Painkiller Already - Painkiller Already #346

Episode Date: August 11, 2017

This week on PKA, clinical psychologist & professor at University of Toronto, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson comes onto PKA and he lays down some knowledge. They discuss the five key personality types and their varying degrees, YouTube's possible censorship of Dr. Peterson's channel and the Marxist ideology plaguing academia.

And we're live. PKA episode 346. Kyle? Yeah, a few sponsors tonight. Smart Mouth, Squarespace, Movement Watches, Dollar Shave Club, HelloFresh.com, and a game from Elder Scrolls. Introducing Elder Scrolls Legends Heroes of Skyrim, the latest game from Bethesda. The Elder Scrolls Legends is a new mobile strategy card game that immerses gamers in the dragons, the world, and the lore of the award-winning Elder Scrolls series. From building your deck to taking on foes in one of the game's three exciting modes,

every decision you make will require strategy and careful planning. The Elder Scrolls Legends is available for download globally online on both Android and iOS devices today. Welcome, travelers, to the Throat of the World. So this episode, we've got one of the most exciting guests we've ever had on PKA. Dr. Jordan Peterson, thank you so much for coming on. My pleasure. Thanks for the invitation, guys. So I was thinking about it, and I realized probably most of this episode, people aren't going to really give a shit what the three of us are having to talk about too much. So I just want to dive right into you.

It's so fascinating, all your topics. I've never started watching a lecture series that I didn't have to watch on the internet and kept clicking onto new ones. Can I apply for a credit or something from you at this point? I'm about 12 hours in. Definitely a form of illness. I don't know what's going on exactly. So the most recent thing that happened with you was, and I haven't heard you speak about this anywhere because it was so recent, just two days ago your YouTube channel got taken down. Have you been able to uncover what that was about? No, no. So what happened was I got, I signed into my Gmail account in the morning,

my main Gmail account, and it was disabled. So I filled out Google's little form that you can fill out if they disable your account. and I figured it was just a glitch of one form or another and I just launched a new YouTube channel the other day so I thought maybe there was a technical error or something but anyways I filled out their little form and then about an hour later they got back to me and said you violated our terms of service which is what they'd said to begin with and we're not going to reinstate you. And they didn't say why. They said, you can read our terms of service. It's like, yeah, well, fine.

You can figure it out. Now you need to guess which terms you broke. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, and I hadn't been doing anything different that I had been doing for years. Well, a year anyways, but years, really, because I'd been posting YouTube videos for a long time. And so that was not good because I have like 150,000 emails in that account. And then my calendar was down. Plus I couldn't get out my YouTube account

and I couldn't contact YouTube because you can't contact YouTube unless you can get into your YouTube account, which, you know, is actually a technical problem, you might say. And so then I tweeted, tweeted about it, tweeted about it. And I got somebody talk to me from an Ottawa AM radio station, and the Daily Caller wrote a story about it, and Joe Rogan mentioned it, and a variety of other people, and lo and behold, an hour later, they turned it back on. I guess the terms weren't that important that you broke. I guess the terms weren't that important that you broke.

Well, you know, look, I feel I have some sympathy for these massive social media outlets because they're dealing with a very complex problem, right, which is how to regulate mass communication. But I can't say that that was precisely handled with any degree of elegance. You know, A, they could have warned me. B, when I filled out their form, they could have told me what I'd actually done. You know, the problem is, is we're turning over our communication

to large corporations with no judiciary, essentially, and no appeal process, and unspecified susceptibility to lobbying and political interference. And worse, we're going to build that sort of thing right into the infrastructure of the net, right? Because all this stuff will be handled by intelligent agents in no time flat. Semi-intelligent agents, unfortunately. Google and YouTube are notoriously difficult to deal with in manners like that, unless you have some sort of an inside contact or something.

I've dealt with all kinds of issues with them like that where they would overreact and an automated system was about to delete a channel that's incredibly profitable. You know, it's like, you know, you're going to lose hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars and it's up to some guy making. I mean, I want to be insulting, but some minimum wage employee somewhere is just like, well, you violated the terms, I guess. And it's like, oh, shit, I have to talk to someone with some authority who actually knows something up there. You're clueless about the entire situation. This is outrageous.

Do you think that it's what happened to you in particular was because of some pressure being applied from elsewhere? Like some extemporaneous force coming onto YouTube or Google and telling them, hey, we don't like the message that we're seeing here. This is hate speech or something like that. Well, it's hard to shake that suspicion because, look, first of all, let's say it was a mistake. It's OK, fine. I fill out your form. You review it. But then when you send me the results of your review and so quickly, and you say, well,

we've reviewed this issue and we're not going to turn your channel back on, it's very difficult to shake the suspicion that if it was just a simple technical matter, they could have said something. So it was either handled very incompetently or it was political. Those are the two alternatives as far as I can tell. And I find it quite, it's not mere coincidence as far as I'm concerned that as soon as there was a substantial amount of media attention that they just turned it right back on. And they haven't sent me any explanation at all yet. That won't happen.

I'm still stuck on the idea of its incompetence. I might be naive on this. Well, you know the rule. Assume incompetence before malevolence. I hear you. And I was thinking of that too. Because YouTube has a lot of content to monitor. And they do it mostly with semi-intelligent agents, you call them, or bots, or algorithms. Take it as you will. And when you need to have it reviewed, the easiest thing for someone to do is just rubber stamp what the bot said. And it could have been some semi-organized campaign of people saying you violated guidelines. Like I've had that. I give away a percentage of my channel's profits just so that I'm not susceptible to those automated things. Like a

human has to shut down my channel and that protects me. I think that maybe you need that. You need to be a managed channel, I think it's called, so that, you know, a thousand people can't just say you're bullying when you're not and get your channel shut down. If I'm not familiar, if I'm not correct, it seems like your YouTube channel, you had all of this content out there before you really like took your biggest steps into notoriety. And then, so everyone's sort of discovering this back catalog of, of really informative stuff.

I've heard you speak about it and you're like, Oh, well this video had 8,000 views and this one had 15,000 views. And I look at those things now and it's, it's hard to find videos of you that don't have a hundred, 200,000 views. Um, it,

it's, it's really interesting. And it's, it's definitely, it's definitely a good litmus test to show that what you're saying is not just what people want to hear, it's what people need to hear. There are a lot of people starving to hear that. People have to be crazy if they wanted to hear it. I mean, it's nothing that you'd want to hear.

It's about the worst things you could ever think of. Your own inadequacy and your lack of ability to take responsibility and your personal contributions to the evils of the world and you know it's it's not it's not exactly a bubblegum marketing material and it's quite stunning to me that it's become so do you do you think any of it like the fact that people are enjoying it has to do with it's almost like seizing a sense of agency back where it's like i have the control of these things i can sort myself out i can get this done i can get that done i'm not a perennial victim of other people i certainly hope so i mean that would be wonderful and you know my my my aim is to has been as a psychologist all along

as a clinical psychologist as an educator for that that matter, and as a philosopher to the degree that I am one, was to aim at strengthening the individual. You know, everything that my little company does, the programs that we're making and all of that is designed exactly at singular people, you know. And I think that people have been fed a diet of freedom and rights for so long that they're absolutely sick and tired of it, and that it's ready, they're ready for a message of responsibility. And I think that's especially true, as far as I can tell, looking at the demographics and the response. I think that's especially true of young men. Thank God for that. You know, so yeah, it's very curious, but very heartening, that's for sure. I think young men are thirsting for something, right?

Because a lot of their standard roles are being taken from them or being usurped in one way or another. They're looking for a purpose. Yeah, well, they're also being criticized all the time for... See, the radicals who are going after masculinity can't distinguish between tyranny and authority, or tyranny and competence.

One of the things that, again, I would say that especially the radical left is pretty appalling in this regard, is that most hierarchies in Western society are hierarchies of competence. Now, there's a certain degree of corruption, and there's a certain degree of power and manipulation and all of competence. Now, there's a certain degree of corruption and there's a certain degree of power and manipulation and all of that, but, you know, compared to what? That's the first question. Compared to Russia, China, or the rest of the world? I mean, God, most places are so corrupt that it's absolutely beyond comprehension and dangerous to boot.

You know, and most of the systems that we have in the West function so well that it's an ongoing miracle, and that's mostly because competent people are running them. I mean, here we are having this conversation, and look, the power is still on. What is this? Go ahead, Kyle. I was going to say we were talking about the hyperinflation in Venezuela earlier. We were talking about a couple of failed socialist regimes. That's not real communism, you know. Of course not. Real communism has never been tried. That's right. Real communism is the communism that works.

You know, they really, those people do themselves a disservice when they use that attack. When they say real socialism, real Marxxism real communism whatever their their little uh blend of things is has never been tried what they should say is they should point out actual times when like there was intervention from say the united states to come in and maybe destabilize a socialist government like that's that's an actual thing but you can't just say that it's never been tried because that's if we had a whole cold war about that. Like, it was in the news. I read about it. It's been tried. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's for sure.

But, you know, nothing seems to put a damper on arrogant utopian dreams. Right. That statement always means, if I was the person who'd been in Stellan's shoes, I would have brought the utopia into being. If a naive person doesn't realize, if they were that sort of person, Stalin would have had them shot in no time flat. So, like, yeah, I never thought about it like that. It really is like saying, if I were the super powerful dictator, it would have gone really well. Oh, like, that's just the way I'm saying it. Exactly, it's exactly what it is. It's, well, with my knowledge of communism and my sophisticated ability to manipulate all these complex substructures of the world, I would have brought the kingdom of God onto Earth as rapidly as could be hoped for.

It's like, yeah, well, I don't know, man. You better be careful what you think and say, because that's just not wise. That's not wise. A lot of people found you initially through the Canadian Bill C-16 or something like that, where it was the misgendering of people, making that illegal. I haven't heard much more about that in past weeks. Can you kind of give a quick synopsis? It's probably impossible to do that quickly given how dense it is, but just for those who aren't fully up to date with what kind of rocketed you into stardom so quickly. Yeah, well, I made a video. I made two

videos. Well, I made three videos in a week last year, September 27th approximately. And one of them was a critique of this bill, C-16, which is a federal bill in Canada. It had already been passed into law in some of the provinces in Canada, and it purported to add gender identity and gender expression to the list of protected groups under the Canadian human rights legislation. And that sounds, in some sense, that sounds innocuous enough, but I had been reading the background policies that constituted the, you might say, legislative and policy surround of the amendment of the bill, and they're absolutely appalling. They were mostly written by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which is a social justice organization by its own admission, Ontario has social justice tribunals,

and the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal is one of them, and it's tightly associated with the Ontario Human Rights Commission. And there is a variety of things about it that I found appalling beyond comprehension. One of them was that the requirement to use these novel linguistic forms to refer to people who don't fit on the gender distribution, let's say, Z and zur and their variants of those words, which have never entered common English parlance, and whose use should not be enforced, especially my issue, had nothing to do with transgenderism as far as I was concerned. It was that I didn't want to speak the language of postmodern neo-Marxists for any reason. Gender rights or transgender rights are for any other reason. I thought those were neologisms that they had created as part and parcel of their overarching and rather traitorous doctrine, as far as I'm concerned.

