The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Why Young Women Are The Most Miserable They've Ever Been

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00:00:30.000 So I want to talk to you tonight about something that's crazily difficult, and I haven't lectured

00:00:38.740 about this specifically for about 10 years, so that's quite a long time.

00:00:46.100 So I was trying to recall today, yesterday, what I need to remember so that I can make

00:00:54.400 this clear. And it's a ridiculously important thing to make clear. So why does this have to

00:01:02.660 be made clear? Well, you can see that there's a fracture in the Western world. There's a fracture

00:01:11.400 in the world as a whole, but it's particularly acute in the Western world. And the reason for

00:01:20.520 that is fundamental. It's not political. It's not economic. It's far deeper than that.

00:01:30.800 You can make a case by definition, I suppose, that the deepest matters are religious matters.

00:01:37.700 And I'm saying that as a matter of definition, is that as you move down the hierarchy of depth

00:01:45.100 towards the abyss itself. 0.97

00:01:47.160 You approach the domain of the religious.

00:01:49.400 You approach the domain of what's ultimately significant.

00:01:53.520 And the culture war that we're embroiled in in the West

00:01:58.340 that's tearing us apart and demoralizing us

00:02:01.600 and encouraging us, tempting us to worship false idols 0.99

00:02:06.820 and to build towers of Babel and to court the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah

00:02:14.480 and to tempt the flood, all of that's indicative of a problem 0.63

00:02:20.400 that has made itself manifest at the most basic of levels.

00:02:25.120 And so I want to describe, I want to try to lay out

00:02:29.640 why I think that problem exists and how it's conceptualized

00:02:35.000 and then I don't know if we'll get towards the conceptualized of a solution.

00:02:40.440 Perhaps in my discussion with Pajot we'll do that.

00:02:44.120 But I want to at least lay out the territory.

00:02:47.360 And this is, because the problem is so deep, this is a very difficult thing to do.

00:02:51.640 And so, especially in 40 minutes.

00:02:55.080 And so, we'll see how we do.

00:02:59.560 Okay, so the first thing you might ask yourself,

00:03:02.900 this is relevant to, say, Tammy's introduction,

00:03:05.380 is why do stories play such an important role in human perception and communication?

00:03:13.280 we find stories intrinsically compelling

00:03:19.120 so much so that we regard them as a form of entertainment

00:03:23.240 and that reflects the fact that there's something about them

00:03:26.740 that's so valuable and significant

00:03:31.440 that participating in a story, listening to a story

00:03:36.900 telling a story, reading a story, watching a movie

00:03:39.440 is intrinsically meaningful

00:03:42.920 right, and so that, and you can deride that as mere entertainment, and think about it as a side

00:03:50.200 effect of some more fundamental psychological phenomena, but that's a mistake, the reason it's,

00:03:58.480 the reason the story is deeply meaningful is because it actually reflects in a manner that

00:04:05.620 no other form can. Something profound about the nature of reality itself and about our

00:04:12.500 relationship to reality. And so why is that? Why is that? See, our failure to understand

00:04:22.580 that is part of the reason that we're in this cultural crisis. It's a failure of conceptualization

00:04:32.380 that stretches all the way back to the dawn of science and the enlightenment itself.

00:04:38.400 And the problem is, the scientific world, this is a good way of thinking about it,

00:04:46.880 the scientific world is by design without value, without meaning, right?

00:04:55.300 You hear, for example, constant claims on the part of scientific practitioners

00:05:00.620 that science in its pristine form is value-free, right?

00:05:05.820 And that every fact is to be considered as valuable in and of itself

00:05:09.460 and that no fact is to be arbitrarily privileged over any other fact.

00:05:14.980 And so the scientific enterprise begins with the removal of value from the world.

00:05:22.080 Now, the problem with that is that you live by value, right?

00:05:26.160 You need a reason to put forth effort.

00:05:29.160 You need a reason to make sacrifices.

00:05:31.500 You need a reason to get up in the morning,

00:05:34.500 especially if things are difficult for you in your life.

00:05:39.540 We can't, a world that's denuded of meaning

00:05:43.500 is a world where no one has any motivation to do anything.

00:05:48.140 Now, but it's worse than that in a way

00:05:50.120 because you can make the positive significance of life

00:05:55.120 disappear as a reality by criticizing it, but you don't have the same luck with the suffering part.

00:06:03.440 And so you can tell yourself that in the final analysis, nothing is meaningful, and that can

00:06:09.600 make the world appear to be a hopeless and dismal place, but you can't tell yourself that your own

00:06:15.360 pain and your own anxiety is equally meaningless, or you can try to tell yourself that, but it's

00:06:20.900 going to have zero effect on the existential reality of your pain and suffering. And so

00:06:26.720 if you remove value from the world, the paradoxical consequence is all that you leave

00:06:34.960 behind in the world is suffering and confusion. And that's not a good thing, especially if you

00:06:42.200 draw the conclusion that suffering and confusion is the ultimate reality of the world. And so

00:06:48.540 obviously, I mean, that's the conclusion that someone insanely depressed and anxious

00:06:54.540 draws, or even suicidal, and it's definitely the case that people who tilt towards a worldview

00:07:01.780 that denudes the world of intrinsic significance do tend to fall under the sway of serious

00:07:09.820 depression and anxiety, and well, and that's not all, because if you're depressed and you're

00:07:15.060 And you're suffering in consequence of that. It's very easy to become bitter. And if you become bitter, it's easy to become vengeful. And if you become vengeful, well, the sky's the limit in terms of the terrible places you might go.

00:07:28.040 And so there are genuine existential consequences to denuding the world of significance, of treating it as if the notion of significance or value is somehow a delusional overlay on a more fundamental and primal material reality.

00:07:46.920 And that is what we think, right?

00:07:49.840 I mean, even if you're a modern religious person, the presuppositions of reductionist materialism,

00:07:58.940 the idea that the world's made out of matter and dead matter is so much part of you

00:08:04.280 that it's a self-evident axiom of the way you conduct yourself in the world.

00:08:11.040 And maybe there's a religious overlay on that because you're still a believer,

00:08:14.500 But you're a post-enlightenment scientific rationalist with a thin veneer of religious belief on the top of that.

00:08:23.160 And that's just not going to do the trick, folks.

00:08:26.500 And you can tell that because we're very susceptible to possession by a variety of forms of pathological ideologies.

00:08:35.200 And we're very weak in the face of external pressure in relationship to our belief systems.

00:08:41.460 and we tend towards a dismal nihilism or an immature hedonism.

00:08:46.640 None of that's going to do the trick.

00:08:49.440 There's serious challenges facing us as individuals and as a society.

00:08:54.540 And that kind of shallowness in relationship to value

00:08:58.680 is counterproductive, barely begins to describe it.

00:09:03.800 It makes us weak.

00:09:05.880 And weak people are prone to the worst of temptations.

00:09:10.860 And so, this isn't good.

00:09:13.040 And the other, a more fun, but you might say, oh, it doesn't matter because we've pursued the truth.

00:09:20.480 And the truth is, as Nietzsche pointed out in the mid-1800s, God is dead.

00:09:26.140 And the scientific revolution killed our religious presuppositions.

00:09:30.120 And the world truly is a dead material place.

00:09:33.580 And we just have to make the best of that.

00:09:35.500 But you know, before we jump to that earth-shattering conclusion, see, Nietzsche, when he said that, he knew what the consequence of that would be.

00:09:47.660 He said that we would become radically susceptible to catastrophic nihilism and to invasion of our psychological space by a variety of utopian ideologies.

00:09:59.820 and that the world would be awash in blood

00:10:03.360 as a consequence of the demise of the structures of value

00:10:07.220 that had oriented us previously.

00:10:09.480 And so, now, the problem with the proposition

00:10:17.500 that the world genuinely is a place of dead matter

00:10:23.040 with a thin overlay of arbitrary value on top of it,

00:10:26.400 the problem with that viewpoint,

00:10:27.800 apart from the existential problems that I just described is it's not true.

00:10:33.940 It's actually, it's a false view of the structure of reality

00:10:37.540 and part of what we're actually wrestling with in our culture.

00:10:40.820 And you all know that to some degree because you wouldn't be at this lecture

00:10:43.600 if you didn't have some sense of this,

00:10:45.260 is that the propositions that have guided us

00:10:51.640 through the technological revolutions of science in the last four centuries,

00:10:55.640 they're not right.

00:10:57.800 It's not the case that the world is intrinsically a place of dead matter and that's all,

00:11:04.340 and that we arbitrarily overlay a system of belief or value on top of that.

00:11:09.360 We know that's not true, partly in consequence of scientific endeavor itself,

00:11:15.600 because, for example, we've been working at a biological level at unpacking the mysteries of perception.

00:11:23.700 the perception upon which your idea that the world is an object depends

00:11:28.720 and what we found is that perception itself

00:11:31.680 doesn't operate in the manner you would predict

00:11:36.060 if the world was only a place of dead matter and objects

00:11:40.220 and so to see an object you have to perceive it obviously

00:11:44.800 and if the perception itself relies on processes

00:11:49.260 that aren't merely materialist let's say

00:11:53.060 then the whole notion that the world is fundamentally a meaningless object falls apart.

00:12:00.260 And this is a foregone conclusion now.

00:12:04.100 We know that that's not how perception works.

00:12:08.180 So, for example, when you're looking at something, when you're seeing something,

00:12:13.500 every glance you make is dependent on an action so there's no perception at all

00:12:27.960 independent of action because you have to move your eyes in order to see and some of that's

00:12:33.780 unconscious because your eyes vibrate but some of it's conscious because you're directing your eyes

00:12:37.600 and what you direct your eyes toward

00:12:40.740 is indicative of what you're paying attention to

00:12:43.720 and what you're paying attention to

00:12:46.260 is indicative of your value structure.

00:12:48.200 Now this isn't some idle hypothesis.

00:12:52.060 There are malevolent forces at work in the world

00:12:55.680 that are making a fortune

00:12:58.740 off their analysis of your eye movements

00:13:02.180 because that's what your phones do

00:13:04.460 because that gives those machines a window into your structure of values

00:13:10.080 and a means of controlling your intention and your actions.

00:13:18.220 And so there isn't anything more valuable than your attention.

00:13:22.700 And the sophisticated machines that you hold in your hands,

00:13:25.840 your cell phones, are watching how you move your eyes

00:13:29.220 so they can figure out what's important to you

00:13:31.520 so that they can capture your attention

00:13:33.660 because of its great value.

00:13:36.360 And so the reason I'm telling you this is to,

00:13:38.460 I don't want to move this outside of the domain of mere abstraction.

00:13:41.580 Like, we understand that perception is dependent upon attention.

00:13:49.240 And that you pay, this is the crucial thing,

00:13:52.200 you pay attention to what you value.

00:13:57.380 Right, now, if your perception of the world is dependent on attention,

00:14:01.600 and you pay attention to what you value

00:14:04.860 then what you perceive

00:14:06.840 is dependent on what you value.

00:14:10.320 And that's not the scientific proposition.

00:14:12.840 The scientific proposition is

00:14:14.280 the world lays itself out as a set of objects

00:14:17.080 and you lay a structure of value on top of them

00:14:21.680 and the object perception is primary

00:14:24.700 and that's wrong.

00:14:27.680 The valuing is primary.

00:14:29.520 Now, we don't exactly know what to make of that, and that's partly what I want to explore with you tonight.

00:14:36.520 Now, it turns out that the way you describe the world of value is very different than the way you describe the world of objects.

00:14:46.520 Now, we have a technology for describing the world of objects, and that's the scientific method, the scientific description, our scientific theories.

00:14:54.520 And that does enable us to gain some purchase on the world, right?

00:14:59.520 We're very technologically powerful in consequence of this mastery.

00:15:04.520 But the world of value is described in a different way.

00:15:07.520 And it appears that that mode of description is not only no less real,

00:15:14.520 it has to exist before you can apprehend the world of objects at all.

