TRIGGERnometry - Jordan Peterson： Order and Chaos in 2021

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00:00:30.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:38.580 I'm Constantine Kishin.

00:00:39.780 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:45.080 We're delighted to say that our guest today is a very special man.

00:00:48.100 It is, of course, Jordan B. Peterson, author, psychologist, and an inspiration to a lot of people.

00:00:53.160 He's just written a book called Beyond Order, 12 Morals for Life.

00:00:57.100 Here it is. Thank you for the advance copy, Jordan.

00:00:59.240 And thank you for coming on the show.

00:01:01.080 Thank you guys for the invitation. I'm very much looking forward to it.

00:01:04.960 It's very kind of you to accept. Let's get straight into the book.

00:01:08.140 First of all, one of the themes that you've explored most of all in your last two books is, of course, order and chaos.

00:01:14.040 And that tension that exists, I think, within societies, but also within individuals, between the safety and boredom of order and the danger and simultaneously excitement of chaos.

00:01:26.300 What is a healthy balance and how does one get there at an individual level, but also at the level of society?

00:01:33.200 What does that look like?

00:01:34.160 Well, I think you're actually calibrated to detect that healthy balance with the deepest of emotional and cognitive instincts.

00:01:45.000 And I mean instinct. I think it's biologically based.

00:01:47.800 So, you have two problems, at least two problems as a living organism in an environment that's too complex.

00:01:55.600 You have to maintain security, but you also have to stay updated as things around you change.

00:02:02.780 So, you want things to be stable because otherwise it's too unpredictable and dangerous.

00:02:07.020 But things can't be stable completely because you don't know everything.

00:02:11.220 So, you're stuck with the limitations of your knowledge.

00:02:14.020 So, then the question is, well, how can you survive when you don't know enough and when the consequence of not knowing enough is danger?

00:02:22.380 And the answer to that is you establish stability, but you explore.

00:02:26.480 And so, you have the security that you need, but you update that security and keep it living.

00:02:35.920 And the instinct that governs that, as far as I can tell, is the sense of engaged meaning.

00:02:43.540 And why wouldn't there be an instinct for that?

00:02:46.200 It's so crucial to your survival.

00:02:50.700 It's as crucial as anything else.

00:02:52.560 You obviously have to eat and you have to drink.

00:02:55.680 You have to regulate your temperature.

00:02:57.160 There's these fundamental biological necessities.

00:02:59.920 But you have to master the environment in order to do all of that.

00:03:06.080 And then that leads you into the problem of security and exploration.

00:03:09.260 And even if you look at it neurobiologically, the system, for example, that governs exploration is unbelievably archaic, ancient from an evolutionary perspective.

00:03:21.400 It's half the hypothalamus, roughly speaking.

00:03:24.360 And the hypothalamus is a very old brain area.

00:03:27.920 It sits on top of the spinal cord, essentially.

00:03:30.520 It's, in some sense, it's the master control system for motivation.

00:03:34.520 It governs hunger and thirst and defensive aggression and temperature regulation and sexual arousal, these very, very fundamental attributes.

00:03:45.180 But half of it is devoted to exploration.

00:03:48.020 And in that system, there's a neurochemical system that emerges out of it, which runs on a neurochemical called dopamine.

00:03:55.220 And all of the drugs that people like to abuse, like cocaine, for example, activates the dopamine system.

00:04:01.760 That's why people like it.

00:04:02.860 And so you can tell when you're in the right place doing the right thing because you're actively engaged.

00:04:08.300 And that is a signal that the balance between stability and incoming information is optimized for you.

00:04:15.860 Jordan, don't you think one of the problems that we've got in our society at the moment is we tend to celebrate chaos.

00:04:22.820 We tend to celebrate because I associate creativity with chaos.

00:04:26.740 But order is seen as dull, staid, boring.

00:04:29.400 But order is what is needed to get things done.

00:04:32.240 And if you look at what is happening now within our institutions, our systems, it seems that order is unraveling.

00:04:39.180 Well, look, the critique of order, which is its stultification tendency, right?

00:04:45.540 Look, you zero out everything that's predictable, right?

00:04:49.740 It becomes boring.

00:04:50.700 It becomes so boring you don't even notice it.

00:04:52.620 So, for example, if you're lecturing to people in any given room and you ask them to close their eyes and then you ask them to imagine the color of the wall on the right of them, most people can't remember.

00:05:05.400 Because who cares?

00:05:06.400 As long as the wall is standing, it doesn't matter what color it is.

00:05:09.200 And right now, you and I, the three of us are talking and we're attending to the words.

00:05:14.460 We're not attending to anything around us.

00:05:16.740 You're not attending to the fact that the floor beneath you is stable.

00:05:21.700 But it's stable because you can rely on the engineers.

00:05:24.820 And the engineers are encapsulated within a legal system that has certain building standards.

00:05:29.680 And the reason that that floor is stable is because you live in this unbelievably developed country where you can take such things for granted.

00:05:37.760 And you can't help but be bored by that.

00:05:40.260 In fact, if you weren't, you'd be attending to everything at once.

00:05:43.120 And, well, that would be absolutely overwhelming.

00:05:47.080 And, again, in our society, too, it's very, very hard not to take things for granted, right?

00:05:54.240 And I've tried to train myself to do that, partly by reading a vast amount, I would say, about what happens in societies when they become too chaotic.

00:06:05.440 You know, we don't expect to see a riot when we go outside.

00:06:08.980 But the riot, in some sense, is the default condition.

00:06:13.020 And we're so protected that we're so protected as modern Westerners, let's say, that we don't even know what the walls guard us from.

00:06:23.040 And that's also a very typical narrative idea.

00:06:26.760 So, in The Lord of the Rings, for example, the hobbits are protected by these warriors, the striders, who patrol the borders constantly.

00:06:35.360 They're descendants of old kings.

00:06:37.420 Aragorn is the foremost among them.

00:06:40.020 And they protect the hobbits from all the darkness and unknown that's outside the kingdom.

00:06:45.400 But the hobbits don't even know.

00:06:47.140 And that's us.

00:06:48.280 We're protected from things we don't understand at all by things we don't understand at all.

00:06:53.920 We'll tear down the walls because we don't know what's behind them.

00:06:58.160 But, you know, it's not an easy problem to solve.

00:07:01.480 Gratitude solves it to some degree.

00:07:04.060 Historical knowledge solves it.

00:07:06.500 Historical knowledge will solve it.

00:07:08.100 But wouldn't you also say that exposure to other cultures and society solves it?

00:07:12.720 So, for me, my mother's from Venezuela, I've seen what happens when society unravels.

00:07:18.440 I've seen what happens when bad ideas are allowed to run rampant.

00:07:22.220 And that has very much inoculated me.

00:07:24.140 It's inoculated Constantine against this type of thinking.

00:07:27.660 But wouldn't you agree that, in a way, we're privileged to use that word?

00:07:31.440 Because most people in the UK or the US or Canada, they haven't been exposed to what happens when society unravels.

00:07:39.360 Well, that's very fortunate, obviously.

00:07:42.060 But it does have the effect that we've been discussing, which is that people take things for granted.

00:07:47.660 And they celebrate chaos.

00:07:49.440 Well, I want freedom.

00:07:50.520 It's like, no, you don't.

00:07:51.740 You want a tiny bit of freedom meted out in very calibrated doses on one dimension now and then.

00:07:57.440 And you want everything else to be as stable as possible.

00:08:00.560 And some people can tolerate more chaos than others.

00:08:03.540 You know, if you're extremely open in your personality, that's the creativity dimension.

00:08:08.120 And you're highly intelligent.

00:08:09.760 And you're conscientious.

00:08:10.980 And you're emotionally stable.

00:08:12.820 So, you don't suffer from negative emotion in too excess amount.

00:08:16.660 You can handle more chaos than someone who doesn't have those attributes.

00:08:20.720 But still, most of the time, well, look, what do you want when you sleep?

00:08:25.720 Silence and predictability.

00:08:28.920 That's not chaos.

00:08:30.380 That's a rarity, right?

00:08:32.460 Just think about how difficult it is to set up a situation where you can reliably have temperature-regulated silence 100% of the time at night for your whole life.

00:08:44.860 That's such a luxury.

00:08:47.340 And, of course, unless you lose it, for some reason, you develop insomnia or you're in an unfortunate situation where you don't have that peace anymore, you won't even notice that that's a privilege.

00:09:00.100 It's an unbelievable privilege.

00:09:03.300 And it's so unlikely.

00:09:05.120 And that's partly, I guess, why my books concentrate to a large degree on gratitude.

00:09:10.580 It's like so many things are going right while you forget about them.

00:09:17.840 You know, that's, and you have to be reminded.

00:09:20.840 It's a fundamental purpose of education is to remind you what you have to be grateful about.

00:09:26.380 And I think that's the proper basis of patriotism rather than pride.

00:09:32.240 Right?

00:09:32.740 You can have pride in your country.

00:09:34.260 It's like, yeah, well, that kind of rubs on upon you.

00:09:36.860 You know, it's like, rah, rah, England or Canada.

00:09:40.280 And then, you know, that makes me part of what I'm shaking my fist in favor of.

00:09:45.960 But gratitude is a different thing.

00:09:47.820 It's like, well, thank God. 0.99

00:09:49.840 Thank God that I don't have to think about the damn floor. 0.98

00:09:54.100 And, you know, you go to third world countries, badly run countries where the building standards are non-existent or the entire construction company infrastructure is corrupt. 0.99

00:10:05.600 Well, then the earth shakes a little bit and you have to worry about the damn floor. 0.95

00:10:11.240 So, Jordan, you use the word education. 0.97

00:10:14.540 I think in the context of this conversation, this is something that I've been thinking about because one of the shocking things to me as someone who was born in the Soviet Union, I remember talking to my grandmother, still alive.

00:10:24.760 She's going to be 95 this year.

00:10:26.580 She lived through the German occupation of Ukraine.

00:10:28.940 And I remember talking to her about her childhood.

00:10:32.720 And she said, the thing that me and my girlfriends were discussing when I was 15 was, will we ever eat bread again?

00:10:42.280 Will we ever eat bread again?

00:10:44.040 And that has always stayed with me.

00:10:45.900 And that's why, for me, gratitude for everything we have here in the West has never been difficult.

00:10:50.440 But I wonder, is there a way we can transcend the fact that I had to hear that from my own grandmother?

00:10:56.860 How do we educate other people about what happens in this sort of society?

00:11:02.220 What happens when you let identitarian ideologies take over these large swathes of Europe and Asia and come into conflict?

00:11:10.020 What happens when this sort of way of thinking takes over?

00:11:14.080 Because you've been very interested in the Soviet Union.

00:11:16.740 You've educated yourself into it.

00:11:18.280 But I don't see that happening, particularly with young people in the West these days.

00:11:21.900 No, it was shocking to me that, so I lectured mostly to students about the Soviet Union, especially under Stalin, but certainly also under Lenin, about the horrors of the Soviet Union.

00:11:36.440 I lectured about that in my personality class in the second year psychology course.

00:11:42.960 And that was a valid enterprise because totalitarianism is a personality attribute in some sense as well as a social system.

00:11:50.640 But it was often the first any of the students had heard of any of that, you know, which is to me was just absolutely, well, it's so outrageous that it's virtually unbelievable.

00:12:02.880 Especially when you think that we put the entire planet at risk for 50 years, at risk of total annihilation because of what happened in the Soviet Union. 0.98

00:12:15.880 And we're barely out of that if we're out of it at all.

00:12:19.320 I mean, the Russians and the Americans still rattle sabers at each other.

00:12:22.900 I think the possibility of anything other than an accidental nuclear exchange has decreased immensely since the mid-80s, let's say.

00:12:31.800 But how is it that we could be so blind that we would forget to notify our young people that we fought?

00:12:42.980 Like, the Second World War really didn't end until 1989.

00:12:47.520 That isn't how the history books look at it yet, but that's the case.

00:12:51.700 And it's just stunning that none of that is common knowledge.

00:12:57.140 You know, there's a little bit more historical knowledge disseminated about what happened in Nazi Germany.

00:13:01.820 But the deafening silence with regards to Maoist China, which is still an immense threat, not least in the form of North Korea and the Soviet Union, it's so remarkable that it's a kind of miracle.

00:13:18.060 So, but it is the responsibility of the education system, as far as I can tell.

00:13:22.980 Where else are you going to?

00:13:25.740 I mean, it's the social responsibility of the education system.

00:13:29.680 In terms of individuals, well, you know, now everyone has access to all the communication technology they could possibly want.

00:13:37.400 And so, if you have a particular interest in making something known, you can just do it.

00:13:43.440 And so, hopefully people will do that.

00:13:45.020 You guys are obviously doing that with your YouTube channel and your podcast.

00:13:50.100 Agreed.

00:13:50.720 I was going to ask you, actually, just as a personal thing, really, what made you interested in the Soviet Union?

00:13:56.320 Why was, how were you drawn to reading about it and educating yourself about it, first of all?

00:14:03.260 It's really hard to tell.

00:14:04.740 You know, I think, well, curiosity, just general curiosity is one driver.

00:14:13.440 So, I'm curious about virtually everything.

00:14:18.280 And I also have a proclivity towards depression.

00:14:23.000 And I think that maybe that makes negative things hit me harder in general.

00:14:27.700 Well, Russian history will help you very well with that, or literature, or anything else.

00:14:32.000 So, I think that it's possible that I was sort of wired to take these things more seriously because they hit me harder.

00:14:39.420 You know, like I noticed in graduate school, for example, that I was obsessed with the shortness of life.

00:14:47.820 That was an idea that was in my head constantly.

00:14:49.840 That it was not appropriate to waste time because time was fleeting and short.

00:14:57.480 And I thought that pretty much every morning I woke up for years when I was writing my first book.

00:15:03.040 And that was definitely a motivating force to write that book, which I really did on spec over about a 15-year period.

00:15:10.160 But I had all sorts of friends in graduate school, and they were very smart people and admirable people as far as I was concerned.

00:15:18.180 Hardworking and curious and good research scientists.

00:15:21.340 McGill had an excellent clinical program, and I had an absolute riot.

00:15:24.680 It was such fun going to graduate school there.

00:15:27.400 But my friends weren't consumed by darkness the same way I was, even though they were clinically interested.

00:15:36.400 I was obsessed with it, and specifically with the issue of individual motivation for atrocity.

00:15:45.380 I was interested in the sociological elements of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and Mao's China.

00:15:51.180 Interested in the political elements.

