Jordan B. Peterson is a fascinating thinker and a leading intellectual of our time. And there may not be a greater voice over the past decade speaking out about the crisis with men and boys, and more. Plus, his home country is about to become our 51st state.
00:13:09.880Well, post-George Floyd, the big corporations decided that they were going to go all in on the DEI front.
00:13:16.920And they just stopped hiring or promoting young men, Caucasian men in particular.
00:13:22.500And so why your sons, for example, or my son, for that matter, should be paying the price for whatever hypothetical sins his ancestors hypothetically committed is,
00:13:35.740well, that's all part of the leftist notion that people should be categorized by group and that the way you attain equity in the equity, you know, equality of outcome in the current milieu is by being prejudiced against people by inconsequence of their race and gender.
00:14:08.960And again, I put a fair bit of responsibility for this at the feet of the Republicans.
00:14:14.400It's like, have you guys been, you guys, I don't mean you specifically, Megan, obviously, but they've been asleep at the wheel for four generations.
00:14:21.460And even now, the Trump administration is taking aim at the Department of Education federally.
00:14:28.400But, you know, that's a tiny proportion of the actual trouble.
00:14:31.740The real trouble is at the state level.
00:14:34.240And I can't see how the school system could be set up any worse.
00:15:29.740We pulled our children from their New York City private schools because of this radicalism.
00:15:34.920When our eldest was in third grade at literally one of the best and most respected private schools in the country and an all boys school where they're supposed to have some knowledge and expertise in educating boys.
00:15:49.520In the third grade, without telling the parents, they unleashed a several week long educational program on these boys on trans issues featuring men running around in tutus, suggesting if you like the color purple, you might potentially secretly be a girl.
00:16:09.080And then made the little boys, all these boys in third grade raise their hands and and say on a scale of one through five, how certain they were that they were boys.
00:16:21.720And I can't remember whether it was the five or the fist that just suggested, I'm just confused about what you're saying here.
00:16:28.900Like, I don't understand what you're asking me.
00:16:30.500And all these little kids chose that option because they didn't even have any understanding of what was being introduced to them.
00:16:39.220And it was this was a school, Jordan, where all the parents who go there most are really wanting little junior to get into Harvard or Yale or Stanford.
00:16:49.100And so these parents typically do not push back because the name of the game is to be well liked by the administration and the people who have juniors future in their hands.
00:16:58.820And even this group after that was outraged and revolted and stood up to say, what are you doing?
00:17:06.100They were actually teaching the children that there could be 100 genders, but at least three or four.
00:17:12.540I mean, I heard that with my own ears from a teacher.
00:17:15.460So I think what you're saying for people out there who are thinking, no, they can't.
00:17:26.240We pulled them because they were being abused by these teachers.
00:17:31.020Well, you see, your story just highlights how deep the problem is because you're in private school and it's a high end private school and still the same thing is happening.
00:17:44.140And so that's an indicative of how that's indicative of how deep the rod is.
00:17:48.200And the problem that the parents that you described still have is they think it's 1995 and that Harvard and the other Ivy League schools are what they were.
00:18:01.160I taught at Harvard, let's say, in 1995.
00:18:04.100I was there from 92 to 98 and it was the most effective and admirable institution I'd ever been associated with by a lot.
00:18:17.320It was the students were super bright.
00:18:20.040A third of them were so smart, they'd catch on to anything you told them on first exposure.
00:18:24.840And the bottom third, who probably were geniuses at some other subject, they'd catch on with a little work.
00:18:39.220And it had a well-deserved reputation, which it had built up over decades by strenuously selecting only, virtually only on the basis of merit.
00:18:50.420There was also some selection in terms of family history, but that didn't, overall, that didn't produce a decrement in student quality.
00:19:00.760And since 2010, there were some signs of rot in the 1990s because some of the departments, like English, had already become pretty politically correct.
00:19:14.240And I had my run-ins with the Department of English when I was at Harvard.
00:20:02.260And that's partly because the accreditation agencies are also captured by the woke mob.
00:20:07.180And so part of what your parents have to do is they have to understand that it's not 1995 and that you're not doing your children a service by sending them to, especially the boys.
00:20:21.280It might even be worse for the girls now.
00:20:23.200And we could get into that if you'd like, because I didn't purposely focus my attention on boys.
00:20:29.920It's just that when I started my YouTube channel, 80% of YouTube viewers and listeners are male.
00:20:36.740And so I picked up a big male audience.
00:20:39.220But it's not like the girls are in better shape.
00:20:41.520I would say, arguably, on the psychological side, they're in worse shape.
00:20:47.380It's more than 50% of young women, 18 to 34, who profess liberal political proclivity also self-report at least one diagnosed mental illness.
00:20:59.340And rates of depression and anxiety in that population, 18 to 34-year-old young women, have skyrocketed.
00:21:05.440And we should also point out that the entire progressive enterprise would collapse if young women weren't being propagandized in a massive manner, not only by the universities, but by bad actors at the international level on platforms like TikTok.
00:21:23.680Which, like, what's happening to young women on TikTok is absolutely reprehensible.
00:21:29.720I've documented that with some of the people I'm working with.
00:21:34.780Well, obviously, you can't demoralize young men without simultaneously terribly affecting young women because what's harmful to one sex is going to be immediately harmful to the other.