00:15:21.520 all. And the method that we use to describe the world of value is the story. That's what a story

00:15:33.100 does. Okay, so let's think about this for a minute. So you go to a movie, and we already

00:15:41.300 described the fact that that's a bit of a mystery. It's like, what the hell are you lining up,

00:15:46.100 using up your time, paying money to go see a movie.

00:15:50.320 And you might say, well, I enjoy it.

00:15:51.840 And then I might say, you enjoy a horror movie, do you?

00:15:55.660 Right?

00:15:55.980 A horror movie disgusts and frightens you.

00:15:58.380 And that's the antithesis of enjoyment.

00:16:00.880 And so what the hell are you doing there?

00:16:02.800 Why would you enjoy that?

00:16:03.940 Now, there is, in fact, a reason.

00:16:05.340 But it's not obvious, right?

00:16:06.740 It's not the simple pursuit of pleasure that leads you to chase the narrative.

00:16:12.340 Okay, it's something.

00:16:13.220 it's the narrative outlines a structure of value okay so how do you understand that

00:16:20.280 you go see a movie yeah you go see um

00:16:25.420 james bond movie an action adventure movie that'll be that'll be fine and

00:16:32.700 you see the characters you have the hero the main protagonist that's james bond in his various

00:16:39.200 incarnations and you have the villain because there's always a villain or a coterie of villains

00:16:43.300 so there's always good versus evil in movies like that and that's the drama of adventure and then

00:16:49.460 you infer the value structure of the protagonist and the villain by watching what they attend to

00:16:57.860 and how they act all right and so now and you do this in a very deeply embodied and unconscious way

00:17:05.560 the same way that you understand other people.

00:17:08.860 So, for example, when you are talking to another person,

00:17:12.260 you watch their eyes, right?

00:17:15.440 And the reason you watch their eyes is because you want to see

00:17:18.200 where they direct their attention.

00:17:20.860 And you want to see where they direct their attention

00:17:22.940 so that you know what's important to them.

00:17:25.840 And you want to know what's important to them

00:17:27.820 so you can mimic that with your own body.

00:17:31.420 That's what you do.

00:17:32.280 When you understand someone else's aims,

00:17:35.040 you can understand what they regard as positive,

00:17:38.740 so what turns them on, so to speak,

00:17:40.980 what motivates them to move forward,

00:17:43.480 and that's anything that will move them towards their aim.

00:17:46.860 And you understand what is negative to them,

00:17:49.800 and that's anything that interferes with their aim.

00:17:51.820 That stops them, it makes them anxious, it causes them pain.

00:17:54.760 And so, as soon as you can infer someone's aim,

00:17:58.380 you can mimic their emotions,

00:18:01.300 using your own body as a representational platform,

00:18:06.760 and that's how you understand people.

00:18:09.020 And so if you're getting to know someone on a date,

00:18:12.380 and you're having a conversation,

00:18:14.100 you pay attention to what the other person is paying attention to,

00:18:18.500 verbally and non-verbally,

00:18:20.040 and then if you pay really careful attention,

00:18:22.400 you can get yourself in sync,

00:18:24.660 and you can be on the same wavelength,

00:18:26.680 and what that means is your aims unite,

00:18:29.120 and then your emotions are the same,

00:18:31.300 and then you understand each other.

00:18:33.040 And then you might say, well, is it intrinsically rewarding

00:18:38.100 merely to mimic someone else?

00:18:40.660 And the answer to that is, no, that's not the whole story.

00:18:44.420 You see, because you, the manner in which you direct your attention

00:18:50.120 is dependent on your aim.

00:18:53.240 And it takes effort and resources to pursue an aim.

00:18:57.460 And so one of the things you really want to figure out in the world is

00:19:00.240 what are the costs and consequences of different aims and what should your aim be and not be?

00:19:08.760 Okay, that's what stories tell you. And so you go watch James Bond and you see that he serves

00:19:13.600 king and country, that he's a brave sort of character, and then he arranges his attention

00:19:18.500 in relationship to those aims and then you imitate that while you're watching him and then you get a

00:19:24.460 sense of how that works out, how that frame of value functions. And you do it without cost because

00:19:31.820 if James Bond gets killed, you don't die, right? And so this is the advantage of narrative

00:19:39.140 characterization is you can toy and play with different viewpoints of value and you can explore

00:19:46.800 their significance for better or worse and you can do that while experiencing all the relevant

00:19:52.260 emotions and all the relevant perceptions, but if it goes terribly wrong, it upsets you

00:19:59.160 in the moment, in the movie, and that's all. And you can walk away. And so when you're being told

00:20:06.340 a story, when you're participating in a story, when you're watching a drama, when you're listening

00:20:11.660 to someone else tell their story, you're gaining insight into the functional consequences of a way

00:20:18.380 of organizing the world, a way of prioritizing the world, and you can use that to orient yourself in

00:20:25.180 the world in a more effective way. And so you know that when you take your children to movies, you

00:20:30.980 sort of hope that they'll imitate the hero and not the villain. And you see the villain, and the

00:20:35.920 villain has villainous aims. He's aiming down. He wants mayhem and pain. He wants other people to

00:20:41.020 suffer. He doesn't cooperate with anyone. He's narcissistic to the core. He's resentful and

00:20:46.260 bitter and that plays out on the screen and you see that spiraling downward and you think maybe

00:20:51.080 it would be better not to be him and then you see on the other hand you see the hero and the hero is

00:20:56.940 what's the hero doing exactly well he's certainly not doing what the villain is doing at least that

00:21:02.080 and in the James Bond example well he's serving king and country in this brave manner and so

00:21:08.160 there's an implication there it's a low-level religious implication you might say that a hero

00:21:15.540 is someone who serves something that's outside his narrow self. And you could argue perhaps that

00:21:21.440 king and country isn't the highest of all possible aims, but you might say, well, it's certainly

00:21:27.040 better than the villain, and at least it's not narcissistic and self-centered. And then you might

00:21:33.180 say, well, what would be the aim of the greatest conceivable hero? And that would be the king of

00:21:39.600 all potential kings and as soon as you start to ask and inquire into that question then you're

00:21:45.840 definitely in the religious domain right so because you're starting to ask yourself something

00:21:50.840 like imagine your favorite lecture dial that up on max put that on steroids and then add some

00:21:59.320 cinematic elements to it that's the best way i could describe a peterson academy lecture

00:22:03.720 I went to college because I had to.

00:22:08.160 I go to Peterson Academy because I want to.

00:22:10.060 I'm still paying off college from 10 years ago, and I'm also still questioning the value

00:22:14.420 that I got out of college.

00:22:15.420 The traditional universities, a lot of times, it's just pretty dry.

00:22:19.000 They don't bring the same energy as the professors at Peterson Academy.

00:22:22.720 It is a completely different experience to learn from somebody who actually wants to

00:22:26.780 teach you.

00:22:27.780 If you've been on the fence about this, this is the time.

00:22:31.100 thing that's calling to you you won't have an answer for it unless you enroll and see for yourself

00:22:35.260 you have the opportunity to investigate that calling yeah so you understand that right you

00:22:41.720 understand that you see how that you see how that works and so that also gives us some insight right

00:22:46.640 away into the christian religious domain for example because you can imagine a movie about a

00:22:52.160 king and then you can imagine 10 movies about 10 kings and then you could imagine that there's

00:22:57.480 something that's common to all of those kings insofar as they're good kings and then you could

00:23:03.400 make a movie about just the greatest of kings and that would start to have like an overwhelming

00:23:09.060 religious significance right because you'd be portraying something like the essence of kingship

00:23:14.860 itself right or the essence of heroism itself and religious stories virtually by definition

00:23:21.900 spiral around that end point and try to specify it. How should you

00:23:25.860 conduct yourself in the world? Now, you see, that's the same

00:23:29.900 question. This is also what you're figuring out when you're watching a movie, even though

00:23:33.820 you don't know it. You're figuring out, what does this person worship?

00:23:37.900 Now, we think, what do we think worship is? Well, because we're

00:23:41.740 shallow materialists, we haven't got a good grip on that.

00:23:45.900 We think it means, I don't know, it means singing a hymn in a church.

00:23:49.800 And it does mean that to some degree.

00:23:52.700 And it means the rituals that would go along with a religious practice.

00:23:57.500 It might mean getting on your knees when you pray, for example.

00:24:00.780 But you see, what you worship is what you celebrate.

00:24:05.460 And what you worship and celebrate is what you hold in the highest degree.

00:24:10.680 And so you see, so to worship is to subjugate yourself to your aim.

00:24:16.160 I mean this as a definition.

00:24:17.680 This is what you want to understand.

00:24:19.800 is that every time you move your eyes,

00:24:22.720 even though you don't know it,

00:24:23.860 you're worshiping something.

00:24:25.080 And what you're worshiping is the goal of your vision,

00:24:29.000 even if you don't know what your vision is.

00:24:30.680 So here's an example.

00:24:31.820 Imagine you're on a date,

00:24:33.480 and you could worship the one-night stand,

00:24:37.300 in which case your eyes are going to be doing something

00:24:39.940 completely different than what they're going to be doing

00:24:42.180 if you're evaluating your date partner

00:24:45.180 as a potential wife or husband.

00:24:48.560 Right?

00:24:48.680 You obviously, you know that.

00:24:51.980 And if you're both playing one night stand,

00:24:54.600 well, then maybe there's not going to be any disagreement

00:24:56.740 about what the eyes should be doing.

00:24:58.940 But if one of you is playing one night stand

00:25:00.860 and the other is playing, I wish I was married,

00:25:03.160 then that's not going to be a date that goes very well,

00:25:06.940 and all the body language will indicate that.

00:25:09.660 And then you might say,

00:25:10.560 well, you can see that there's different objects of worship

00:25:14.620 in those two approaches

00:25:15.840 because one worships short-term hedonistic sexual gratification

00:25:20.020 at all costs, absent any relationship or responsibility,

00:25:25.080 and the other worships marriage as the foundation of what?

00:25:29.640 The proper relationship between men and women

00:25:31.660 and the foundation of society.

00:25:33.320 Those are very, very, very different things.

00:25:36.880 And those different, see, this is the kicker.

00:25:40.480 Those different aims structure your perceptions.

00:25:43.060 Your aims structure your perceptions.

00:25:46.980 And so, given that, you see, that's why the scientific worldview in its fundamental propositions is incomplete.

00:25:57.100 Because that's not an axiom of the scientific world.

00:26:01.500 The scientific world assumes the facts are dead, they're all equal.

00:26:04.700 you look at them neutrally as a scientist, and the science of perception indicates that

00:26:11.540 you cannot look at anything neutrally. It's not possible. You have to inhabit a value frame,

00:26:17.700 because your values determine your pattern of attention, and your pattern of action,

00:26:23.160 and your perceptions are attention and action predicated. There's no escape from the problem

00:26:29.620 of value. Now, we don't know

00:26:31.340 what to do with this exactly, because

00:26:33.640 I'm not a post-modernist. I don't think,

00:26:35.940 I'm not going to make a claim that there's no

00:26:37.500 such thing as scientific fact,

00:26:40.140 right, and that

00:26:40.680 somehow everything's up for grabs

00:26:43.540 because the world of value is real.

00:26:45.760 That's a mistake, and it's

00:26:47.680 erroneous. But by the same

00:26:49.640 token,

00:26:51.880 the fruits of the scientific

00:26:53.560 endeavor will be dependent on the aim

00:26:55.600 of the scientist. And we already

00:26:57.480 know that because you guys you go to movies and you see the evil scientist it's like how many

00:27:02.160 bloody evil scientists do you have to see before you clue in it's like evil scientists produce

00:27:08.760 evil science and so how can that be if the scientific venture itself is value free because 0.81

00:27:17.660 an evil scientist could produce good science because what the hell difference does it make

00:27:21.800 Everyone knows that's not the case.