00:15:52.580 My first degree was actually in political science, but I soon found that I was much more oriented towards Dostoevsky, let's say, than Tolstoy.

00:16:02.060 I like Tolstoy, but Tolstoy is basically a sociologist, right?

00:16:05.540 He writes about these wide swaths of sociological occurrences, sort of at the level of society.

00:16:15.520 But I like Dostoevsky because he got inside people's heads.

00:16:19.660 And that's what I was really interested in.

00:16:21.520 It wasn't how the concentration camps were set up politically or even what ideology motivated them,

00:16:28.260 but what was the guard thinking when he pushed people to the right rather than the left?

00:16:35.220 What was in his head as a person?

00:16:38.560 And as if I was there.

00:16:41.260 And it was always personal to me, and not even so much on the victim side.

00:16:46.540 I always thought of it on the perpetrator side, because it was such a mystery to me.

00:16:51.320 How could you be like that?

00:16:53.500 And, well, that was very illuminating to me.

00:16:56.660 I mean, it transformed my personality entirely, I would say, studying that.

00:17:01.620 Partly because I realized that you don't have to be that different than you are.

00:17:08.400 And that makes you different than you think.

00:17:11.460 And in some ways, you take yourself a lot more seriously when you understand that, right?

00:17:19.720 As soon as you understand that you're a loose cannon, in a really fundamental sense, you start being more careful.

00:17:29.240 And so that was really helpful to me.

00:17:31.360 And I think I became much more careful, perhaps, more careful with what I said, for sure, as much as I was able.

00:17:41.680 And, Jordan, do you think part of the problem with today's society is that we don't acknowledge that we have this in us?

00:17:49.460 We like to pretend on social media, on Twitter, whatever it may be, that we're this really moral, woke, good people without any shadow.

00:17:59.160 But the reality is that we are all dark, we're all complex, we all have shadow within us.

00:18:04.460 And the propensity to commit both beautiful acts, but also acts which could easily be described as evil.

00:18:11.820 Well, I think that it's better to identify the enemy within than the enemy without.

00:18:18.480 That doesn't mean that you should never identify the enemy without, right?

00:18:22.520 Sometimes your group matters and the enemy is at your gates and you have to take action.

00:18:30.520 But in peaceful circumstances, let's say, well, then I think it's an individual matter.

00:18:38.420 And so this is one of the things that's made me ashamed of the universities in large part, too, I would say.

00:18:43.300 Because there's such an activist culture in the university.

00:18:46.500 It's almost like a moral rite of passage.

00:18:49.880 You become adolescent and one of late adolescent on the steps into adulthood.

00:18:54.420 And you're encouraged tacitly and explicitly by the university culture to protest, to find the perpetrators, to alter the system.

00:19:04.760 It's like, no, I don't think that's a good idea.

00:19:10.480 Yeah, I think there's something deeply wrong about that in all sorts of ways.

00:19:15.880 First of all, you know, you don't know anything at that age.

00:19:20.020 Well, it's true.

00:19:21.260 You just don't know anything.

00:19:22.720 And look, the thing that we should make clear here, Jordan, is when we laugh at that, we're laughing at ourselves from 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, whenever it was for each of us.

00:19:33.100 We know that we can laugh at the idea that students don't know anything because we were once students who didn't know anything.

00:19:38.760 Absolutely. Well, and it's not like I don't take undergraduates seriously.

00:19:42.600 I love university teaching.

00:19:45.220 And I took the undergraduates seriously.

00:19:47.380 I never thought of them as a burden to my research career, say.

00:19:52.460 I love teaching.

00:19:53.460 And my experience with undergraduates was you pretty much got back from them what you gave.

00:19:59.840 So if you were intent on teaching, they responded unbelievably positively.

00:20:05.180 And so it's not like I have contempt for undergraduates.

00:20:10.600 Quite the contrary.

00:20:12.500 And one of the things I really – I taught at Harvard for a while, and that was quite an experience.

00:20:17.940 The university was exceptionally well run at that time.

00:20:21.940 Hopefully that's still the case.

00:20:23.320 The undergraduates were at the top of the power hierarchy, and they were treated – and you could be cynical about it.

00:20:31.520 You know, I used to joke that Harvard treated its undergraduates like baby 40-year-old millionaires.

00:20:37.120 And they did.

00:20:38.240 And part of that was pure economic calculation, right?

00:20:41.140 Because Harvard has a huge endowment, and it has that endowment because it's so good at treating its undergraduates properly and selecting them as well.

00:20:50.160 So it's a great deal for Harvard, especially if you're thinking over decades.

00:20:54.000 But that's the right way to treat undergraduates.

00:20:57.060 It's not as 18-year-olds who knew nothing but as future incredibly competent adults.

00:21:03.660 But that still, having said all that, when you're 18, you haven't had a child.

00:21:12.220 It's unlikely that you've engaged in the kind of long-term intimate relationship that requires adult-level compromise over, let's say, the years.

00:21:24.640 You haven't worked, or if you have, minimally, and often not at all.

00:21:30.200 You certainly haven't started a business.

00:21:31.640 You haven't written anything.

00:21:34.640 You haven't created anything, with exceptions.

00:21:38.020 So it's not time to be thinking, you know how to reconstruct the world.

00:21:43.860 And why we think that's okay is just beyond me.

00:21:47.180 It's like it's not okay.

00:21:48.940 And I figured that out when I was about 17, 16, 17.

00:21:52.160 I worked for a socialist party when I was a kid.

00:21:54.600 And I had a career there if I wanted it.

00:21:57.380 It was quite obvious.

00:21:58.460 But I woke up one day, partly under the influence of this roommate of mine, who's still a really good friend of mine.

00:22:05.420 And he'd been kicked around a lot.

00:22:07.960 He was from a really poor background.

00:22:09.360 He was a tough guy.

00:22:10.220 He'd worked on oil rigs and lead smelters.

00:22:12.180 And he banged around a lot.

00:22:13.880 And he was a little older when he went back to university.

00:22:15.920 And he was a cynical, compassionate optimist.

00:22:21.760 And he ended up working with, like, the worst delinquents in Canada.

00:22:24.600 And he could really do that well because he was a tough guy.

00:22:27.820 And he told me one day, you just don't know anything.

00:22:33.740 Like, you have this theory, which was a socialist theory.

00:22:36.160 But it certainly wasn't mine, although I knew it, and I could say it, and I could argue for it, and win the arguments for that matter.

00:22:43.880 He said, that doesn't explain the world.

00:22:46.920 And I'd already kind of figured that out.

00:22:49.020 I noticed that I worked on this board, Board of Governors, for this little college I went to.

00:22:55.060 And all the people on the Board of Governors had been appointed by the government, and the government was conservative.

00:23:01.500 And so they were all small businessmen who'd done well on the frontier of Canada, essentially, because it was in this town called Grand Prairie, which was pretty new.

00:23:11.300 A lot of them were immigrants because Alberta is an immigrant province.

00:23:15.320 It was only established in 1905.

00:23:17.340 They'd all kind of lifted themselves up by their bootstraps.

00:23:20.600 And I'd also worked for guys like that who owned, like, I worked in restaurants from the time I was 13 to the time I was about 17.

00:23:27.980 And I admired those guys, even though I didn't agree with their politics.

00:23:32.660 But I admired them, and that bugged me.

00:23:34.980 It was like, Jesus, here, I don't agree with them intellectually, but I admire them.

00:23:40.200 And then I'd go to the socialist meetings, and I knew some, like, committed, working-class, hero, socialist types.

00:23:48.820 You know, they were the real deal.

00:23:50.680 But a lot of them were activists, and they just drove me crazy.

00:23:54.740 I couldn't stand them.

00:23:56.200 They were whiny and resentful, and they weren't admirable at all, even though, hypothetically, we shared political view.

00:24:01.860 And so that really put a knot in my tail.

00:24:05.320 And that was another realization that, well, I just didn't—

00:24:08.820 I realized that I was, like, 16, mouthy, smart.

00:24:12.320 I could formulate an argument.

00:24:14.500 I could speak, but I didn't know anything.

00:24:18.000 And thank God for that.

00:24:19.760 So I figured I'd try to see if I could learn something before I dared to do anything political.

00:24:25.220 But doesn't that speak to another quality, which is humility, which is something that frequently, in a lot of our young people, they're, you know, that are lacking as well.

00:24:36.520 That ability to look in on oneself and realize that they don't know the answers.

00:24:41.940 The fact that you may have this confidence, you may be bright, you may have the ability to articulate, you may be able to win arguments.

00:24:48.320 You're describing me, mate.

00:24:49.380 Yeah, exactly.

00:24:52.080 Well, you know, it's not that easy to figure out that just because you win an argument—

00:24:57.700 You know, if you win an argument, you think, well, I'm right, because I won the argument.

00:25:01.180 I can tell you that's not going to go very far in your marriage.

00:25:05.360 So one of the things I learned in my marriage quite quickly was that sometimes—

00:25:12.060 and it was the same on my wife's part—

00:25:14.260 Sometimes your best bet is to help your partner make the best argument they can to defeat you.

00:25:20.500 Because just because you can win the argument doesn't mean you're right.

00:25:23.880 It really doesn't mean that.

00:25:25.760 It might be that your partner has got a handle on something.

00:25:28.880 They can't articulate it very well.

00:25:30.960 But their intuitions, their ability to detect patterns is spot on.

00:25:36.760 And you can crush them verbally, let's say, or using other techniques at your disposal, whatever they might be.

00:25:42.620 And you think, well, you know, I proved my point.

00:25:46.180 Yeah, fair enough, perhaps.

00:25:48.180 But if your wife isn't on board, well, good luck for you. 0.94

00:25:51.220 And just because you proved your point doesn't mean the world is going to accept that conclusion.

00:25:57.300 And that's also something, I think, that we do a bad job of teaching young people.

00:26:03.980 You know, because we teach them that if you win the argument, you're right.

00:26:09.720 It's sort of the hallmark of being intelligent.

00:26:11.440 And fair enough, it's better than losing the argument.

00:26:16.000 But it's not as good as learning something.

00:26:18.900 That's for sure.

00:26:21.100 Jordan, we were circling around the idea of socialism and communism a little bit.

00:26:28.260 I wanted to ask you, given what you as a psychologist know about human beings,

00:26:32.240 do you think that there is something fundamentally incompatible in that worldview with humanity?

00:26:40.700 Or do you think, quote, unquote, it hasn't been tried properly?

00:26:45.120 Oh, well, it hasn't been tried properly means that the world hasn't been fortunate enough to have me run it.

00:26:52.180 That's the constant claim.

00:26:53.960 Well, it hasn't been tried properly.

00:26:55.100 What that means is, well, I understand this system deeply.

00:26:58.020 And if those, if I was in charge or people like me, then it would work.

00:27:02.260 It's like, no, it wouldn't.

00:27:03.680 That's, that's what would happen is you'd be wiped out by the next batch that were even worse than you.

00:27:09.280 That's what would happen.

00:27:10.200 But, so, it's such an arrogant claim that it hasn't been tried properly.

00:27:14.600 It's, so, but having said that, like, it's not, I understand the motivation for, like, the desire for an egalitarian distribution of valuable resources.

00:27:28.300 And we should walk through that.

00:27:30.160 So, systems have a tendency, Marx commented on this, but it's much deeper than Marx's realization.

00:27:39.160 Systems have a tendency to radically distribute resources unequally.

00:27:45.600 And that's really destabilizing.

00:27:50.420 Yep.

00:27:51.020 So, and there's a couple of reasons for that.

00:27:53.400 One reason is, as you get more, you're offered more.

00:27:59.960 So, I'm in a position now where I am offered an indefinite array of opportunities.

00:28:06.280 And I don't need them.

00:28:08.400 I'm not ungrateful for it.

00:28:10.320 But once you're saturated with opportunities and your time is completely taken up, more opportunities can't be utilized.

00:28:20.300 And so, and if you have money, well, it's way easier to make more money.

00:28:25.000 I mean, you can lose it too.

00:28:26.140 But it's way easier to make more money once you've got started.

00:28:30.100 And so, once you are educated, you have some capital, you have a connection network.

00:28:36.540 And then, let's say, in addition to that, you're well known.

00:28:40.340 You can just multiply that endlessly.

00:28:42.260 And, but then on the other end of things, if you have nothing, well, you can't even afford to get started.

00:28:49.680 Yeah.

00:28:50.160 So, like if you start a business, the most difficult customer to get is the first one.

00:28:54.640 Once you have 10, getting 100 is not that hard.

00:28:58.220 But getting from 0 to 1 is virtually impossible.

00:29:01.860 And so, 0 is a really tough.

00:29:04.800 It's a hole that's really hard to climb out of.

00:29:07.560 And it's not good for society to have a lot of people at 0.

00:29:12.420 So, there's this propensity for people to fall off the end and to degenerate down to 0.

00:29:20.060 And another propensity for resources to aggregate in the hands of a very, very small number of people.

00:29:25.020 And look, it doesn't matter what dimension you measure that on.

00:29:29.460 So, if you look up among basketball players, you look at successful, you know, number of points scored.

00:29:36.920 There's a few people way out on the extreme.

00:29:39.200 If you look at number of records sold, records produced, songs written, popular songs written.

00:29:45.780 It's like five composers account for 95% of the classical repertoire.

00:29:52.400 But it's only 5% of the music they wrote that's played.

00:29:57.920 And so, you see that happening in two ways there.

00:30:01.040 And the problem with that is that it produces this radical inequality in society.

00:30:07.300 And that's really unsettling because you have a mechanism that's very deeply embedded within you that runs, as far as we can tell, on serotonin, a fundamental brain chemical.

00:30:19.920 And the degree to which serotonin regulates your negative emotion is dependent on your status within the group that you strive for status within.

00:30:33.500 And what that means is that if you're on the bottom end of the status hierarchy, you're much more prone to negative emotion.

00:30:43.840 And that actually hurts you physically.

00:30:46.540 You'll die sooner.

00:30:47.820 You'll age faster.

00:30:49.040 You'll develop all the age-related diseases faster.

00:30:51.840 It's a real calamity psychologically and physically.

00:30:55.760 And so, there's endless motivation to work against that tendency for resources to be distributed so unequally.

00:31:05.200 The problem is we don't know how to do it.

00:31:09.780 It's such a powerful force.

00:31:12.260 We don't know how to do it and simultaneously maintain creative and productive endeavor, for example.

00:31:18.320 So, because you want everything to be more productive, right?

