00:58:45.360this battery of neuropsychological tests that was put together at the Montreal Neurological Institute,
00:58:50.560took about 11 hours to administer, and hypothetically assessed prefrontal cortical function.
00:58:56.320We computerized that, reduced it to about 90 minutes, and then assessed antisocial adolescence in
00:59:03.600Montreal, and found out that they did show deficits in problem-solving ability that we associated with
00:59:09.360prefrontal ability. When I got to Harvard, I thought, well, that's interesting. We could use the
00:59:17.520neuropsych battery to predict negative behavior. Perhaps we could use it to predict positive behavior.
00:59:24.560So I thought, well, what if we turned the neuropsych battery over and thought, well, can we predict grades,
00:59:31.040for example, because, you know, that's a decent thing to predict. So we ran a study that looked at
00:59:37.600Harvard kids, University of Toronto kids, line workers at a Milwaukee factory, and managers and
00:59:43.920executives at the same factory. And what we found was that the average score across these neuropsychological
00:59:51.280tests, they were kind of like games. They were game-like, you know. So in one test, there were five
00:59:57.440lights in the middle of the screen, and a box was associated with each light, and you had to learn
01:00:02.400by trial and error which box was associated with each light. That was one of the tests.
01:00:08.640So we took people's average score across the tests because they seemed to clump together into a single
01:00:15.760structure. You can find that out statistically. If you take a bunch of tests, you can find out how
01:00:20.960they clump together statistically by looking at their patterns of correlations, and you might get
01:00:24.960multiple clumps, which is what happens with personality research, where you get five, or you might get a
01:00:29.600singular clump, which is what happens in cognitive research. And we got a single clump, essentially.
01:00:35.840And then we were trying to figure out if, at the same time, I was reading the literature on performance
01:00:41.120prediction, and there's an extensive literature on performance prediction, a lot of it generated by the
01:00:46.000armed forces, by the way, indicating that IQ is a very good predictor of long-term life success.
01:00:52.000And so here's the general rule. If your job is simple, which means you do the same thing every
01:00:58.960day, then IQ predicts how fast you'll learn the job, but not how well you do it. But if your job is
01:01:04.640complex, which means that the demands change on an ongoing basis, then the best predictor of success
01:01:10.160is general cognitive ability. And I learned that the general cognitive ability tests clumped together
01:01:16.880into a single factor. That's fluid intelligence or IQ. And then we didn't know if the factor that we
01:01:22.320had found was the same factor as IQ. And we still haven't really figured out whether or not that was
01:01:28.400the case, because it kind of depends on how you do the analysis. But anyways, I got deeply into the
01:01:33.440performance prediction literature, and I found out, well, if you wanted to predict people's performance
01:01:37.600in life, there's a couple of things you need to know. You need to know their general cognitive
01:01:41.520ability if they're going to do a complex job. You need to know their trait conscientiousness.
01:01:47.120Some of you might have heard that rebranded as grit in a very corrupt act, by the way,
01:01:52.960because it's a good predictor of long-term life success.
01:01:56.560Freedom from negative emotion. Low neuroticism is another predictor, but it's sort of third on the
01:02:01.680hierarchy. And then openness to experience, which is a personality trait, is associated with expertise
01:02:07.360in creative domains. The evidence that, now I should tell you, this is such a complicated question,
01:02:13.520I should tell you how to make an IQ test, because it's actually really easy. And you need to know this
01:02:18.160to actually understand what IQ is. So imagine that you generated a set of 10,000 questions, okay, about
01:02:26.000anything. They could be math problems, they could be general knowledge, they could be vocabulary,
01:02:30.720they could be multiple choice. It really doesn't matter what they're about as long as they require
01:02:34.480abstraction to solve, so they'd be formulated linguistically, but mathematically would also
01:02:39.760apply. And then you have those 10,000 questions. Now you take a random set of 100 of those questions
01:02:47.280and you give them to 1,000 people and all you do is sum up the answers, right? So some people are going
01:02:52.800to get most of them right and some of them are going to get most of them wrong. You just rank order the
01:02:56.720people in terms of their score. Correct that for age and you have IQ. That's all there is to it.