00:27:25.980 And you can certainly see a terrible danger in the scientific enterprise

00:27:31.700 because we all know that if the technological power

00:27:35.060 our scientific viewpoint provides to us is misused,

00:27:39.920 then heaven help us.

00:27:42.940 You know, I read a book once that was written by a KGB, ex-KGB officer,

00:27:47.580 and he talked about scientists in the Soviet Union,

00:27:51.040 And their goal was to produce a hybrid between Ebola, which is a hybrid between Ebola and smallpox.

00:28:01.940 And so that's a perfectly valid scientific question, just like gain-of-function research in Wuhan, you might say.

00:28:08.740 And so, seriously.

00:28:11.900 And we saw what happened as a consequence of that particular value-predicated endeavor, right?

00:28:18.020 And we shut down the bloody world for two years because of that.

00:28:20.860 and turn the entire West into a totalitarian state, right?

00:28:24.920 So watch out for the aims of your scientists.

00:28:27.860 And so then you might think, well, what should those aims be?

00:28:31.200 Right, well, that's the problem of narrative.

00:28:33.720 What should your aim be?

00:28:35.760 Okay, so I want to lay out for you, too.

00:28:43.340 Tammy told the story of Snow White for a particular reason,

00:28:46.120 and I want to lay out for you partly how narrative,

00:28:49.620 in its most fundamental way

00:28:51.380 characterizes the world of value.

00:28:54.340 So let's say, you know,

00:28:55.720 I remember once when I was a kid,

00:28:57.760 I went to a drive-in

00:28:58.700 and I saw a Burt Reynolds movie

00:29:00.380 and I don't remember what it was,

00:29:01.800 Smokey and the Bandit, I think,

00:29:03.200 and Burt Reynolds was zipping around

00:29:04.940 in some fast car and being a cool dude.

00:29:07.320 And when all the teenagers

00:29:09.800 drove out of the parking lot

00:29:12.560 at the end of the drive-in,

00:29:13.760 they were all spinning their tires

00:29:14.840 and like racing down the highway.

00:29:16.260 And it's like they're imitating.

00:29:17.900 they were imitating Burt Reynolds

00:29:20.820 and you know, fair enough

00:29:22.020 and

00:29:22.820 what, you see what

00:29:26.720 that's how we

00:29:28.720 develop our

00:29:30.620 patterns of value, we develop our patterns

00:29:32.860 of value through imitation, that's a good way

00:29:34.840 of thinking about it, so you imitate your

00:29:36.660 father for example, you

00:29:38.280 you imitate your father, you imitate

00:29:40.920 even more particularly the spirit

00:29:42.840 of your father, so here's a way of thinking about it

00:29:44.920 so imagine that you're a little boy

00:29:46.900 and you're inviting a little girl to play house

00:29:49.820 and you say to her,

00:29:51.800 do you want to play house?

00:29:52.800 And she says yes,

00:29:53.720 which is a good start to the game

00:29:55.100 because she has to say yes

00:29:56.500 or it's not a game

00:29:57.700 in case you didn't notice when you were three.

00:30:00.920 And so then you might say,

00:30:05.320 well, the boy who now is going to play the father

00:30:07.720 is imitating the father, right?

00:30:10.300 But imitation,

00:30:11.340 like if I was imitating you,

00:30:12.600 I'd sit with my legs crossed like this, right?

00:30:15.040 That's a direct imitation.

00:30:16.240 I'm using my body to precisely duplicate what your body is doing.

00:30:20.080 But you see, if you watch little kids play, that's not what they do.

00:30:24.960 They do something way more sophisticated.

00:30:26.780 So a three-year-old or a four-year-old has watched his father operate as father,

00:30:32.980 so with the goals and aims of a father, over many different episodes.

00:30:37.400 And he's watched fathers and adult men in movies, and he's seen fathers in books.

00:30:44.120 And what he does is he pulls out an abstraction of what constitutes the father,

00:30:50.440 and that would be the spirit of the father.

00:30:52.100 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:30:53.500 He pulls out an abstraction of what the father is from all of those examples,

00:30:57.580 and then he plays that in the pretend game.

00:31:01.780 And so he's possessed by the spirit of the father.

00:31:04.900 Okay, so one way that the world of value that characterizes human society

00:31:11.080 is transmitted from generation to generation

00:31:13.920 is through imitation of the spirit of the Father.

00:31:18.060 Okay, now if you're thinking at all,

00:31:19.820 if you're paying attention at all,

00:31:21.040 you can see that there's a very, very thin line

00:31:23.140 between that and, well, you might say

00:31:26.420 both Jewish and Christian forms of worship

00:31:29.040 because what you're enjoined to do

00:31:31.540 as a Jew or a Christian,

00:31:33.240 there's other religions that are oriented

00:31:36.020 in the same, towards the same paternity,

00:31:41.080 end is that you're called upon to imitate the spirit of the Benevolent Father. Now, that's not

00:31:47.660 all. Like in Catholicism, for example, you have Mary, who's an example of the spirit of the

00:31:52.640 Benevolent Feminine, and that's a different thing. But part of what the religious process is doing 0.51

00:31:59.500 in its complex narrative is abstracting out the essential spirit of celebration and worship

00:32:07.200 and utilizing character and personality

00:32:11.220 to produce a pattern that can be imitated.

00:32:15.860 Right now, see, the girl who's playing with the boy,

00:32:18.900 she knows this because if the boy who's playing house with her

00:32:23.380 imitates the spirit of the benevolent father properly,

00:32:28.040 then she'll enjoy the game,

00:32:30.500 and then she'll want to play another game with him,

00:32:32.940 and then they'll become friends.

00:32:34.340 And so, the test for whether or not his imitation of the spirit of the benevolent father is valid is whether the girl will continue the game.

00:32:45.980 And if you can't see the relationship between that and your marriage, you're just not trying.

00:32:50.860 Right?

00:32:51.360 So, because that's exactly what you're both aiming for in your marriage, whether you know it or not.

00:32:59.160 Your wife is trying to encourage within you your embodiment of the spirit of the benevolent masculine, yes, and you are attempting to encourage the same development in her with regards to the feminine.

00:33:17.060 And those are two cardinal ways of characterizing the world of value.

00:33:22.360 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:33:23.880 And so, I'll give you an example of that.

00:33:28.880 So, I already made allusion to the fact that Christ in the Christian tradition is the king of kings.

00:33:35.140 And so, you could think about him as the central pattern of sovereignty to which all sovereigns who are genuine have to bow, right?

00:33:45.260 And you know you don't want a king or a president who believes that he's on top of everything, right?

00:33:52.600 That's a tyrant. 0.92

00:33:54.400 That's a tyrant.

00:33:55.160 if your leader, despite his position

00:33:57.980 of authority, is beholden

00:34:00.040 to a principle that's transcendent

00:34:02.020 that is beyond

00:34:04.020 him and upward aiming

00:34:05.680 then he's someone who's

00:34:07.520 serving the

00:34:09.260 he's mimicking the benevolent spirit

00:34:11.900 of the father instead of

00:34:13.900 allowing himself to become possessed by

00:34:15.820 power and that means that he's

00:34:17.720 the sort of sovereign that you can trust

00:34:19.660 just like if you're doing that in your household

00:34:21.640 then you're not a tyrant as a husband or a

00:34:23.900 Okay, and that's all nested inside narrative and developed in character.

00:34:30.900 And so we use character and story to portray the world of value,

00:34:38.900 and that's what teaches us how to direct our attention and to organize our actions.

00:34:42.900 Right now, and if you understand that, you can also see how that unites us socially

00:34:47.900 socially, because if your vision of what constitutes the benevolent, masculine, is the same as mine,

00:34:56.800 then we can understand each other, and we can work together. Not only can we work together, we can

00:35:02.140 compete peacefully, because we could assume something like, we're playing the same game,

00:35:09.740 because we have the same aim, and we can let the better man win, and that would be good for both

00:35:15.800 of us because that way we'd learn a bit more about who the better man is and maybe we could

00:35:19.800 imitate that and both improve. And so that union of aim, upward aim, brings peace even to

00:35:33.880 competition, productive peace even to competition. That's a very useful thing to know with regards

00:35:39.360 to masculinity because men tend to be very competitive and you could make a case that

00:35:43.920 competition per se is a manifestation of the oppressive patriarchy, so that's the negative

00:35:49.820 masculine, and that's true if the competition is for power, but it's not true if the competition

00:35:57.040 is the maximization of the proper aim. And then you have to ask yourself, well, what's the proper

00:36:02.740 aim? And we've touched on that a little bit, and it's something like whatever's represented by

00:36:07.460 concepts like the king of kings, or the spirit of the benevolent father. And so that's how God

00:36:15.740 is characterized, for example, often in the Old Testament. He's the God of Abraham and Isaac,

00:36:21.700 right? He's the spirit of benevolent masculinity as it makes itself manifest across the generations

00:36:28.800 in the world. And it's up to the individual man, like Abraham or Jacob, any of the biblical heroes,

00:36:35.440 to ally themselves with that spirit,

00:36:38.680 to invite it through prayer and worship,

00:36:42.040 to possess them,

00:36:43.440 to sacrifice everything that isn't appropriate along the way,

00:36:48.480 and then to develop upward.

00:36:50.600 And the narrative that's laid out in the biblical corpus

00:36:54.660 describes that spiraling upward process.

00:36:58.100 And it culminates in the idea that

00:37:00.560 the ultimate upward aim

00:37:04.500 that's the spirit of the King of Kings

00:37:06.960 is something like

00:37:07.800 the voluntary spirit of self-sacrifice

00:37:11.380 that mature families and communities

00:37:15.460 are founded upon.

00:37:17.180 And so that would mean that

00:37:18.200 as a mature man who's worth his salt,

00:37:21.020 so to speak,

00:37:21.600 it's not all about you and your pleasure

00:37:23.700 in the most narrow of senses,

00:37:25.460 but that you're in service to the future

00:37:28.540 and to your wife and to your children

00:37:30.200 and to the community and the city and the state.

00:37:32.700 Right, right, right.

00:37:35.600 And the thing that's so wonderful and remarkable about that

00:37:39.020 is that imagine that really what you want

00:37:41.520 is to make your dreams come true.

00:37:43.140 And you might say, well, if I want to make my dreams come true,

00:37:46.100 I will pursue what's in my self-interest.

00:37:49.500 But you'll find that if you do that, 0.62

00:37:51.080 you become a narcissistic pretender

00:37:53.540 and people do everything they can 0.95

00:37:55.440 to distance themselves from you.

00:37:57.760 and if you take the opposite tack and you say I don't don't I'm not going to live for my narrow

00:38:03.700 self I'm going to find myself in service to the future my wife my children my community my state

00:38:11.840 my nation under God let's say then everything that you need and want will come to you right

00:38:18.740 and see your nation knows this that's a very strange thing about the United States because

00:38:23.380 you guys have got this more right than any other people in the world, and maybe more than any other

00:38:28.360 people in the world ever have, which is that if you can pursue the spirit of benevolent self-sacrifice

00:38:37.660 without envy, then you can produce a land of abundance, and that's exactly right, and that

00:38:44.400 that ability the ability to do that should be the highest of aims okay so right okay

00:38:53.120 and you can you can see you can see how that's dramatized in narrative obviously because

00:39:02.520 the self-sacrificing hero is the mainstay of an action adventure movie or a romantic adventure

00:39:08.860 I mean, was it the last James Bond where he ends up sacrificing himself

00:39:13.660 to the woman he loves and society at large on an island, right?

00:39:17.940 Yeah, well, that motif of voluntary self-sacrifice,

00:39:21.360 well, that's obviously deeply Christian, obviously,

00:39:26.380 although there are radical precursors to the idea, for example,

00:39:31.020 in the Jewish scriptures and throughout the Old Testament,

00:39:33.640 the idea that sacrifice pleases God

00:39:36.660 and that there's an ultimate form of sacrifice that's ultimately pleasing.

00:39:40.540 And that's all.

00:39:42.220 And then you might say, well, is that true?