00:31:24.900 Because you try to wipe out absolute poverty and maybe even give everyone you can a certain amount of luxury.

00:31:32.580 And maybe that's even better for the planet because richer people tend to take better care of the environment.

00:31:37.440 So, you want absolute wealth to rise and you don't want inequality to become too extreme.

00:31:43.580 But the systems that have been set up to manage that are not good at it.

00:31:49.300 They don't work.

00:31:50.780 And Marx, he attributed inequality to capitalism.

00:31:55.040 That's wrong.

00:31:57.660 It's seriously wrong.

00:31:59.360 So, the diagnosis is right.

00:32:00.800 Well, inequality is intolerable psychologically.

00:32:05.160 Or at least it's extremely costly.

00:32:07.320 But that doesn't mean we know what to do about it.

00:32:09.660 Jordan, let me just jump in there very quickly because this has always been the problem for me.

00:32:15.240 When I look at, like, free market right-wing people, I go, you expect everyone to pull themselves by their bootstraps.

00:32:21.300 That's not going to happen.

00:32:22.200 That's not.

00:32:23.080 Well, lots of them can't.

00:32:24.700 That's my point, right?

00:32:25.600 Lots of them can't because we understand people have different IQs and different genetic basis and different experiences and childhood and whatever.

00:32:32.680 And on the other hand, you've got people on the left who say, well, inequality is intolerable.

00:32:37.660 And I agree with that.

00:32:39.060 But as you say, the systems that they try to apply in order to address that don't work and don't make any sense and create terrible outcomes.

00:32:48.120 So, where is the golden middle?

00:32:50.880 Well, that's, look, the reason that I'm an advocate of free speech is that the golden middle moves.

00:32:58.040 And so, how do we find it?

00:32:59.940 Well, we talk about it.

00:33:01.620 Where is it?

00:33:02.160 It moves all the time.

00:33:03.680 Yesterday's solution isn't going to work today.

00:33:07.000 So, that golden solution is genuinely a mobile point because inequality even changes with time.

00:33:17.540 You know, and the conservative viewpoint is inadequate.

00:33:21.000 I was watching The Crown and the seasons with Maggie Thatcher, you know, and Thatcher is an extraordinarily conscientious person. 0.70

00:33:28.220 That's her fundamental attribute and that is a predictor of conservatism. 0.97

00:33:32.160 And that's dutifulness, industriousness, orderliness, by the book, patriotism, all of that.

00:33:37.640 If you want someone to run your company, you want a conscientious person.

00:33:42.080 If you want a teacher, you want a conscientious teacher.

00:33:44.400 It's not associated with artistic creativity.

00:33:47.880 That predicts liberalism, that predicts liberalism, that's openness.

00:33:50.840 In any case, Maggie Thatcher is extremely conscientious and she believes that hard work will get you there and that should be encouraged.

00:33:59.960 And everyone can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

00:34:04.240 And look, there's truth in that.

00:34:06.780 If you look at what predicts people's success across time, this is where psychology is actually reliable as a science.

00:34:13.360 We know some of what predicts life outcomes and we know it validly and reliably.

00:34:18.880 So, the best predictor is IQ.

00:34:21.760 And that accounts for about 25% of the differences in outcome between people.

00:34:26.860 So, a lot's left unexplained, right?

00:34:28.600 75%.

00:34:29.460 But 25% is a lot.

00:34:32.520 The next best predictor is conscientiousness.

00:34:36.240 And it accounts for about 5% to 9%.

00:34:40.300 Which, again, leaves a lot unexplained, but it's not nothing.

00:34:44.500 And then the third one is how sensitive you are to negative emotion.

00:34:47.680 And it accounts for something like 3% to 4%.

00:34:50.100 So, it is definitely the case that if you took two people that are equal in some valuable domain,

00:34:57.840 the one that works harder is going to do better.

00:35:02.660 And that might even compound over time.

00:35:06.920 But, if you take two people of radically different IQ and they both work equally hard,

00:35:12.960 the person with the higher IQ is going to crush the person with the lower IQ.

00:35:17.900 And, you know, you said we know that, but we don't.

00:35:21.720 Because you can't even talk about IQ in modern society.

00:35:25.440 It's such a hot topic and it's not surprising.

00:35:29.200 I know the IQ literature for a variety of reasons.

00:35:32.120 Partly because I built tests to predict performance and studied that for 15 years.

00:35:39.400 And my tests couldn't sell, at least in part because they actually worked and were too threatening because of that.

00:35:45.440 Well, and there's reasons for that.

00:35:46.840 But, if you have an IQ of under 82, you can't be inducted into the American armed forces.

00:35:56.720 And the reason for that is the armed forces have done IQ testing for a very long time.

00:36:01.520 And they're hungry for people always.

00:36:04.160 So, they're not going to throw away anybody that they can use.

00:36:07.200 They found that they couldn't teach anybody with an IQ of under 82 anything that made them valuable.

00:36:15.760 They were a net drain.

00:36:17.700 And that's 10% of the population.

00:36:20.040 So, there's about as many people with an IQ of 82 or lower as there are of people who are capable of doing well in an institute of higher education.

00:36:34.360 So, and among that population, those who work harder are going to do better.

00:36:38.540 But, but, in a cognitively complex environment, they're at a marked disadvantage.

00:36:48.600 And the conservatives can't deal with that.

00:36:50.820 They don't know what to do about that.

00:36:52.520 And fair enough, you know, it's like, it's a very hard problem.

00:36:55.340 And the liberals, they say, the liberals take the opposite tack, which is even more annoying in my estimation.

00:37:01.240 It's like, well, you can train anyone to do anything.

00:37:03.600 And that's, that's so wrong that, that it's hard to even know where to begin.

00:37:11.580 I'd love it if it was the case.

00:37:13.200 I'll give you an example of this.

00:37:15.380 So, the Americans, in their war on poverty, ran a program called Head Start.

00:37:20.340 And Head Start was a program that everyone wanted to succeed, conservatives and liberals alike.

00:37:24.620 And so, the idea was, get disadvantaged kids early and enrich their education, say, between the ages of three and five, preschool.

00:37:33.600 And so, the Americans poured immense monetary resources into this project.

00:37:40.560 And, and it has been studied in terms of outcomes for decades.

00:37:46.680 And its goal was to increase cognitive performance.

00:37:51.040 That was its goal.

00:37:53.420 And it did.

00:37:55.440 But the, but the differences went away.

00:37:57.360 So, the hope was, if you got the kids early and taught them, they'd get, they'd develop an advantage.

00:38:02.480 And then, that advantage would compound across time.

00:38:05.080 And it would ameliorate the worst effects of poverty.

00:38:07.760 And who wouldn't want that, right?

00:38:09.040 Like, I don't care who you are.

00:38:10.500 Everyone wants that.

00:38:12.700 The kids did leap ahead academically.

00:38:14.620 But all the other kids caught up by grade three or four.

00:38:16.720 And then, after that, there was no differences at all between the Head Start kids and the non-Head Start kids.

00:38:20.820 Except, the Head Start kids were less likely to get pregnant and drop out of school. 0.99

00:38:25.200 And they were more likely to graduate.

00:38:27.000 But that looks like it was a socialization effect.

00:38:30.220 Probably, some of those kids were shielded against the worst of their family environment by being in daycare.

00:38:36.600 But there was zero effect on cognitive ability.

00:38:40.600 Very unfortunate, right?

00:38:41.900 Because that was a large-scale social experiment.

00:38:46.580 Everyone had the highest hopes for it.

00:38:48.580 No effect on cognitive ability.

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00:39:23.540 Hey, Constantine, do you love trigonometry?

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00:40:22.860 See you there, guys.

00:40:23.860 What you're talking about, Jordan, is actually the great taboo in education.

00:40:29.880 I was a teacher for many, many years, and my head, the head deputy head would go to me

00:40:36.880 in the primary school, why is it that, you know, this cohort aren't doing as well as last

00:40:42.140 year's cohort?

00:40:43.100 And it was seen as taboo to just go, well, last year's cohort was smarter.

00:40:47.680 No one can tolerate IQ.

00:40:51.900 Look, it's the only thing psychologists have ever discovered, really, except for maybe the

00:40:56.660 big five.

00:40:58.100 It's like, these are facts.

00:40:59.680 IQ is unbelievable.

00:41:00.980 It's easy to measure.

00:41:02.640 To measure IQ, all you have to do is take any set of questions that require abstraction

00:41:08.280 to answer.

00:41:09.260 And so you can take 20 questions, and you can do that, you know, better or worse, but

00:41:16.160 with 20 random questions, you're going to get a decent estimate.

00:41:19.340 So take 20 questions, ask 100 people the answers, sum up the answers, rank order the people,

00:41:25.760 and that'll be correlated with IQ at something like 0.8, 0.9, really high, really high.

00:41:31.480 That's all you have to do.

00:41:32.540 And then that'll be predicted with their life, or that'll predict their life outcomes, like

00:41:37.640 economic success, for example.

00:41:42.160 That'll account for about 25% of the difference across people.

00:41:45.080 It's unbelievably powerful, and it's unidimensional as well.

00:41:47.960 You know, you hear all these appalling claims that there are multiple kinds of intelligences

00:41:54.520 and multiple kinds of learning styles and skills.

00:41:58.000 Look, people differ in their abilities, and they're not all reducible to IQ.

00:42:03.140 But in the realm of intellectual endeavour, it's one factor.

00:42:07.540 It's one thing.

00:42:08.320 One thing.

00:42:09.560 It's not decomposable.

00:42:11.280 Not really.

00:42:12.940 And that's harsh, man.

00:42:14.700 It's harsh.

00:42:15.840 Let me ask this question, John, because I feel like it's begging to be asked, and you've

00:42:20.260 teased that you've put us in a position where I have to ask you this question, given the

00:42:24.520 way that you've been talking about this.

00:42:26.640 And that question is, I mean, it comes obviously.

00:42:30.680 What is our fear of this conversation?

00:42:33.160 There is, I feel it.

00:42:34.340 I sense it as we talk about this.

00:42:36.400 There is some kind of Pandora's box at the end of this conversation.

00:42:39.640 It violates our moral sensibility.

00:42:43.420 You know, we deeply believe that human beings are of equal value.

00:42:47.360 It's a predicate of, well, I think it's probably a predicate of human biology in some sense,

00:42:51.920 but maybe not, but in any case, because you could make a case that we're aristocratic

00:42:56.460 by nature too, but forget about that.

00:42:58.880 Certainly, it's the fundamental axiom of the West.

00:43:03.500 Everyone's equal before the law.

00:43:05.080 We're all of equal value in that transcendent sense.

00:43:08.620 Okay.

00:43:09.660 Well, what does that mean practically?

00:43:12.040 Well, what we hope it means is that we're sort of roughly equal in ability or trainability

00:43:18.380 at least.

00:43:19.560 And we're not.

00:43:21.280 And no one, that doesn't sit well with us.

00:43:24.600 We don't even know what to do with it.

00:43:26.220 We're very uneasy with it.

00:43:28.920 And then it's no wonder.

00:43:31.120 Now, ignoring it isn't going to help.

00:43:33.360 And also, what also isn't going to help is, you know, in Boston, for example, recently,

00:43:38.420 they shut down a lot of the gifted programs because the ethnic makeup of the classes was 0.99

00:43:43.980 unacceptable.

00:43:46.900 It wasn't randomly selected, let's say, or it wasn't representative of the broader community.

00:43:54.400 And it's no wonder that that bothers people.

00:43:58.520 Who wouldn't that bother?

00:44:00.720 But what are we going to do?

00:44:03.040 In that situation, you shut down the gifted classes.

00:44:05.700 Well, who are those gifted classes for?

00:44:08.680 Are they for the gifted kids or are they for society at large?

00:44:13.600 There isn't anything more valuable than human intelligence.

00:44:17.900 And if we don't utilize it, well, then we let it go to waste.

00:44:21.120 Well, how can that be in anyone's interest?

00:44:23.300 It's a resource that we should maximally exploit, even for our own narrow self-interest.

00:44:30.500 But we can't.

00:44:32.120 And so gifted programs, they're always...

00:44:37.580 People are never happy with them.

00:44:41.020 Or even with the idea.

00:44:42.680 You know, you can celebrate differences in athletic ability, and we certainly do.

00:44:48.280 We're very uneasy when we celebrate differences in intellectual ability.

00:44:53.220 It's kind of a non-starter.

00:44:55.700 It isn't part of the problem that we don't want to admit that we all have our limits.

00:44:59.900 We like to pretend that we can go out, we can achieve anything.

00:45:02.660 In fact, isn't that the basis of the American dream?

00:45:06.120 But the reality is, we can't.

00:45:09.020 And that's not simply the world that we live in.

00:45:11.280 Well, this is a nice, upbeat conversation, inspiring people all over the world, isn't it?

00:45:16.540 Well, like, working hard helps a lot.

00:45:22.760 So, hooray.

00:45:23.860 I mean, there's one example.

00:45:25.260 For example, in general, the offspring of first-generation Asian immigrants to the U.S.

00:45:33.240 outperform the offspring of Americans, but also the offspring of second-generation immigrants. 0.99

00:45:43.780 Why?

00:45:44.720 It looks like it's because they work much harder.

00:45:48.120 And they work harder enough to give them what's roughly a 15-point IQ advantage equivalent.

00:45:55.080 And that's roughly the difference between a college student, average college graduate, say,

00:45:59.920 and the average high school graduate.

00:46:01.920 So, it's a big difference.

00:46:04.180 And it's a big difference.

00:46:05.960 So, work hard, set your sights, you know, 60-hour weeks, discipline, all of that, no doubt.

00:46:14.540 But, you know, there are pretty pronounced individual differences in the ability to do that as well.

00:46:21.240 So, even that's a rough...

00:46:24.200 Even your ability to focus and concentrate in a disciplined way seems to be quite affected

00:46:30.320 by underlying biological factors.

00:46:33.500 And that's also unjust.

00:46:35.000 It appears unjust in a fundamental way.

00:46:38.140 So, it's tough.

00:46:40.720 And it's something that I used to talk about many...

00:46:42.580 We used to go over this again and again in the staff room all the time.

00:46:47.200 The question that frequently came up was,

00:46:49.460 in a world of automation, you have these people who have got low IQs

00:46:53.780 and before they used to be able to go and do menial jobs in a factory

00:46:57.060 and they used to be able to do that job.

00:46:59.700 And work brings dignity.

00:47:01.380 It's one thing that gives people a sense of purpose.

00:47:03.720 Yep.