00:21:47.880And so all this hand-waving on the part of the Democrats, it's too little too late.
00:21:55.620And it's also, I'm certain that they don't have the wherewithal to do this properly because virtually everything they've set their foundations on is rotten to the core.
00:22:24.600I reached out to a couple of friends of mine who are on the left.
00:22:28.740And my one friend, or at least formerly of the left, my one friend has a son who is now 16 and who was, like she was, very left, a committed Democrat.
00:22:42.880And he's been raised in New York City, surrounded by other Democrats and gone through the school systems there, which are replete with Democrats.
00:22:53.520And he and many of his friends now are Trump-supporting MAGA hat-wearing Republicans.
00:23:01.080And so I asked her, after I saw this article in NBC, and I knew you were going to come on today, I said, try to explain, you know, in a nutshell, what did it?
00:23:12.060How did he have this dramatic transformation?
00:23:15.960You know, I saw him go from this leftist to this MAGA hat-wearing kid.
00:23:21.780And she summed it up by saying, actually, I pulled it, but she summed it up as follows.
00:23:27.520She said, the main communication between government and young people is education.
00:23:35.320If the curriculum is that white voices don't matter anymore, that's alienating to every white boy out there.
00:23:43.600She said, my son feels that they have blamed straight white men for everything.
00:23:49.560He is not allowed to read white male authors at school.
00:23:55.020And it reminded me, Jordan, of a story my one friend told me about his sister, who was a visiting professor at Smith College, where she came in.
00:24:03.720They asked her to come be a visiting professor.
00:25:04.000And I really enjoyed the University of Toronto for the 20 years I was there before everything fell apart in about 2017.
00:25:11.740And I'm not the least bit happy to be pointing my finger at these institutions and say that they've not only lost their way, but that they're perverting.
00:25:26.680And all of our young people and all of our institutions and that they're clearly not salvageable.
00:25:33.520And I know why they're not salvageable.
00:25:35.900So, the first reason is that they became absurdly administratively top heavy.
00:25:43.580And that happened pretty much from the 60s onward, where all the extra money that was devoted to education essentially went not to students and certainly not to professors or researchers, but to an ever-expanding administration.
00:26:00.820And that probably peaked around, in terms of just administration, that probably peaked around 2010.
00:26:09.360And then the woke mob took over the administration.
00:26:12.980And so now that's who runs the universities.
00:26:17.400And you can get them to forego their DEI and equity terminology, but all they'll do is camouflage their same machinations under different headings.
00:26:35.920They're not going to retool their epistemological commitments.
00:26:41.520They're not going to become different philosophically.
00:26:44.220They're not going to learn their lesson.
00:26:46.440And then on the faculty side, especially in the last 10 years, say, when you literally couldn't get hired at a university.
00:26:55.740Well, first of all, if you were male and Caucasian, you could just take that off the table.
00:27:00.540But also, if you didn't write a diversity statement that indicated your submission to or fervent advocacy of the radical progressive ideology.
00:27:18.420But absolutely, in the University of California system, which was a great system for a long time, especially on the scientific side, 80% of candidates were knocked out of the running for beginning positions as assistant professors in the scientific realms because their diversity statements were inadequate.
00:27:40.900This was before their research dossiers were evaluated.
00:27:45.840Now, you just can't imagine, unless you're a scientist, can't imagine what that means.
00:27:51.160The only thing that matters with regards to the prediction of your ability as a researcher, and this is statistically speaking, the best predictor of your future success as a researcher, is the number of publications you had as a graduate student.
00:28:10.760Because that's actually a direct index of how well you did your job.
00:28:14.640And so, to take that off the table in favor of racial categories and political belief means that the scientific endeavor is just, it's dead in the water at the universities.
00:28:28.640This also happened, just FYI, speaking of our New York City experience, one of the top schools in New York, Brearley, that's an all-girls school, which is just a funnel to the Ivies.
00:28:40.160And it's one of those schools where many, many parents in New York would give anything to get their child in there.
00:28:47.200I mean, the tuition now is probably nearing $70,000 a year.
00:28:51.300Where the same thing, you had to, as a family, applying your daughter to the school, affirm your commitment to DEI and offer one of these DEI values and how they're incorporated into your family statements on applying to the school.
00:29:09.380So, they were screening out anybody, they didn't want anybody, and I think it's still in place, at Brearley, who didn't bend the knee fully and completely to DEI and then have specific examples of how it was being incorporated into their child rearing at home.
00:29:27.800Yeah, well, so, the reason the Ivy League diploma became so valuable is that from about 1960 onward, the universities made a concerted effort to select, essentially on the basis of intellectual capacity, general cognitive ability.
00:29:47.840And that's a measure that differs widely between people, as everyone who's ever gone to school knows, you know perfectly well that in the average class of 30 kids, there's three kids that are outstanding academic performers.
00:30:02.800And there's three kids who just can't be taught, even the basics, without a tremendous amount of extra effort.
00:30:13.780And what the universities as a whole did, especially after World War II, but it really got going in the 60s, was radically select on the basis of intelligence.
00:30:25.140And what that meant was that an Ivy League degree was a stamp of extreme intellectual competence.
00:30:34.700And that's why the brand value went through the roof.
00:30:38.860Now, the effect of intelligence on performance isn't linear.