I don't like postmodern neo-Marxists in the least, or ideologues of any type. I'm not going to use their language, and I don't care what the damn rationale is. To write that into the law, it just made my jaw drop that Canada was considering compelled speech. That's the important part to me, the compelling of the speech. Yeah, that's the important part, all right. You ask people about taxes in a friendly conversation, and you say, well, hey, so what happens if you don't pay your taxes? And they're like, well, this happens, and then what happens?

At the end of that timeline, men with guns come. And so that's what compelling means. It could be this little thing that we all have in our lives. And you do know that if you just stopped mailing that piece of paper off every month, men with guns would eventually come here and take you away, right? Like that's the eventuality to not paying your power bill for long enough. They'll eventually, or your mortgage, they're eventually going to come get you. And that's what's not really spoken out loud, I'm sure, when these guys are waving the flag of this bill. There's nobody saying, oh, and if you don't, well, the Mounties come.

The queer Mounties. They wear a rainbow get up, and they're on a giant caribou, and they put you on a rail through town and flog you. What's coming? What are they going to do? I think they ride moose here. Ah, that makes more sense. Well, these are the queer Mounties. They prefer the elk. So, yeah, well, so people immediately criticized me for overreacting to the legislation,

but then the university helpfully sent me two warning letters telling me to stop saying what I was saying because I was probably violating, A, the university's diversity codes, although I wasn't violating their free speech codes, let's make that clear, and also possibly the Ontario law, which was exactly the point I was making in the video. So I was immediately backed up in my paranoia by the university's legal department and then I contacted a number of lawyers and had them or and many of them contacted me and so we reviewed the policy and the legislation together and I had a debate at Queen's University with a law professor who actually played devil's advocate because none of the

coward that who are part of the faculty at Queen's University would debate me, which is pretty much standard, has been the standard situation here. So, and then we went and talked to the Senate, the Canadian Senate too, and tried to describe the danger that was associated with this bill. That was quite funny because I think it was probably the most watched Senate hearing ever in Canadian history. I think about maybe about the most watched Senate hearing ever in Canadian history. I think about maybe about 500,000 people have watched that. And the senators tried to put me on the spot quite rudely and unprofessionally, in my opinion, because I was being very careful with what I was saying and doing. And that didn't go very well either. Well,

it went fine for me, which was very fortunate, but it didn't go that well for the senators. But they passed the damn bill anyways. And, you know, the senator that I was working with proposed an amendment to the bill, which was his attempt to have the justice minister write into the bill an amendment that said that this wouldn't interfere with freedom of speech, and she wouldn't do it. So basically a tacit admission that its entire purpose is to curb freedom of speech. Yeah. Certainly a tacit admission that the diversity machine trumps all other rights.

Diversity and equity, which is exactly the case in Canada. Like hypothetically, none of our rights are, no rights trump, none of the rights trump one another, you know, which is ridiculous because there has to be a hierarchy. But in Canada, it's the equity rights trump everything. And I'm not happy about that in the least. I think it's absolutely brutally appalling. Do you find when you came out against that, that there was a large upsurge of people kind of on the down low telling you, hey, I think it's great what you're doing? Or was it pretty much just a tidal wave of people distancing themselves as far as in the academia it was an absolute oh well in academia like it was radio silence fundamentally i mean 200 um faculty and

graduate student types signed a petition describing me as, you know, transforming the campus into an unsafe space, and then that was part of why the university went after me. And then after that, my colleagues were basically silent. Not all of them. There's a small group in Canada called Society for Academic Freedom, and they supported me. And Gad Saad came out and supported me right away. He's that business professor at Concordia University who has quite a YouTube following and quite an advocate of free speech. There's a couple of us in Canada that have been playing this role. But the public support was absolutely overwhelming. And also the support from the journalists. Like, first of all, the journalists reacted sort of 50-50 split, eh? Half of them supported me and half of them thought that i was just a noisy troublemaker and actually i have some sympathy for that viewpoint because when someone comes out in a

country like canada and waves his or her hand and says there's something rotten in the state the most logical initial response is why the hell should we listen to you you're just paranoid and delusional because this is a pretty good country and has been forever. And so you should view someone like that with skepticism. But the problem was, is that it actually turned out that I'd read the policies and I knew what the hell I was talking about. And so when the journalists started to investigate it and find out that this really was a free speech issue, and you know, it's actually rather important to journalists to have free speech I got overwhelming support like 200 Canadian newspapers came out in support of what I was doing and and and so all of that

helped the university back off the university know what they what to do really they hadn't had a issue to deal with like that ever probably and I mean the I should also say the university has treated me quite well since since this has all got straightened around. Yeah it would seem like newspapers and print in general would kind of side with you on this. I'm wondering what is the future of say libel laws

like what if I write a story in my paper about a person and I refer to them in the incorrect gender have I libeled them now? Have I broken a law in some way by not referring to this person as Xer or Z? Yes, you have broken a law. And as a professional journalist, I feel like, am I going to have a Brian Williams situation now,

or am I going to be let go of week to, are they going to send me away for six weeks for some gentrification training or something like that? Am I going to have to sit in a room and learn 85,000 genders? Are they going to get out the gender-bred man and I'm going to touch his little hand on the left? The gender-bred person, Kyle, you bigot. Because that's my fear.

And if I were you, not my specific fear, it would be my fear for someone in that position. And I wonder if you have any fears like that. Because you're there in Toronto, right? You're a tenured professor. What happens next year when you say the wrong thing and the mounties won't come but someone might well i've been living in some amount of existential terror since september about saying the wrong thing you know because it was very my life has been very chaotic and and um well that's the right way to put it very

chaotic since since all this has happened but my confidence has been growing i would say again for a variety of reasons i mean first of all i think i was fortunate when i made those initial videos because i'd already had 250 hours of everything, single thing I'd ever said to students recorded and on YouTube. So when people went after me for the standard, for being the standard, you know, evil guy, the transphobe and bigot and racist, for God's sake, because I criticized these two horrendous women that run Black Lives Matter in Toronto. It's like, I don't care if they're green. I was going to criticize them. It had nothing to do with them being black. It had

everything to do with them being dangerous and crooked, which they are. What is it that they purport? Do they say that white people, because we have less melanin, are less connected to the spiritual world, are less connected to God, and we're the black Israelites? Yeah, that's one of their

rants. That is so close to the same shit you would hear coming right out of Goebbels' mouth. That's Nazi propaganda with a Jewish man with whiskers like a rat scurrying or something. Dr. Peterson, do you worry that you're just mean, though? Yeah, yeah. mean though like because there is a there's an argument to be made that like the people that you're against aren't completely mentally healthy oh right and and you are not being kind right you're saying you know what I don't like the way you're wired I'm gonna deal with you the way that I like to deal with people even though like in my opinion they might be in some amount of pain or

distress right there's suicide rates are much higher in that community. Oh, yeah. Ten times higher. Okay. And so I'm not enthusiastic about calling someone Xur. If my coworker asked me to call them that, I'd probably not go to lunch with them. They probably wouldn't be my kind of guy or Xur, whatever it is that they are. But I would...

Take two weeks, Woody. But I do think that that guy's probably in some amount of pain and perhaps I would handle him with kid gloves. You don't want to do that. Oh, well, I mean, first of all, I probably would because I'm soft-hearted beyond, what would you call it, beyond any... Well, you're Canadian. It goes without saying, right goes without saying right well yeah yeah there's that

that's for sure but the thing is one of the things we want to make okay two things the first is my colleagues kind of said the same thing they said well we like what you're doing but couldn't you be nicer about it and i wasn't really very happy about that because basically what they were saying was had we done what you did you we would have done it better it's like yeah go right ahead man and try so if you can do it better hey i'm i'm i'm right behind you so and i'm not really a big fan of nice i think it's a low-end virtue now that doesn't mean mean is good but nice and harmless and naive are very difficult to distinguish and i don't think those are virtues Usually they're just a matter of not having any teeth. But let's speak more specifically about this.

So first of all, there's absolutely no reason to assume that the transgender activists speak for transgender people. And just because an activist comes along and says, well, this is what I purport to believe on behalf of my group, doesn't mean we should believe that that's what the group believes or that that person has any right to put forward that proposition. Just because you're transgender doesn't mean you're a representative of the transgendered community. So it's absurd. And I've had, like, literally, I think it's 30,

because I've tried to keep count, 30 transgendered people write me and many more comment on YouTube that they're 100% behind me and that they are absolutely appalled at the negative attention these crazy activists have brought to bear on this situation. Most of them, first of all, most of them don't want to be referred to by these strange pronouns, which are third person anyways for crying out loud, so you'd never use them in a first person conversation. ways for crying out loud so you'd never use them in a first person conversation and and second of all most of them want to be referred to by the normative pronoun just the other one and i actually

have no problem with that like if you come up to me and you look female and you want to be called she it's like it's all the same to me and it didn't have anything to do with like i said it didn't really have anything to do with the transgender transgender issue it was and people have asked me well why do you pick that mountain to die on and the answer to that is well when there's encroachment right especially on the territory of free speech and each bit of encroachment is an inch and you think well it's just an inch what the hell well at some point you have to say no No, not not another inch and well for me. It was quite straightforward because I'm not using postmodern

Neo-marxist neologisms Period so that was an easy decision for me Now the original question was well, how is all this washed out in some sense? And it's actually quite comical how it's worked out. If I had any sense, I probably wouldn't say this, but I don't have that much sense, so I probably will. I've been in a very comical position since probably January, because what happens now is if the left-wing radicals come out and protest me, if I get to speak, then

like 150,000 people watch the talk. So that's good. And it goes well publicly because my audiences are generally, they're happy about what's happening. And then if they protest, then the protest gets filmed and it gets put online. It gets 500,000 views. So I'm in this weird situation now where if people leave me alone, then I get to talk. And if people come and harass me, let's say, and protest, especially in the way they've been

conducting their protests, it's scandalous. And half a million people watch it. And what's even more comical, and this is the part I shouldn't say, but I'm going to say it because it is comical, is that that's all monetized now. So it's really hard on the social justice types because if they come out and protest me, then my Patreon account grows and there's nothing that irritates radical leftists more than someone making money. And so I'm the first person I know

who's been able to monetize social justice warrior protests, which I think is, you know, you ought to think that's pretty damn funny i i think it's very impressive you have a very successful you have a very successful patron over there i noticed that there's one thing that i i i see come up and whether it's communism or marxism or this this neo-marxism it's it's all about deciding i think who deserves what and i and the word deserve is a very interesting word to me. We've thrown it back. Over the years, we've had this discussion because as we would make money on the internet,

and sometimes large amounts of money, and someone would accidentally flash their PayPal account and people would say, oh, this guy that I thought was just my buddy and my equal has like $120,000 sitting around. Now I don't feel so good about him. And it would be like, like $120,000 sitting around. Now I don't feel so good about him. And it would be like, but sir, who decides who deserves what? Well, you're right about that, man.