01:03:03.600And what you'll find is that no matter which random set of 100 questions you take,
01:03:08.160the people at the top of one random set will be at the top of all the others,
01:03:12.160and with very, very, very high consistency. So one thing you need to know is that
01:03:17.680if any social science claims whatsoever are correct, then the IQ claims are correct.
01:03:26.160Because the IQ claims are more psychometrically rigorous than any other phenomenon that's been
01:03:32.240discovered by social scientists. Now the IQ literature is a dismal literature. No one likes it.
01:03:38.000Here's why. Here's an example. So here's a little, here's a fun little fact for you,
01:03:43.040for liberals and conservatives alike. Because conservatives think there's a job for everyone
01:03:46.720if people just get off their asses and get to work. And liberals think, well, you can train
01:03:50.720anyone to do anything. It's like, no, there isn't a job for everyone. And no, you can't train everyone
01:03:56.720to do everything. That's wrong. And here's one of the consequences of that. So as I mentioned,
01:04:02.560the Armed Forces has done a lot of work on IQ and they started back in 1919. And the reason they did
01:04:08.080that was because, well, for obvious reasons. Let's say there's a war and you want to get qualified
01:04:14.720people into the officer positions as rapidly as possible or you'll lose. So that's a reason.
01:04:20.960Now the Armed Forces has experimented with IQ tests since 1919. And in the last 20 years, a law was
01:04:29.360passed as a consequence of that analysis, which was that it was illegal to induct anyone into the
01:04:34.160Armed Forces who had an IQ of less than 83. Now the question is why? And the answer was,
01:04:41.440all of that effort put in by the Armed Forces indicated that if you had an IQ of 83 or less,
01:04:46.240there wasn't anything that you could be trained to do in the military that wasn't positively
01:04:50.080counterproductive. Now you've got to think about that, eh? Because the military is chronically
01:04:55.440desperate for people, right? Then it's not like they're, it's not like people are lining up to
01:05:00.160be inducted, right? They have to go out and recruit and it's not easy. And so they're desperate to get
01:05:05.360their hands on every body they can possibly manage. And then, especially in wartime, but also in peacetime,
01:05:11.600but then there was another reason too, which was the Armed Forces was also set up from a policy
01:05:15.680perspective to take people in the underclass, let's say, and train them and move them up at least into the
01:05:22.080working class or maybe the middle class. So there's a policy element to it too. And so even from that
01:05:26.720perspective you could see that the military is desperate to bring people in. But with an IQ of 83
01:05:33.040or less it's not happening. Okay, so how many people have an IQ of 83 or less? Ten percent.
01:29:23.520We found two clumps, one of which looked like something like moderate leftism,
01:29:28.200and the other that looked very much like totalitarian political correctness.
01:29:32.060And it was a very, very robust finding, and we replicated it as well.
01:29:37.240She did this for her master's thesis, by the way.
01:29:41.200And then we looked at what predicted these beliefs.
01:29:44.300First of all, the correlation between the moderate leftist clump of questions and the radical leftist clump of questions actually wasn't very high.
01:29:52.140And so one of the things that we surmise is that there's an actual division on the left between the moderates and the radicals.
01:29:58.380And that's just not played itself out.
01:30:00.620And I think you can actually see that happening by the proclivity of the radical leftists to devour themselves, right?
01:30:06.760So which happens on a very regular basis.
01:30:08.720Or perhaps you can see it in the proclivity of the radical leftists to go after the moderates when the moderates criticize the radicals, whatever.
01:30:17.340So there's two clumps to political correctness.
01:30:19.840Both of them were predicted by trait agreeableness, which is one of the traits that women score higher on than men.
01:30:26.700And it's the antithesis of aggression, by the way, and by also by being female, which was a real shock to us because most of the so let's say females and males differ with regards to some outcome.
01:30:37.740You try to figure out why that is might be just because they're female, but there's all sorts of welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.