00:47:03.840 What are we going to do in a world of automation

00:47:06.080 with these people who have lower IQs

00:47:08.800 when they simply can't access jobs?

00:47:11.460 Well, it looks like what we're going to do is give them phones.

00:47:16.240 Well, I mean, we all have that problem in some sense, right?

00:47:19.420 It's not like any of us is occupied fully by our jobs.

00:47:24.840 And so, we have free time, spare time, time to waste.

00:47:28.280 You know, I ask undergraduates on a pretty regular basis

00:47:30.980 how much time they waste a day.

00:47:33.140 And the average is something like six to eight hours a day, which is a lot.

00:47:37.380 Well, what do people do with that?

00:47:38.520 Well, they're on their phones.

00:47:39.940 They're on their computational devices.

00:47:41.640 And now, will that provide purpose and meaning and productivity?

00:47:52.860 Who knows?

00:47:54.500 The technology is so new and so rapidly changing

00:47:57.180 that all you can say is, well, look, it's really absorbing.

00:48:01.640 Everyone's glued to it.

00:48:02.800 It's addictive.

00:48:04.540 And it's just getting going.

00:48:06.340 You think it's addictive now.

00:48:07.540 You wait till the AI algorithms learn how to manipulate your attention

00:48:12.020 by watching your eye movements.

00:48:14.840 Because that's coming down the pipeline so fast that, well,

00:48:19.280 Facebook owns Oculus, the VR company.

00:48:21.460 And the VR headsets can read your eye movements.

00:48:23.700 And your eye movements are a direct pipeline to your attention.

00:48:27.560 And so, and the AI systems are going to figure that out real fast.

00:48:30.400 So, now, does that deal with the productivity issue?

00:48:35.780 No, probably not.

00:48:37.780 You know how it is in the tech world.

00:48:39.220 Unless you're on the cutting edge, you can't monetize your action.

00:48:44.960 You know, you guys have this relatively new podcast.

00:48:47.180 That's a pretty new world.

00:48:49.620 You can monetize it because you're on the cutting edge.

00:48:51.880 You're on the leading edge.

00:48:52.760 In five years, people who start, it's going to be much harder for them

00:48:56.820 to do what you did.

00:48:59.240 They may have other advantages.

00:49:01.420 Yeah.

00:49:01.860 Well, we wish we'd started when Joe Rogan did.

00:49:05.700 That would have been great for us as well.

00:49:07.740 Jordan, you bring up technology.

00:49:09.820 I was going to move on.

00:49:10.620 But let's talk about that a little bit.

00:49:12.500 I think we've seen the impact of this modern technology

00:49:16.600 and particularly social media on the political landscape,

00:49:20.860 on the mental health landscape, on almost every area of our life.

00:49:26.520 Hey, I've got something horrible to say about that.

00:49:30.400 We've kept it upbeat so far, Jordan.

00:49:32.720 So, let's carry on down that part.

00:49:34.200 Well, I'll let you guys see what you make of this.

00:49:37.340 About three years ago, I was interviewed by The Economist.

00:49:41.460 And we were talking about aggression.

00:49:44.760 And I said that men are, on average, more aggressive than women 1.00

00:49:49.760 or they're more physically aggressive.

00:49:52.580 So, among children, for example,

00:49:55.460 boys are more likely to kick, hit, bite, and steal.

00:49:59.340 And that's not a bad operationalization of aggression, let's say.

00:50:03.120 And then if you look within boys,

00:50:05.000 a small proportion of the boys are that way at two.

00:50:08.980 Most of them get socialized out of it,

00:50:12.080 but those that don't are stably antisocial and criminal

00:50:15.680 into the adolescence and adulthood.

00:50:17.840 And then that burns out around 27, 28.

00:50:20.940 That's the developmental trajectory of aggression.

00:50:23.240 Doesn't look like it's learned.

00:50:26.380 Okay, so, however, there's something else.

00:50:28.540 So, that's interesting enough.

00:50:29.760 It's like, it's there at two.

00:50:31.640 It's a rage circuit.

00:50:32.760 It's an old, old biological circuit.

00:50:34.500 And it gets controlled.

00:50:36.320 And most aggressive kids are socialized by the time they're four.

00:50:39.500 And if they're not, you can't socialize them after that.

00:50:42.060 That's also very interesting and rather disheartening.

00:50:46.640 But women, girls, however, 1.00

00:50:49.280 they are more aggressive than males

00:50:51.060 if you measure aggression differently.

00:50:55.600 They use reputation destruction.

00:50:58.140 So, well, we've seen what happens with social media.

00:51:06.980 Physical aggression doesn't translate to social media.

00:51:10.800 But reputation destruction,

00:51:13.140 that translates to social media unbelievably well.

00:51:17.660 So, maybe it's time to have a little chat about toxic femininity. 1.00

00:51:22.280 Well, there we go.

00:51:24.200 Jordan, I've got a little piece of paper here

00:51:26.220 with some of the questions we were going to ask you.

00:51:28.380 And the next one on my list is,

00:51:30.380 why do people hate you?

00:51:31.860 I think you've answered that.

00:51:34.120 Why?

00:51:34.620 So, why do you think?

00:51:35.860 Why do you think?

00:51:36.820 Well, I was going to ask you this.

00:51:38.180 I kind of know, but what would you point to?

00:51:39.900 Well, let me ask you this,

00:51:41.040 because I think this is an important part of it.

00:51:43.580 Helen Lewis, who's interviewed you

00:51:45.660 and who wrote a review of your book.

00:51:48.340 She hates me. 0.99

00:51:49.440 Yeah, she hates you.

00:51:51.120 I've met Helen Lewis,

00:51:52.280 and she's interviewed me.

00:51:54.300 And of all the things you might say about her, 1.00

00:51:56.620 you wouldn't say that she was stupid, 1.00

00:51:58.820 and you wouldn't say that she was poorly educated, right? 1.00

00:52:02.160 I might say that.

00:52:05.380 I was being generous.

00:52:06.520 She took advantage of the education that was offered to her,

00:52:09.520 but education is so corrupt 0.92

00:52:13.540 that mastering it makes you an expert at nonsense. 0.97

00:52:19.320 Touche.

00:52:20.000 Touche.

00:52:20.460 I'll accept that.

00:52:21.060 But let's just go with the she's intelligent point.

00:52:23.260 So, she should be able to understand your arguments,

00:52:25.460 and I'm sure she does.

00:52:26.940 And yet, I noticed time after time

00:52:29.080 where an intelligent person,

00:52:32.280 even Kathy Newman, 1.00

00:52:33.400 you wouldn't say that she's stupid, 1.00

00:52:35.280 and lots of others, 1.00

00:52:36.920 come after you with a vitriol and a visceral...

00:52:41.260 You can feel it.

00:52:42.680 You can...

00:52:43.300 You should be there.

00:52:44.880 Yeah.

00:52:45.560 Right.

00:52:45.960 Well, when I went to the GQ interview...

00:52:48.480 Yeah.

00:52:48.860 Look, I've got to say,

00:52:50.100 when I went to the Kathy Newman interview,

00:52:52.360 Kathy Newman was very professional.

00:52:54.360 We met in the green room beforehand.

00:52:55.980 She was perfectly polite,

00:52:57.900 in a professional sort of way, you know,

00:53:00.460 but that's fair enough.

00:53:01.660 Professional politeness beats the hell out of,

00:53:03.600 you know, random rudeness.

00:53:05.220 So, I'll take it.

00:53:07.740 When I walked into the GQ interview,

00:53:10.020 and this was...

00:53:11.660 I was already pretty worn out at that point.

00:53:14.740 There was a photo shoot first,

00:53:16.440 and then the interview.

00:53:18.220 And that place was hostile,

00:53:20.440 right from the moment I walked in.

00:53:22.040 And so, I'm kind of on edge in that interview,

00:53:23.900 because I could feel that.

00:53:25.160 And it was like...

00:53:26.720 The stage was set long before I walked into that.

00:53:30.460 And so, there wasn't even professional politeness.

00:53:33.100 It was...

00:53:33.580 You know, people can freeze up a room.

00:53:35.940 Some people are really good at that.

00:53:37.500 I think maybe it has to do with smell.

00:53:40.120 You know, I lived with someone once,

00:53:41.760 and you could tell if they were upset

00:53:43.660 when you walked into the house,

00:53:44.720 you'd get kind of an uneasy feeling.

00:53:46.280 And the only explanation I have for that

00:53:48.500 is that it's related to smell

00:53:50.240 at some unconscious level.

00:53:51.720 In any case,

00:53:53.120 the GQ interview atmosphere

00:53:55.840 was unbelievably tense.

00:53:58.580 And I was sort of in there for 45 minutes

00:54:00.480 before I started talking.

00:54:01.640 So, I was...

00:54:02.200 You know, I was already in the position of a cat

00:54:04.740 who hears dogs barking down the street.

00:54:07.040 So, in any case,

00:54:11.860 it still isn't obvious to me

00:54:14.820 what it is that causes such animosity.

00:54:20.180 Well, let me posit a theory, Jordan,

00:54:22.060 because this is what I really wanted to ask you.

00:54:23.940 You tweeted the other day

00:54:25.000 when Helen Lewis published a review of your book.

00:54:27.640 You said,

00:54:27.940 Why do you hate me?

00:54:28.780 I've tried to be a good man.

00:54:30.540 And I replied saying,

00:54:32.040 I think you've answered your own question.

00:54:34.240 And my fear is,

00:54:35.640 and my question to you is,

00:54:37.520 do you think that fundamentally,

00:54:39.400 you mentioned toxic feminine, 0.93

00:54:40.900 I don't like to get into this whole gender thing 1.00

00:54:42.920 in that way,

00:54:43.660 because the whole gender war 1.00

00:54:45.260 is a stupid thing to me, 1.00

00:54:46.500 as far as I'm concerned. 1.00

00:54:47.660 But I do think it's possible

00:54:50.440 that we live in a society

00:54:51.600 where some people,

00:54:52.980 those people that I'm talking about,

00:54:55.560 they hate,

00:54:56.940 they don't want strong men.

00:54:59.000 They don't want men to be better.

00:55:01.380 They want men to be weaker.

00:55:02.700 And they see you as an agent of change

00:55:05.500 who helps men to be better.

00:55:06.820 And they are scared of that.

00:55:09.180 Well,

00:55:10.160 if you've had bad experiences with men,

00:55:15.840 and, you know,

00:55:16.700 that's probably the universal female experience, 1.00

00:55:20.020 right?

00:55:20.340 Because we all fall short of the ideal.

00:55:23.860 And of course,

00:55:24.700 that's deeply disappointing to women, 0.95

00:55:26.320 just as women who fall short of the ideal 1.00

00:55:28.560 are deeply disappointing to men.

00:55:31.000 But let's say you've had

00:55:32.580 less than ideal relationships,

00:55:35.260 perhaps with any man in your life.

00:55:38.480 It might make it very difficult

00:55:40.220 for you to distinguish

00:55:41.320 between authority and power.

00:55:43.880 Right?

00:55:45.080 Because

00:55:45.560 if authority is misused,

00:55:47.880 it looks like power,

00:55:48.860 and misused power is tyranny.

00:55:50.880 And so,

00:55:51.380 the best thing to do

00:55:52.760 in the case of misused power

00:55:55.320 is to reduce the power.

00:55:56.600 And if authority and competence

00:55:59.100 never enter the issue,

00:56:00.260 never enter the question,

00:56:02.300 then

00:56:02.520 you don't ever think

00:56:04.680 you're sacrificing something.

00:56:05.960 You're just

00:56:06.340 dampening down

00:56:07.700 the possibility of tyranny.

00:56:09.520 This is partly why

00:56:10.560 the oppressive patriarchy narrative

00:56:13.540 is so

00:56:14.080 distasteful to me.

00:56:16.660 It's like,

00:56:17.120 look,

00:56:17.440 fair enough,

00:56:17.980 you know?

00:56:18.280 I mean,

00:56:18.940 every hierarchical system

00:56:21.240 has its tyrannical aspect.

00:56:23.320 And you might say,

00:56:24.600 well,

00:56:24.740 let's get rid of hierarchies.

00:56:26.080 It's like,

00:56:26.740 no,

00:56:27.760 sorry,

00:56:28.420 you can't even see

00:56:29.860 without a hierarchy.

00:56:31.360 Because

00:56:31.800 you have to decide

00:56:33.060 what you're going to look at.

00:56:34.400 And

00:56:34.560 you privilege

00:56:35.660 what you're looking at

00:56:36.900 over all the things

00:56:37.900 you aren't looking at,

00:56:38.840 and you produce

00:56:39.360 a value hierarchy

00:56:40.300 instantly.

00:56:41.140 There's no escape from that

00:56:42.820 unless you could

00:56:43.600 equally attend to everything

00:56:44.840 all the time.

00:56:46.080 Which you can't.

00:56:47.540 So you're stuck

00:56:48.120 with hierarchies.

00:56:49.700 There's no escape from them.

00:56:50.900 That doesn't mean

00:56:51.660 they're universally benevolent

00:56:52.960 because they're not.

00:56:53.880 And they get warped

00:56:54.780 by power.

00:56:56.380 But just because

00:56:57.140 they get warped

00:56:57.860 by power

00:56:58.420 doesn't mean

00:56:58.900 that that's their essence.

00:57:01.220 Authority is their essence.

00:57:02.500 And that's competence.

00:57:04.000 Right?

00:57:05.580 And,

00:57:06.100 but if you can't

00:57:07.800 distinguish those two,

00:57:10.020 well,

00:57:10.320 then it's all out of salt

00:57:11.420 on anything

00:57:11.880 that looks like power.

00:57:14.540 So,

00:57:15.140 and there's definitely,

00:57:16.200 there's a huge element

00:57:17.740 of that.

00:57:18.100 It's so unfortunate

00:57:18.960 because you see then

00:57:19.880 that boys

00:57:21.580 get punished

00:57:22.740 for their ambition.

00:57:24.560 You know,

00:57:25.300 and

00:57:25.600 because that looks like

00:57:27.860 the route to power.

00:57:28.960 I knew,

00:57:29.460 I had friends

00:57:30.280 who were so guilty

00:57:31.300 about their ambition

00:57:32.420 that,

00:57:33.520 well,

00:57:33.820 in one case,

00:57:34.560 it killed him.

00:57:36.360 He committed suicide.