00:30:46.020And so, if you can select selectively for extremely intelligent people, you get a non-linear return on your, in terms of enhanced productivity, in consequence of doing that.
00:31:01.840And so, the universities did that, especially with the SATs and the GREs and the LSATs and the MCATs, which, although there's a lot of noise around this, are fundamentally intelligence tests.
00:31:15.020And so, now, if you can stamp your graduates with the assurance that they're in the 99th percentile for intelligence, then it makes perfect sense for every employer worth his salt to line up to hire them.
00:31:31.060Okay, but now what happened was the universities produced a brand that was of unbelievable economic value because of their selection technologies.
00:31:41.280And then that got gamed by the progressives and the radicals.
00:31:45.020So, they can destroy the universities by filling them with progressives, let's say, who are selected for reasons other than their intellectual prowess, to put it mildly.
00:31:59.100And there'll be some lag before everybody figures out that the degrees have lost their value.
00:32:04.460Now, that's already starting to happen.
00:32:06.240And a lot of the tech companies are moving toward their own selection because the universities are no longer viable as screening institutions.
00:32:17.700So, but these parents you talk about, like I said, especially in places like New York that are still democratic to the core, they still think it's 1995.
00:32:27.260And it's not even 2000 anymore, like it's seriously not 1995.
00:32:33.600Things have changed a lot and they're going to change more.
00:32:36.740We hope with Peterson Academy that we can keep our students on the cutting edge of learning and that we'll leverage all the new learning technologies to make that possible and be able to do that.
00:32:47.720And as I said, radically, radically, radically less expensively that we already have 50,000 students who've taken us up on the offer.
00:32:54.780And so, I can't, I really can't see, Megan, I'm really dead serious about this.
00:33:00.980You know, like I said, I was involved, am involved with Ralston College.
00:33:04.960I've had conversations with the University of Austin folks.
00:33:07.520If the universities were salvageable, that would be a lovely thing.
00:34:18.080However, he ignores the fact that we live in Connecticut, where there are a significant number of large cities, where there is a large black population.
00:34:26.600And in over 70 percent of black homes, they are missing a father.
00:34:32.620The father has split and there's no one who stepped in to fill the gap.
00:34:35.920Why don't you start there, Ned Lamont?
00:34:39.100He would never speak of that, Jordan, right?
00:34:41.960He's not going to talk about the crisis in boys missing strong male role models and start in the black community,
00:34:48.120which actually would help those young boys on their own get into elite academic institutions.
00:34:55.140Much more than saying, I'm going to grease the pipeline for them to become teachers.
00:35:00.420Yeah, well, you know, there are schools that have managed to teach non-selected inner city kids extraordinarily effectively.
00:35:12.100There's a school in the UK called the Michaela School run by Catherine Burblesingh, which has done a job that's so good, you just can't believe it.
00:35:19.320And so there are educational initiatives that can work and can work for minorities.
00:35:26.940Catherine Burblesingh's school is minority dominated.
00:35:31.780The students are selected from low tiers in the economic hierarchy.
00:35:35.520And she graduates more students into Russell Group universities.
00:35:39.980That includes Oxford and Cambridge and the university.
00:35:44.240Well, let's stick with Oxford and Cambridge to begin with.
00:35:47.240She graduates a higher percentage of her students into Russell Group universities than any other school in the UK, including Eaton.
00:35:56.060And so the kinds of initiatives that are being proposed can work.
00:36:00.500But one of the comical things about Catherine Burblesingh is that the UK press and the teachers hate her because she's conservative to the bone.
00:36:09.120She used to be a lefty and her school is extremely disciplined and top down organized.
00:36:16.560And so it's a model of education that the progressives not only wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole, no matter how good the demonstrated effects, even for minorities, but that her approach is absolute anathema to them.
00:36:31.380Now, and then with regard to your broader comment, so it's increasingly normative in the black community for children to be raised in a father absent home.
00:36:43.440And that's been spiraling toward the majority since the early 1960s.
00:36:50.720But we should also note that the black population is only ahead of the game in that curve.
00:36:59.280Like the Hispanic population curves for fatherlessness are the same as the blacks, except 10 years later.
00:37:08.260And the same is true on the Caucasian front.
00:37:11.080Now, that's not true for the wealthy, by the way.
00:37:17.660And the Democrats won't address this fundamental issue, obviously, because they would have to drop everything they stand for in order to even admit that fathers are necessary.
00:37:27.280And that's also appalling beyond comprehension, because there's almost no facts that are more thoroughly documented in the developmental psychology literature than the detrimental effects on children, boys and girls alike, of fatherlessness.
00:37:45.220So, girls without a father hit puberty one year earlier.
00:37:50.020And that's just an indication of the magnitude, even of the physiological consequences of not having a man around.
00:37:57.980Girls mature sexually faster so they can attract a man, even though there's still children in their psychological development.
00:38:07.640And boys without a father at the age of 12 already have telomeres that are much shorter than their peers with fathers.
00:38:18.560And telomeres are part of the genetic structure that determines how long you'll live.
00:38:24.440So, they're so stressed that they're already fated for an early death.
00:38:27.680And so, and, you know, so then now you want to address the fatherlessness issue.
00:38:33.560Okay, well, now you have to admit that marriage is not only not an oppressive patriarchal institution, which is one of the most idiotic claims you could ever possibly make, but that it's a net good for men, women and children alike.