00:39:44.460 And the answer to that is something like,

00:39:46.280 well, it's not true from the narrow materialist reductionist perspective,

00:39:50.240 but that's because that is forbidden from the beginning

00:39:54.340 when you're playing that game.

00:39:56.180 But it is true if you're trying to figure out, for example,

00:39:58.480 how you bring peace to your household and meaning to your life

00:40:01.920 and productive abundance to your society.

00:40:04.440 All those things seem relevant, and so serving that kind of relevance also seems to be something like serving the truth,

00:40:12.040 or maybe the essence of serving the truth, and that's not the same viewpoint that underlies the scientific enterprise as such.

00:40:23.140 What that shows is not that the scientific enterprise is correct, and the religious enterprise or the narrative enterprise wrong,

00:40:29.680 but that the scientific enterprise is radically incomplete in its current form

00:40:35.520 and prone to spiral badly sideways if it isn't encapsulated within the proper structure of value.

00:40:42.380 And I think we're at a point where we know that.

00:40:45.820 Okay, so that's a quick outline of two different ways of looking at the world, right?

00:40:54.300 the object world

00:40:58.120 and the world of value

00:40:59.840 and the way things seem to be

00:41:01.660 constituted is that the world of value

00:41:03.960 is the foundation

00:41:05.460 proper foundation for the

00:41:07.320 world of objects

00:41:08.720 not the other way around

00:41:10.260 is that unless you're

00:41:11.940 an ethically self-sacrificing scientist

00:41:16.160 the truths you discover

00:41:18.720 will serve

00:41:20.180 malevolent purposes

00:41:22.060 rather than producing abundance and peace.

00:41:27.080 Right, and so what that means is that the aim of the scientist

00:41:30.000 is the paramount issue with regards even to the productivity of science itself.

00:41:35.600 Yeah, and that seems to me, I just cannot see for a moment

00:41:38.600 how that can be disputed.

00:41:40.820 And even if it is disputed, we bloody well know it

00:41:43.280 because you can see the motif of science gone wrong

00:41:47.240 permeate our movies.

00:41:49.220 The Terminator series is a good example of that, for example.

00:41:52.060 and which we're likely to live out in our lifetime 0.62

00:41:55.300 because we're foolish enough not to pay attention to our own warnings, you might say.

00:42:00.580 You know, the Chinese surveillance system is called Skynet. 0.95

00:42:05.100 It's literally called Skynet.

00:42:07.200 700 million closed-circuit TV cameras.

00:42:10.640 Full-gate analysis.

00:42:11.920 Those systems can assess where you are and who you are, even if you mask yourself. 0.99

00:42:16.860 And when the engineers were called on that, the Chinese engineers were called on that,

00:42:21.720 why do you name it Skynet? Didn't you see the Terminator series? They said, because they're

00:42:26.380 engineers and nerds, they said, of course we saw the Terminator series. We're building the good

00:42:31.480 Skynet, which is, of course, exactly what the engineers in the Terminator movies thought,

00:42:36.480 right? And so if your good is defined by the tenants of the Chinese Communist Party, 0.91

00:42:41.820 you're not going to build the good Skynet. 0.59

00:42:51.720 Okay, so I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the positive masculine and the way it's portrayed in narrative and in movies.

00:43:03.720 And I wanted to tell you a bit about the negative masculine and the positive and negative feminine.

00:43:08.360 And Tammy touched on that a little bit with her discussion of Snow White.

00:43:12.040 But there's only so much you can do in 40 minutes.

00:43:14.300 And so I think what I'll do, I'll do that with the discussion with Jonathan, because he's very good at that sort of thing.

00:43:19.920 because the characters can go right and go wrong

00:43:25.360 and male characters can go right and go wrong

00:43:28.080 and female characters can go right and wrong

00:43:30.500 and there's a pattern to that

00:43:31.760 and our deep stories like Snow White

00:43:34.160 which is a cultural phenomena

00:43:35.680 and has to be hit the target squarely to work

00:43:39.240 even as a commercial product

00:43:41.180 our pop cultural narratives

00:43:48.580 are reflective of the disorder of our ethical systems.

00:43:52.940 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:43:54.300 So I'll talk with Jonathan about that

00:43:56.420 and we'll walk through that

00:43:57.420 and see if we can get that straight.

00:43:59.320 For now, I think I'll just reiterate

00:44:00.920 so hopefully we'll make this clear.

00:44:03.580 So that there's two problems you have to solve in the world.

00:44:08.840 This is another way of thinking about it.

00:44:10.000 You have to know what the world's made of, right?

00:44:12.720 But that's not enough.

00:44:13.860 You have to know how to orient yourself in the world.

00:44:16.580 You have to know how to navigate.

00:44:18.240 And to navigate, you have to prioritize.

00:44:20.680 You have to establish a destination, an aim.

00:44:23.420 That's the promised land, you might say, assuming you're aiming up.

00:44:28.460 Or the shining city on the hill, or the heavenly Jerusalem.

00:44:32.280 Those are all abstractions of the idea of the proper aim.

00:44:35.980 And if your aim's appropriate, the world shows itself as a pathway forward,

00:44:42.480 and the person who walks that pathway to the proper aim, that's the hero.

00:44:47.380 And the hero is characterized in drama and narrative, right, as an example to imitate, right?

00:44:54.280 And you need to know that because you have to walk through the world.

00:44:56.880 If you were just a passive recipient of sense data, value-free sense data,

00:45:05.660 which is sort of the ideal scientist from the enlightenment perspective,

00:45:09.560 well then, if you didn't have to navigate and you were just a passive recipient,

00:45:14.580 then value wouldn't be necessary.

00:45:16.180 But because you're a limited perceiver and everything has a cost

00:45:21.140 and you can only do so many things, you have to prioritize.

00:45:25.360 You have to do one thing rather than the other

00:45:27.360 and you have to organize all the things you're going to do towards some end.

00:45:31.640 and the organization towards that end

00:45:35.600 determines the manner in which the world makes itself manifest to you.

00:45:40.600 That's a terrifying thing to understand too.

00:45:42.740 One of the things you can ask yourself very seriously

00:45:45.640 is that if the sacrifices you're making

00:45:49.040 aren't being met by appreciation from yourself, others, or God, so to speak,

00:45:56.140 it's very possible that there's something pathologically wrong with your aim.

00:46:01.640 Right, and that's very, very, that's a terrible thing to contemplate, you know,

00:46:05.160 especially when your failures appear to be radically arbitrary.

00:46:09.700 But it's a hopeful realization as well,

00:46:14.920 because if the reason that the world's in disorder around you

00:46:18.100 is because your aim is pathological,

00:46:20.600 then you have some hope of fixing it.

00:46:22.680 If the world itself is just turned against you,

00:46:25.020 well, you know, too bad for you.

00:46:27.100 There's nothing left for you. 1.00

00:46:28.820 but if you could get on your knees and figure out why the hell you're wrong and stupid 1.00

00:46:33.140 that's a big book that then 0.99

00:46:37.120 you know then you'd have the possibility of rectifying it moving and moving forward effectively

00:46:44.580 and since there's no limit to your ignorance if you admit to that ignorance there's no limit to

00:46:50.160 what you could learn and if you take the humble attitude that there's no limit to what you can

00:46:55.520 learn in consequence of facing your error, then you'll walk the self-correcting pathway up to the

00:47:02.340 shining city on the hill. That's exactly right. Yeah. So,

00:47:07.020 and those are the ideas. Those ideas are coded in our deep narratives. And you see,

00:47:14.960 we don't understand that. And the scientific mind dispenses with all that and proclaims that the

00:47:21.500 world's a value-free place, and the narrative is nothing but delusion and superstition, and that's

00:47:26.420 wrong enough to make all of us sick, disunited, and unhappy. Right.

00:47:35.600 Okay, well, that seemed to make a certain amount of sense, I hope, and

00:47:39.220 even though it's very, very complicated, and I think what I'll do now is I'll invite Jonathan

00:47:44.100 to come out and offer what he has to offer, and we'll continue this discussion, so.

00:47:51.500 how you feeling

00:47:57.700 that's a lot

00:48:00.180 well like i said i haven't done that for a long time you know it's like 2016 or something like

00:48:07.540 that and so it was fun to go back and revisit that and see if i could get a little clearer

00:48:11.980 because it's nice to get something a little clearer every time you revisit it you know and

00:48:16.580 So, did that happen today?

00:48:18.620 I think I got the explanation for why the value structures have to be characterized more clear than I did when I was lecturing for Maps of Meaning, for example.

00:48:28.640 So, I think I understand that in a manner that's more compressible.

00:48:32.280 So, alright, so...

00:48:33.940 Okay, so I want to start, and I also went to see the Snow White movie.

00:48:41.520 And I guess a way to resume what Jordan is saying is to ask yourself the question.

00:48:46.580 Why was it so boring?

00:48:50.020 Like, why was it inane, and why is it that no one cares about it, right?

00:48:55.080 And so what Jordan is trying to portray is that stories are not infinitely malleable.

00:49:01.380 That unlike, in accordance with the kind of postmodern world, we are saying that there is an overlay of value that brings the world of facts together.

00:49:12.920 The postmoderns say that too.

00:49:15.060 But the postmoderns think that that world that is overlaid is arbitrary

00:49:19.780 and that it is only a sense of force and a sense of power.

00:49:25.340 But what we're trying to say is that actually the order of attention,

00:49:28.640 the hierarchy of attention, is objective.

00:49:31.600 And the reason why you know it's objective is because the Snow White movie is boring

00:49:35.780 because no one likes to watch it.

00:49:37.740 What I mean is that no one cares, right?

00:49:40.120 This idea that Jordan is talking about where it is that you put your attention on something that reflects a universal structure of values, and that's what makes people care about it.

00:49:52.260 Now, you can push on that, right?

00:49:54.240 You can push on it towards extremes.

00:49:57.060 It is possible because we do have in us a desire for exploration, right?

00:50:01.220 So you can push on that and create horror stories, do this type of pushing into the margins.

00:50:06.460 But at some point, if you don't order the story in the proper way,

00:50:11.940 people just stop paying attention, right?

00:50:14.880 Because no one will pay to watch propaganda.

00:50:17.200 Well, it isn't even exactly that people stop paying attention.

00:50:20.580 It's that their attention isn't gripped, right?

00:50:23.920 Because, you know, you might think, well, you could go to Snow White

00:50:26.640 and you could feel sorry for Disney

00:50:28.740 because they spent a quarter of a billion dollars on this movie.

00:50:34.300 and so you'd expect it to grip your attention but it doesn't and and and that's so weird you see

00:50:41.640 this is this is the crucial thing here with regards to Jonathan's comments about the the

00:50:46.240 reality of the value structure you see because if you had any sense and and you could control what

00:50:52.900 you thought was important you'd think well I spent you know you bring your family I spent 0.97

00:50:58.500 fifty dollars going to this movie god damn it I'm gonna enjoy it and that just doesn't work 0.97

00:51:03.480 right? You cannot force yourself to care about a movie that you don't care about. 0.98

00:51:08.420 It has to entrance you, right? It has to grip you. Now, the question is, why does it grip you?

00:51:16.160 See, this is, and this is an unbelievably important question. This is exactly the same question

00:51:20.600 that the religious types grapple with when they talk about the issue of calling. You know,

00:51:26.080 there are things in the world that attract your attention. Now, sometimes those are pathological

00:51:30.420 things, and you know, you should get your act together and straighten up, but it's not, it's

00:51:35.960 very common that it's your destiny calling to you, it's the next step on your journey calling to you,

00:51:43.420 it's your higher purpose calling to you, and if you have the courage to attend to that calling,

00:51:49.240 then you magically transform, that's how it works, and everyone knows that, and so then when the

00:51:56.400 narrative deviates from the pattern it no one cares it's because it doesn't call you anymore

00:52:02.580 it doesn't call you because it doesn't reflect the transcendent pattern that's that's it and

00:52:08.320 and it's insane like we've been we've been told now for decades that the idea of a the story of 0.80

00:52:14.980 a princess that finds her prince is ridiculous and you know it's passe and it's antiquated

00:52:21.140 that is literally how the world continues to exist like a woman and a man coming together 0.92

00:52:27.580 and get it coming together and then that is how the world continues to exist the idea that that 0.99

00:52:32.520 is ridiculous and inane is passe is the dumbest thing in the world you can have all the political 0.98

00:52:37.420 ideology and revolutions you want if you have no people you have no world right 1.00

00:52:42.740 yeah well and you can have a narrative that's bent enough that you proclaim that a world

00:52:49.080 without people would be a better world. 0.59

00:52:51.020 Right.