00:57:37.860 Now,

00:57:38.220 he had his problems,

00:57:39.200 you know,

00:57:39.480 but one of them

00:57:40.320 was that

00:57:40.760 he was unbelievably guilty

00:57:42.880 about 0.95

00:57:43.820 being white, 0.98

00:57:45.740 about being an oppressor, 0.97

00:57:47.080 about,

00:57:47.360 about any human activity

00:57:49.020 because he associated

00:57:49.980 that with the

00:57:50.600 despoiling of the planet.

00:57:52.260 And it's not like

00:57:52.780 we don't hear that story

00:57:53.820 over and over and over.

00:57:56.340 So,

00:57:57.340 but it's so punishing.

00:57:59.760 Jordan,

00:58:00.200 don't you think

00:58:00.720 part of the problem

00:58:01.600 as well

00:58:02.020 is the tribalism

00:58:03.040 that we have nowadays

00:58:04.020 and the narratives

00:58:05.240 that we all speak

00:58:06.400 and that we all seem

00:58:07.700 to ingest entirely

00:58:08.720 without thinking

00:58:09.540 and these,

00:58:10.220 you know,

00:58:10.880 they're propagated

00:58:12.600 right the way,

00:58:13.340 you know,

00:58:14.200 through the way

00:58:15.140 we interact

00:58:15.760 with each other

00:58:16.300 and so on

00:58:16.720 and so forth

00:58:17.240 in our society

00:58:17.920 that when someone

00:58:18.580 stands up

00:58:19.200 and goes,

00:58:19.980 hang on,

00:58:20.640 that's wrong.

00:58:21.600 I don't believe

00:58:22.160 in that for X,

00:58:22.860 Y,

00:58:23.040 and Z reason.

00:58:23.940 All of a sudden

00:58:24.740 you're getting people

00:58:25.620 to think,

00:58:26.260 to challenge themselves

00:58:27.160 and that's a real shock

00:58:28.800 and people react

00:58:29.800 against that

00:58:30.460 really strongly.

00:58:32.640 Yeah,

00:58:32.820 well,

00:58:33.000 there's always taboos

00:58:34.400 in societies,

00:58:35.320 right?

00:58:35.900 And they move around

00:58:37.240 and obviously

00:58:38.120 I violated some taboos.