00:38:48.800And that any attempts to de-center it are cataclysmic.
00:38:53.260It's like, the Democrats aren't going to go there.
00:39:42.260And there was a very interesting discussion by Ezra Klein of the New York Times and his guest on the gender divide and why Trump won the last election.
00:40:01.140This is, to me, the scariest chart in this entire presentation.
00:40:04.600And again, you know, something I'm very surprised by.
00:40:06.520And so what you can see is that, you know, for voters over 30, the gender gap was fairly stable at around 10%, which is roughly where it's been in American politics.
00:40:19.640But what's crazy is if you look at people who are under the age of 30, the gender gap has exploded.
00:40:25.280If you look at 18-year-olds, 18-year-old men were 23 percentage points more likely to support, you know, Donald Trump than 18-year-old women, which is just completely unprecedented in American politics.
00:40:38.780I think it's too early to say exactly what the cause is.
00:40:42.020What's interesting is that this is happening in other countries as well.
00:40:45.200There is a sense the Democratic Party is becoming much more pro-women party and in some ways sort of anti-young men, and that that just had a huge effect on young men's political opinions.
00:41:05.540That's where his mind goes on being shown these numbers of the gender gap and why young men overwhelmingly are moving to the Republican Party.
00:41:13.080That is their number one issue on the left.
00:41:16.200It must define everything as opposed to taking a hard look at what they, their side, has been doing to young men for, yes, decades, but the peak over the past 10 years has just driven these young men to extreme measures.
00:41:35.620The deaths of despair have gone up to tens of thousands per year.
00:41:39.120Remember, Scott Galloway, who's writing a book on this, he said, we've lost more men, young men, to deaths of despair, some 400,000 over the past few years, than we lost in one of the world wars.
00:41:53.360Like, we're—that's—it's all about abortion in the mind of the left.
00:41:57.220That's how we have to fix it somehow, Jordan.
00:41:59.220Well, it's also—that's also a profoundly stupid theory, even from a conceptual perspective, because there's no reason, a priori, to assume that access to abortion—I mean, if it appeals to young women who want to keep the sexual revolution going with no cost, hypothetically, why wouldn't it appeal to young men for exactly the same reasons?
00:42:19.820Like, it's just a stupid idea, but it shows you how bereft the Democrat theorists are on the ideational side to jump to that conclusion immediately.
00:42:30.320And, you know, what they don't understand, really, there's a long list, things they don't understand.
00:42:37.420But in the black community, let's say, with regard to black young men, is that by not concentrating on marriage—so at this group I put together in London called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship,
00:42:53.500we tried to put together a visionary form of conservatism and classic liberalism, let's say, because conservatives aren't very good on the vision front, generally,
00:43:02.080because their attitude is we should just keep doing what we're doing that works, and that's not exactly a vision.
00:43:08.020Things are so unstable now that even the conservatives have to put forward a vision.
00:43:11.860And one of the biggest fights we had within our organization was a fight in relationship to how are we going to conceptualize support for the future, families.
00:43:23.380And we settled on long-term, stable, committed, heterosexual, child-centered marriages, knowing that there has to be a domain of tolerance around that center ideal,
00:43:39.420because people get divorced, and there are single mothers, and there are gay people, and, you know, and there are widows, and there are orphans.
00:43:47.380I mean, just because there's an ideal doesn't mean you shouldn't pay attention to the margin, let's say, but the ideal has to stay intact.
00:43:56.620Now, you might say, well, why is that a saleable message to young people?
00:44:02.100You see, I know why, because I've been selling that message to young people for 15 years, and very successfully, so I know what I'm talking about.
00:44:10.640What you want to tell young men is that they have something crucially important to do that's exciting and difficult and meaningful, and they find that in the voluntary adoption of responsibility.
00:44:25.260They don't find that in idiot hedonism or in the struggle for power.
00:44:30.820They find it in their willingness to make themselves into somebody who might be attractive to a young woman, let's say, who has her head screwed on straight enough to understand that there isn't a greater privilege that she'll have in her life, if she's fortunate, than to become a mother.
00:44:50.260You know now, maybe half of women in the West, at 30, have no child.
00:44:57.580Half of those women will never have a child.
00:45:00.820They won't find a mate, they won't have a child, and 90% of them will be very upset about that.
00:45:08.240And so, by deprioritizing marriage, we're doing young people such a terrible disservice.
00:45:15.260It's like, let's think about young black men.
00:45:18.220It's like, okay, they're not going to get married.
00:45:21.680So then, first of all, why the hell should they grow up?
00:45:28.540We've known this as psychologists for decades.
00:45:30.820Young men quit their adolescent hijinks somewhere in their mid-20s if they gain stable employment and find a mate.
00:45:42.480And the reason they do that is because they think, well, why the hell not just drink and carouse around if no one's depending on me?
00:45:52.440You know, and that's a reasonable question.
00:45:55.380I'm not saying that's a particularly mature attitude, but it takes some, you need something resting on your shoulders to motivate you to take the leap into sacrificial responsibility.
00:46:10.120But the thing about sacrificial responsibility, that's what I've outlined in this new book of mine, by the way, is that it lends meaning to your life.
00:46:42.760Now, well, what does the left tell young men?