We need to have a serious discussion about money because the issue isn't how much money you have. That's irrelevant. The issue is what you choose to do with it. And, you know, we know already, the psychological literature is pretty clear, is that once you hit a kind of lower end middle class existence, extra money doesn't do anything to make you happier. So, you know, there's the pain of poverty. But once you're out of poverty, which basically means the bill collectors aren't chasing you around and you're not exactly living hand to mouth, then additional money doesn't do much for your psychological well-being.

So extra money isn't do much for your psychological well-being so extra money isn't making you happier but for me and i think for many people who have their head screwed on straight about money it's a tool for accomplishing things and so you know i'm trying to put the money to good use i started this biblical lecture series and rented the theater with some of the patreon funds i mean i that's that's paid for itself because of all the tickets that were sold but i had no idea i mean who the hell is gonna what a business what kind of business plan is that is it gonna rent a theater do a lecture on the biblical series hey man people are gonna be lined up for blocks to go to that i've got a question since the start you You mentioned in the lecture series, you were talking about personal responsibility, right?

My listeners have heard me talk about Obamacare and personal responsibility for some time now. And I'll lay it out and I want your opinion on it. Prior to Obamacare, there was no mandate that people carried health insurance. So what people did, mostly poor people and healthy people like 25-year-old guys, didn't carry insurance. And then when that 25-year-old guy breaks his arm in a skiing accident or whatever it is that they're doing, they go to the hospital. They're in dire straits. They fix it, and they don't pay their bill, right? So now that there's an insurance mandate, it forces people to be responsible, in my head. I feel like if Obama had pitched it that way, as he was selling it to America,

like this isn't some slacker giveaway. This is a bill enforcing personal responsibility, just like we do with driving, for example. And that way, when I go to the hospital with no insurance, I'm not leaning on you three to pay my bill for me, or to pay double so that you can pay your bill for people like me. What do you think of that argument? How do you feel about an insurance mandate? Well, I'm temperamentally opposed to such things, I would say, although I'm not claiming for a minute that you're not making a good case. And I would also say the health care issue is incredibly complex you know because well we have a single-payer system in canada and it actually works not too bad like i lived in the

states for a while and i i gotta say i think at man this might be true of the states in general compared to canada at the high end nothing beats the care you can get in the U.S. But in the media, and at the low end, Canada's health care system works pretty good. And it has some perverse effects from a, what would you say, right-wing perspective. So one of them is, for example, that the rate of entrepreneurship in Canada is actually higher in the U.S. than in the U.S. per capita. Canada is actually higher in the US than in the US per capita. And the reason for that seems to be that Canadians can take risks when they're young, like starting a new business or changing jobs, for example, and they never have to worry about losing their health care. And so that's kind of cool.

The mandate, I mean, we kind of have a mandate like that in Canada because you have to pay your taxes, right? And you can say, well, that's not really that much different than being mandated to purchase insurance. And so, you know, maybe I'm talking on both sides of my mouth at the same time, but it does seem to me that there's something wrong with forcing people to buy insurance. However, we do it for automobiles. Yeah. You mentioned the entrepreneurial thing and I didn't bring it up because I'm a small sample size, but that happened to me. You don't know me, but I have a special needs son.

And I wouldn't have been able to leave the paternalistic cover that my Fortune 500 job gave me and start my own businesses if Obamacare didn't force insurance companies to take children. if Obamacare didn't force insurance companies to take children, right? When you get children on your plan, it doesn't matter if that kid has, you know, autism, Down syndrome or a heart condition or whatever. The insurance company will cover that kid. Children get covered. That's an Obamacare thing.

And if, you know, my business has did pretty well. It was a good thing for the country to enable entrepreneurs to do their thing. And there's an argument to be made that not locking people into their day jobs is good. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I would approach this sort of question often more from a scientific perspective, which is, well, let's make a minor change and then evaluate and see what happens. Because lots of weird things happen. Like like no one it's not obvious that when you put in a social safety net like like single-payer health care that the rate of entrepreneurial activity would go up no one would hypothesize that right it's an observed consequence and i think with these complex systems especially health care because it's such a morass you have to make small adjustments and check and see what

happens and i don't think you can rely on ideological solutions to solve the problem. You know, I think the free market is a good solution to most things because it distributes decision making. That's the fundamental issue. And it enables computations to be made about such things as comparative value that would be impossible for any organization to make. But that doesn't necessarily mean that there's a free market solution for every problem. And healthcare seems to be, well, because it's so closely tied in with death, let's say, which seems to not play by the rules,

you know, it's not easy to encapsulate that within a single philosophy, perhaps. I didn't think we'd line up on this. I thought we were going to debate. One of the arguments that my listeners have heard before is syphilis, right? Syphilis is a disease. It'll eventually give you, it'll make you go crazy and then you die, right? It's a painful death that involves going psycho and then, of course, expiring. The cure for syphilis is a 50 cent penicillin pill, right? That's how you cure it. But somebody with it will pay everything.

They'll mortgage their house. They'll sell their house. They'll go into poverty, right? If I'm a drug company and I have an EpiPen, I can raise that price to anything I want, right? Only if you're the only provider. Only if I'm the only, you're right. But then you get into the whole, you have to issue patents because otherwise there's no incentive for people to break new ground. And it's complicated. But I would argue, I really only have two examples where I don't like capitalism. I'm a pretty big fan of capitalism. One is health care.

Because like you said, death doesn't really follow the normal rules of supply and demand. You get desperate people making desperate decisions. And the other one is security. I feel like if whatever, your subdivision looks for the cheapest security, then you might not get what you're looking for. I feel like policing is a good government task. Do you know what? When I think about the health care thing and the money that gets paid into it, the biggest thing that bothers me about being mandated

is that I know where the money that I'm paying in is going. It's going to people much older and in much more need than I am. And while that's a very altruistic thing to have, I suppose you could take that mindset, I tend to take the mindset that I kind of wish that there was an age group that was 25 to 35 and all of us guys who were within there were paying into one pot. And that was our pot of money. And that money was not just sitting on a shelf somewhere but accruing interest or maybe in the market.

Maybe you get to decide where your money sits and when you need that money, that money can pull out and you can have like an insurance saving account that was in a way government mandated. I don't know if that's a crazy idea but it would make me feel so much better than just paying money in and just seeing it go away. Well, just so you know, that's definitely a thing. It's HSA. It's called a health savings account.

And you put into it tax deferred, just like a, or maybe tax free, just like in a retirement account. And then that can grow and grow and grow. And, you know, maybe you put in so much and you're so healthy through your 20s that you're just funded. And I feel like those should be mandated.

Like, I feel like that is such a better answer than what we currently have. Because the big complaint you'll hear from the far right is like, and they'll use some dirty language, they don't want to pay for those people's health care. I don't mind the way they do it. It's a choice. I like choice. And it's, yeah, you can do an HSA if that's your thing. You could do insurance if that's your thing. Because there's a risk period there, right?

Maybe you start contributing to your health savings account when you're 22 22 you get hurt when you're 25 and there's only six grand in there you know yeah that hardly handles an ingrown toenail in the hop in the er right for many men in that age i feel like it's against our very like genetic code to do that to take to they're saying whoa whoa slow down with all that adventuring and entrepreneuring. Let's get a safety net under you first. That's not what we're supposed to be doing. We're like, no, I want to swing on two vines and then jump down on that beast because I know I can kill it with one whack and the whole village is going to eat because that's what's in my genes. But it's modern days. You got to take a step back, get that safety net under you.

Yeah. And a lot of people in their 20s and stuff say, hey, I'm healthy. Why am I paying for this insurance? And it's like, you're healthy now, right? When I was in my 20s, I broke a foot playing ice hockey, and that had to be handled. That's when I tore my, maybe I was in my early 30s when I tore my ACL. You know, I had all these athletic related injuries as I did this sort of thing. I went through some period, I had to see doctors because I couldn't turn my neck. You could have known me for two years and I'd only do this. Your hand! Yeah, I had to get that fixed. I think it was, you know, whatever mid-30s for that.

Everybody, you know, is really healthy until they're not and you know that that's why... This whole healthcare discussion, it's really interesting because it parlays into something else that I wanted to talk to Dr. Peterson about, which is your personality series and the difference between people on the left and people on the right, agreeableness, conscientiousness. Can you go into that a little bit? Because I was watching some of it and it's just fascinating. Okay, well, yeah, there's been a fair bit of work done among psychologists in the last about 15 years, really. It's not much older than that. Well, and it's only been 30 years, I would say, since we've really got a handle on the basic personality dimensions. And so I'll start with that. So if you look cross-culturally, you can identify five fundamental traits. You can argue about exactly how many there are, but five isn't a bad guess. The statistics allow you to extract out more, but you want to make it

simple and comprehensive at the same time. So five seems to be a pretty good number. And so the first dimension is extroversion. And extroversion is a positive emotion dimension. And so you have a neurological system that's part of your central nervous system that mediates positive emotion. It's the system that drugs like cocaine affect directly. It's the system that is operating whenever you're doing anything that is moving you towards a valuable goal, for example. And you like having that system on. And extroverts have a very low threshold for activation of that system, or it's a more powerful system. It's not obvious which. And so extroverts are assertive, so they'll talk more in a group. You guys are all extroverted, obviously. And they're also enthusiastic, although those two aspects, they're called called can vary slightly independently and then there's neuroticism neuroticism is a negative emotion dimension and people who are high in neuroticism feel higher levels of anxiety and emotional pain which would include grief and shame

and and frustration and disappointment and neurotic people are more likely to withdraw and avoid and they're also more volatile, which means touchy and likely to respond with a certain amount of defensive aggression. And women are higher in neuroticism than men by a fairly substantial margin, and that's not sociocultural, regardless of what the bloody social constructionists say, because the differences are biggest in Scandinandinavia where they've done the most to flatten out the socioeconomic uh playing field between men and women what happens is if you flatten out the socioeconomic playing field the biological differences maximize

and that's well established yeah i know it's so there's a bit of science we did the test here's the evidence yeah we did the test the social's the evidence. Yeah, we did the test. The social constructionists were wrong. Period. The sample size wasn't big enough? I don't like the data. Let's do another test. Like, well, it's only three countries. Those are countries. Those are countries we're talking about. And yeah, the data is very, very clear. And so the next trait is agreeableness and agreeable people.

I think it's the primary maternal dimension. And agreeable people are polite and compassionate. And agreeableness is associated with political correctness. And you might think, well, they're not polite or compassionate. But what you have to understand is that compassionate people are very compassionate towards their in-group. But the out-group is a predator as far as they're concerned. And so it's like the social justice warrior types who are motivated by agreeableness are like mothers protecting their babies from snakes. And that's

exactly how they act, which I think is also very comical because almost all the PC authoritarian types, the radical leftists, they're all social constructionists. And here they are acting out their biology like robots, essentially. It's quite amusing. You almost want to stop and say, I noticed that like 15 of you out there hit someone today. How often do you strike people in your day-to-day lives, really? So it's only when you're expressing this that you find that it's needed or necessary or that you feel justified to hit people.