00:58:41.420 What exactly

00:58:42.420 they were

00:58:43.120 isn't

00:58:43.680 particularly obvious

00:58:45.840 I think

00:58:47.360 I'm not

00:58:48.540 a fan

00:58:49.160 of

00:58:50.420 the

00:58:50.640 currently

00:58:51.660 promoted

00:58:52.260 social justice

00:58:53.280 theories

00:58:53.720 of identity

00:58:54.900 and

00:58:55.740 that's also

00:58:56.680 partly why

00:58:57.280 I'm not,

00:58:58.800 why people

00:58:59.460 don't like me

00:59:00.100 or some people

00:59:00.640 don't like me

00:59:01.280 but that's also

00:59:03.440 a technical issue

00:59:04.460 like your identity

00:59:05.900 the,

00:59:07.520 there's an,

00:59:08.720 this,

00:59:09.740 I stood up

00:59:10.320 against this law

00:59:11.040 in Canada,

00:59:11.700 Bill C-16

00:59:12.460 which compelled

00:59:13.300 people to use

00:59:14.260 pronouns that other

00:59:15.800 people chose

00:59:16.540 let's say

00:59:17.040 under the

00:59:18.480 unspecified threat

00:59:20.480 and I thought

00:59:24.320 to begin with

00:59:25.000 that that was

00:59:26.020 mostly a free speech

00:59:26.980 issue

00:59:27.260 it's really bothered

00:59:28.100 me that I would

00:59:29.240 be compelled

00:59:30.040 to utter

00:59:30.760 any

00:59:32.540 pre-approved

00:59:34.820 phraseology

00:59:35.800 and I didn't

00:59:37.200 see any precedent

00:59:38.020 for that

00:59:38.600 in English

00:59:40.200 language law

00:59:41.180 English culture

00:59:42.140 law

00:59:42.580 and it was

00:59:43.500 actually

00:59:43.920 rejected

00:59:44.880 as a move

00:59:45.780 by the Supreme

00:59:46.420 Court in the

00:59:46.920 United States

00:59:47.460 and I believe

00:59:48.060 in the 1940s

00:59:49.020 so I thought

00:59:50.580 it was mostly

00:59:51.060 a free speech

00:59:51.700 issue

00:59:51.940 but I've come

00:59:52.580 to think

00:59:52.920 more recently

00:59:53.520 that there

00:59:53.960 was more

00:59:54.260 to it

00:59:54.580 than that

00:59:54.880 there was

00:59:55.100 more bothering

00:59:55.680 me about

00:59:56.100 it than

00:59:56.380 that

00:59:56.680 there's a

00:59:58.900 theory of

00:59:59.380 identity

00:59:59.840 in the

01:00:00.360 bill

01:00:00.620 and the

01:00:01.820 theory of

01:00:02.260 identity

01:00:02.640 is basically

01:00:03.800 predicated

01:00:04.340 on the idea

01:00:04.960 that your

01:00:05.380 identity

01:00:05.820 is your

01:00:06.980 choice

01:00:07.700 and it's

01:00:10.260 as mutable

01:00:10.960 as your

01:00:11.460 choice

01:00:11.940 and also

01:00:12.680 that your

01:00:13.200 choice

01:00:13.680 is enforceable

01:00:15.200 on others

01:00:16.420 and you might

01:00:17.720 say well

01:00:18.220 look

01:00:18.800 if I want

01:00:21.320 to be treated

01:00:21.760 a certain way

01:00:22.420 then why

01:00:23.200 can't people

01:00:23.780 treat me

01:00:24.220 that way

01:00:24.740 well

01:00:25.080 maybe they

01:00:26.160 could

01:00:26.360 but how

01:00:27.580 much force

01:00:28.140 can you

01:00:28.540 use

01:00:28.920 that's the

01:00:29.660 real question

01:00:30.260 should they

01:00:30.760 be required

01:00:31.520 to do it

01:00:32.100 well then

01:00:33.180 you might

01:00:33.480 say well

01:00:33.880 perhaps if

01:00:34.460 it was in

01:00:34.860 your interest

01:00:35.480 they could

01:00:35.880 be required

01:00:36.420 to do it

01:00:36.820 but I

01:00:37.100 don't think

01:00:37.480 the identity

01:00:38.000 theory

01:00:38.360 that's at

01:00:38.740 the bottom

01:00:39.080 of all

01:00:39.380 this is

01:00:39.720 in anyone's

01:00:40.240 interest

01:00:40.500 because it's

01:00:41.000 actually

01:00:41.440 inadequate

01:00:42.460 identity

01:00:45.440 is something

01:00:48.520 practical

01:00:49.640 it's a game

01:00:51.740 that you play

01:00:52.260 with other

01:00:52.620 people

01:00:52.880 you have

01:00:53.400 to play

01:00:53.820 it with

01:00:54.060 other

01:00:54.220 people

01:00:54.500 they have

01:00:55.080 to cooperate

01:00:55.780 otherwise

01:00:57.040 it's not

01:00:57.600 playable

01:00:58.180 and so

01:00:59.420 if you're

01:01:00.000 going to be

01:01:00.280 successful

01:01:00.740 in the world

01:01:01.220 and we

01:01:01.560 know this

01:01:02.040 from the

01:01:02.380 developmental

01:01:02.800 literature

01:01:03.360 in relationship

01:01:04.780 to child

01:01:05.260 development

01:01:05.660 when you're

01:01:07.060 two

01:01:07.360 you're

01:01:07.620 egocentric 0.99

01:01:08.200 and you

01:01:08.600 tend to

01:01:09.020 impose your

01:01:09.760 game on

01:01:10.340 the world

01:01:10.840 and that

01:01:11.580 means you

01:01:12.080 can't play

01:01:12.820 with others

01:01:13.380 and two-year-olds

01:01:14.340 are notoriously

01:01:15.320 non-social

01:01:17.280 they don't engage

01:01:19.200 in mutual

01:01:20.280 play

01:01:20.620 if you put

01:01:21.240 two-year-olds

01:01:22.040 side by side

01:01:22.820 they'll play

01:01:23.740 but they won't

01:01:24.260 play with each

01:01:25.100 other

01:01:25.380 now what

01:01:26.260 Piaget

01:01:28.500 the developmental

01:01:29.080 psychologist

01:01:29.660 great developmental

01:01:30.340 psychologist

01:01:30.840 noticed

01:01:31.200 was that

01:01:31.580 around

01:01:31.860 three

01:01:32.200 or four

01:01:32.700 children

01:01:33.820 will start

01:01:34.300 to negotiate

01:01:35.860 the game

01:01:36.400 so a two-year-old

01:01:37.140 will just be

01:01:37.500 playing with a

01:01:38.040 truck

01:01:38.260 back and forth

01:01:38.980 and maybe

01:01:39.600 the other

01:01:39.920 two-year-old

01:01:40.380 is playing

01:01:40.760 with a doll

01:01:41.300 and they're

01:01:41.680 side by side

01:01:42.440 but at

01:01:43.960 three

01:01:44.380 they have

01:01:45.640 the doll

01:01:46.040 or the truck

01:01:46.620 and then

01:01:46.940 they decide

01:01:47.460 whether they're

01:01:47.900 going to play

01:01:48.260 with the doll

01:01:48.780 or the truck

01:01:49.460 and then

01:01:50.180 they lay down

01:01:50.740 the ground rules

01:01:51.400 for the game

01:01:52.000 and then

01:01:52.460 they both

01:01:52.880 abide by them

01:01:53.720 and so

01:01:54.960 they have a

01:01:55.680 little identity

01:01:56.320 within that game

01:01:57.320 but it's

01:01:58.320 shared

01:01:58.720 and that

01:01:59.780 means that

01:02:00.300 they can

01:02:00.640 cooperate

01:02:01.180 and compete

01:02:02.300 within that

01:02:03.220 game

01:02:03.620 well that's

01:02:04.520 the beginnings

01:02:04.980 of identity

01:02:05.740 and so

01:02:07.100 your identity

01:02:07.740 is a mode

01:02:10.240 of being

01:02:11.120 and perceiving

01:02:11.900 that opens

01:02:13.760 the door

01:02:14.220 for you

01:02:14.640 in the social

01:02:15.240 world

01:02:15.760 it isn't

01:02:17.580 only a tiny

01:02:18.300 part of it

01:02:18.860 is who

01:02:19.360 you feel

01:02:21.340 you are

01:02:22.040 now it's

01:02:23.560 not like

01:02:23.920 that's an

01:02:24.280 unimportant

01:02:24.820 part

01:02:25.400 but

01:02:26.220 if you

01:02:29.380 feel you're

01:02:30.000 an unplayable

01:02:30.700 game

01:02:31.200 that doesn't

01:02:32.800 help other

01:02:33.400 people

01:02:33.840 play with

01:02:34.660 you

01:02:35.020 and so

01:02:36.440 part of the

01:02:36.860 reason that

01:02:37.260 that law

01:02:38.460 and all of

01:02:39.120 the philosophy

01:02:40.560 let's say

01:02:41.280 behind it

01:02:42.100 ideology

01:02:42.660 more accurately

01:02:43.580 has this

01:02:45.100 egocentric

01:02:46.660 view of

01:02:47.500 identity

01:02:47.980 and it's

01:02:48.520 never made

01:02:48.940 explicit

01:02:49.440 right

01:02:50.760 it's like

01:02:51.380 we use the

01:02:52.500 word identity

01:02:52.980 we won't even

01:02:53.520 talk about

01:02:53.980 what it

01:02:54.300 means

01:02:54.680 well it

01:02:56.180 means

01:02:56.520 and then

01:02:57.100 we'll say

01:02:57.500 well it

01:02:58.380 means

01:02:58.760 your felt

01:02:59.560 sense

01:02:59.980 of sexual

01:03:01.000 identity

01:03:01.480 let's say

01:03:01.900 or gender

01:03:02.380 identity

01:03:02.860 or however

01:03:04.380 far that

01:03:05.200 might be

01:03:05.540 extended

01:03:05.980 fair enough

01:03:07.660 but

01:03:07.920 no

01:03:09.100 wrong

01:03:10.200 that isn't

01:03:11.220 how identity

01:03:11.740 works

01:03:12.240 it's way

01:03:13.980 too sparse

01:03:15.400 a theory

01:03:16.040 to be

01:03:17.160 playable

01:03:18.480 you know

01:03:19.220 and I

01:03:19.560 insist on

01:03:20.240 this playability

01:03:20.960 because

01:03:21.340 in a marriage

01:03:22.720 a marriage

01:03:24.900 isn't one

01:03:25.460 interaction

01:03:26.120 a marriage

01:03:26.600 is one

01:03:26.940 interaction

01:03:27.420 then another

01:03:27.960 one

01:03:28.140 then another

01:03:28.580 one

01:03:28.760 then another

01:03:29.200 one

01:03:29.420 and that

01:03:29.960 pattern

01:03:30.360 of interactions

01:03:31.140 has to be

01:03:32.600 played in a way

01:03:33.220 that doesn't

01:03:33.680 degenerate across 0.94

01:03:34.660 time

01:03:35.140 right

01:03:36.260 and there's an

01:03:36.820 ethic that

01:03:37.480 governs that

01:03:38.340 and if the

01:03:40.300 ethic produces

01:03:41.280 a deteriorating

01:03:42.080 game then the

01:03:42.680 relationship will

01:03:43.320 end

01:03:43.700 so

01:03:44.860 the game

01:03:47.000 you're playing

01:03:47.360 has to be

01:03:47.960 repeatable

01:03:48.600 and it's out

01:03:49.720 of that

01:03:50.080 necessity for

01:03:51.100 repetition

01:03:51.620 that ethics

01:03:52.260 emerges

01:03:52.700 actually

01:03:53.220 and your

01:03:54.880 identity has

01:03:55.680 to be a

01:03:56.060 playable game

01:03:56.800 that means

01:03:57.740 it isn't

01:03:58.240 something you

01:03:58.660 can merely

01:03:59.040 enforce on

01:03:59.900 other people

01:04:00.420 it doesn't

01:04:01.040 work

01:04:01.400 and so

01:04:02.680 the people

01:04:03.140 who are

01:04:03.560 hypothetically

01:04:04.620 being helped 0.86

01:04:05.280 by this

01:04:05.920 are being

01:04:06.760 encouraged

01:04:07.320 to adopt

01:04:08.060 a theory

01:04:08.640 of identity

01:04:09.320 which is

01:04:10.560 counterproductively

01:04:12.640 egocentric

01:04:13.320 and you say

01:04:14.720 it's

01:04:14.880 counterproductively

01:04:15.780 egocentric

01:04:16.460 and I would

01:04:16.940 agree with you

01:04:17.620 but do you

01:04:18.320 not think

01:04:18.940 that the

01:04:19.480 reason we

01:04:20.120 have been

01:04:20.560 that we

01:04:21.380 have

01:04:21.680 adopted

01:04:23.180 this

01:04:23.580 ideology

01:04:24.000 as you

01:04:24.420 say

01:04:24.640 is because

01:04:25.360 it's a

01:04:25.740 quasi-religion

01:04:26.660 and that

01:04:27.400 stems from

01:04:28.060 the fact

01:04:28.520 that we

01:04:29.260 don't have

01:04:30.120 religion

01:04:30.540 anymore

01:04:31.120 in the

01:04:31.840 west

01:04:32.060 you know

01:04:32.380 we're

01:04:32.620 more and

01:04:33.460 more living

01:04:33.780 in secular

01:04:34.400 societies

01:04:35.840 well there's

01:04:37.620 a chapter

01:04:38.020 in my

01:04:38.380 new book

01:04:38.900 beyond order

01:04:40.620 called

01:04:41.020 abandoned

01:04:41.480 ideology

01:04:42.140 and it

01:04:42.580 and then

01:04:43.980 ideology and

01:04:44.760 idol are

01:04:45.300 kind of the

01:04:45.800 same thing

01:04:46.280 idol

01:04:46.980 be careful

01:04:47.840 what you

01:04:48.240 worship

01:04:48.620 I think

01:04:50.240 ideologies

01:04:50.800 are crippled

01:04:51.480 religions

01:04:52.000 so and I

01:04:53.800 make a case

01:04:54.320 for that

01:04:54.680 in beyond

01:04:55.120 order

01:04:55.460 and in

01:04:56.080 my first

01:04:56.480 book

01:04:56.720 maps of

01:04:57.180 meaning

01:04:57.480 a religious

01:04:59.300 framework

01:05:00.120 of complete

01:05:01.040 religious

01:05:01.460 framework

01:05:01.860 offers you

01:05:02.400 a balanced

01:05:03.000 view of

01:05:03.520 the world

01:05:04.020 and you

01:05:04.880 might say

01:05:05.220 well how do

01:05:05.580 you know

01:05:05.780 if it's

01:05:06.060 balanced

01:05:06.440 it's like

01:05:06.900 fair enough

01:05:07.540 you know

01:05:07.840 and how do

01:05:08.320 you know

01:05:08.580 that your

01:05:09.080 viewpoint

01:05:09.440 isn't just

01:05:09.980 another

01:05:10.260 ideology

01:05:10.840 it's

01:05:11.220 these are

01:05:12.360 good

01:05:12.500 questions

01:05:13.000 I can

01:05:14.920 give you

01:05:15.200 an example

01:05:15.740 of two

01:05:16.180 ideologies

01:05:16.740 that put

01:05:17.380 together

01:05:17.780 make a

01:05:18.660 complete

01:05:19.840 world view

01:05:20.560 let's say

01:05:21.080 it's sort

01:05:22.560 of like

01:05:22.920 joining

01:05:24.080 the philosopher

01:05:25.100 Hobbes and

01:05:25.840 Rousseau at

01:05:26.500 the hip

01:05:26.880 Hobbes believed

01:05:27.860 that you know

01:05:28.420 the state of

01:05:28.920 nature was

01:05:29.500 chaos and

01:05:30.120 that every

01:05:30.460 man would

01:05:30.820 be at

01:05:31.080 every other

01:05:31.440 man's

01:05:31.820 throat

01:05:32.040 without the

01:05:32.680 benevolent

01:05:33.620 influence

01:05:35.040 of culture

01:05:35.640 and Rousseau

01:05:36.240 believed that

01:05:36.840 human beings

01:05:37.380 were essentially

01:05:37.960 good but

01:05:38.660 and that

01:05:39.220 culture warped

01:05:40.000 them

01:05:40.220 and they're

01:05:41.640 both right

01:05:42.260 and you

01:05:42.920 say well

01:05:43.220 how can

01:05:43.480 they be

01:05:43.740 both right

01:05:44.220 when they

01:05:44.540 say the

01:05:44.860 opposite

01:05:45.180 thing

01:05:45.620 and well

01:05:46.160 some

01:05:47.760 things are

01:05:48.620 the thing

01:05:50.220 they are

01:05:50.580 and they're

01:05:50.900 opposite at

01:05:51.460 the same

01:05:51.860 time

01:05:52.240 unfortunately

01:05:52.840 so anyways

01:05:54.200 consider the

01:05:56.440 environmentalist

01:05:57.340 ideology

01:05:57.880 so it

01:06:00.160 posits that

01:06:00.980 nature is

01:06:02.240 benevolent and

01:06:03.580 wonderful

01:06:04.100 Gaia

01:06:04.760 the interconnectedness

01:06:06.240 of all things

01:06:06.820 the beauty of

01:06:07.520 nature

01:06:07.860 the

01:06:08.200 sustainability

01:06:10.380 of the natural

01:06:11.420 world in the

01:06:11.980 absence of

01:06:12.520 human beings

01:06:13.160 it's a

01:06:14.340 it presents a

01:06:15.320 very positive

01:06:15.880 view of

01:06:16.320 nature

01:06:16.640 and it

01:06:18.420 presents a

01:06:18.900 view of

01:06:19.180 culture that's

01:06:19.840 like the 0.99

01:06:20.260 raping savage 0.69

01:06:21.260 it's something

01:06:22.160 like that

01:06:22.740 that human

01:06:23.400 culture you

01:06:24.120 see that in

01:06:24.640 movies like

01:06:25.340 have those

01:06:26.920 blue haired

01:06:27.520 those blue

01:06:28.360 skinned aliens 0.97

01:06:29.340 I'll remember

01:06:31.100 it in

01:06:31.420 there was a

01:06:32.240 Freudian slip

01:06:33.060 with blue

01:06:33.540 hair Jordan

01:06:34.240 that's another

01:06:34.900 archetype isn't

01:06:35.900 it

01:06:36.180 it's avatar

01:06:36.880 avatar that's

01:06:38.240 right so this

01:06:38.740 this is the

01:06:39.220 theme of avatar

01:06:39.920 and and so

01:06:41.260 there's this

01:06:41.840 natural world

01:06:42.620 and there's the

01:06:43.100 military industrial

01:06:43.940 complex that

01:06:44.660 comes in and 0.99

01:06:45.240 rapes mother 1.00

01:06:45.900 nature and

01:06:46.460 there's the

01:06:47.140 terrible adversarial

01:06:48.620 individual who's

01:06:49.860 utilizing the

01:06:50.820 social structure

01:06:51.580 to rape nature

01:06:52.620 and that's one

01:06:55.100 story so that's

01:06:56.440 the environmental

01:06:56.880 story in the

01:06:57.560 U.S. there was

01:06:58.200 another story that

01:06:59.140 was dominant for a

01:07:00.220 long time that was

01:07:00.880 the frontier myth

01:07:01.860 and the frontier myth

01:07:03.720 was well nature was

01:07:04.960 chaos and desolate

01:07:06.380 and and waste

01:07:07.860 and the

01:07:09.320 noble pioneer

01:07:11.020 who was positive

01:07:12.220 would bring the

01:07:12.840 civilizing force of

01:07:13.860 society and make

01:07:14.860 nature fruitful

01:07:15.640 and so you have

01:07:17.280 on the frontier myth

01:07:19.480 side you have the

01:07:20.080 positive individual

01:07:21.020 and on the

01:07:22.060 environmental side

01:07:23.140 you have the

01:07:23.540 negative individual

01:07:24.260 and on the

01:07:25.540 frontier myth side

01:07:26.320 you have positive

01:07:27.020 culture and the

01:07:27.880 environmental side

01:07:28.720 you have negative

01:07:29.320 culture and

01:07:30.000 on the frontier side

01:07:31.520 you have negative

01:07:32.120 nature and on

01:07:33.120 the environmental

01:07:33.900 side you have

01:07:34.500 positive

01:07:34.860 nature if you put those things together that's the world of human experience and ideologies

01:07:42.600 stories for that matter use those characters but unless they use all of them there's a bias and

01:07:50.760 and the problem with the bias is that something important isn't being taken into account so for

01:07:56.240 example if you view the west as a patriarchal tyranny it's like fair enough man like how you

01:08:02.820 could you could advance evidence for that forever but well the lights are on and it's warm you know

01:08:12.420 so yeah the terrible tyrant but but how about a little gratitude for the benevolent king

01:08:19.040 the same goes for the natural world it's like well of course it's beautiful and it shouldn't be

01:08:25.260 despoiled but you know if someone dropped you naked in the middle of the jungle that isn't exactly how

01:08:30.400 you'd be thinking about nature because it'll eat you in no time flat and so it's it's doing

01:08:35.860 everything it can to destroy you at every second despite the fact that you're also dependent on it

01:08:40.700 for everything and so it's a religious view in my estimation takes all of those factors into account

01:08:46.820 it it and then it says you've got to strike the balance between the tyrant and the benevolent king

01:08:52.200 between nature as a destructive force and nature as a benevolent force between the hero that's the

01:08:58.040 individual and the adversary which is everything terrible about the individual i was gonna say

01:09:03.300 when it comes and i've thought about this a lot and i was wondering what your take on this is

01:09:07.580 to me when you look at a lot of religions it's about the fact that man is powerless before god

01:09:13.840 and the realization that you are weak fragile mortal and that you you need to worship god and salvation

01:09:21.960 lies in god but the identity ideology focuses you to focus in on yourself what is unique and different

01:09:30.420 about you which ultimately breeds a sense of narcissism and therefore a sense of dissatisfaction

01:09:36.600 and hopelessness as well have you become religious again mate yeah i know catholic school he sounds like

01:09:42.940 he's preaching right there well i would say there is that element to religious belief but there's also

01:09:49.300 the an element element in it generally speaking that's ennobling because there is the the constant

01:09:56.240 insistence in christianity for example that you do have the you know you are a creature of god you are

01:10:02.700 assigned a divine worth you have an immortal soul and you could be far more than you are and so there's

01:10:09.580 an ennobling there as well um so i think i think the religious viewpoint is salutary in the way that

01:10:16.380 you describe because it does attempt to remind you that there's something outside of you i do think that

01:10:21.160 the identity theory that's characteristic of um the woke movement let's say is narcissistic to its core

01:10:28.940 technically speaking it seems very egocentric and i had this sense when i was surrounded by protesters

01:10:35.560 at the university of toronto for example some of them were trans people who were

01:10:39.340 protesting me and you know my sense was you think that i'm your enemy but i see something wrong with

01:10:47.700 this that's going to hurt you it's not good for anyone else but it's also not going to help you

01:10:52.460 because it isn't right it isn't oriented property isn't gonna it isn't going to produce the results

01:10:57.500 that you want and so but it's it's it's taken me a long time to put my finger on exactly what it was

01:11:04.220 that was bothering me there might be more too but certainly the identity theory is is unbelievably

01:11:09.840 sparse and jordan do you think the the the trans issue which you you talk about which was sort of

01:11:16.880 the the star of this tourney that you've been on to some extent and you know i remember francis and i

01:11:22.280 when we started trigonometry two and a half years ago you know we were saying should we should we look

01:11:26.980 into this should we talk about this and we were like well this is an issue that affects at that time

01:11:30.980 very few people you know it's a it's a local issue for them it doesn't really have any impact

01:11:36.020 and yet over the last two and a bit years as we've educated ourselves on some of the implications of

01:11:41.840 this stuff having had trans gender and transsexual guests on the show and talked about all of this

01:11:48.240 it seems to me like with this trans thing where demands are now being made of us to accept things 0.97

01:11:55.740 that are so patently not true that is where a lot of people are now starting to become aware of this

01:12:03.680 as a breaking point because in and of itself it's not necessarily as i say an issue that affects a lot

01:12:09.400 of people but just that demand and you've talked about it in the context of the soviet union where

01:12:14.680 people were required to publicly declare things they knew were not true as a method of demoralizing

01:12:20.920 them more than anything it seems to me that we've almost got to that point is that how you feel about

01:12:25.700 it well i think you know another part of the reason that the bill that i objected to bothered me

01:12:35.020 because was because i saw it as part and parcel of a complete ideology and so it was sort of at the

01:12:41.400 vanguard of that ideology and i felt that once this had been established that increasingly

01:12:48.860 unreasonable demands would manifest themselves and i think that's continuing to happen um what would

01:12:58.040 i say about that well i i went over the identity issue that's that's kind of where my thinking has

01:13:05.320 progressed to with regards to that issue you it it it it's not solving the problem and at all as far

01:13:14.880 as i can tell and it's it's it and i don't think that the i don't think that it's been helpful to

01:13:21.240 further confuse young people about who they are so for anyone you might have straightened out and i

01:13:27.100 don't see any evidence for that yet i think there's likely a hundred people that have been left more

01:13:32.260 confused do you want to promote your business to an intelligent audience who don't need to know your

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01:14:33.580 well this is the worry for me because i i believe fundamentally in the pursuit of truth

01:14:41.460 and i believe that's important and i believe that people who who pretend to believe in things in public

01:14:47.820 that they know are not true are harming society i fundamentally believe that but on the other hand i also

01:14:53.400 want to combine that pursuit of truth with a compassion and and respect and tolerance for people

01:15:01.620 who who feel that they are quote unquote in the wrong body and whatever and i i've been trying to

01:15:07.820 square that circle in my head for for years i'm trying i'm trying to understand how one does that

01:15:13.320 and i don't i don't know that i have the answer quite yet do you no i wouldn't say so um i just found a

01:15:21.020 limit point for me the limit point was i'm not going to say words that ideologues want me to say i don't

01:15:26.440 care what the reason is and i suppose part of the reason why it's justifiable to hate me i suppose is

01:15:31.740 because that looks like it's uncompassionate you know what's the harm and i was asked that a lot well

01:15:37.100 what's the harm in going long you know these poor people are are having great difficulty well i'd have

01:15:43.760 to believe that movement in this ideological direction was likely to help them you know before

01:15:49.880 i would consider compassion appropriate grounds to go along with it i don't believe that i think the

01:15:55.620 the whole the whole notion is so ill conceived i looked at all the background documents that were

01:16:01.420 associated with the law and all that did was further my conviction that there was something