00:46:46.200Well, if you grew up in adopted responsibility, you'd just be oppressing your wife because marriage is an oppressive patriarchal institution.
00:46:53.600You know, even though married women with children are by far the happiest women.
00:48:31.660You know, whenever someone makes a clip of me talking about the fact that young women need to make finding a husband and having a child a priority in their 20s,
00:48:42.960probably their early 20s, and then they can concentrate on their career if they're inclined to for the next 30 years of their life.
00:48:51.740Just plenty to be a slave to a corporate entity.
00:48:56.640You know, I don't make clips like that and put them online, but people clip my lectures and, you know, maybe they'll make a little three-minute piece where I'll say something like that.
00:49:06.860And it's inevitably the case that the comments fill up with comments from young women that are so vitriolic that they just make your hair curl about, you know, this horrible old white man who's telling them what to do with their bodies, which is so idiotic because I'm trying to warn them.
00:49:23.320I had lots of women in my clinical practice who ended up alone and childless in their 30s and then got desperate about it, you know, because you get desperate about it.
00:49:47.360Why do they need to tell you that you're a woman hater?
00:49:50.700Because this is how you see the world.
00:49:53.120This is what your expertise has driven you to conclude.
00:49:55.540This is what interviewing and counseling all these patients has led you.
00:49:58.840I mean, it's a valid viewpoint that they can take for what it's worth or reject, but not then comes the names, you know, calling and the mudslinging.
00:50:06.940And we're going to get into that in a minute because I'm very interested in first of all, I'm going to show the audience what some of these Democrats are now trying to do.
00:50:15.020And I believe it's a direct effort to recruit young men.
00:50:17.940In addition to this effort we've discussed, there's another one underway.
00:50:21.220And then we're going to talk more about the blowback that Jordan has received just for saying these things.
00:50:27.640This is his POV, and it's very well informed, but it has not come without a personal and professional price for Jordan Peterson, who stays with me for the full show.
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00:53:26.100Chuck Schumer seemed uncomfortable actually saying it there.
00:53:28.380But I, my own belief, Jordan, is that this is their belief of how to win young men back.
00:53:35.920Well, that, that's a topic well worth delving into, partly because it would also enable us to talk a little bit about what's happening hypothetically, on what is hypothetically described as the right.
00:53:49.020And so, I guess you might, there's a number of people who have influenced young men in a more conservative direction.
00:53:58.920And I'm one of them, and Ben Shabiro is another, and Andrew Tate is a third.
00:54:03.960And I warned people back in 2016 that if they kept making men weak, that there would be a consequence of that, because weak men do very terrible things.
00:54:20.280They turn, for example, further models to people like Andrew Tate.
00:54:24.160Now, the reason I'm bringing that up in relationship to the clips that you showed me is because you put together three clips that are predicated on the assumption that masculinity has this kind of brisk, pushy,
00:54:38.760I don't give a damn if I swear on national TV because I'm so tough, kind of me into it.
00:54:45.160And it's very easy for weak men to assume that power is the defining characteristic of a respectable man, like an actually masculine man.
00:54:58.360And that's what Andrew Tate, at least in part, purports to sell his audience.
00:55:05.860So, now, Andrew Tate is a very bad actor, to say the least.
00:55:10.400He's a pimp, an electronic pimp, and I think pimps are possibly the lowest form of male life because they are parasitic on women, and that's about as bad as you can get if you're a man.
00:55:26.920Maybe you can get lower because you could be parasitic on children, but being parasitic on women, that's pretty bad.
00:55:32.960And he's taught his followers how to be this, you know, playboy, lothario type of love them and leave them, do it my way or hit the goddamn highway sort of attitude.
00:55:43.920And, you know, if you've been demoralized your entire life, and you haven't been attractive to women, and you're not doing well in your career, and you're very disoriented, and you've had no role models at all,
00:56:02.000then someone who has all the trappings of surface success, like Andrew Tate, and who's very good at flaunting it, can look like just the medicine you need.
00:56:12.500And to give the devil his due, you know, I can understand why men who have nothing would at least want to have something, and I can see that Andrew Tate offers that to them.
00:56:26.000And that is not any advocacy for Andrew Tate, as I've already made my view of him very clear.
00:56:34.140Now, the left likes to think that Andrew Tate and me, for example, are gateways to the alt-right, and that somehow we're the same.
00:56:46.120And what I'm offering young men is a pathway to adulthood through responsibility, not through the exercise of power.
00:56:55.280Now, if you're powerful, and you're strong, and you're forthright, and you're articulate, then you can harness all that power into your responsibility, and that can make you an even better man.
00:57:08.180But if you weaken men, they will 100%.
00:57:12.520They'll become nihilistic, they'll become hedonistic, and they'll worship power.
00:57:19.000And Andrew Tate is exactly the face of power worship.
00:57:22.120And you can bloody well expect to see a lot more of that coming down the pipes.
00:57:25.900And if the Democrats are daft enough to turn to a power representation of masculinity, because they're too foolish to understand the relationship, let's say, between responsibility and proper masculinity, then they deserve exactly what's coming to them.
00:57:40.960And what will come to them is no increase whatsoever in their approval rating among young men, because anyone with a clue can see through what they're doing in 15 seconds flat.
00:57:49.880But they'll also do nothing but promote people like Andrew Tate, and then we'll have serious trouble.