00:52:51.600 And there's a villainous narrative for you.

00:52:54.620 You know, and you can make everybody guilty

00:52:56.300 about the fact that they want to get married

00:52:58.060 and have children

00:52:59.660 because children are part of the force 1.00

00:53:01.380 that's devouring the damn planet. 0.99

00:53:03.120 And then you might ask exactly 1.00

00:53:04.940 whose aim underlies that narrative

00:53:07.200 as you should.

00:53:09.380 And so, and we're in a situation

00:53:11.620 where that's literally the case.

00:53:13.460 Like the New York,

00:53:14.140 was the New York Times last year

00:53:15.620 talked about the morality of limiting

00:53:18.300 the number of children that you bring into the world

00:53:20.280 because of the planetary burden

00:53:21.980 that you're placing on, I don't know what, 0.99

00:53:24.320 the goddess of nature, some damn thing. 0.97

00:53:27.160 So, yeah, but I think that it's encouraging now. 0.99

00:53:31.280 Like, actually, this, to me,

00:53:33.340 this most recent version of Snow White

00:53:35.000 is actually hopeful, right?

00:53:36.960 And the reason why it's hopeful

00:53:38.400 is because when you watch it,

00:53:40.540 you can see that they went way too far.

00:53:43.280 And they're actually trying to backtrack

00:53:45.080 and they're trying to fix it.

00:53:46.420 And it ends up in this jumbled, confused mess.

00:53:48.960 But you can feel that they're trying to fix it.

00:53:51.440 Which means that it feels like we're at the end.

00:53:54.300 We're at the nadir of this type of ideological storytelling.

00:53:57.380 And that hopefully it's all uphill from there.

00:54:00.200 So, you know.

00:54:04.620 So, the original trailer for the Snow White movie.

00:54:09.500 Back then, that was a year and a half ago or something like that. 0.96

00:54:12.580 They decided they were going to replace the dwarfs with like a diversity crowd.

00:54:16.420 and that, see, there's an unbelievable arrogance in that, because, especially for storytellers,

00:54:23.320 because there's actually reasons that those dwarfs were who they were, so I can go through

00:54:27.900 the reasons, so in the original Grimm Brothers fairy tale, the dwarfs are partial manifestations

00:54:33.660 of the positive masculine, so they don't have names, so they're not, they're not stellar

00:54:40.480 individual men, but they're men who work hard to do the things that are necessary, so they're

00:54:48.980 minors, and they keep a clean house, and so this is very different than this new Snow White, because

00:54:55.320 they're like messy little rats in the Snow White movie, and the woman, who's like this progressive 1.00

00:55:00.740 princess, has to come in and clean house for them. No, she tells them what to do. Yes, she tells, that's true, that's true. 0.99

00:55:06.480 Tell them how to clean their house.

00:55:08.120 Yes, that's true.

00:55:09.040 That's true, Jonathan.

00:55:10.220 That's true.

00:55:10.980 In the original, the dwarves kept a good house.

00:55:13.380 And now the Snow White, the princess, is getting away from the evil queen. 0.58

00:55:18.380 Okay, so whether you know it or not, 1.00

00:55:20.340 that's what all the young women in your country are trying to do right now. 1.00

00:55:23.700 They're trying to get away from the evil queen 1.00

00:55:26.300 who is attempting to feed them poison apples

00:55:29.680 so that they're infertile and unattractive.

00:55:32.540 And it's working. 0.97

00:55:33.540 And so you can't muck with that story, and it's partly because there is a negative feminine, you might say, and we could flesh it out a little bit.

00:55:44.820 And so the negative feminine is the older woman who, instead of being a mentor to a young woman, is holding on desperately to her primarily sexual attractiveness

00:55:55.780 and the power that confers on her to be envious of the upcoming generation, 1.00

00:56:02.160 including her own daughters, and to hurt them so that she maintains control.

00:56:08.960 And that's an eternal story, man.

00:56:11.700 And you see that reflected in all sorts of psychological investigations.

00:56:16.000 So, for example, one of Freud's primary discoveries

00:56:18.640 was the pathology of the Oedipal mother in the pathological family.

00:56:23.960 And so one of the conundrums that human beings have is that we have a very lengthy dependency period, right? 0.73

00:56:31.340 Far more than any other creature.

00:56:32.920 Like your kids are autonomous maybe when they're 80, 18, or 40.

00:56:38.580 And so they're unbelievably dependent.

00:56:43.800 And what that means is that there is very little that's more important than mother maternal love,

00:56:49.260 especially for very little kids.

00:56:50.600 but it also means that because that force is so powerful, and children are so dependent on it,

00:56:56.280 if it pathologizes and overextends itself, it's literally a world-destroying force.

00:57:02.840 And so the Oedipal story in the Freudian world is the mother who's a little too close to her son in particular.

00:57:10.360 And you can imagine a situation like that arising where there's a lot of tension between the father and the mother,

00:57:15.920 and the mother turns inappropriately to her son

00:57:18.900 as a source of support and attention.

00:57:21.820 And because she desperately needs that,

00:57:24.400 she sabotages his attempts to become independent and attractive.

00:57:28.800 And this is exactly, by the way, 0.99

00:57:30.920 what's portrayed in the Disney movie Sleeping Beauty.

00:57:34.400 You remember that Prince Philip is caught in a dungeon by the evil queen.

00:57:39.500 And she basically tells him that although he wants to go find Sleeping Beauty

00:57:43.520 and, like, have a life, she's going to lock him in the dungeon

00:57:47.560 until he's laughably old. 1.00

00:57:50.440 Right, and then these fairies come along. 0.98

00:57:52.640 They're the benevolent feminine, and they get rid of his chains, 0.99

00:57:55.900 and they encourage him to leave, and he escapes, 0.99

00:57:58.340 and she turns into this horrible dragon that breathes fire, 1.00

00:58:01.600 like she's the force of nature itself gone pathologically wrong.

00:58:07.720 And she stands in his way, and he has to fight his way through her.

00:58:11.600 He uses the sword of truth and the shield of virtue to overcome the dragon that the evil queen turns into.

00:58:19.220 And then he hacks his way through the thorns and finds Sleeping Beauty and wakes her up.

00:58:23.240 And you can't mess with that story because it's always happening.

00:58:27.880 And it has to happen because otherwise the prince doesn't meet the princess.

00:58:32.340 And the princess stays unconscious and asleep. 0.99

00:58:35.440 And the evil queen rules.

00:58:37.340 And the dragon emerges and burns everything to the ground.

00:58:40.620 and it's strange that we don't know this when we're watching the movies but it doesn't matter

00:58:45.940 because they grip us right and they grip us by our most fundamental presuppositions

00:58:51.080 yeah right and and if you deviate from that everyone's bored and you can spend a quarter

00:58:57.780 of a billion dollars and it doesn't make a bloody bit of difference yeah we we started we started

00:59:05.600 with, you know, Dustin Hoffman being seduced by his girlfriend's mother in The Graduate

00:59:11.580 in the late 60s, early 70s, I think it was, and, you know, a bit provocative, a bit enticing,

00:59:20.020 and at the end of that, if you follow that line, you end up with, I'm sorry, I'm going 1.00

00:59:24.120 to say the word, but you end up with MILFs, you know, it's like you end up with, like, 0.95

00:59:28.000 these old ladies, old, what do they call them, like, the Cougars or whatever, like, completely 1.00

00:59:33.200 degenerate world of women in their 50s you know acting like they are still little starlets you 1.00

00:59:40.300 know and that's really like that brings about total chaos in our society well it's also the 1.00

00:59:45.260 case that it's also the case frequently that it's oh god we're gonna get in such trouble here

00:59:52.380 it's that like there is a developmental course that's appropriate to the propagation of life

00:59:59.420 And so, what you want as you age, if you're a man or a woman, is, well, you start out young, and you have your romantic adventure with one another, and you have no children, and then you have children, and then all of a sudden, it's not about you anymore, it's about them.

01:00:15.340 And then if you sacrifice for them, and they grow up courageous and attractive,

01:00:21.440 they find their own mates, and then they have children.

01:00:23.480 And then your role is grandparent.

01:00:25.860 It's not competitor for the attention of the virile young man.

01:00:31.180 And you'd only want that if you hadn't had your life, right?

01:00:34.940 Because then you're... 1.00

01:00:35.860 See, the evil queen wants to hang on to her youth and beauty for a reason. 1.00

01:00:40.700 And I'm not trying to say that, like, every older woman who's trying to look attractive 0.99

01:00:45.080 is falling into that pit. 1.00

01:00:46.880 I'm just saying that there's a desperation

01:00:50.260 that comes from not following

01:00:52.540 the appropriate pattern properly,

01:00:54.680 and it becomes pathological.

01:00:56.760 It's like being the oldest guy at the frat party.

01:00:59.480 It's like when you're 18 and you're at a frat party,

01:01:02.220 it's like, no problem, because you're 18.

01:01:03.900 But if you're 40 and you're at the frat party, 0.91

01:01:06.460 people should be wondering just who the hell you are 0.97

01:01:09.560 and why you think you're 18. 0.98

01:01:11.760 because a 40-year-old,

01:01:13.420 an 18-year-old 40-year-old

01:01:16.040 is a pretty ugly sight,

01:01:17.540 much less a 13-year-old 40-year-old.

01:01:20.420 Right, and so it's everything in its place, right?

01:01:23.800 And so, and you can see in these narratives,

01:01:27.220 the evil queen narratives,

01:01:28.320 you can see,

01:01:29.220 in for a penny, in for a pound,

01:01:31.220 you can see exactly what's happened

01:01:32.620 in the universities too

01:01:33.660 because they're basically,

01:01:36.000 they've become,

01:01:36.880 they're basically,

01:01:37.560 they've basically been taken over 1.00

01:01:39.340 by evil queen types 0.92

01:01:40.580 who are poisoning the young women.

01:01:42.500 And, you know, I'm not saying this lightly. 0.96

01:01:44.940 We bloody well know that the most miserable people 0.99

01:01:49.820 in the United States are liberal women between 18 and 34. 1.00

01:01:56.240 And, you know, here's the dreadful thing. 0.98

01:02:03.540 Like, you'd hope that education would illuminate

01:02:07.200 and enlighten and free,

01:02:08.960 but what's happened in the universities,

01:02:10.580 is that the more educated, educated, 1.00

01:02:15.060 the more poisoned apples the young women have been fed, 1.00

01:02:18.840 the more unconscious and miserable they've become. 1.00

01:02:21.920 And that's because they've fallen under the sway of the evil queen. 0.90

01:02:26.100 And so then you might ask yourself, 0.97

01:02:27.700 because this is all about how the women are going wrong, 0.92

01:02:30.220 you might ask, where the hell are the men?

01:02:31.880 And that's a really good question too.

01:02:34.600 And so, because they're not standing up and saying,

01:02:37.500 enough of this.