Okay, all right. Yeah, well, and I do really think that it's, our research into political correctness indicated that both being female and being agreeable were contributors to the politically correct attitude. And that's quite interesting, because usually if you look at sex differences in behavior, they're almost always accounted for by personality.

But we found effects of being female and effects of being agreeable. And so the next trait is conscientiousness. And conscientious people are dutiful. They're industrious and orderly. And orderliness is quite a good predictor of conservative political belief. And it seems to be associated with disgust sensitivity, and that seems to be associated with morality of purity. So it's something that Jonathan Haidt has talked a lot about.

And so that's very cool, and it was very interesting to—our lab did a lot of work on the relationship between orderliness and disgust sensitivity. What does that mean, a morality of purity? Well, imagine that conservatives are much more convinced of the necessity of regulating your moral behavior, say, with regards to such things as sexuality. And some of that is rooted in the contamination avoidance. That would be a good way to put it. I can tell you a really interesting study that's relevant to this. It's so cool.

This should have been like headline news around the world, this study. It was about three years ago. People were looking at the relationship between disgust sensitivity and authoritarianism. And so these people went and did a study looking at the prevalence of infectious diseases within a country and also between countries. And it turns out that the correlation between the prevalence of infectious diseases and totalitarian individual views was about 0.6, which is a correlation, the magnitude of which you never see in the social sciences.

It suggests causation at that point. It certainly does. That's fascinating because what you have is a group of people who have been, and it's ingrained in them, maybe just through their lives or maybe genetically, that there's a big fear of the other here. The other for them might be dirty water, it might be street gangs, but because of that, that's ingrained in them and they're much more likely to feel that way about other outside forces that yeah well and i think it could be triggered ideas triggered pretty easily like it can be triggered by epidemic you know and i mean you saw some of that in the response to aids in north america you know and but you also saw the reason for that

existence of that disgust sensitivity with the rise of AIDS, because AIDS was a virus that mutated to take advantage of promiscuity. And so the thing about disgust sensitivity is you can't just get rid of it, because it actually turns out that lots of things that disgust you can kill you if you are exposed to them. And so it's not a simple... Now, one of the things it does suggest, though, is if you wanted to decrease the degree to which people were authoritarian around the world, the public health policy might be the best way to do it. Who would have guessed that, you know?

You go eradicate the infectious diseases, people get a lot more liberal and a lot more tolerant. So I mean, well, that's why we have science, right? Because it tells you things you'd never guess at. And then the last, by the way, the last dimension is openness. And openness is a creativity dimension, basically. And it's associated to some degree with intelligence, with psychometric intelligence. And the biggest difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives are

low in openness. And most of that isn't mediated by intelligence, by the way. But conservatives tend to be less creative and more conscientious. And so that makes them really good managers and administrators, lawyers, conservative businessmen, you know, in the more traditional sense. They're very good at running things, but they're not very good at originating them. It's the creative types, the liberal types that start businesses. And it's the conservative types that run them, which is also very cool because it shows you that we need each other so which we do because you know that the low

conscientious liberals are more likely to take a risk and go off in a wild tangent they're going to bloody well fail catastrophe catastrophically most of the time if they didn't need each other we wouldn't have evolved that way i would i would imagine that people with those two mindsets have been combining those two parts of themselves for eons. Yeah, well, you can think about, you know, the social world as containing niches that people fit in. And one niche is the entrepreneurial creative niche. And so there's evolution towards that niche. And the other one is the managerial administrative traditional niche. Because, I mean, it makes a lot of sense to do things the way everyone else does them

if everything's working, right? That's the conservative issue. But it also makes a lot of sense to do something new if things aren't working. And that's a different way of adapting successfully to the world. So, okay, so what's the upshot of all this? Well, the first is that these temperaments, these traits, act in some sense as filters in the world. And so it isn't exactly that people whose political attitudes differ have different

opinions, although they do. It's that they see the world differently. They literally see it differently. And they filter the facts differently. And so I think it might make people more politically tolerant if they actually understood that the person across the ideological divide was a different sort of being than them. There's a good argument for diversity. How about that?

How about real diversity? Because the racial diversity argument really bugs me. And I can tell you why. Because it's predicated on the idea that there's more difference between people of different races than there are is differences between people within the same race and that's wrong technically factually not only is it incorrect it's really seriously incorrect even with men and women there are more differences within women and within men than there are between men and women on average. To me, the diversity thing is,

the criticism that sunk home with me is the idea that they want equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. And I hear that and I'm like, right, that is so correct. That's the equity argument. My father-in-law, he's passed now, but he was a fireman. And through his whole career, he had to struggle with diversity requirements. And it was just known, I'll say it blankly or bluntly, white guys needed higher test scores. If you're a white guy, you typically had to finish in the top like one to three scores to get promoted. three scores to get promoted. And then if you're a black guy, you just had to finish in the top one to three amongst black people, which would tend to be in the teens and twenties overall.

And he found this really frustrating. He wasn't particularly academically gifted, but it was always like, you know, scores easily well enough to get promoted if I was black, but because I'm white, I'm burning, you know, busting my butt. There was a big to do about that in the news in the U S like, um, you know, affirmative action coming under kind of, you know, critique. And it is more nefarious than you think. Like when you think about it, just like, uh, just real quick, it's easy to go out. Good idea. It makes me feel good. Nice. But really it's kind of like, like you're taking people who otherwise could be really successful at a middling university and shoehorning them into the top universities just by virtue of

gender or race or whatever. And then they underperform, of course, and it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's like you did this by trying to pretend that just because they have that something different between their legs or a different color skin that they're, you know, worthy of that merit. Like, no, it's really just kind of a roundabout and really condescending, by the way, like to just go and be like, oh, you know, black people, women, none of them can succeed unless we give them an edge up. You know, they obviously can't compete with white guys in the free market. So we got to make special little allowances. Do you remember that scene in G.I. Jane where Demi Moore is trying to become the first Navy SEAL or whatever, and in the obstacle course, they have a box. You have to climb one of

those vertical walls that a six-foot-tall man can jump, grab with his fingertips, pull himself up, and muscle himself over, but there was a step there for her, and she was like, fuck that step. I feel like there are steps there for a lot of people and if I were one of those people I would say fuck that step. Fuck that step. This is what you think of me? You think I need this? It seems so racist, so awful if I'm that individual. So it really makes me take to heart what you say often about how just because you are a member of group A or B, you're not automatically a spokesperson for them. Quite the opposite. You might be the only member of that

group that feels that way. Yeah, well, the reason that we have elections is that we can identify genuine representatives. You know, I just can't believe that, you know, like in Ontario, for example, the premier met with the leaders of Black Lives Matter. It's like, well, what the hell? It's like, so somebody makes this group predicated on their racial identity, claims oppression, but worse, claims to be a spokesperson for that entire race. And our elected officials treat them as if they're valid representatives just by basically by virtue, by virtue of their, of their, what would you call it, exploitation of their skin color. It's completely crazy, you know, but it's, it's part and parcel of the times that we live in, I'm, I'm afraid.

So, but it is, it's been very interesting. I mean, the orderliness thing really, really struck me hard, especially when we started to associate that with disgust sensitivity, because I had been reading Hitler's table talk while I was doing some of this research. And Hitler's table talk was a collection of his speeches, spontaneous utterances at dinnertime for three years, I think from 1939 to 1942. And, you know, one of the things you hear about theories about what motivates the radical right is fear of the other. And it's a powerful theory, that, except that it doesn't seem to be borne out by certain

facts. So, for example, if conservatives are more fearful, they should be more neurotic on the big five personality scales. But in fact, they're not. They're actually slightly less neurotic. The most neurotic political types are actually liberal men. If you go on Twitter, that's not surprising. Yeah, well, so the conservatives don't seem to be high in negative emotion.

In fact, overall, their life satisfaction is higher than that of liberals. And so it doesn't look like it's fear of the other that's motivating, say, that stay-in-your in your box right wing ideology. But disgust, that's a whole different thing. And, you know, when I was reading Hitler's table talk and starting to think about disgust, which, again, Jonathan Haidt has studied a lot, the disgust language among the disgust, disgust language was absolutely pervasive in Hitler's discussions of the Jews and the gypsies, for example, all the people that he went after. He treated them like they were contaminants, and they were associated with rats and insects and all of that, and he used the

same biochemical means to combat all of them, but it was disgusting, so that was really interesting. I think that's telling as to it. I think that really supports your argument here. The fact that when Hitler starts his his cleaning of Germany, he starts low, right? The rats, the disease. I'm sure there were sanitation programs that were very beneficial to the German people. Then he starts. He's like, oh, Zyklon A, this this incredibly powerful gas that that that a Jewish man had, just eradicates all the pestilence inside German factories. They become much cleaner places. It's not much longer, though, until he says, take that smell out of that Zyklon A.

If it were, let's call it Zyklon B, nobody can smell it, and we'll use that on the other rats that we have. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll use that on the, and that's what they used on the Jews. It's really terrifying, too, when I thought, when I associated it with those other studies that were showing that the prevalence of infectious disease was a predictor of authoritarian attitudes. Because, you know, it shows how deeply wedded, rooted this is in our biology. And that's frightening, right? But it's even more frightening because it's rooted there for a reason you know and it is frequently the case that the other is a source of contamination so when the europeans came to north america you know the europeans had been in these

filthy cities packed together in terrible epidemic conditions and millions millions died but we we evolved a substantial immunity against many of those infectious diseases. The Spaniards came to Central America, and, you know, 95% of the natives died across North and South America, just in waves, right? Measles, mumps, smallpox, chickenpox, no immunity whatsoever. There were almost no diseases in the new world And so it wiped out almost the it almost wiped out the entire population of the Western Hemisphere So it's no wonder we're leery of strangers, you know, like now of course the counter-argument is yeah well What about all the cool things and the trade and the and the expansion of knowledge and of course that's the liberal attitude and it's

Absolutely correct. What about all those things? It's wonderful. But the problem is you've got a devil on both sides. So it's a really difficult thing to contend with. and all that, are those more hardwired into who you are? Or if someone realizes, oh, I'm way too agreeable or I'm way too conscientious, are there kind of thought processes you can have or practices to do to try and improve that? There's this psychologist named Jerome Kagan, and he's an older guy now. He was a very famous developmental psychologist, and he was interested in studying who he called inhibited children, temperamentally inhibited children. Those were probably introverted kids with high levels of neuroticism.