00:57:57.720You know, it's interesting, because I listened to a bunch of leftists talk about this issue in recent weeks, because I'm curious to see what they think the problem is.
00:58:09.280And many, many, if not all, blame President Trump.
00:58:24.920And then Elon gets dumped in there for a good measure, too, as same on all those fronts.
00:58:29.960And once again, Jordan, I think they've totally misunderstood what it is about Trump, and for that matter, Elon, that is drawing young men to them.
00:58:38.340I don't think it has anything to do with Trump and his behavior toward women 30 years ago.
00:58:45.960And I don't think it's Trump's occasional dropping of a swear, although I do think that makes him seem much more relatable to especially the working class.
00:59:18.980Why do you think the left thinks that what's happening on the right with respect to some admiration for Andrew Tate, etc., is really the fault of Donald Trump?
00:59:28.760That's how they interpret it, that these toxically masculine guys are the product of Trumpism.
00:59:35.560Well, it's partly because the left doesn't have a vision of responsible masculinity.
00:59:39.560So it's either, you know, soy boy or bully.
00:59:43.720That's their whole theory of masculinity.
00:59:46.640And you shouldn't be a bully because that's the worst.
01:01:07.760And also, by the way, the divide in our society is no longer between left and right.
01:01:12.920Those categories don't even, they don't even make any sense anymore, as far as I'm concerned.
01:01:16.680I mean, one of the Democrats, whose video you posted earlier, pointed out that, you know, increasingly the Democrats are the side of, are the party of women.
01:01:26.440And that's part of what's happening is actually, we're actually seeing a sex divide in terms of political affiliation.
01:01:32.080But it's not because the women are becoming left and the men becoming right.
01:01:36.540It's because the left is now feminine and the right is now masculine.
01:01:43.220And the political distinctions have become virtually undetectable and irrelevant.
01:02:53.560Well, and she's got enough humility to play her role well and to be apparently satisfied and grateful for that by all appearances.
01:03:01.940And so, you know, Trump is a blustery character and he's definitely got that kind of throw your shoulders around masculinity that is attractive to people who confuse power with masculinity.
01:03:15.960But he's also, there's a lot more to Trump than that.
01:03:19.320I mean, he's got a vicious, vicious sense of humor.
01:03:22.500He's got a tremendous amount of energy and he's been successful at like five impossible things, just like Musk.
01:03:29.280And you can throw that away as you would if you felt that all forms of capitalist success are just another manifestation of oppressive patriarchy.
01:03:38.600But, you know, that's a pretty idiot theory unless you're a progressive leftist.
01:03:43.420Yeah, I think you're exactly right on that.
01:03:46.380So you've been saying all these things for years now, many years.
01:03:50.800And, you know, if it may be if Wes Moore and Gretchen Whitmer and Adam Schiff and Chris Murphy and Chuck Schumer had listened to you back in 1516, maybe their party wouldn't be in this predicament.
01:04:03.740I don't know, because you're saying it's really a worldwide phenomenon.
01:04:09.240I think that's at its core what it's been caused by.
01:04:11.500And I don't see leftism, more leftism being the cure for it, but it may be some awakeness on the part of the left, not wokeness, but some awakeness on what they've done to young men is a positive.
01:04:22.320In any event, I don't know that they're capable of getting there, because one of the controversies that you suffered through as a result of speaking these truths was a Hollywood actress and director, Olivia Wilde, made a whole movie about this alleged toxic masculinity.
01:04:43.740Chris Pine played a character who she admitted was based on Olivia Wilde's view of Jordan Peterson.
01:04:52.060And she was extremely nasty talking about you.
01:04:55.420She went on her PR tour promoting her movie.
01:04:59.620Don't Worry Darling was the name of it, saying, you're an insane person who is, quote, a pseudo intellectual hero to the incel community.
01:05:09.820Incel, for the listening audience, I think you know this, but it stands for involuntarily celibate young men who are not having any sexual relations whatsoever.
01:05:20.240And the despair that comes with that is rejected.
01:05:23.300It's really just they're painted as basically white supremacist alt-right people who gravitate onto meaningless pseudo intellectuals in Olivia Wilde's view.
01:05:32.920And so here's just a clip from her movie of Chris Pine playing what we now know is a Jordan Peterson type.
01:06:31.560And, of course, they make you seem like some faux preacher type and like a cult leader from the 1950s instead of what you're actually doing.
01:06:41.840And there was an extraordinary moment where you went on with our pal Piers Morgan after this and he asked you about it.
01:07:43.560It's very difficult to understand how demoralised people are.
01:07:50.380And certainly many young men are in that category.
01:07:55.320Why did that make you so emotional, Jordan?
01:07:58.960What is it you've seen that Olivia Wilde hasn't?
01:08:04.920Well, I'd like to say something in defence of Chris Pine momentarily.
01:08:10.740I heard through the grapevine, by the way, that he had no idea that that character was based on me until after he finished the movie.
01:08:18.860And he started paying some attention to what I was saying and actually found out that he agreed with my stance.
01:08:26.100So, now, I'm not absolutely certain that's true, but I heard it from a very reliable source.
01:08:32.100So, if I've got that wrong, my apologies.
01:08:35.160But I'd like to set the record clear if I do have it right.
01:08:37.500Well, that clip's very interesting because it indicates the misapprehension of, first of all, what I think.