01:02:38.340 and so the the story when you see the roles especially in fairy tales when you see the

01:02:47.360 roles of the feminine and the masculine you know you you realize that these are really

01:02:52.160 they're archetypes obviously but they play a structural role and if you think about it you

01:02:57.700 know to bring it back almost to the beginning when you talk about science there is this sense

01:03:02.500 even in the scientific endeavor there is a sense in which there is this union you could say

01:03:07.580 of masculine and feminine that is productive, you know. And so you have, and you really have to

01:03:14.240 reduce it to its elements. It's difficult because people get, take it personal. It's like all of us

01:03:20.260 are more than our gender. All of us are more than our sex, right? But when we have sex together and

01:03:26.200 we produce a child, that's what we are, right? That's the reality of that moment. And there's a 0.55

01:03:32.000 There's a reality to that, which is that the woman provides the body for the child, right? 0.88

01:03:39.240 The man provides necessarily for the pregnant woman that has the baby in her belly. 0.87

01:03:45.280 The man will provide protection, will provide sustenance, will protect her because of that moment,

01:03:51.820 will provide direction for the family.

01:03:54.460 And that is how the scientific endeavor works as well.

01:03:57.020 You have a body, you have facts, and then you have a vertical.

01:04:01.280 You have a reason why you're looking at the facts, right?

01:04:04.160 There's a reason why you care about certain facts and not others,

01:04:07.600 and that gathers it towards a productive scientific endeavor.

01:04:11.620 You know, when you are, it's really very similar to the prince coming and kissing Snow White.

01:04:16.020 Because when you're doing science, you're not studying everything at once.

01:04:21.340 That's not possible.

01:04:22.740 You have to select something, and you have to bind it and bring it together.

01:04:26.700 And that the attention that you give to that, let's say, bound together amount of facts is productive towards.

01:04:35.840 Well, so that plethora of valueless facts is, to further your metaphor, that's the chaos that's potentially productive.

01:04:48.280 It's use potential to avoid the problem.

01:04:50.060 It's potential, it's potential, right, exactly that.

01:04:52.800 And then the act of prioritizing is the act of the, what do you call that?

01:05:02.080 The fruit-defying logos.

01:05:03.620 That's the right way of thinking about it.

01:05:05.480 Use the image.

01:05:06.680 You have the seed that is placed in the earth.

01:05:10.180 Yeah.

01:05:10.660 The seed is bodiless purpose or bodiless pattern.

01:05:15.760 And the earth is a body without a pattern.

01:05:20.500 So in the seed is the whole tree.

01:05:22.260 but the tree is nothing without the body.

01:05:24.640 So the seed goes into the earth

01:05:26.560 and the earth provides a body for the seed

01:05:29.480 and then you have a new tree.

01:05:31.640 It's the pattern of everything.

01:05:32.980 It's the pattern of life.

01:05:33.920 But it is also the pattern of the sexual union

01:05:37.200 especially in the narrative form

01:05:40.060 especially the one you see in the fairy tales

01:05:42.180 or you see in the Bible

01:05:43.260 or you see in the mythology.

01:05:44.960 Now you see, you might say

01:05:46.200 if you're a scientific materialist

01:05:47.940 you might say 0.78

01:05:48.800 well that's ridiculous symbolism 0.93

01:05:50.900 and spiritualist nonsense, but then, see, the most famous reductionist, materialist, atheist 0.68

01:05:57.940 alive today is Richard Dawkins, and Richard Dawkins wrote a book where he claimed that,

01:06:03.840 and this is a pure biological claim as far as he was concerned, that an organism could not survive

01:06:08.520 in an environment unless it was a microcosm of that environment. Okay, so now that's a very

01:06:15.960 interesting claim, because it means that the organism itself reflects the entire structure.

01:06:21.260 Well, we see the very essence of human survival is the dynamic between masculine and feminine.

01:06:30.980 And if that's the fundamental biological reality, and the fundamental biological reality has to be

01:06:37.460 a microcosm or a reflection of the environment, then you have to conclude that the masculine

01:06:43.300 element of the environment and the feminine element of the environment are the superordinate

01:06:48.100 principle. I mean, this is Dawkins' own argument. I tried to make that case to him when I talked to

01:06:53.500 him like two months ago, three months ago, but he knew what I meant, but we never got anywhere with

01:06:59.540 the discussion, you know, because it's very annoying to be proved wrong by your own ideas.

01:07:04.600 Right, right, right. Seriously, seriously. Yeah, he couldn't deal with the consequences

01:07:11.500 of what that meant and how it does ultimately do what you proposed at the outset, which

01:07:17.400 is that the narrative structure precedes the scientific endeavor almost just necessarily.

01:07:24.960 You know, in the scientists, in the things we care about, in the way we decide what to

01:07:29.540 study, in the way that people fund certain studies rather than others, in every single

01:07:34.440 way that science happens, it has to be framed within the narrative of the hierarchy of values.

01:07:39.660 there's no way around it. Yeah, well, and it's, if you know anything about scientists, like the

01:07:42.920 actual science, first of all, most scientists aren't scientists, they're just functionaries,

01:07:47.780 and so, and that's partly because you need a lot of functionaries, the functionary to genius

01:07:53.140 ratio has to be pretty high for anything to work, so I'm not complaining about that, look, there has

01:07:58.300 to be beginner scientists, like graduate students and so forth, and the science they do isn't very

01:08:03.140 good, but they have to learn, and there has to be scientists who kind of publish, but nothing real

01:08:07.780 useful, but they teach. And then there's people who are real scientists, and there aren't very

01:08:12.500 many of them, but they do a lot of work. And those scientists, see, they're not pursuing money,

01:08:19.140 because if they were pursuing money, they wouldn't be scientists, because it's not a way to make a

01:08:23.620 lot of money. So then you might say, well, what are they pursuing? And the answer is, well, what the

01:08:28.800 true scientists are pursuing is what calls to them. They have a religious commitment to their

01:08:33.680 object of inquiry. And what's the nature of the commitment? This is worth studying. Right? This

01:08:39.900 interests me. This engages me. I would voluntarily spend all my time chasing this. Chasing what?

01:08:46.500 You know, Barbara McClintock, I think that was her name, she studied the genetics of corn coloration

01:08:52.600 in Indian corn for like 30 years, something like that. And she was kind of an outsider. Everybody

01:08:57.320 thought, what the hell's with this crazy broad studying like variations in color and corn? And 0.98

01:09:02.720 she made a discovery that was foundational to a number of cancer cures, you know. And so

01:09:08.260 everything's a mystery, and if you study it enough, you get to the bottom of things. And

01:09:13.660 the genuine scientists are called by a burning bush. That's the right way of thinking about it,

01:09:19.120 and it motivates them. And it's something that's, it's a manifestation of a superordinate value

01:09:24.840 system that precedes them even, because they chase it. They don't pick what they're interested in,

01:09:30.760 it picks them, and then they devote their life to it. And that's not in the scientific model.

01:09:38.320 It's completely, it's prior to it. And so what else is prior to it? You have to believe the

01:09:43.300 universe is intelligible. Well, what's the proof of that? You have to believe that attempting to

01:09:49.520 understand the universe is positive. Well, maybe it is, and maybe it's not. You have to understand,

01:09:55.400 assume that you could understand, and that there's communal value in that, and those are all a priori

01:10:02.660 commitments before the scientific endeavor even gets off the ground, and then you have to assume that pursuing what interests you

01:10:09.200 is

01:10:10.900 justification for your sacrifices, right?

01:10:13.860 And so that's all part of the narrative in which science is embedded, and if that narrative is

01:10:20.600 upward-oriented in the proper manner, then science becomes a productive enterprise.

01:10:24.560 Otherwise, it becomes like Dr. Evil and nuclear annihilation.

01:10:29.840 Right. Same data.

01:10:33.320 Indeed.

01:10:35.260 All right. I think we're going to bring Tammy out,

01:10:37.760 but I want to make a shameless call to all of you,

01:10:41.080 which is that right now in Hollywood, in the world of storytelling,

01:10:46.220 everything is shaking.

01:10:47.920 We can feel like the model of this kind of ideological propaganda-type stories

01:10:53.040 are falling apart.

01:10:54.560 But now we all need, you, everyone here in this room has something very precious, and

01:11:03.540 that is your attention.

01:11:05.160 And so we all have to be deliberate about what it is we give our attention to, what

01:11:09.820 it is we, and so we can criticize and we complain about how bad the stories are, but we also

01:11:15.520 have to move into a new form of storytelling.

01:11:19.100 We have to be able to move towards better stories.

01:11:21.140 And so I'm going to, if you are interested, I, myself, and my team, we are rewriting the fairy tales right now.

01:11:28.280 We're doing it in a mode that is celebratory, that is trying to elevate them to the highest level that we can.

01:11:34.800 And so if you're interested in that, we wrote a version of Snow White called Snow White and the Widow Queen.

01:11:39.340 And we're hoping to prove Hollywood wrong.

01:11:41.920 We're trying to prove to them that if you tell these stories beautifully with a type of honor and a type of celebration,

01:11:47.680 that that is actually the stories that matter

01:11:49.980 and it's the stories that people will care for

01:11:51.620 so thank you for that little

01:11:53.020 so you know I'll just

01:11:59.960 I'll just put a capstone on what Jonathan

01:12:02.080 just said if you understand

01:12:04.020 that there's no difference

01:12:05.940 between what you worship and what you pay attention

01:12:08.080 to if you actually understand that

01:12:09.840 you'll be a lot more careful with what you do

01:12:12.060 with your attention right because

01:12:13.980 what you're doing with your attention goes

01:12:16.020 all the way up, all the way up, or all the way down, right, so beware, and that's especially true

01:12:24.660 given these machines that you're going to be increasingly interacting with, because

01:12:29.220 they will take you wherever your attention, they will take you towards whatever you orient

01:12:36.580 your attention toward, and so be careful, that's for sure. Okay, Tam, let's come out,

01:12:44.300 I'm about to have you come out and, uh...

01:12:49.300 Hi.

01:12:55.300 Ready?

01:12:57.300 I'm ready. Okay.

01:13:02.300 What's your take on the heated political situation between the U.S. and Canada?

01:13:14.300 There's a little bit more.

01:13:15.420 How can we work to keep the friendship going between our two great nations?

01:13:25.380 Do you want to start?

01:13:27.180 Sure, I'll start.

01:13:29.220 The first thing that you have to know is that most of you really don't want Canada to join the United States.

01:13:36.780 I'm just saying the next elections will not be great if that happens.

01:13:41.520 And so that's the first thing.

01:13:42.920 I think the second thing that I'd like to say is, you know, we're watching, it's hard to tell, like Donald Trump, there's something that he wants, he hasn't yet completely revealed what that is, he's just, he's pushing and prodding, he's making everything shake, and at some point it will become clear what he wants.

01:14:01.160 My intuition is that what he wants is for Canada to get its act together, you know, militarily, economically, and, you know, and so I think that that's what he wants.

01:14:13.200 And if that's what he wants, then I'm all for it, you know.

01:14:16.280 But if there's a darker aspect to it, which is if it is this just kind of America trying to find someone to bully to make itself look strong, then I don't see that playing out well, you know, in the long term.

01:14:29.420 Yeah, well, you know, Trump is a mystery, and I suspect, I suspect to some degree even to himself, and as we all, well, as we all are, right, as we all are, and he's a complex character, and he's playing a very complex role.

01:14:46.880 So I'm not saying any of this lightly, you know, and I do believe that there's a part of him that is hoping that your northern neighbor gets its act together, even if he's primarily indicating that by contempt.

01:15:05.220 Because, like, well, I think one of the most productive ways of viewing what Trump is doing

01:15:11.600 without being naive is by observing that he couldn't be dismissive and contemptuous of Canada

01:15:20.280 if the groundwork for that hadn't been laid.

01:15:24.080 And it has been laid.

01:15:25.320 I can say that as a Canadian.

01:15:26.460 And it's been laid in a bunch of ways.

01:15:28.500 the last 10 years of Trudeau government have been appalling.

01:15:34.360 We were as rich as you were 10 years ago.

01:15:36.600 In fact, we had a slight advantage.

01:15:38.600 And now you make, you produce a dollar for every 60 cents we produce.

01:15:43.920 That's not good.

01:15:44.880 And the prognosis for Canada is worse performance over the next 40 years.