01:30:46.700You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon, the link to which can be found in the description.
01:30:53.580Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at selfauthoring.com.
01:31:17.340I'm going to begin by introducing Jordan Peterson, and then I will talk a little bit about how this event is going to work, and then we'll get underway.
01:31:26.280So Jordan Peterson has been called, quote, one of the most important thinkers to emerge on the world stage for many years by The Spectator.
01:31:34.620He has been a dishwasher, gas jockey bartender, short order cook, beekeeper, oil derrick bit re-tipper, plywood mill laborer, and railway line worker.
01:31:44.280He's taught mythology to lawyers, doctors, and businessmen, consulted for the UN Secretary General's high-level panel on sustainable development,
01:31:52.560helped his clinical clients manage depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety, and schizophrenia,
01:31:58.180served as an advisor to senior partners of major law firms, identified thousands of promising entrepreneurs on six different continents,
01:32:06.180and lectured extensively in North America and Europe.
01:32:09.180He has flown a hammerhead roll in a carbon fiber stunt plane, piloted a mahogany racing sailboat around Alcatraz Island,
01:32:17.180explored an Arizona meteorite crater with a group of astronauts, built a Native American longhouse on the upper floor of his Toronto home,
01:32:25.180and been inducted into the coastal, Pacific Kwaukwaukwaukwauk tribe.
01:32:33.180Malcolm Gladwell discussed psychology with him while researching his books.
01:32:36.180Norman Doidge is a good friend and collaborator.
01:32:39.180Thriller writer Greg Hurwitz employed several of his, quote, valuable things as a plot feature in his number one international bestseller,
01:32:46.180Orphan X, and he worked with Jim Bì œê°€, former RIM CEO, on a project for the UN Secretary General.
01:32:54.180With his students and colleagues, Dr. Peterson has published more than a hundred scientific papers, transforming the modern understanding of personality, and revolutionized the psychology of religion with his now classic book, Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief.
01:33:09.440As a Harvard professor, he was nominated for the prestigious Levinson Teaching Prize and is regarded by his current University of Toronto students as one of three truly life-changing teachers.
01:33:20.460Dr. Peterson is a Quora Most Viewed Writer in Values and Principles and Parenting and Education.
01:33:26.240He has innumerable Twitter followers and Facebook followers.
01:33:30.040His YouTube channel now has about a million subscribers.
01:33:33.360And his classroom lectures on mythology were turned into a popular 13-part TV series on TV Ontario.
01:33:41.560Dr. Peterson's online self-help program, The Self-Authoring Suite, has been featured in O! The Oprah Magazine on CBC Radio,
01:33:51.700It has helped over 150,000 people resolve the problems of their past and radically improve their future.
01:33:57.940Without further ado, please join me in welcoming Dr. Jordan Peterson to Lafayette County.
01:34:02.660Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
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01:34:32.400Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport,
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01:34:55.660Well, on the dark web, your personal information could fetch up to $1,000.
01:35:00.560That's right, there's a whole underground economy built on stolen identities.
02:47:16.400we shouldn't therefore make the mistake of assuming that if group A or person A is lower on one of these attributes than group B or person B
02:47:24.400that that is somehow reflective of their intrinsic value as human beings
02:59:52.400I did a research project with one of my students
02:59:58.400We haven't published it, unfortunately, for a variety of reasons
03:00:02.400She's been quite ill and I've been quite preoccupied
03:00:05.400So those are the two barriers at the moment
03:00:08.400But the first thing we wanted to do was to find out
03:00:11.400Whether there was actually such a thing as political correctness
03:00:14.400You can actually do that technically as a social scientist
03:00:17.400So what you do is, this is what we did is
03:00:18.400We got a group of people together and we collected a whole bunch of statements that seemed to be vaguely associated with the idea of political correctness
03:00:26.400So maybe you could think, well, it's a media construct
03:00:28.400And that's fine, you can go analyze media statements and then you can collect ideas that seem to be associated with whatever political correctness is
03:01:24.400There's such a thing as political correctness hypothesis out of the water
03:01:28.400But that isn't what happened, we found two clumps
03:01:30.400One of which looked like something like moderate leftism and the other that looked very much like totalitarian political correctness
03:01:37.400And it was a very, very robust finding and we replicated it as well
03:01:41.400She did this for her master's thesis, by the way
03:01:45.400And then we looked at what predicted these beliefs
03:01:49.400First of all, the correlation between the moderate leftist clump of questions and the radical leftist clump of questions actually wasn't very high
03:01:57.400And so one of the things that we surmise is that there's an actual division on the left between the moderates and the radicals
03:03:34.400And the woman who did this research is very, very smart
03:03:37.400And the study was well done, so I think it's credible
03:03:39.400So, and one of the things that's interesting to me about that is that it does tie into the Freudian nightmare of the devouring mother, essentially
03:03:49.400Which was Freud's, I think, signal contribution to psychopathology
03:03:52.400You know, for most of Freud's clients were people who were struggling to get out of the clutches of their family, right?