And you could pretty much detect them by six months of age. They were the ones that would startle more easily. If they started to cry, it was harder to soothe them. They were more reactive to strangers. and when they were a little older he used to do things like have them stand by their mom and roll in a Like a little robot and watch how the kids reacted and some kids would go and just play with the robot right away and others Would hide behind their mother's legs and you know be cautious and then come out what what Kagan found was that if you had a temperamentally inhibited child and you encouraged

their exploratory activity, you could shift them up into the normative range over a number of years. And so that's a good example of the role of the environment in modifying the initial temperamental predisposition. So you can imagine a normal distribution, so you could be anywhere from very low to very high, and then imagine you sort of have a place on that at birth. It's a place that's, it's a fixed point with a blurry surround, and then the environment can move you to the more inhibited or to the less inhibited side. So you could be, you know, you're born somewhat extroverted, your environment could make you really extroverted or less extroverted. The question is, how far can you be moved? And

the answer is, that's proportional to the effort that's put in. So with twin studies and IQ, for example, imagine you take twins and you separate them at birth and you put them in different homes. And then you look at their IQ. If I remember correctly, I think I've got this about right, that you need a three standard deviation difference in socioeconomic conditions to produce a one standard deviation difference in IQ. So let me, I'll try to make that more easily understandable. So, and I'm going to get the details wrong because I can't do the math, the statistics quickly enough in my head, but it's close enough. To move someone from as intelligent as a high school student to as intelligent as a college

student, which is a 15 percentile improvement, you'd have to move them from the fifth percentile in socioeconomic status to the 95th percentile. So it's a huge movement. So you can change IQ, but it's very, very expensive. And the more you want to change it, the more expensive it gets, and you run into the problem of diminishing returns. Can you change it on a case-by-case basis, or are you saying that within a group of a certain socioeconomic level, that will be produced? Because I feel like, I don't think that what you're saying is if we took a poorer child and put him in a rich family, that that child's IQ is going to be high? Yes, no, that is what I was saying. Exactly that, yes, exactly that. But the effect isn't as dramatic as you might think. And with

adopted out children, the IQ of the adopted out children is much more like their biological parents than their adoptive parents. So IQ is really heavily influenced biologically. This was in the bell curve too. And that author was blasted. Yeah. Well, you know, IQ, man, that's a tough subject. It's a dismal science, that. But I can tell you some things about IQ. First of all, it is measured more accurately and more reliably than any other phenomena that social scientists have ever measured. And it was invented, discovered by the people who invented all of our statistics. So you don't get to be a social scientist and say, I don't believe in IQ, but I believe in all these other things we've demonstrated statistically. You can't have both those claims simultaneously.

And then IQ is actually pretty simple to measure. So all you have to do to measure IQ is, Matt, you could make an IQ test quite rapidly. You just go online and get a list of words, like make a multiple choice vocabulary test with words ranging from simple words to complex words, and then collect 30 general knowledge questions and 20 mathematical, simple arithmetic equations and just ask people to solve them.

And then what you do is total the correct answers and rank order them. That's basically IQ right there. And now you correct it for age because you do that with IQ, but basically the average of any, the total score of any set of questions that assess the ability to abstract will give you a proxy for IQ. One of the things that people, oh, I'm sorry. No, no. And then the harsh thing about that, the harsh thing about that is that it turns out to be a very good predictor of life success, right? And especially in complex jobs.

So that's rough. That's where I was headed. So those two things combine into a very tough reality, right? One, your IQ test, it's true, right? Take that and you're stuck with your actual IQ. It's easy to measure. Two, that's a very good predictor

of how successful you'll be. And you said it in complex jobs. I'm sure you're right. But he made an argument that it applies to every job, that a waitress with a higher IQ will be much better at her job than a waitress with a lower IQ. He said that a construction worker with a higher IQ will get injured less frequently than a construction worker with a lower IQ.

They just see a step ahead and they do this better. That an IQ test would be a great job application, even more so than perhaps the traditional applications we use now. This guy made everything about IQ, and then he even went as far as to IQ rank different races and how the success of different races corresponded with the IQ test results of different races, and they hated that, but it was the data.

Don't Jewish people have like a 15 on average higher iq it's it's 15 points it's more than 15 percent 15 points so what that means is the average blown out the average ashkenazi jew so that's your jews with european heritage the average iq for an ashkenazi Jew is 115 compared to 100 for, you know, other Europeans. And that is enough to account for the vast over-representation of Jews among high-end intellectuals and in complex jobs. Yeah, it's a major deal. And it's another one of those things that you don't get to talk about.

I mean, IQ is rough. Like, it's even worse, say. Well, so first of all, in jobs that you can learn by rote, IQ predicts how fast you learn the job, but it doesn't predict how well you do it once you learn it. Conscientiousness starts to be a better predictor there. But here's an ugly little fact for you. This is a hate fact for sure man so you know the u.s army has been using iq tests for like a hundred years you know and has done some of the basic research and uh it wasn't very long ago i don't remember exactly when this legislation came into being but it is illegal in the united states to induct anyone into the armed forces if they have an IQ of less than 83. Okay, and that's because the armed forces have determined with

extensive testing and desperation that there's nothing that someone with an IQ, somebody with an IQ of 83 can do in the armed forces that isn't counterproductive. The force complementment. Right, well, now you're good. It's really worth thinking this through because the first thing you have to understand is that the armed forces actually wants people because they're chronically short of them. And so they're not inclined to get rid of people unless they have to.

So they're motivated in the right direction to actually rely on the truth to guide them, right? Because if the truth tells you what you don't want to hear, well then, you know, you're not going to be inclined to listen to it. But these guys want people, and if their results... They wish they could deny it. If they could get away with 77, they'd do it. That's exactly it, that's exactly it.

Okay, so you think, well, 83. Well, that doesn't sound so bad. How many people have an IQ of 83? Well, it's like 10% of the population. Now, you just let that sink in. That's more than I would have thought. Yeah, no kidding. Well, okay, and there's been, basically, the evidence suggests

that if you have an IQ of 90 or less, which is substantially more than 10% of the population, it's very difficult for you to develop literacy levels that are sufficient so that you can read instructions. Imagine that's the basic metric for literacy. You can read instructions and you can follow them. Sorry, just give me one sec, guys. Yeah, so you can read instructions and follow them that's your basic that's your basic guideline for literacy but under 90 you can't do that and that's more like that's more than 15 of the population that's approaching one in five so that's pretty damn

terrifying and and especially as our society gets more complex because there's going to be fewer and fewer jobs yeah i hate so that's why there are forces but i think of the elites is not typically the people that fill it out right you know so maybe they only 80 of the population because of this iq qualification is eligible there's probably 20 30 percent who who self, I don't know, pull themselves out of the pool just because they have other opportunities that don't include the army. You're saying that the pool of entry to the military might have a lower IQ on average than the general population? It's hard, it's not fun to say, but yeah. What you're saying is it's not a great idea to join the army so probably not a genius a lot of that's not what i'm saying i'm saying that like you know you should you should say that okay high socioeconomic groups are not our warrior class right our warrior class doesn't

come from the millionaires of this world it comes from the people who maybe need that um the gi bill right to pay for college it comes from people you, who maybe don't have a lot of other great job opportunities. They look at the military. And, you know, I feel like sometime afterwards they reverse engineer their reasons to say patriotism and love of America or whatever. But,

you know, before they got in, a lot of it was about, like, well, fuck. Free college for a lot. Free college is one or just, like, shitty job. It's been an explicit aim of the U.S. military, especially in peacetime, to be an agent of social mobility. And so I don't think there's anything wrong in pointing that out at all.

I mean, part of what the armed forces do is to try to take people out of the... what would you say, what's the word? It's not lower class, it's the underclass, the underclass, and move them up the socioeconomic hierarchy so that they can have functional lives. And that's a pretty decent job for the military in peacetime in particular. And so I don't think it's unreasonable to point out that that's often a motivation for people i mean it the military doesn't track more conscientious types and also people who are low and more low and lower in openness and so they're more likely to be kind of conventionally patriotic as well but the the comment you made about you know perhaps

the distribution of intelligence among the applicants is skewed towards the lower end. That may be true, but it doesn't matter because the 15% figure I used, or 10% figure for below 83, that's in the general population. That's not even... Yeah, that's in the general population. Yeah, yeah. I would be interesting to see what the U.S. military numbers are,

like what percentage of U.S. military applicants fall into that range. That would be very telling. That's where I'm headed, right? If 15% of the general population isn't smart enough to be in the military, I wouldn't be shocked to hear 25% of the applicants weren't smart enough because a lot of people at the high end, people who are otherwise like mommy and daddy can easily afford their schooling all the way through the master's degree level. Those people weren't going to join the army.

And I think, and, and, and because of that, I feel like that, that if you are an outlier, if you are a literal genius and your aspirations are military, wow, the doors are open, eh? If you go in there, you know, and you're scoring 35 points higher than the mean average, and they're like, oh, well, we're going to find something special for you to do, young man. There's no doubt about that. They're very good at that. They do a pretty decent job of not wasting talent. The military is very good at assessing aptitude, and they do utilize it.

That's wonderful. The terrifying thing here is that this is especially terrifying given what's coming down the pipes, you know. So the Tesla people, for example, are working pretty damn hard on really functional autonomous cars. And the most common occupation in the United States is driver for men. Right, exactly. And so, and then the other issue is, well, you know, that for the liberals, the only reason that people, let's call them left-leaning people and leave the poor liberals alone, because I actually happen to be a liberal. But on the radical left, the idea is, well, the only reason that people are at the bottom is because of the oppression of the patriarchal elite.

And for the conservatives, it's, well, there's a job for everyone if you just get off your damn ass and go look for one. But the reality of the situation is that as our society becomes more complex, jobs for people at the lower end of the cognitive distribution are getting pretty damn hard to come by. And that's a social problem that no one will contend with because we can't have an honest discussion about IQ. And I can understand it. IQ, man, it's rough. It's rough. It hurts your feelings. It does. It hurts. How do people dance around that in academic circles, like the whole difference in races or gender distribution differences? Or is it just kind of ignored or spoken away?

Someone yells eugenics and then they drag you out of the room. Yeah, you don't know. It's just, well, for example, there is an absolute dearth of courses on intelligence in psychology graduate schools. And I have colleagues who say, well, I don't believe in IQ. It's like, well, you know, it's not like the genie under your bed. You don't get to not believe in it.

I don't believe in bench press. This is a gender we're talking about. This is a real thing. I know that you can measure it. Yeah, I did, but I don't believe it's a gender we're talking about i know that you can measure it yeah i did but i don't believe in bench press sorry yeah so but but the thing is i understand i know the intelligence literature extremely well for for a variety of reasons partly because i tried to design tests of cognitive ability that weren't precisely iq tests i will but i what i learned was that that was actually impossible took It took me 10 years to learn that.

I got very educated about IQ while doing it, but I was trying to expand the domain of cognitive tests using neuropsychological tests that medical doctors had designed to assess brain damage. Would somebody with a higher IQ have learned that faster? I worked with some graduate students who were smarter than me and it took them quite a long time to learn the shit. It might be the opposite, you know.