01:15:49.380 We've become almost entirely reliant on your country for our fossil fuel production

01:15:55.040 because we're too clueless to build pipelines

01:15:58.260 across our country, east to west.

01:16:00.640 And when the leaders of Germany and Japan,

01:16:04.260 I can't say this without it hurting my heart,

01:16:06.560 when the leaders of Germany and Japan came to Trudeau,

01:16:11.560 when the Russians started saber-rattling in the Ukraine,

01:16:15.060 they both asked him for untrammeled access

01:16:18.400 to Canadian liquid natural gas for like the next 40 years,

01:16:22.820 And he told both of them within the same month that he couldn't make a business case for that.

01:16:27.700 And Trump signed a billion-dollar deal, a trillion-dollar deal this month that should have been Canada's and could have been.

01:16:36.360 And so, and then our country, our leader, Trudeau, has, you know, he's done some terrible things.

01:16:45.480 He locked down Canadians' bank accounts, which was utterly unforgivable.

01:16:48.860 That was the most totalitarian thing I've ever seen a Western Democrat leader do.

01:16:52.820 And then he also, he's a WF puppet to the core, and he also has told Canadians for 10 years that

01:17:02.780 the country has absolutely no national identity of any value except that of colonial patriarchal

01:17:11.100 oppressor, essentially. And now Trump says, well, you've got a pretty pathetic country there. 0.99

01:17:16.700 Why don't you just be one of our states? One, how insulting is that? It's like, 0.99

01:17:21.400 how about 10 of your states, you know? No, one. You deserve one. It's like, oh, just one? It's

01:17:29.940 like, and what Canadians do, they don't go, oh, you know, what the hell are you talking about?

01:17:36.160 Look at us. Like, you know, we're together. They go, quit picking on us. It's like, that's pretty

01:17:42.480 sad, you know, because it should be just laughable. But the problem is, and this is what Trump's

01:17:47.040 trying to figure out. It's not laughable. It's not laughable. The leader of a foreign country

01:17:53.600 says, I don't think your country should exist. And the people in the country go, well, that's

01:17:58.060 unfair. That's the best defense they can come up with. And so, and our military in Canada is in,

01:18:04.560 oh my God, like your military is suffering under, you know, after 15 years of DEI idiocy, but you 0.96

01:18:11.800 should see ours our bloody soldiers have to buy their own boots and really that's that's the truth 0.96

01:18:17.800 and so you know there's some well-deserved contempt some contempt towards that is well 0.73

01:18:25.100 deserved and trump is a bull in the china shop and i think he was very careless in his comments

01:18:30.240 about canada and he made a big mistake because he the liberal party in canada so that's the trudeau

01:18:36.760 party. They were dead in the

01:18:38.840 water a month ago. Dead. The party

01:18:40.660 was going to cease to exist because Trudeau's been

01:18:42.760 such a disaster. And Trump came out

01:18:44.920 and, you know, saber-rattled

01:18:46.780 and threatened Canada. And Canadians 0.70

01:18:48.800 like to feel all virtuously 0.85

01:18:50.780 anti-American. And so now the liberals are

01:18:52.820 riding high. And so that was

01:18:54.640 careless. I mean, unless Trump's

01:18:56.880 goal is truly to destabilize

01:18:58.700 the country. That'll happen if we

01:19:00.640 elect the liberals again.

01:19:02.820 You know, Carney, who's now

01:19:04.520 Canada's prime minister, he's

01:19:06.700 net-zero advocate, man, and like on a major scale, he was governor of the Bank of England. Every stupid idea of the last 20 years 1.00

01:19:13.660 has Mark Carney's name stamped on it on the international scene. He loves diversity, equity, and inclusivity. He's a 1.00

01:19:22.980 central planning WEF

01:19:26.260 mainstay. He was UN climate envoy, and he thinks that three-quarters of the world's fossil fuels have to stay in the ground.

01:19:32.940 And that's what that's like the Canadian economy is like mostly a natural resource economy and

01:19:40.980 So I'm actually I got to say 0.98

01:19:44.380 I'm happy that Trump trumped around like a madman 0.93

01:19:47.420 And I think he made a big mistake politically because I'm not happy with the fact that the Liberals are 0.94

01:19:53.120 Back riding high in the polls. That's quite the cataclysm

01:19:56.740 And I think he's gonna be a sorry man if Carney gets elected because Carney will do absolutely everything he can

01:20:02.600 to undermine everything Trump does

01:20:05.200 on the international scene

01:20:06.440 and he will do that effectively

01:20:08.280 because he has the connections.

01:20:10.480 So that's not good strategically

01:20:12.300 but I'm thrilled that he

01:20:14.760 maybe woke the country up a little bit

01:20:16.680 and forced it to get its

01:20:17.940 attentional priorities straight.

01:20:20.360 Maybe.

01:20:21.320 We'll see.

01:20:22.840 So, yeah.

01:20:25.540 Vote Pierre.

01:20:27.100 Yeah, exactly.

01:20:27.820 That's right.

01:20:28.580 Yeah, yeah.

01:20:29.540 Or else.

01:20:30.720 Right.

01:20:32.600 It's nice of you Americans to notice, by the way.

01:20:41.980 Well, here we are on stage and everything.

01:20:44.540 Hopefully they notice.

01:20:47.120 You have stated that you cannot think of a single negative interaction with your mother.

01:20:54.100 How does one become a mother whose children remember them so fondly?

01:20:59.480 well do you think that you

01:21:04.420 I mean my mom and dad

01:21:06.500 had some trouble in their marriage

01:21:07.920 primarily because my dad suffered from depression

01:21:10.560 and that made things difficult

01:21:12.020 for my mom and genuinely so

01:21:14.440 and it's not like my dad was happy about that

01:21:16.480 but

01:21:16.760 apart from experiencing

01:21:20.300 second hand the difficulties

01:21:22.380 in their marriage did you ever have any negative interactions

01:21:24.680 with my mom?

01:21:26.320 no

01:21:26.500 well so and she's my mom was her mother-in-law so think about that 1.00

01:21:32.120 so why was that well oh my god I'll tell you a funny story this is such a stupid story but 0.99

01:21:41.020 it's my mother in a nutshell oh my god I can't believe this popped into my head 0.99

01:21:45.300 I went to Manhattan 20 years ago with Julian my son and he was singing at Carnegie Hall he

01:21:53.520 was singing in this

01:21:54.880 choir.

01:21:56.580 Yeah, he was singing songs

01:21:59.420 that a Canadian composer had set

01:22:01.240 to poetry that was written by kids

01:22:03.160 in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany

01:22:05.560 and we went to

01:22:06.620 Carnegie Hall and to the UN

01:22:09.140 to hear his choir and I asked my mother

01:22:11.420 and her sister

01:22:13.300 to come to Manhattan and she was always

01:22:15.320 up for an adventure so they had never been to

01:22:17.340 Manhattan and they were

01:22:19.340 pretty thrilled about that and we got to

01:22:21.320 go see Julian at Carnegie Hall and at the UN

01:22:23.360 which was, like, that was cool. And we were in Manhattan, and my sister, who's a bit of a troublemaker and has good sense of humor,

01:22:31.160 decided that she would take my mother and her sister, both of whom are somewhat sheltered farm girls, 1.00

01:22:37.160 to a drag club. And 1.00

01:22:40.640 it was a Chinese restaurant, this was before the whole, you know, everything that's happened in the last 15 years, 1.00

01:22:46.860 so it was a joke

01:22:48.820 and it was this Chinese restaurant 1.00

01:22:51.300 that had this big black drag queen 1.00

01:22:53.620 as the MC 1.00

01:22:54.680 and like girls were going there 1.00

01:22:56.680 with their stagettes 1.00

01:22:57.720 to have a time

01:22:59.120 you know

01:22:59.440 and so we went to this restaurant 1.00

01:23:02.580 and there was this huge black drag queen there 1.00

01:23:05.240 and my poor aunt 1.00

01:23:09.820 who was even more naive

01:23:11.740 and sheltered than my mother 0.99

01:23:12.880 just sat there the whole time 0.99

01:23:14.280 like this

01:23:15.180 but they have good senses of humor 1.00

01:23:19.240 both those women 1.00

01:23:20.000 and anyways this black drag queen came along 1.00

01:23:22.320 and got a look at my mom 1.00

01:23:23.720 and my mom had like snow white hair

01:23:25.740 and was a very fair person 1.00

01:23:27.240 and the drag queen said 0.68

01:23:29.760 you are the whitest person I've ever seen 0.52

01:23:32.780 and my mother got like she kind of blushed

01:23:34.920 and she was kind of laughing 0.96

01:23:36.040 and the black drag queen said 1.00

01:23:38.060 I bet you make a mean apple pie 1.00

01:23:40.040 and my mom said oh yeah yeah I actually do

01:23:42.300 it was so funny because those two people like you couldn't believe they were both part of the same

01:23:51.920 species they were so they were so far apart and they had a fun time and it was a funny interaction

01:23:58.420 but that was my mother like she was up for an adventure and she was a sheltered person in a way

01:24:03.600 but she was no pushover and she was very good-natured and hospitable and she could laugh

01:24:09.140 at herself, and she was a delight to be around, and I, it is the case, like, if I, when the day she

01:24:16.040 died, I was in a helicopter flying over, um, the Grand Canyon, we were in, we'd done a show in Las

01:24:23.380 Vegas, you know, um, for a couple of years, I was banned in Las Vegas, isn't that good? I'm so happy

01:24:32.780 about that it's like gambling mafia murder prostitution no problem but Peterson no way

01:24:41.320 so I definitely regard that as an accomplishment anyways we we were flying over the Grand Canyon

01:24:56.860 and I had traveled quite a bit with my mom on tour as well and we did that partly because we

01:25:01.840 knew that she would have been up for that adventure, and I spent the whole day thinking

01:25:05.060 about her, and I really, and still, even since then, like, I think the one memory that stands

01:25:14.920 out, and this is typical of my mother, too, is my sister, and me, and my little brother,

01:25:20.500 I was probably about 10, and he was about 5, and she was about 7, we were orangutan-ing

01:25:27.060 around the house, and causing trouble, and making noise, and torturing my poor mother,

01:25:31.600 and she took out a wooden spoon

01:25:33.200 and she whacked one of us with it 1.00

01:25:35.560 and it broke

01:25:36.080 and so we laughed

01:25:36.980 and she burst into tears

01:25:38.280 and then, you know,

01:25:39.320 we felt like absolute wretched, 0.98

01:25:41.380 nasty, horrible little savages 0.96

01:25:42.980 which is exactly what we were 0.99

01:25:44.440 for, you know,

01:25:45.480 bothering our mum

01:25:46.520 to the point where she actually got upset

01:25:48.300 and, like,

01:25:50.020 that's my memory

01:25:52.680 of a negative interaction with her,

01:25:54.960 you know,

01:25:55.460 so that's pretty good.

01:25:57.080 So, yeah, yeah,

01:25:59.300 and that's,

01:25:59.800 And she was a very hospitable person and a very self-sacrificing person, and maybe to a fault.

01:26:09.180 Although, you know, when push came to shove and she had to stand up for herself,

01:26:12.800 she went out and had herself a career once her kids hit school,

01:26:16.240 and she got a pretty decent position in our town.

01:26:20.920 She ran the library at the local college, and she set her career in order.

01:26:26.080 and so she was a successful wife

01:26:27.940 and a successful mother

01:26:28.940 and she had a successful career

01:26:30.280 and she was a lot of fun to be around

01:26:31.600 and so, you know,

01:26:33.800 two thumbs up for my mom.

01:26:42.900 Do you have anything to say about her?

01:26:44.920 I love her.

01:26:47.120 Why?

01:26:48.320 She was a good mom.

01:26:50.080 I love her.

01:26:51.120 Yeah.

01:26:51.700 Yeah, she supported us

01:26:53.880 and played with us

01:26:55.980 and came along with us

01:26:59.020 for fun and she was just a great

01:27:00.840 person. Yeah, she was a good

01:27:03.000 grandmother. Oh yeah.