03:03:58.400And part of that is human beings are very dependent, right?
03:04:01.400Because, well, because we have this incredibly long period of development
03:04:06.40030 years, maybe, but certainly 18 years
03:04:10.400So it's hard to struggle up from infancy, mature and leave as an independent creature
03:04:16.400And lots of people, you see this, if you're a clinician, you see this all the time
03:04:20.400People are so tangled up in their families that they can't get away from them
03:04:23.400And that's the Oedipal situation that Freud described so brilliantly
03:08:47.400The psychoanalyst said the good mother fails
03:08:51.400And what that means is that when your kid is three years old, two years old, and stumbling around, making mistakes
03:08:58.400You back the hell off, and you let them make mistakes
03:09:02.400And you don't view the world as infant and predator, and you don't project that onto the political system
03:09:06.400Because it's not a good idea, especially if those who, especially for those who you're misdiagnosing as predators
03:09:15.400Okay, so now we are going to open it up for Q&A
03:09:18.400Alright, so the idea that I've put thought into this is perhaps an optimistic one
03:09:23.400But, as you might imagine, you've been a topic of conversation on this campus a lot in the past week or so
03:09:28.400Certainly among a lot of us who discuss politics
03:09:30.400And one of the things that sort of united people who like and dislike a lot of your ideas is that we appreciate your defense of free speech
03:09:36.400And we appreciate you coming here to talk about it with us
03:09:39.400But one of the things I thought was really interesting is Professor Van Dyke addressed the distinction between you and Jonathan Haidt
03:09:44.400And you mentioned this as sort of a temperamental one
03:09:47.400And I think, I'm sure that's true to some extent, but I noticed you've made a lot of more sort of substantively inflammatory claims
03:09:53.400Like in the course of this lecture you called the authors of Facebook posts demons and totalitarians
03:09:59.400In past events you've called them things like neo-Marxists, cultural Marxists
03:10:04.400You've called them, I believe, a fifth column that is committing treason against the West
03:10:09.400And it seems to me that this is more than temperamental, this is a substantive difference
03:40:56.400It's like, people come out and criticize me and say
03:40:59.400Dr. Peterson doesn't understand that postmodernism and Marxism are incommensurate
03:41:03.400It's like, yeah, actually I do understand that
03:41:06.400But the postmodern neo-Marxists don't seem to understand that
03:41:10.400So how can you be a postmodernist and a Marxist at the same time?
03:41:15.400Well, the answer to that is actually to be found in the historical data
03:41:18.400The postmodernist types like Foucault and Derrida were Marxists
03:41:22.400Before Marxists, before they became postmodernists
03:41:25.400And the postmodern overlay on the Marxism was as far as I can tell
03:41:29.400Mostly a cover story for going about the same old murderous idiocy under a new guise
03:41:35.400Do you think it's possible that there are, I'm sorry, that there are lenses, like postmodern lenses that we can view culture from under that can at times be more powerful and useful than other lenses
03:41:53.400Like for example, Baudrillard, the idea of the simulacrum and the successive phases of the image