01:08:47.180Like, it was interesting that the screenplay focused on chaos, for example, because it is the case that chaos and possibility tend to be symbolised with the feminine.
01:09:02.140And that's the basis of literary symbolism and psychological symbolism for thousands and thousands of years.
01:09:10.220And it's partly because the feminine is a useful symbolic marker for possibility because females bring new life forms into the world.
01:09:20.280And so, chaos isn't the enemy of order.
01:09:23.620It's the dance partner of order in the transformation that leads to progress across time.
01:09:30.980So, she just didn't get that right at all, like not even a bit.
01:09:35.380And that's indicative of the shallowness of her analysis.
01:09:40.200You know, there is an element to me that's like a 1950s preacher, you know, and that's fair enough.
01:09:46.840I mean, I've been teaching people religious stories for 40 years and I gather large audiences and the lectures are emotional and they're motivational.
01:10:01.020And so, I can see why people who think they're my enemy are set back on their heels by that because they don't know what to make of it.
01:10:10.280And that's not surprising because isn't it really quite remarkable that young men will come and listen to lectures about the Bible, for example.
01:11:54.500And then she gives her a comb that makes her, that poisons her because that's the temptation towards narcissism.
01:12:02.860And then she feeds her a poisoned apple, which is exactly what the harpy ideologues are doing to young women to destabilize their identity and to push them off the reproductive tract.
01:14:57.280The real story is a lot more interesting.
01:14:59.240You know, because one of the mysteries she could have delved into is, like, why the hell are people, young men, letting me tell them stories about the Old Testament?
01:17:04.000And you said, I'm going to leave X at this point because I've received an endless flood of insults because you saw this picture and said, sorry, not beautiful.
01:17:13.740And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.
01:17:28.500You are not allowed to have those opinions, Jordan.
01:17:31.060You can't say that Elliot is still really Ellen and no and not a woman any longer.
01:17:39.500And you can't say that a morbidly obese woman in this Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition is, in your opinion, not beautiful.
01:17:50.360And by implicit implication, that you prefer the old approach to Sports Illustrated swimsuit models, which in which you speak on both fronts for ninety nine point nine percent of the world that's willing to be honest.
01:18:04.140Yeah, well, with regard to Paige, you know, like I think what's up to her is just an absolute bloody catastrophe.
01:18:10.020Like I I think it's terrible, like seriously terrible.
01:18:13.620And I would regard her as a victim and accept that she paraded it.
01:18:21.140And the problem with that is that once you parade your self-destructive proclivity as a virtue, you're no longer a victim, you're a perpetrator.
01:18:35.940And so that was the dividing line for me.
01:18:37.560Like she must have been stunningly unimaginably unhappy to have gone through what she went through.
01:18:47.420And I can only imagine what how she got there.
01:18:50.820And I think that the physicians and the counselors who enabled her in that, I believe they should be put in prison for the rest of their life.
01:19:03.580But I used to watch Paige when she was a young woman on the Trailer Park Boys in Canada, which is this like off color, hilarious Canadian sitcom.
01:19:12.280And she was so charming and so she was great in Juno.
01:20:19.780Well, you could argue that Sports Illustrated should have never gone into the swimsuit model business, but they did.
01:20:26.500And it means that to accept that photograph as a valid statement of the truth, you have to dispense with the idea of beauty and athleticism.
01:20:36.820And I'm not doing that because beauty has value and so does athleticism.
01:20:42.320Now, that doesn't mean that someone who's obese, who's eaten way too many carbohydrates because they've been diluted by their government for 40 years, is not worthy of a certain degree of sympathy.
01:20:54.980I certainly regard obesity as a disease.
01:20:59.440I don't think it's a problem of willpower.
01:21:02.920I think that the Department of Agriculture gerrymandering of the food pyramid for marketing purposes pathologized the whole society in an absolutely appalling manner.
01:21:14.320But that doesn't mean that obese women on Sports Illustrated get to be regarded as beautiful.
01:21:22.420But here's the thing about that that's so infuriating.
01:21:24.920So this woman, her name is Yumi Nu, she's allowed to pose in a public magazine.
01:21:33.960She's very well aware that in her hopes, millions of people will see this photo and comment on it.
01:21:40.800But in her mind, the bargain, and in the mind of the left, the bargain can only include positive feedback, compliments.
01:21:50.700And anybody who doesn't feel that way about it and is honest about it is a villain.
01:21:55.460But meanwhile, you were not commenting and probably didn't even know who this Yumi Nu was prior to her choice to put her body into a bikini and on the pages of Sports Illustrated.
01:22:19.860But under their rules, which are not the Jordan Peterson rules for life, you are not allowed to be honest if honesty is anything other than absolute praise.
01:22:30.080Well, that's, we talked earlier a little bit about the shift in the political world to the toxic, toxically feminine.
01:22:39.480And the toxically feminine has a definition.
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01:29:59.520So, Jordan, how does all of this affect women who need men?
01:30:05.100Well, I think the most striking statistic that I know of is, well, the two striking statistics.
01:30:11.020The two we already discussed, the radical rise in unhappiness among unmarried young women who have liberal proclivities and the fact that 50% of women in the West now who are 30 don't have a child and that half of those will never have a child despite wanting one.
01:30:34.320Like, you just take those women, you know, let's just think about them for a minute.