01:16:06.900 deeply wrong about what was happening and even it wasn't going to help the people that it purported

01:16:13.500 to help i couldn't see any evidence for that it's really hard to help people you know it's really

01:16:18.720 easy to make things worse and there was certainly nothing built into the law to assess whether this

01:16:25.040 change was actually going to be beneficial it was just the assumption well we know how to reconstruct

01:16:29.620 things so the world will be better it's like no you don't it's it's way easier to make things worse

01:16:36.160 than better especially when you're messing around with something as fundamental as gender identity

01:16:41.120 you know which children usually have reasonably well established by the time they're three

01:16:46.400 you mess with that at your peril as far as i'm concerned so and then you know you've seen this

01:16:53.500 spread of of gender transition surgery yeah um we've covered it we've had someone from the

01:17:00.800 tavistock clinic on our show a whistleblower from that uh place where a lot of this stuff was done

01:17:05.940 uh look it's it's an impossible circle to square isn't it i just i don't know we seem to be stuck

01:17:13.640 in this loop uh and i don't know how it gets resolved and i'm deeply troubled that you you know you say you

01:17:20.460 haven't squared that circle either i really am well the problem of of how to fit in is a permanently

01:17:29.240 insoluble problem you know we all sacrifice our pound of flesh to adopt a persona that makes us

01:17:37.200 acceptable socially there's huge benefit in that no we wouldn't be able to talk if we didn't use the

01:17:43.660 words that dead people uttered we we were were the beneficiaries of socialization as well as the

01:17:50.680 victims and the victim element of that is permanent there's no and for some people it's much worse than

01:17:56.640 for other people because it's harder for them to match their temperament to the social demand

01:18:02.480 but it's very seldom the case that radical social transformation is the answer to that problem

01:18:09.720 because those radical social transformations tend to go sideways in in unexpected ways

01:18:16.540 isn't part of the problem jordan that we try and be compassionate with people and sometimes when

01:18:25.520 you're compassionate and i've seen it when i was a teacher where teachers try to be compassionate

01:18:30.020 and actually whilst trying to be compassionate you end up making the easy choice or the weak choice

01:18:36.440 which in the long term ends up damaging people more well look if you look at the way people's

01:18:44.100 personalities are structured um you kind of have two exploratory dimensions openness so that's creativity

01:18:52.540 maybe that's exploration of the realm of ideas and extroversion and that's social landscape

01:18:59.620 exploration and then you have three dimensions that are more associated with stability and those are

01:19:09.740 negative emotion that's neuroticism agreeableness that's compassion and conscientiousness and

01:19:18.060 conscientiousness and agreeableness are both social virtues and you might ask well why do you need

01:19:24.120 two social virtues why isn't one enough compassion well the answer is i think the answer is probably time frame

01:19:33.000 so conscientiousness think of margaret thatcher conscientiousness is a cold virtue it's like

01:19:42.580 why do i have to take this medicine because it's good for you will you force it down my throat

01:19:50.600 if necessary well won't that hurt my feelings yes but if you don't take it you'll die

01:20:00.900 and that's a conversation in some sense that you have with sick children

01:20:06.100 you know and compassion compassion is for infants now that doesn't mean that and having said that

01:20:16.440 let me make no mistake about the fact that we're often reduced to the state of infants so if you're

01:20:23.240 extremely ill and you need to be taken care of right in some sense you've been reduced to the state of an

01:20:29.820 infant and that compassion is necessary for you but conscientiousness it says well this is hard but

01:20:40.080 if you do it it'll be better next week or next month or you can make these sacrifices now and

01:20:46.860 society will benefit as a consequence you can forego this gratification which is very frustrating

01:20:53.380 and but the long-term consequences will be better and so compassion isn't enough and so if you bring

01:21:01.540 in a conscientiousness virtue which might be judgment for example or justice which are both

01:21:06.720 conscientiousness virtues then you're it's easy to seem cold-hearted and we were talking about

01:21:12.920 squaring the circle it's well we don't know how because mercy and justice often conflict right but

01:21:20.000 they're both necessary principles so why can't everybody just do what they want to all the time

01:21:26.720 well that's sort of an agreeableness question that's a compassionate question and the answer is well it

01:21:30.840 just it doesn't work over the long run it it generates and deteriorates i mean i'll give you

01:21:37.360 an example of the conflict um i remember one time my daughter got ill she was about three and she got

01:21:45.200 this mouth infection that was really quite brutal she had a really hard time swallowing for about two

01:21:50.620 weeks it was very painful and so we let some of our rules relax like we let her come into bed with us

01:21:58.420 for example and we let her be more dependent than we had previously and no wonder because she was 0.95

01:22:05.720 suffering dreadfully but there was a huge price to be paid for that when she got healthy again

01:22:10.900 because we had to go through the training again and we learned then well that we learned that was an

01:22:18.400 an object lesson in the price to be paid for excess compassion in the final analysis it wasn't a helpful

01:22:24.880 move and so and the problem with with with agreeableness with compassion too is that it

01:22:31.360 announces itself so self-evidently as a virtue that if you if you wave a flag and say well wait here's the

01:22:38.160 limit case for that it's almost impossible for you not to be regarded as cold-blooded and and and harsh

01:22:44.500 you know and women are more agreeable than men so they're more compassionate and

01:22:51.300 more polite than men and the probability that that's associated with their the necessity for 0.98

01:22:58.920 them to be extremely patient with extremely dependent infants is very very high but that

01:23:07.300 doesn't mean that it's the right principle to be used to govern your relationship with adults

01:23:12.160 and i can't help but see the spilling over of agreeableness into the campuses for example

01:23:18.360 manifesting itself in claims like well this is a home this is a place where people should be

01:23:24.160 comfortable this is a place where people should feel welcome and everyone should be included and

01:23:28.900 well fair enough those are virtues but it isn't obvious that they're the right virtues for a university

01:23:36.720 or they're certainly and even if they are they're certainly an incomplete set of virtues

01:23:41.740 what about beauty and excellence uh what about um discrimination the ability to make value judgments

01:23:50.740 you know that just that word itself has become a curse in some sense to be discriminating well that

01:23:57.840 means you have judgment you can tell the difference between what's good and what isn't and that means

01:24:03.340 you have to admit that some things aren't good and that's not compassionate jordan and you've been uh

01:24:09.040 out of the game for a while we're so glad to see you on good form and doing well one of the things i

01:24:14.800 wanted to ask you is kind of a lot happened in the time that you were away i hold you slightly

01:24:20.280 responsible for that because things were going all right and then you go away for a year and a half

01:24:24.260 and then things go downhill uh you must have obviously you've had a terrible experience and i joke but

01:24:30.080 when you came back and you started paying attention to the things that had happened in the world

01:24:35.340 what was your first reaction when you saw the the blm protest what the trump election and all of that

01:24:42.960 everything we've seen in the last year or so what was your first thing that you went you looked at it

01:24:48.620 and you went oh

01:24:49.720 i don't know if i i don't know if i can answer that um

01:24:58.020 i think i'm still probably trying to wrap my head around the current situation and i that i don't

01:25:05.900 have any particularly trenchant observations on how things have radically transformed partly because

01:25:13.000 the covid virus has thrown such a loop into everything that you know who who can who can

01:25:18.380 make any judgment about the state of current affairs it's impossible with any luck the vaccines will work

01:25:25.140 and there's lots of them so perhaps we'll beat the virus that would be really good if we manage that

01:25:30.880 that would be a miracle and then the world will limp back to something approximating normal and we'll see

01:25:37.300 what that new normal is i guess at the moment my judgment is sort of suspended plus you know the

01:25:42.660 democrats took power in the u.s and so now the liberal end of the universe has got control again and

01:25:48.140 that's going to have um a transformative effect of one form or another but it's impossible at the

01:25:54.460 moment to see what that is especially with all the uncertainty that's associated with the covid

01:25:59.440 lockdown so i would say i'm just sort of watching to see where all of this goes um uh because it's

01:26:06.760 we're not in a normal circumstance and so what what conclusions can you draw from it who knows

01:26:12.620 what's going to happen in three months if we're fortunate everything will reopen and we can go back

01:26:17.220 about our business with maybe a renewed appreciation for just how bloody remarkable

01:26:21.200 walking down a street with open shops really was you know i i hope we can remember that but until

01:26:29.220 then i'm just going to watch and see and yeah i don't i don't i don't feel

01:26:34.540 i'm sort of watching with open-mouthed amazement and and trying to and trying to keep up

01:26:42.980 as are we all jordan the the question your books strike a chord strike a chord with me because

01:26:50.700 i see them as a way especially for a man as a guide to how to be successful

01:26:56.880 as a gut as a way to make the most of your life to develop your life to take responsibility and all

01:27:02.740 these kind of things and one of the things that i've seen with men of my age i'm in my late 30s i know

01:27:08.460 i look younger you don't have to say it but but in my late 30s i see a lot of men struggling with

01:27:15.940 what does it mean to be successful when you when we look at that word success what does that mean

01:27:21.680 to you and how would you inspire men of my age and younger and others too late for you yeah it's too

01:27:27.660 late for me but to to actually become a success well first of all i think it's really worth thinking

01:27:34.780 about what success means and i try to do that a lot in in both the books um it's really fun to make

01:27:42.520 other people successful like that's this is one of the the reasons capitalism i would say gets a

01:27:49.920 really bad rap and an unfair rap like the people i've known who have been successful in the capitalist

01:27:57.920 enterprise and a lot of them are entrepreneurs um rather than managers let's say just it's just

01:28:04.520 that's the population i've been exposed to and this was the same among the professoriate for that

01:28:10.480 matter one of the great pleasures the people that i've seen who i respect took was in mentoring

01:28:17.380 and so don't underestimate the radical satisfaction that's associated with helping other people develop

01:28:26.020 one of the reasons that good professors well and good businessmen love to be in the position

01:28:33.080 they're in is because they can identify young people who are promising and open up doors of

01:28:38.480 opportunity to them it's really intrinsically motivating and so you know when you think of

01:28:44.620 capitalism for example or success as only a competitive enterprise that's a real mistake because there's

01:28:50.400 that aspect of it that's there everywhere in every enterprise i've ever seen so success real success

01:28:58.080 means you're successful in a way that makes other people around you successful you need both of

01:29:03.280 those and that's also really good for your conscience because then you're not working at the expense of

01:29:08.680 anyone else quite the contrary right you're you're lifting the tide that lifts all boats maybe you're

01:29:15.520 simultaneously elevating your own relative status but it's really it's not um unreasonable to put that

01:29:23.440 in as a constraining requirement it has to help other people well it helps you and i would say the way

01:29:30.180 we're wired now some people are more selfish than others but i would still say human beings are

01:29:35.640 unbelievably social and reciprocal that's built into us at an incredibly deep level and it can go wrong

01:29:42.240 and we can get cynical and malevolent and bitter and and work at counter purposes to it but

01:29:46.840 to be of service to your fellow man your family members your broader community

01:29:55.440 there are there are virtually no pleasures that that compete with that so and and and so that's

01:30:04.340 partly why it is useful to do a critique of mere materialism and materialistic satisfactions are

01:30:11.700 pretty fleeting they're not non-existent um but they're they don't have the deep and lasting

01:30:18.760 satisfaction of well of successful mentoring for example and the relationships that build out of

01:30:24.460 that so i think i don't think there is any success at all without moral success in fact i think that

01:30:33.460 success without moral success is actually a form of torture you know if you don't let's say you don't

01:30:40.580 feel you deserve anything um because you're you know that you're being you're not being a good

01:30:46.320 person and that's your own judgment and let's assume that you're accurate you're not because some

01:30:51.220 people will judge themselves far too harshly but let's just say you know you have reasons to have

01:30:56.340 your conscience bothering you and you're not successful well at least you don't feel the continual 0.98

01:31:03.160 injustice of that you think well i'm a son of a bitch but i don't have anything but then let's say 0.98

01:31:08.700 you're successful well you know that's all ill gotten how can that do any and then maybe you 0.98

01:31:16.000 have to rationalize constantly to live with it everything you can collect around you is nothing

01:31:21.260 but a source of torment and a constant reminder that you're criminal in your fundamental orientation

01:31:28.880 that you've ruined people on your mad scramble to the top jesus you don't want that like you seriously

01:31:36.420 don't want that and no amount of relative material status is going to even come close to rectifying

01:31:44.340 that you want your conscience to be clean clear you want your interpersonal relationships to be honest

01:31:51.440 you want to be reliable and dependable and if you can add exciting and adventurous to that so much the

01:31:57.160 better but success means to be successful means to be good and you say that successful means to be good

01:32:07.580 isn't that a problem whereby where in society particularly our society where people judge success

01:32:14.540 they judge it on the acquirement of property material goods and possessions and therefore there's there's

01:32:21.000 that imbalance where someone can be morally good and a fantastic person but in a materialistic society

01:32:26.800 seem to be a failure because they haven't acquired a great deal well that that definitely is a problem

01:32:32.740 when you have productive people that that's a problem in how the month it's a measurement problem

01:32:38.920 in some sense you know economic success is generally associated with intelligence and conscientiousness

01:32:47.300 so there is a rough correlation between ability let's say even moral ability and success

01:32:53.040 now i'm not making too much of that but i do know look if you're going to be a successful businessman

01:33:00.800 especially across business person across multiple dimensions multiple enterprises you bloody well better

01:33:08.100 be honest because it's going to catch up with you man and the probability that you're going to be a

01:33:14.160 successful crook multiple times is very very low you can do that but you have to move constantly

01:33:19.900 right so your reputation doesn't keep up with you so there is some association between success and

01:33:27.360 moral virtue thank god but it's it's it's a rough approximation and there's plenty of exceptions

01:33:33.620 it's very hard for creative people to monetize their productivity for example so you have unrewarded

01:33:39.600 virtue and that's a flaw of the monetary system means we haven't been able to and you might say the same

01:33:45.600 thing applies to such things as our inability to pay homemakers now why don't we pay homemakers well

01:33:54.300 it's because what they produce isn't monetizable for 20 years and our economic system isn't sophisticated

01:34:01.460 enough to figure out how to pay people for returns that are that you know pushed off into the future

01:34:09.040 that doesn't make it right but we don't know how to fix it technically right i mean if you're a venture

01:34:15.640 capitalist and you want to invest in something you want a tenfold return on your investment within a

01:34:20.540 handful of years you can't afford to invest over a 20-year period and so that makes it really rough

01:34:26.640 on homemakers because we're not sophisticated enough to monetize it so it's a measurement problem