If you have a 150 IQ over there, and I think you do, it might be difficult sometimes to understand someone or to understand the inner thinkings or inner workings of personality stuff and the biology that affects someone with an 87 IQ oh it's really hard like I I have an advantage over many academics because I'm a clinical psychologist and I've had clients who had IQs in that range and you know you just cannot believe how difficult things are for people like that so I had one client I mean he had lots of problems but he was he was about three quarters deaf and he'd been bullied and like he had lots of problems man and but i tried to find employment for him which was extraordinarily difficult even finding a volunteer job is finding a volunteer job is actually harder than finding a

job because you have to go through so many police uh um screams and that sort of thing now. So it's very, very hard. But I tried to, so he got a job stuffing envelopes, you know, he had to fold up letters and put them into envelopes. But imagine the envelopes are stacked and all the addresses in order and the pieces of paper are stacked and all the addresses are in order. Well, first of all, you have to not make a mistake, because if you get one out of order, you screw up the whole thing. Second, you have to be able to fold a piece of paper with incredible accuracy to fit it into an envelope well enough so you don't crumple the envelope so that it doesn't jam up the automatic sorting machines, right? You have to be within a tolerance of about less than a millimeter per fold. It took me like 30 hours to train him how to fold a piece of paper in three

so that he could manage it and then it was complicated by the fact that on these pieces of paper there was sometimes a photo was stapled and the photo wasn't always in exactly the same place so then he had to make a decision about how to fold up the paper so he didn't crumple the photo so that would still fit in the envelope i mean it was just he sweated blood man trying to and that was a volunteer job at a charity and they were going to fire him. So what's the kind of solution for these 15% of people with these kind of debilitatingly low IQs? Is there a job that they can do, like service industry, or are they kind of almost not?

You have a lot of wildfires out west. Well, you know, that's an open social question. And as the Silicon Valley geniuses keep complexifying our life, that problem is going to become more and more paramount. Exacerbated. Every day it's worse and worse. If you rewound 150 years, fill that, all of those guys with those 87 IQs, first of all, they're not that far below the standard deviation anymore. Second of all,

those are railroad workers. Those are farmers. They don't need to fold anything to a millimeter. They need to hit that railroad spike hard all day. That was a good paying job. I feel like all of those manual labors, man muscle, the jobs that took advantage of the fact that a man was more muscular and physically powerful, 85% of those manual labors man muscle the the jobs that took advantage of the fact that a man was

more muscular and physically powerful like 85 of those are gone and even that though whatever you get you're really really dumb as far as iq is concerned and someone tells you all right you need to fence in this whole pasture put in a gate over there do this that and the other thing feed the animals you know raise a barn like it seems like like that's just a different kind of intelligence but someone with 83 doesn't necessarily mean like oh i get how to hammer things so this will be easy well the issue is the issue is really um rapidity of adaptation to change hey so iq is an excellent predictor of how fast you learn something it's it's a better predictor of how fast you learn something than how well you do at your job. But a lot of occupations, especially more traditional societies, were, well, you learn the routine and then you repeated it.

And so once you learn the routine, IQ is IQ independent to a large degree. Not if a problem emerges, but let's say under normal circumstances. to a large degree. Not if a problem emerges, but let's say under normal circumstances. But the problem now is that, you know, even if you're pretty damn cognitively sharp, it's hard to keep up. I mean, damn computer changes on you every day. And, you know, it's not, and it's also obvious that people who are computer literate, I mean, in our society, being intelligent and computer literate is a multiplier that's almost beyond belief. You know, I know guys who run whole enterprises that would have, should even now, probably employ a thousand people, and they're basically running it all by themselves, because they're so unbelievably efficient with computer utilization, and that's a cognitive multiplier, but it's still almost all

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So, yeah. Closer to back on ad schedule. What did you want to ask about? About the gender wage gap. We've discussed that a few times and all the factors that lead to it. Yeah, well, that's another topic about which our culture is too,

I guess, part of it's fear, part of it's naivety, some of it's ideological possession, but some of it is just complexity. You know, I mean, we're in the aftermath of the invention of the birth control pill, and we don't want to underestimate the impact of that. I mean, one of the impacts of that, by the way, as far as is known, is that women on the birth control pill don't like masculine men as much as women off the birth control pill. That's pretty damn interesting. So look, here's one of the examples of that. So the pill, to some degree, mimics the state of pregnancy. Now, if you take women across the ovulatory cycle and you show them pictures of men, say the same man, but you vary his jaw width, which you can do obviously with Photoshop or something like that, the women closer to ovulation like the guy with the squarer jaw,

the wider jaw, and that's a marker for testosterone. And as she moves away from ovulation, she likes the narrow-jawed guy better. And the higher testosterone guys are more assertive and more dominant. So the fact that the pill has shifted women towards preference for less masculine men is something that has unknown political consequences.

You're starting to sound just a teensy weensy bit like Alex Jones, because he told me the fluoride would not only turn frogs gay, but also my son. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm a little on the fence on that one. It's not just good for your teeth, like all those dentists want you to believe, you know? Don't believe big dentistry. Don't believe big dentistry. Don't believe big dentistry.

It's a complete scam. That's fascinating. So my friend Woody here has an interesting preference for the women that he finds attractive. And I'd love for you to sort of give us your shake on this. So we all went on a rafting trip once, and there was a very muscular guide on the trip, a female. She had a hairy belly like she had what we call a happy trail where hair extends from below her bikini line all the way up and around her belly button.

It's visibly there. Up to the belly button, not around it. Yeah, she's got that square jaw that you're referring to, and she's muscular. She's doing a job that only men are doing besides herself and she's not asking for any help she there's this part where the guide has to lift a eight person raft over their head and walk with it and she had her she had learned a technique to do it like a fireman's carry and it was just and she had it and woody was smitten And everybody else was thinking, like, that's not my cup of tea. That's not what I find.

This is a fine-looking young lady, but that doesn't turn me on. She's pretty. If we were out in the wilderness and this was the last group of human beings, I'd be like, well, maybe there's some cave bitches over there or something. Like, maybe there's some, like, Amazonian women who are, like, six feet tall and blonde and hairless. Like, let's go look for them. But Woody's like, no, I are six feet tall and blonde and hairless. Let's go look for them. But Woody's like, no, me and Mug Lug here, we're together now. So I saw this Jimmy Kimmel episode, and he and Sarah Silverman were talking,

and Sarah Silverman was always self-conscious about the amount of body hair that she has. She would grow a mustache, for example, if she didn't take care of it, and she had hairy arms. And Jimmy Kimmel, who used to date her, said, I always liked your your hairiness because that means you have high testosterone that means you like sex and it was like aha i thought that for years before i heard jimmy kimmel say it i had arrived at that same conclusion that you know a high t woman is a woman who's down and uh i guess kyle wants you to call me gay or something sounds like sounds like a post-hoc rationalization to me. Hmm. I agree.

Yeah. Well, I mean, there's no accounting for taste, and I'm certainly not going to step in the middle of this discussion, I can tell you that. I'm not that sensitive. So the wage gap issue, that's one of these other... Sorry, guys. Oh, come on.

I mean, it was a post-hoc rationalization. It's not just her. We'll look at women online and stuff. Sometimes we objectify them in a terrible way. And I see someone with a square jaw and think, like, she's hot. That's a good-looking girl. And everyone else is like, no. It's not just this Woody one-person thing.

It's that when we do look at women on the show or girls or whatever, consistently Kyle and I have very similar tastes, very small, more petite, feminine women, softer. And Woody usually likes kind of the cage fighter look. fighter look yeah well maybe he's up for a challenge man all right I'll call it a testament to his courage how about that anyway we'll go back to the wage gap if you're not having fun with that well I mean you know um there's there's the the, the standard statistic that's always bandied about is a univariate statistic.

It acts as if there's only one reason why there are differences between the earnings of men and women. It collapses them completely across age, which is absolutely unfair. And it fails to take into account the fact that there are multiple contributing factors. One of the hallmarks of ideological thinking is that everything is caused by one thing, in this case, the patriarchy and discrimination and oppression. Now, you know, it's reasonable to posit that part of the reason that some women make less money than some men is because of holdover of discrimination, let's say. And I suspect that that probably does play a role, although an increasingly small role. But there's

all sorts of other factors. So, for example, we know that agreeable people make less money than disagreeable people in the same jobs. And part of the reason for that is that a disagreeable person will say, hey, if you don't give me more money, I'm going to leave. And they mean it. And part of the reason for that is that a disagreeable person will say, hey, if you don't give me more money, I'm going to leave. And they mean it, and they'll say it without being afraid of the conflict. It isn't being afraid of the conflict, because it isn't fear. But agreeable people don't like conflict. It's like, well, lots of times bargaining for money, that's a conflictual enterprise,

man, because people just don't leave money lying around. If it's just lying there, someone's going to pick it up. And so you actually have to bargain and push, especially in the world today, in order to continue to move your salary up the hierarchy as you move up the socioeconomic ladder. It's an active game. hierarchy, as you move up the socioeconomic ladder, it's an active game. Men are also more driven by socioeconomic status than women are, and part of the reason for that is that women admire men who are of higher socioeconomic status, and the reverse isn't true. So there's a big correlation between male socioeconomic status and male sexual success,

and the correlation for women is negative. that's a big deal well you think here's why like look i mean i see this i've worked with a lot of high-powered women as a consultant because i worked for this company for a while that took um law partners in big law firms who were extremely high performing and tried to make them better because our pitch was, look, your high performing people generate most of your revenue. We can probably increase their productivity by 10% and we'll charge you a fraction of what that will bring you. And so it was quite fun because I got to work with, I've had a practice that's really spanned the range of intellectual ability. And I got a chance to work with a lot of really, really competent lawyers,

and most of the ones I worked with were women. Well, the law firms all lose the women in their 30s, the big law firms. All the women quit. And the women know it, and so do all the law firms. So, and I know the reasons, they're pretty straightforward. So this is the typical story. So the typical female partner in a big law firm is well put together, very conscientious, very intelligent, and very dutiful. And so they're the sort of women who did extremely well in high school, then they did really well in university, then they aced their LSATs. Then they went to law

school and did extremely well. Then they articled and did extremely well. And then they got their, it's not called an internship. I don't remember what the hell the lawyers call it, articling. And then, you know, they make partner and then they're 30. Okay. Now they've hit the pinnacle of their profession. You can still move up because, you know, there's no end to up in a job like law. But what happens is that they wake up at 30 and they think, what the hell am I doing? They're working with these guys who are hyper competitive. You have to work 60 to 80 hours a week.

And I mean work too it's not like it's a competitive businessman if you're not going to be working flat out someone's going to come along and take you out and it's not team play it's very competitive because the men are all jockeying for position and they're jockeying with the women and the men don't know what to do with competitive women because they can't flatten them like they might a compatriot and they can't kowtow them to them so they don't know what to do with them and the women are also in their 30s immediately beset by all of the other issues of life like do i get married do i have a partner do i have kids how the hell am i going to do that and maintain this 60 to 80 hour a week work week and all of them virtually all of them decide to quit they

take nine to five jobs they take a massive pay cut and they go have a life and the strange thing isn't that they do that because the strange thing is that some men will get so obsessed with their business their law business say that they'll happily work 60 to 80 hours a week, right? And that's a small percentage of men. And those are the hyperproductive men that occupy the top rungs of the Pareto distribution, you know, the strange 1% distribution of creative production that also characterizes wealth. So the issue isn't why there aren't women at the higher echelons of power. It's a stupid question, because most of the men aren't there either right the question is what the hell is up with the people who do occupy those higher

echelons of power and that's fairly straightforward they're generally very intelligent they're generally either very creative or very conscientious they're extremely energetic they're very status driven they have they're very physically healthy because they have high levels of energy and they're extremely energetic they're very status driven they have they're very physically healthy because they have high levels of energy and they're insanely single-minded about their pursuit and those are very rare people now they're the people who rise to the top yeah exactly sound like anyone you know is he grabbing her by the of course he's grabbing her and she's not happy about it no she's not that's my disc golf guilt get disc i had it made

yeah i did a good job and it made jesus christ of course they don't make these i had to request this i woke up in my 30s That's sad that you have that thing. Everyone else gets a laugh out of it. It's more sad than a thrush. I was like 36 maybe. And my listeners have heard this before. Kyle had a YouTube channel. He has a YouTube channel that was just exploding.