01:30:38.460So, that means that half of women at 30 who don't have a child, half of them will search for a mate and try to have a child, let's say, through their 30s.
01:31:02.100And the thing is, you know, as you get older, the people that you have gathered around you, your family, become increasingly important to you and increasingly necessary.
01:31:14.700And what you do when you mature is that you start attending to other people more than you attend to yourself.
01:32:05.120So, but you see that the problem with the progressive liberal types is they think that being mentally healthy is a matter of getting your individual psyche in order.
01:32:20.200Being mentally healthy is a matter of arranging the hierarchy around you that you belong to in a harmonious manner.
01:32:28.980So that there's you and your relationship with yourself.
01:32:32.520But then there's you and your relationship with your husband.
01:32:35.200And then the relationship between both of you and your children.
01:32:38.680And then the relationship between your families and other families in your town.
01:32:43.680And then with regard to your state and your nation.
01:32:47.660And then with regards to the natural world and to whatever's beyond that, say, in the landscape of divinity.
01:32:55.600And happiness, resilience, meaning, purpose are all a consequence of organizing that hierarchy properly and finding your place within it.
01:33:06.980It's not an individualistic pursuit, you know, and even the Scottish liberals, let's say, of the Enlightenment, who established liberal individuality, did that with the presumption that they were operating within a radically Christian framework and society.
01:33:27.480So what they did was they took the existence of that hierarchy for granted and then said, well, if you organize that property, then you can be a fully functioning individual.
01:33:39.820Well, it's like, fair enough, but when all that collapses and half and an increasing majority of young people are headed for a relationshipless and childless future, then none of those liberal presuppositions hold.
01:33:59.180And so that makes everyone, well, it deprives their life of the meaning that comes in social service, you know, and look, human beings are unbelievably social.
01:34:14.200You know, you can take psychopathic murderers and you can punish them by depriving them of other people.
01:34:56.680That's the stupidest thing you could believe.
01:34:58.900Like, teenagers are desperate to belong.
01:35:02.240You know, and you can parody that and say, well, if your friends all jumped off a cliff, would you?
01:35:07.700And, you know, there's limits to how much you should sacrifice your soul to be part of the group.
01:35:13.540But by the same token, like what other people think of you and how they relate to you, not only does that matter, it should matter.
01:35:21.720And so the whole progressive theory of the human being is it's flawed in a manner that makes its enactment produce nothing but resentful pathology and misery.
01:37:25.100Because the right question is, how do I make myself into the sort of person that's so attractive to other people that potential mates are lining up for me?
01:37:35.100That's a way different question than how do I find the person that's right for me?
01:37:42.020And what's so special about you that what the, how do you know that the right person wouldn't take one look at you and run away screaming if they had any sense?
01:37:51.180Like, seriously, you know, you're settling, are you?
01:37:54.280You know, if you use that language, even the first thing you might ask yourself is, why do you start with such a high opinion of yourself and such a low opinion of the people who are pursuing you?
01:38:09.060Now, look, I understand that it's necessary to be attracted to a potential partner, you know, and that women have the right and the duty to be picky.
01:38:18.020Um, they should find a man who's going to be not a child and who's going to be very helpful to them in all ways, particularly when they have children, who's going to be a good father.
01:38:28.680And so hooray to women for being picky.
01:38:31.080But that's not the same thing as starting out narcissistic.
01:38:44.340Now, you might think, well, why should we pay attention to a fairy tale?
01:38:47.260It's like, well, how about because people remembered it for 15,000 years and that Disney just spent a quarter of a billion dollars trying to retell it and failed.
01:38:57.440And so, and then with regards to the order of affairs in a woman's life, look, I calculated recently that even an attractive woman, like radically attractive woman, let's say, who often has her own problems, by the way, because she tends to scare men away, right?
01:39:17.040A lucky woman has five potential partners in her life.
01:39:27.920Because it's a terrifying way to think.
01:39:30.380So imagine that you're primarily looking, say, from the time you're 16 at the lowest end to, say, 30.
01:39:37.220Like, because after that, it's starting to get harder because the clock is ticking so desperately.
01:39:43.080One in three couples at 30 already have fertility problems, by the way, which is defined as difficulty conceiving within a year, even though the attempts are being made.
01:39:53.400Okay, so let's say you've got 14 years, something like that.
01:39:57.240Now, how long does it take to find someone and then figure out who they are, especially if they're strangers?
01:40:04.820You know, before you're going to decide to marry someone, likely you're going to want to know them for a year, something like that.
01:40:11.840And so that's five years right there with five people.
01:40:16.860But that also assumes that you go from one relationship to another with no intervening space.
01:40:22.700So you're not suffering too much, for example, when a potentially promising relationship collapses or you don't get sick or something doesn't waylay you in your professional career.
01:40:34.540So imagine two years per relationship, that's 10 years for five, that's assuming that people want to be around you.
01:40:45.060So I don't know if you're settling, it's, I get the picture, you don't want to lie to someone and tell them that you find them attractive in all possible ways when you don't.
01:40:55.320But maybe you could start the bloody process with a little more humility.
01:41:00.880You know, I like the way you started that.
01:41:02.760What shouldn't the goal be to make yourself so attractive in, just in heart and soul, not to mention on the outside, that does require some effort, that they're lining up, that they're lining up there.