01:34:33.460 but unless you can figure out a better way of doing it you're stuck with what we've got

01:34:38.260 jordan i was going to ask you as we we head towards the end of the interview we've there's another issue

01:34:43.500 we've been circling around and you bring up uh the the issue of stay-at-home uh moms uh and i feel like

01:34:50.260 this conversation by its very nature has been quite male-centric and i said earlier i think the whole gender

01:34:55.800 wars thing and men and women competing over who's more victim who's more this is a bit silly because men 0.88

01:35:03.040 and women need to work together and they need each other that's how i feel they have right of course 1.00

01:35:09.460 exactly so but but we do live in a society where i think some people don't see it that way and want

01:35:15.760 to disrupt that uh what what do you think men and women need to do more of to coexist peacefully if you

01:35:24.500 might or or to build healthy relationships uh and to work together

01:35:28.900 well the only the i mean i can only tell you what i've experienced one thing that people aren't

01:35:38.740 taught to do is to negotiate and so that's what we need to do look if you're either going to have

01:35:45.760 traditional gender roles where everybody shuts up and does what their mother did or their father did 1.00

01:35:52.240 which works as long as society isn't changing too quickly that actually works quite well and it's

01:35:57.380 quite a relief to everyone because how many bloody questions do you want to ask yourself

01:36:01.320 you know like you just have no idea how much certainty you actually want you know if if you

01:36:07.200 take a three-year-old and you and you stand them in front of their clothes closet and there's 20

01:36:11.320 pairs of you know 20 outfits there say it's not that pleasant for the child to have to pick

01:36:17.800 if you throw three things on the bed and say pick one they're pretty happy about that because

01:36:22.180 they get some choice but it's constrained and you know people say they want to be free but that's

01:36:27.240 just complete nonsense because you you run into paralysis of will with an infinite degree of

01:36:32.960 freedom you you want a certain amount of freedom but not that much and you sort of want it when you

01:36:37.540 want it in my room in my marriage and in my relationship with my children in my clinical practice

01:36:44.220 it's you have to negotiate that's what men and women have to do and so i i talk about that

01:36:51.780 particularly in chapter three of my new book which is don't hide things in the fog it's like well let's

01:36:58.340 talk about sex for example that's a good one there's a stumbling block in a relationship

01:37:02.080 let's talk about sex well that's hard people don't do it they're uncut you know like they'll have sex 0.96

01:37:09.960 they'll engage in sexual acts but they won't represent them abstractly and discuss them 0.52

01:37:14.900 you know so well how often should we have sex

01:37:21.260 well how are you going to solve that problem well first of all each person has to admit

01:37:28.280 how often they'd like to have sex they might be uncomfortable with that right off the bat they

01:37:33.260 might not even know because they're so uncomfortable about it they never even

01:37:36.660 asked themselves and then you have to ask yourself well what will i do if i don't get that

01:37:44.440 and people don't like that question either because it means why you're going to get bitter and you're

01:37:48.980 going to get resentful and you're going to get mopey and whiny and you're going to justify having an

01:37:53.540 affair or at least looking elsewhere and you don't want to admit that about yourself so you won't have 0.97

01:37:58.080 the damn discussion like as soon as you know that you're flawed deeply and if you're sexually 0.87

01:38:04.680 frustrated you're more likely to to to stray well then you can be afraid of yourself enough to 1.00

01:38:10.840 overcome the fear to have the conversation it's like look uh woman if we don't make love three

01:38:17.400 times a week i'm so whiny and immature that i'm going to go to strip bars and that doesn't work

01:38:23.580 out well for our relationship and you know and she might say well why that why don't you grow the

01:38:28.660 hell up and you know i'm so overworked i have 50 hour a week work week because i'm a lawyer and 0.99

01:38:34.300 i have three small kids and they're clamoring for my attention and my goddamn husband is such a 0.99

01:38:39.400 miserable wretch that he threatens me with you know marital disintegration if i don't pull out another 0.99

01:38:45.360 four hours a week to please him it's like fair enough those are two good arguments and who the

01:38:50.720 hell wants to have that discussion but my sense is it's tyranny slavery or negotiation and i've walked

01:38:59.340 couples through this process many times and i have some you know rules of thumb which my i've got kind

01:39:05.860 of a kick out of the critical response to the book and it's been sort of universally this controversial

01:39:11.920 man is very banal it's like look guys get your insults lined up here yeah which one is it well

01:39:22.200 or unless i've managed to elevate banality to the level of controversy which perhaps is the hallmark

01:39:27.700 of a good self-help book um in any case you know my observation of couples has been that they have to

01:39:34.060 spend about 90 minutes a week um in practical discussions about about their joint life the kids

01:39:41.120 the household economics their plans for the future all of that and they need to carve out two or three

01:39:47.960 times a week in a relatively established relationship to have a date and chapter 11 is that in my book i

01:39:55.840 know it's chapter 10 plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship you know

01:40:01.860 it's like you have wants she has wants um negotiate negotiate about everything who's going to 1.00

01:40:10.980 set the table who's going to do the dishes who is going to clean the leaves out of the gutter

01:40:15.220 who does what and because you either default to traditional sex roles or you engage in a battle

01:40:22.960 battle of resentful stubbornness or you negotiate and to negotiate you have to look and see how little 1.00

01:40:30.420 and stupid you actually are and you notice oh you know i'm actually annoyed when i have to do the dishes 0.99

01:40:36.260 who wants to admit that it's like well why well because i'm kind of macho and that's sort of 1.00

01:40:41.800 woman's work maybe i mean who knows what the reason is maybe you're just lazy maybe your mother used it 1.00

01:40:46.960 as a punishment um god only knows you've described both of us in one sentence he's lazy i'm a bit

01:40:54.020 macho well it's hard to negotiate unless you know how little you are it's like really that matters to 0.50

01:41:00.160 you it's like yeah and then i've noticed in my clinical practice these little things aren't

01:41:05.820 little you know you have to clean up the dishes three times a day for the rest of your life

01:41:10.380 it's like five percent of your life cleaning up the dishes five percent of your waking life

01:41:16.600 how you're greeted at the door you know all these tiny things that make up day-to-day domesticity

01:41:23.360 defines the relationships between men and women that has to be negotiated and and to negotiate

01:41:29.780 you have to start out little and demanding and and then listen and you know my experience in my

01:41:36.240 marriage has been

01:41:37.100 with mutual goodwill and the commitment to radical honesty negotiation

01:41:50.240 succeeds

01:41:53.420 it's hard but it succeeds and that's been true under even extremely

01:41:59.460 trying circumstances and so and i always look at the micro situation it's like well i don't know

01:42:04.860 how to regulate relationships between men and women in the workplace that's i don't even think

01:42:10.280 an answer to a question like that is possible how do you treat your wife how do you treat your

01:42:16.380 daughter or perhaps how do you treat your female worker your your your your the females that you work 1.00

01:42:23.840 with you can you can you can address these issues at that level and that's where we have to start as

01:42:29.760 far as i can tell and i think that's another reason why the activist types don't like me it's like

01:42:35.520 i'm not much for social engineering start local man it's that's where the action is yeah and uh look

01:42:43.700 we've got a couple just questions wrapping up my final question for you is you've talked about your

01:42:49.260 critics and the social activist types and all the rest of it what do you think is the most legitimate

01:42:55.860 criticism that people make of you talk too much probably that might be it i mean i've been trying

01:43:03.000 to stop doing that when i'm interviewing people on my youtube channel um other legitimate criticisms

01:43:10.740 well people are quite skeptical of you know this comes out quite often i've had this problem i took

01:43:16.940 benzodiazepines sort of it's a complicated story i had my reasons i was very ill when i first started

01:43:24.420 to take them i i had terrible insomnia and i started taking them and they were prescribed i just kept

01:43:33.620 taking them and that ruined my life it destroyed my life and i still haven't recovered by maybe recovered

01:43:41.620 10 percent something like that it's absolutely dreadful i write self-help books it's like get

01:43:48.660 your act together before you change the world you know that's my advice so you know do i have my act

01:43:54.520 together well i certainly appear to have made a mistake i mean i've gone over it with fine tooth comb

01:43:59.020 i was genuinely distressed beyond my capacity to tolerate when i went to see the doctor i as far as i

01:44:08.600 could tell you know i was basically sleepless sleepless for about a three-week period you know

01:44:13.540 maybe i had micro sleeps during that time but the subjective experience was a 21 day long day i was

01:44:20.140 freezing cold i couldn't pile on enough blankets to stay warm i fainted every time i stood up um i was

01:44:27.140 like completely frozen with terror it was terrible i don't know what happened and i went to the doctor and

01:44:34.860 he gave me benzodiazepines and so i took and sleeping pills i only used the sleeping pills a

01:44:39.840 couple of times i used these benzodiazepines and two a day and that cured the insomnia and it was very

01:44:46.380 stressful period of my life and much stress followed and i just kept taking them i was paying attention

01:44:53.560 to other things i never gave it a second thought really um well that turned out to be a mistake and

01:44:59.720 then the question is you make a mistake like that and you think what does that signify you make a

01:45:05.620 mistake does that mean that you know you're you're flawed to the core as a character maybe that's

01:45:13.060 certainly possible it's one possible truth so

01:45:17.020 so how do i you know i was terrified when i wrote the second book because i thought well

01:45:23.660 first of all might be met by a really harsh reception because i've invalidated my claims to

01:45:30.280 any credibility with with what's happened in my life um but that didn't happen people seem to be

01:45:37.780 forgiving remarkably and um and then i guess i was protected in my own defense i would say i was

01:45:45.340 protected against that sort of criticism to some degree because i never pretended that

01:45:49.400 i was writing the rules only for other people i i think and i think i believe that that's evident in

01:45:57.060 my lectures and my writing is that i'm talking to me too you know i'm in the crowd of reprehensible

01:46:07.180 degenerates that need some work and so i mean if they weren't relevant to me

01:46:14.060 well how could i even write about them in any realistic sense so i'm you know among the great

01:46:21.140 unwashed who are clearly in need of a little bit of cleaning up and polishing and so and that seems

01:46:29.500 to be how the public is responding you know i read my comments on youtube and i take them seriously and

01:46:36.040 the reviews the public reviews i don't take the critical reviews seriously because they're

01:46:41.980 that ship has sailed you know i could write the reviews before before i see them i know what

01:46:49.400 people are going to say because that decision's already been made and some collective decisions

01:46:52.960 already been made so uh what i hope people can listen to what i say and read what i read and they

01:47:01.440 can try it out for themselves and if it works great and if it doesn't sorry you know

01:47:08.620 jordan as comedians we we face some of this the critical reviews i remember someone told me very

01:47:14.840 early on he said uh the story about a critic talking to an artist and and the critic says

01:47:20.200 would you like to hear my opinion about your work and the artist says yes go ahead and the critic says

01:47:25.320 it's worthless and the artist says i know but tell me anyway i found that a useful approach you know

01:47:32.120 i also i know why there are critics like things need to be criticized because there's too many

01:47:38.620 things so you have to rank order them so you know what to attend to um and there's justifiable

01:47:46.420 criticism i suppose and non-just and unjustifiable criticism i think one of the things i have detected

01:47:53.000 you guys can tell me what you think about this is i note in my critics reviews of my work

01:48:00.300 the same contempt for the audience i'm trying to communicate with that drives the populism that

01:48:09.800 the same elites cannot understand it's like because there's this snarky undertone constantly

01:48:15.620 well he's delivered delivering pseudo intellectual banalities to reprehensible you know to to the

01:48:23.900 to the reprehensible unsuccessful it's like well that attitude is exactly what makes you

01:48:30.300 so well liked you know and i don't have that attitude i'm thrilled to see the people who come

01:48:38.640 to see my shows and i don't feel like i'm lecturing down i never do that you know i'm always lecturing at

01:48:48.680 the edge of my ability and assuming that my audience will follow along and this is something

01:48:59.720 i think this is something that

01:49:03.380 i've always felt that the people who've written about me have missed the story really

01:49:13.660 they're not interested in why what i'm doing has this broad impact and the reason it has a broad

01:49:22.220 impact is because i'm it's helpful to people and so that says something about what it means to be

01:49:27.520 helpful and there's something really interesting there but there's something about that kind of

01:49:34.160 help that's viewed with contempt and i think it is the contempt that drives this anti-elitism

01:49:41.500 it's not and that that stumps the left so badly it's like well why do the right-wingers vote for trump

01:49:48.940 for example well it's because they don't like you they don't like you why because you hold them in

01:49:55.760 contempt with all your talk of compassion it's like well i feel sorry for them well that's contempt

01:50:03.680 and on that note jordan thank you so much for coming on the show we really appreciate it uh with the last

01:50:13.840 question we always ask is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society but we really

01:50:18.420 should be

01:50:19.040 well you know we don't have much of a view of what we want to do

01:50:28.640 i mean this is a real issue it's like when i was a kid in the 60s there was this i read a lot of

01:50:36.300 science fiction there's this sort of technological utopia that bennett beckoned and everyone was caught

01:50:41.760 up in it post-war period the better future well we seem to have exhausted that the power of that

01:50:50.120 in some fundamental way where are we headed and why in some positive manner we're really stuck on that

01:50:59.580 no political party seems to be able to formulate it and and so what kind of world are we trying to

01:51:08.300 create and why that's what we should be talking about i couldn't agree with you more jordan uh

01:51:15.560 thank you so much for your time and you've been very generous with it i obviously advise everybody

01:51:20.360 to get the book beyond order and uh next time you are in london which i hope you are we wish you a

01:51:25.980 continued speed of recovery but when you are next in london would love to have you here i'd love that

01:51:30.180 i love london i love great britain it was so wonderful to visit there it was great such a

01:51:38.700 great country and we look forward to seeing you back here jordan all the very best to you and thank

01:51:44.060 you guys for watching and listening at home uh we will see you very soon with another interview

01:51:48.740 all of them go out 7 p.m absolutely see you soon guys and take care

01:51:53.500 broadway's smash hit the neil diamond musical a beautiful noise is coming to toronto the true

01:52:15.600 story of a kid from brooklyn destined for something more featuring all the songs you love including

01:52:20.860 america forever in blue jeans and sweet caroline like jersey boys and beautiful the next musical

01:52:27.240 mega hit is here the neil diamond musical a beautiful noise april 28th through june 7th

01:52:33.280 2026 the princess of wales theater get tickets at mirvish.com

TRIGGERnometry - March 14, 2021

Jordan Peterson： Order and Chaos in 2021

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