It was going crazy. And I was sitting in these meetings working big hours, really. I used to be a senior software architect for Cisco, the networking company. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's a competitive job. So I'm there and I'm in these meetings, just super focusing because a lot of people speaking with accents. And it's soul-sucking for me. And Kyle sends me a picture of his day, which is a pickup truck filled with watermelons. He's going to explode later on.

And it was like, oh my God, I want to be Kyle when I grow up. And then I had to make that happen. Yeah, well, not everybody is or should be cut out for absolutely obsessive attention to their career. You know, and the guys who are like that, you know, it often costs them in terms of their familial relationships, or they have someone at home who's backing them up,

you know, 100%, something like that. And then, you know, these women, the other thing that was interesting about these women is they often have a hard time finding mates because, well, most of them are attractive, you know, they're well put together physically, so they're intimidating because they're they're fairly beautiful um then they're smart you know then they're rich tell me about their belly and they're tough

marked absence of such things so you know so what happens to as men advance up the socioeconomic hierarchies ladder, they get more attractive to women. But as women march up the ladder, they get more intimidating to men. And so they're and besides, you know, we also have the hypergamy phenomenon, which is that women marry across and up dominance hierarchies and or hierarchies, let's say, not necessarily dominance hierarchies, and men mate across and down. And so one of the implications of that is for women is that as women become increasingly successful across multiple domains, it's harder and harder for them to find a mate because there just aren't any. And then it even gets worse because it's better to be a beautiful 25 year old woman than

to be a beautiful 30 year old woman and the reason for that is that if you're a beautiful 30 year old woman you have to compete with beautiful 25 year old women and the thing about beautiful 25 year old women is they don't put as much pressure on men because if you're say you're a 30 year old man okay so fine you meet a 30 year old woman that's fine, except that she wants to have children now. Whereas if you are going out with a 25-year-old woman, it's like, yeah, well, you know, five to seven years. And men, they can wait. So, yeah, well, and later. I mean, my sense is women should be married by the time they're 27.

I'll just state that bluntly. It gets ugly afterwards. Now, that's a rule of thumb, but it's something I'd certainly and have told my daughter, you know, who is actually married. She's 20. How old is she? She's 25. She made it. She made it.

She made it. Just under the wire, man. And I'm not saying that because I think there's something wrong with women over 27. That's not the point. The point is that it's not that easy to find a partner. And you have to put your best foot forward in every possible way. And age actually happens to matter. And, you know, you can call it sexism if you want.

I don't give a damn what you call it. But, you know, most 25-year-old guys won't go out with an 80-year-old woman. And you can call that ageism too if you want. And that's exactly what it is. But we don't want to be too stupid about such things. It makes sense with the super successful women almost like pricing themselves out of the market because if they're making half a million a year as an attorney and they meet a doctor who's making $480,000 as a surgeon or something, to most people they'd be like, oh, hell yeah, we're pretty close. But I'm kind of understanding you're saying there's almost like an intrinsic thing in women that they need someone higher up they don't want someone on that same plane the thing about women it's it's a it's

partly biological and partly just plain bloody rationality like you you place yourself into a position of dependence when you're pregnant and when you have an infant. So let's call that three years, okay? And then if you have two or three kids, it's like seven years, let's say. Well, what's the logical thing to do if you place yourself in a state of dependency voluntarily? Get a contract that assures your future. Yeah, you find someone who's going to help you out, man. So you're going to look for someone who's competent. And why would you look for someone less competent than you? You already have you.

So these things are, I think it's a sign of the immaturity of our culture that we can't have these sorts of discussions. And I'm really not happy with the way that young women are educated because most of what they're told are lies. Like they're for example that career is going to be the most important part of your life it's like that's true for a very small fraction of people so you have to have a pretty damn spectacular career before it's worth sacrificing the other values and pleasures of life for i saw you were talking about were talking about Frozen at one point and how that movie had a... I've never seen the movie,

but apparently you were saying it has a political agenda. Does that kind of play into what you're seeing with women not getting this talk as much? Yes. Are you noticing things in the zeitgeist? Can you lay that out? I don't fully know. Well, it was explicitly not a, you know,

Prince saves the princess movie. And fair enough in a very kind of casual sense. But the thing is, is that the prince does rescue the princess. That's the archetypal story. And the prince that rescues the princess can be the woman's own masculine side. I mean, these stories can be read at, you know, individual psychological and sociological levels. But Frozen, in my estimation, was nothing but a, was essentially a piece of propaganda because it attempted to subvert the normal, the standard relationships between the genders. And I

don't, like, I don't find creative products that have an ideological agenda credible, and I didn't find Frozen credible in the least, because it violates basic truths, and it does it casually. I thought there were other things wrong with the movie as well. I thought the boyfriend guy with the moose, he kind of comes in and saves the day, right? The princess is lying there dying, and he gets her warm again,

and then she's able to go save the day. And while it's not the prince drawing his sword and facing down the dragon for his love it's not that standard archetype but but he's there in his own way yeah well he's sort of the nice supportive guy and you know how well they do and i see you know you're right he comes in when there's trouble with a blanket and i you yeah go go get him girl you got this yeah and then he fucks off somewhere with his moose like on that on that exact same token i love your explanation and i had never been able to internally articulate it before about the male feminist thing and the

whole like just it gives you a creepy vibe and the more i heard you talk about it where you're saying well these people are just kind of weaker subservient men that can't compete in a traditional male hierarchy so they have to be kind of you know sneaky and try and go under the wire tell you a funny story man people will hate me for this one so it's about orangutans and so now a fully developed male orangutan is the guy that has the big fat pads around his face. So he almost looks like a moon. And he's a big, tough character.

And the big males get so big they actually can't hang around in trees. They spend most of the time on the ground, whereas the typical orangutan is up in the trees. And so it used to be thought, so there's only one of these males around in any given territory, and these big males, and then there's other males that kind of look like the females. And it used to be thought that all of those more juvenile-looking males were adolescents. But then they discovered that that wasn't true, that what happened was, is if there was a dominant and fully developed male in the territory, then all of the other males didn't mature fully, and they stayed in their juvenile form.

Now, the females, female orangutans come to the big moon-faced guy. So they come for mating purposes to him. The juveniles have to resort to rape. And if you can't understand that from a human perspective, then you're not bloody well thinking. So it's the same thing, is that the successful males, and this is true genetically, so for example, you have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. And you think, no, that can't be possible. It has to be 50-50, but it doesn't. So it's easy. Every male who reproduced had two children, but a bunch had zero,

and every female who reproduced had one. So every female had one child, and half the males had two. That's basically the stats. So there's much more male reproductive failure than female reproductive failure, and that's part of this Pareto distribution issue where all the spoils go to the victor. But the orangutan story is just insanely comical as far as I'm concerned. It is an interesting parallel. Do you think it's something that is thought about cognitively by people, like in the male feminist trying to sneak in under the radar? Or do you think it's almost just a strategy that they're going out and doing, trying to get laid, and they don't even fully think about it? I think they use the be nice strategy, and I think they use it because they don't have a better one.

That's fascinating, but I would have to take that study one more step, right? Remove the male. Remove the dominant male, and maybe through artificial means, rise one of these juvenile males who look a bit through artificial means rise one of these juvenile males who look a bit like a female these beta males rise him up to the new alpha however you do that i don't know that is what happens if you put a handkerchief on him maybe they'll all love him now you know but what happens then does he does he start growing those fat pouches and getting a mane yes that's exactly what happens so fascinating's so fascinating. It is. It's mind-boggling, man. You know that happens with pigs, too. So pigs are like dogs.

They're all part of the same species. So any pig can interbreed with any other pig, whether it's those micro, silly pigs you see on Instagram or it's those big Russian boars with tusks. They can all interbreed. And what happens when you release one of those pink little pigs that we all have for bacon here in the United States, you release him out there in the wilds of texas with the with the russian boar and the uh the

hybridization that's happened there it's its own species at this point he's within six months or something maybe it's six weeks he starts growing this long black bristly fur he starts growing tusks cutting teeth like He becomes what they are. I'd like to see that in humans now. We're just animals too. There's got to be an example of what... If I were in that survival situation, like if the world falls to apocalypse

and there are three males in 30 mile radius and I'm one of them, do I finally get a full beard? Is this going to fill in? Not even then. No, no. God damn it. It's an open question. It's an open question how different you would be in a truly different situation. You know, I mean, we do know, for example, that one of the reasons that people change when they go to new environments is because new environments shift, switch on new

genes in the brain. So it's not merely a matter of absorbing new information and encoding new memories and all of that. It's that you literally change physiologically when you subject yourself to new challenges. New genes turn on and code for new proteins. And we have no idea what the full extent of that is. Wow. I did not know that. That's fascinating. Yeah, it's so in-depth. So much to even think about with that. And we have no idea compared to what we're going to know. At least I would hope so. In leading up to this, I've heard you speak on the failures of communism, socialism, Marxism, governments, and that sort of thing. Have you ever heard about, I'm sure you've heard about the cannibalism that took place

in the Soviet Union, something called the Holodomor in Ukraine? Oh yeah, that was Ukraine. Well, that was only six million Ukrainians. Oh, is that all? Yeah, hell, why teach that in school? I believe that is referred to as the most widespread case of cannibalism in mankind's history. From what I understand, there's photographs of a mother and father and their children's bodies in front of them on the table, butchered.

The heads are there. Yeah, well, it was about as brutal as it could get. Yeah, that was the first major failure of, well, it was the first overwhelming failure of the communist revolution yeah it was and you know one of the things that's really shocking to me is that of course people are very poorly informed about history in general but most of my students have at least some cursory knowledge of World War two and the Holocaust but when I teach in my personality class which is a hell of a

place to teach it you know what happened in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959, it's usually the first exposure of any of these students to any of that. It's pretty damn shocking given, as you said, we fought a whole Cold War. We brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear destruction to settle this. it had to it had i feel like it was worth it every step of the way rather than than if if i i'm thankful that my ancestors such that they were like fought that cold war such that it was so that i'm not under the yoke of some horrible that this country wasn't contaminated by that that sort of mindset that leads to ruin and failure and poverty. It's also, yes, it's appalling that the degree of failure of those systems isn't

thoroughly known by everyone. That would be good. But it's also equally appalling, or perhaps even more appalling, that Marxist predicated doctrine is still so popular and so unchallenged in some sense, especially in the humanities. It's like, what the hell? How many bloody corpses do you need before you think you might be wrong? What is it that those people in humanities just don't, because this is the thing I have trouble when I'm talking to people about this, and you say, well, there's this huge problem with bias, with Marxism, whatever, in universities or academia or such. How do you make a compelling case for that since the response is usually, oh, you think there's a

grand cabal of Marxists at the top, you know, top down, going to ruin society? And then when they frame it like that, it's like, oh, well, I guess not, you not. It's just hard to make a compelling case because it seems like so quickly it just is like, oh, well, that's just one bad apple or that's just a bad facility or a bad— You can do it in part. The empirical data are pretty clear. This has been generated in large part by the people who are associated with Jonathan Haidt's heterodox academy. I mean, there are no Republicans in the humanities, like none. It's one in 30 or something, or even smaller percentage than that. And so to be in the center politically, if you're in the humanities, puts you on the far right.