01:27:05.020 Yeah, Julian loves her. I mean

01:27:06.700 good memories.

01:27:09.460 All good memories.

01:27:11.120 So, what are your thoughts

01:27:13.020 on underage drinking?

01:27:15.660 I was an expert at it.

01:27:17.280 Yeah.

01:27:21.200 Well, I grew up in northern Alberta

01:27:22.980 and I don't

01:27:25.280 know how to explain Northern Alberta to you. Do you ever watch the Trailer Park Boys? Yeah, well,

01:27:34.140 that's Eastern Canada, but Western Canada has its version, and it's even more whatever the hell that

01:27:42.000 is than Eastern Canada, and Fairview was like that a lot, and it was dark and cold for much of the

01:27:50.900 year, like the year I went to college, it was 40 below for 38 days in a row, right, well, so of course

01:27:59.200 you drink, what are my thoughts, it's a bad idea to drink when you're a teenager, really, alcohol is a

01:28:07.520 very destructive drug, and it's very addictive, and especially for people who enjoy it, and I really

01:28:13.500 enjoyed it, and you learn how to socialize only when you're intoxicated, and all your friends

01:28:20.060 drink and a lot of my friends became

01:28:21.960 like not good alcoholics

01:28:24.040 and it's amazing

01:28:26.240 we didn't die on the back roads

01:28:27.940 because we used to drive around drunk all the time

01:28:29.980 way the hell out in the middle of the prairie

01:28:31.920 in the dark of night 0.65

01:28:33.680 and the poor bored policemen

01:28:35.760 out in that northern outpost would chase

01:28:38.140 us around and that was their 1.00

01:28:40.060 job, chase stupid drunk 1.00

01:28:41.860 teenagers and our job was to avoid 1.00

01:28:44.040 the cops and not die and mostly

01:28:46.020 we did that

01:28:46.800 it was

01:28:50.600 it was too much

01:28:52.600 really and alcohol is a bad

01:28:54.200 alcohol is a bad drug you know

01:28:56.340 so alcohol

01:28:58.620 is the only drug we know that actually makes

01:29:00.620 people more aggressive chemically

01:29:02.320 half of people who are

01:29:04.680 murdered are drunk half the people

01:29:06.540 who murder them are drunk

01:29:08.040 there'd be almost no domestic physical abuse 0.88

01:29:10.700 if it wasn't for alcohol 0.81

01:29:11.860 like it's a major contributor to heart disease

01:29:14.560 and cancer like it's

01:29:16.540 it's bad news, and it's a bad idea when you're young, because I started drinking when I was

01:29:21.660 probably 13, something like that, and you structure your social life around, it took me a long time to

01:29:27.840 even figure out that you could have a social life without drinking like 30 beer, and so

01:29:34.400 better not to do it, now it's tough, because you don't want to be completely sheltered, and one of

01:29:42.660 the things that's happened to young people now is they

01:29:44.600 don't date. They don't

01:29:46.740 go out with their friends. They don't

01:29:48.640 drink. And you might think, well, that's an improvement.

01:29:50.620 It's like, no.

01:29:53.380 Doing nothing isn't

01:29:54.680 an improvement over

01:29:56.060 breaking some rules. But

01:29:58.580 alcohol's a bad drug.

01:30:07.280 And your life is a lot.

01:30:08.440 Like, you know, we travel a lot.

01:30:10.340 I'll tell you one more thing about that. We travel a

01:30:12.540 lot, Tammy and I. We've been

01:30:14.600 on the road for eight years, and

01:30:16.540 we've gone to, like, I don't know,

01:30:18.420 600 cities. Like, we've traveled

01:30:20.540 a lot. And in most of those cities

01:30:22.640 we meet people for dinner

01:30:24.420 and lunch, and they're often cultural

01:30:26.660 leaders of one sort or another, and

01:30:28.200 sometimes they'll have a drink or two,

01:30:30.780 and after two drinks

01:30:32.400 they all get less impressive.

01:30:35.780 You know, and

01:30:36.640 like, I don't drink anything, and neither does

01:30:38.480 Tammy, and partly because what we're

01:30:40.520 doing is high stakes, and there's no room for error

01:30:42.600 at all, but

01:30:43.600 it's noticeable, and

01:30:46.540 so I would also say, if you have something that's

01:30:48.480 important to do, alcohol

01:30:50.580 is not improving your performance,

01:30:52.780 so better

01:30:54.400 to step lightly.

01:31:05.360 You've said that children

01:31:06.620 need to understand that malevolence

01:31:09.040 exists in the world. At what age

01:31:11.180 should you go about that, and how

01:31:13.000 should it be explained?

01:31:17.260 Well, you probably do that

01:31:19.020 mostly with stories. You know,

01:31:21.040 I was talking to my son. He's reading

01:31:22.920 his son,

01:31:25.000 who's only four. He's reading his

01:31:26.980 son, Harry Potter. And

01:31:28.960 that's pretty rough for a four-year-old,

01:31:30.940 but this little guy is, he's

01:31:32.860 pretty verbally proficient,

01:31:34.800 and he's got a long attention span,

01:31:36.800 and he can handle a complex story.

01:31:38.360 And, you know, I exposed my kids to relatively rough narrative material pretty young,

01:31:45.240 and I taught them to watch the hero, right?

01:31:49.180 So, you know, because it's scary.

01:31:52.140 Disney movies are scary.

01:31:53.580 Lord of the Rings is scary.

01:31:55.420 Harry Potter is scary.

01:31:56.960 And so what do you do about that?

01:31:58.160 You can shelter your kids from it, or you can teach them to keep their eye on the hero.

01:32:02.860 And that's what you want to teach them in their life, right?

01:32:04.900 It's like, keep your eye on the hero.

01:32:06.680 He'll get through it.

01:32:08.360 And so, then you teach them to be brave and resourceful and courageous instead of sheltering them.

01:32:16.620 And if you don't shelter them, then the evil queen doesn't inhabit your house.

01:32:22.600 And that's very, very important because she's also malevolent.

01:32:27.620 So, and how do you know when you should do that with your children?

01:32:32.840 Well, you've got to get to know them.

01:32:36.160 You know, some kids are very hard to frighten.

01:32:45.300 And other kids are very easy to frighten.

01:32:47.280 And so you've got to watch your kid.

01:32:50.700 And so if it's too much, you think, well, that was a little too much.

01:32:54.420 And you wait for a while.

01:32:56.360 And, you know, you've got to.

01:32:58.840 Well, this is what you do when you're playing with your kids is you push them.

01:33:02.720 you know like a good game

01:33:05.140 with a kid

01:33:06.140 is a game on the edge you know if you're a father

01:33:09.260 you know this you're playing with your kids

01:33:11.280 physically wrestling

01:33:13.260 with them and throwing them in the air and you know

01:33:15.360 it's so interesting

01:33:17.140 even little kids little tiny

01:33:19.220 kids you know like my son

01:33:21.260 in law I watch him now

01:33:22.220 he's got this little guy who's about

01:33:25.160 a year old and my son

01:33:27.260 in law is a pretty big guy he's about six

01:33:28.980 six I don't know he's a pretty big guy

01:33:31.480 he's bigger than I am

01:33:32.620 And, you know, he throws this baby up in the air.

01:33:36.600 And it's like, I'm thinking, wow, what's that like to be that baby?

01:33:39.600 It's like, you know, you're like, you're 30 feet off the ground and a giant is throwing you in the air.

01:33:44.440 And that's pretty exciting.

01:33:46.140 And he loves it.

01:33:46.920 This kid's pretty, you know, rangy kid and not easily scared.

01:33:50.860 And so, but if the kid's laughing and having a good time, then that's not too much.

01:33:55.880 And if he's like crying in terror and your wife is like hitting you with a frying pan,

01:34:00.280 then probably you've pushed the limit a bit.

01:34:02.620 And so, you can figure that out, if it's not fun, then it's too much, you know, and, but it's tricky, because the most fun is right on the edge of disaster, right, so, that's where it's most fun.

01:34:18.140 yeah i've always thought that fairy tales especially there's something like i don't

01:34:26.980 know how to say it like trauma preparation for children and that's why when people tell me i don't

01:34:32.760 like telling these fairy tales to my kids because there's like a big bad wolf that's eating the

01:34:36.520 child there's all these horrible things i'm like you know the big bad wolf is an imagistic uh you

01:34:42.240 know story and the child can take it in you don't have to tell them about the horrible rapist that's

01:34:49.220 hiding in the dark you tell them the story of a big bad wolf and it prepares the child so that

01:34:53.740 when they encounter real situations of danger they have that spider sense already in them

01:34:59.720 and they can recognize opportunities sometimes it's not just negative opportunities as well

01:35:04.060 but then also the negative aspects of of our possible story yeah yeah your job is not to

01:35:09.780 protect your children from serpents

01:35:11.640 your job is to teach them how to handle

01:35:13.720 serpents, right? And so

01:35:15.640 yeah

01:35:17.020 right and that's a tough game

01:35:21.940 that's very hard and

01:35:23.540 you have to be awake to play that

01:35:25.760 game properly and

01:35:27.620 your children want to see

01:35:29.900 that in you, they want to see

01:35:32.040 that their father in particular

01:35:33.720 but also their mother has the courage

01:35:36.100 to contend with

01:35:37.360 the terrible forces of the world

01:35:39.300 and they want to see that

01:35:41.500 the father in particular

01:35:43.580 but also the mother if she's playing

01:35:45.540 a role properly

01:35:46.300 has faith in their ability to prevail

01:35:49.680 and adventure

01:35:50.880 and so that's

01:35:53.240 why you have to offer your children to the world

01:35:55.760 that's what Abraham does with Isaac

01:35:57.620 when he's offering them upward

01:35:58.920 it's like you have to offer your children

01:36:00.880 God, you have to offer your children 0.91

01:36:03.460 to be destroyed by the world

01:36:05.020 or you're the destructive force

01:36:07.720 right, so

01:36:09.020 And the thing is, this is what happens in the story of Abraham, is that Abraham is willing to offer his son to God, and God gives him his son back.

01:36:16.980 And what does that mean?

01:36:18.120 Well, if you're parents and you offer your children to the world, they'll become competent and courageous and adventurous, and they'll like you and want to have a relationship with you, and then you'll get them back.

01:36:31.920 And so that's a good deal.

01:36:33.340 kids are tough

01:36:39.180 yeah kids are tough

01:36:41.100 and you can teach them a lot

01:36:44.140 and they can surprise you

01:36:46.240 with how brave they are

01:36:47.260 and that's what you want

01:36:48.680 you want your kids to surprise you

01:36:50.140 with how brave they are

01:36:51.060 and you want to encourage that

01:36:52.800 and that takes some risk

01:36:53.940 so you do that

01:36:57.220 within the confines of love

01:36:58.680 right and you want to make it a game

01:37:00.280 and then it's okay

01:37:02.320 no force

01:37:04.000 right

01:37:04.600 or minimal

01:37:05.440 necessary force

01:37:06.500 okay

01:37:07.540 good

01:37:08.300 thank you

01:37:09.240 everybody

01:37:09.920 lovely to see you

01:37:14.780 thanks Tim

01:37:25.540 you're welcome

01:37:26.280 thank you Jonathan

01:37:27.700 thank you Jonathan

01:37:29.140 it's been great

01:37:32.320 Thank you all very much for coming.

01:37:34.480 Thank you.

01:37:35.340 Yep.

01:37:36.020 Good night.

01:37:37.040 Good night.

`witch hunt`	Both words, anywhere in the episode.
`"witch hunt"`	The exact phrase.
`witch OR hunt`	Either word.
`"alpha male" -"high value"`	The first phrase, but not the second.
`(feminist OR feminism) AND (marriage OR divorce)`	Parentheses group alternatives.
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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - November 02, 2026

Why Young Women Are The Most Miserable They've Ever Been

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Transcript