So, and that's just a matter of empirical fact. So, and then with regards to the cabal or conspiracy idea, it's like, well, women's studies is a conspiracy. It's just, all you have to do is go look at the websites. They say, well, we train social justice activists who are opposing the oppression of the patriarchy. It's like they teach them all it is, is political activism training. And it's not like they're hiding it. I mean, like I said, in Ontario, our tribunals, we have social justice tribunals that are part and parcel of the provincial government.

Social justice isn't a bad thing though, right? I mean, they're coming from a good place. And I've heard you say that twice in the show. Like, hey, they're not hiding it. They have social justice tribunals. I've heard you say that twice in the show. Like, hey, they're not hiding it. They have social justice tribunals.

But what they're going for is a... They have good intentions in this thing. They're trying to have people not hurt other people, right? Well, that's the theory. I mean, I don't buy the good intentions argument because I don't think that they have intentions that are, say, better or worse on average than the typical person. And the typical person has

plenty of uh what would you call aspirations that aren't so positive so but what for me is and you you brought this up a little earlier is the tipping point is when you move from equality of opportunity to equality of outcome and and like this discussion of equity i mean the department the human resources department at my university is called human resources and equity and equity is defined as as the pursuit of equality of outcome and so and i don't think that you can pursue equality of outcome and have good intentions at the same time i mean you're or you're so ignorant you're so historically ignorant that that that you shouldn't have the kind of power that would enable you to make any decisions to make someone believe they could

but like so the people or the ignorance people who are pro-social justice i might argue have low disgust factors in their personality right they're open to these ideas and disgust is a negative emotion right uh well i mean that's one of the dangers of of radicalism on the right you know we know the dangers of radicalism on the right you know i mean the thing is is both the right and the left can deteriorate into a really vicious form of identity politics i mean now obviously that's what happened in in nazi germany and and that that can easily happen with uh sort sort of more extreme nationalist movements that are rising, coming to the forefront in Europe. I mean, there's definitely a bad trail that that can go down.

And there's no doubt that disgust sensitivity can produce pretty intense political pathology. It's quite terrifying. But, you know, there's a hell there's there's there's a hell on the left and there's a hell on the right and at the moment at least in the universities the hell on the left is a lot more potent and and and dangerous i think certainly the one winning right now just by numbers just by numbers yeah it has in universities is all we're talking about yeah yeah you're right you Yeah. You're right. You're right.

You're right. I guess I was in university, undeniably, right? The left is running the show. In politics, the right is. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's been, it's funny too, because part of the reason that in politics, the right is running the show is because in universities, the left has run it. the right is running the show is because in universities the left has run it you know and what at least what I see looking down at the US from Canada is

that you know a huge part of the reason that Hillary lost the election was because she abandoned her working-class base to pursue this identity politics nonsense and that scares a lot of people badly enough so they held their nose and voted for Trump I mean Trump has his genuine supporters but a lot of it from my perspective was well are we going to go for the witch on the left or the tyrant on the right it's like well enough on the left man and it's and it also seemed to many of us it also seemed to many many of us that the witch on the left was a very powerful witch she had all of her books in order, all of her spells. She had two magic wands.

She had a former witch married to her who was going to be coming in there helping her stir the cauldron. And then you had Trump. And we've seen how effective he's been at getting his poorer ideas across. It just seems like it still is the right decision. Well, you know, I think to be really cynical about it, let's say,

I think people preferred the impulsive and disorganized lies of Trump to the crafted and carefully aimed lies of Clinton. That's how it looked to me. Because at least with Trump, you could think, oh, well, we get some sense of what this guy's like, partly because he can't stop himself, you know? And with Clinton, it

was like, well, there's a well-oiled machine for you. I didn't see it like that. I got a couple. One, just to be clear, people preferred Hillary. She got more votes, right? I know that because of the way the electoral college works and stuff, Trump won. I'm not saying he didn't win. I'm just saying people voted for Hillary more.

Just lay that out there. And I had a second point queued up. It was about, oh, I think a lot of people believed what Trump was saying. There are a lot of people who actually thought there was going to be a wall, and people who thought Mexico would pay for it. When he said he had a plan to defeat ISIS, people voted for him because they believed he had a plan, right? He wouldn't tell you what the plan was, because they'd be telling ISIS what the plan is, and there's a certain logic to that.

I get it. But he says, I'll take care of ISIS in the first 30 days. I'll have healthcare solved in the first week. I'm going to build a wall, and Mexico's going to pay for it. He told a... If you got what Trump promised, it would be fantastic. Trump'm going to build a wall and Mexico is going to pay for it. He told a like, if you got what Trump promised, it would be fantastic. Trump was willing to tell bigger, bolder lies than Hillary was. And I think that got him a lot of votes. Yeah, well, I mean, I there's no doubt

that he had genuine supporters who genuinely believed what he had to say. And I mean, for all I know, he believed what he was saying when he said it. It wouldn't surprise me. But, I mean, you know, if you're speaking in front of people like that, and you're speaking extemporaneously, and the crowd is responding, it's pretty easy to get swept away in your own rhetoric.

And I also think that, I mean, who knows, right? Because God only knows. But I can't help but think that the victory came as a shock to him. It did. It did. Oh, I bet it totally did. There's no way that he was sitting up that night going, like, at 10 o'clock, he had to be watching, like, there's no way. No way.

This is absolutely unprecedented. Like, he had no idea. Yeah, and I mean, be careful what you wish for. You know, I mean, he's kind of old, and I can't imagine a more stressful job than President of the United States, you know? Yeah, he's getting fatter. He's got to deal with those pesky Koreans, for example, and that'd be enough to make you turn old and gray overnight.

That's an interesting solution. I predict he will not turn gray. No, he won't. No, he won't turn gray. I don't won't. No, he won't turn gray. I don't see that happening. He'll turn gray before his hair does. Yeah, yeah. It turned Obama gray.

Yeah, right? And he was jet black hair walking into that office, and he left just with so many secret bags under his eyes. Like, oh, Jesus. Exhausting. Yeah, well, it's too much of a job for one person. I mean, it's possible that the United job for one person i mean it's certainly possible it's possible that the united states is too big it's just i think so i mean i don't know

but but i think we need to take california let you guys be your own thing just california yeah i saw those guys down in texas there's always a vocal group who wants a session from the union you know because texas has its own power grid for those who? Don't know they're in the US public of Texas. It's a republic of Texas. They could secede if they wanted There's three power grids the United States East Coast West Coast and Texas they got their own all right These are self-sufficient cowboys with modern rifles like they're different people okay And and they talk about seceding often And I think they put it up for a vote a couple years ago

And it got like 12% of Texans were on board with that shit, maybe a little higher. That'll never happen because too many Texans are also American patriots where they'd be like, I'm not leaving America. You know, Texas is the best state in this union or whatever they would say. Well, they'd have to head up north to Oklahoma then. But sometimes I see California, some people there discussing the same things, and I wonder what they would do without any water. I think California contributes more tax dollars than they receive, and Texas receives more tax dollars than they contribute. California is, I think, the furthest in the hole of any state other than, is Illinois worse now? In terms of what in the hole? In terms of debt. In terms of like infrastructure

not doing as well. Michigan right? Oh Michigan yeah that's a good one. Yeah. Like what are they building in Michigan? I heard they're building farms in Detroit. Like farms. Yeah. Snow beats. Yeah sure. I'm not even kidding. Like where like a block of buildings has been demolished and they're like ah ah, let's plant some wheat here or whatever they're planting in Detroit. That's a real example of our failures. For Professor Peterson, I was watching, because of how much you've exploded

and how many people you've influenced at this point, and you've made so many points on so many different topics, is there one or maybe a couple things that people consistently misconstrue about your point of view or your message that's aggravating and it's not a good representation of what you're trying to put out there? Well, I think we covered it to some degree with regards to the original videos, you know, because the initial presupposition was that what I was talking about had something to do with transgender rights.

And that was a reasonable thing for people to assume because that was the issue that gave rise to everything, but it's not. It's not. And I think the misconstrual is too that in regard to that, and I've told a number of transgender people this when they've been, or or transgender activists when they've been confronting me it's like don't be so sure i'm your enemy you know the mere fact that you think that this legislation is going to be good for you and that you think that it's what you want doesn't mean that it's going to be good for you or that it is in fact what you want what you deeply want now you might say who am i to you know question someone's opinion about what's good for them but we do that all the time

you know and i especially do that with younger people it's like when i face the typical 18 year old my general my general attitude is like i really like teaching young people i think it's a privilege and i think it's great that you know youth is full of potential but an 18 year old doesn't know damn thing about anything I'm not gonna pretend that I think differently you know I mean if they knew enough to make me to make the most profound decisions about the nature of the state reality then what the hell are they going to learn for the rest of their lives? My daughter's 18 and you are right. Yeah, well, I mean, what I think about 18-year-olds

is that six years before they were 12. On a side note, lately people have been posting pictures of me like from four years ago or whatever, like just side by side, like, hey, look how Woody's aged. Yeah, yeah. Six years ago, you were 12., like, hey, look how Woody's aged. Yeah, yeah. Six years ago, you were 12. Look at how you

aged. We've all aged. You know? You look different, too. You're just lucky that you're in the part of aging where people don't consider it bad. I would say, in broader response to your question, is that mostly

I've been absolutely overwhelmed at how positive the response has been to what I've been doing. It's absolutely beyond belief. And I mean that literally. When I wake up in the morning and every time I think about my life during the day, it's not like it's my life. I can't believe it. I don't know what to make of it. And, you know, the comments on YouTube run about 50 to 1, positive to negative. And the other thing that's interesting about the YouTube comments is most of them are intelligent. You know, I mean, YouTube isn't the place you go for intelligent comments, you know. No, it is not. And it's a cesspool, the comments on YouTube videos. But that's, you know, I've pruned the, I've pruned ones that are particularly egregious in one form or another, although not very many of them.

Like if they're extremely laden with cursing, for example, I think that's not really a productive contribution to the discussion. And my general rule of thumb for purging a comment is that if it annoys the hell out of me and I don't want to feel that way, every time I go to that video, I remove it. And I probably don't take out more than about one in a hundred. But I'm overwhelmed by how positive the response has been. And that's especially true in the live discussions that i've had because and it's really something to talk to an audience full of mostly young mostly young guys because that's mostly who comes listens and they're not all that young they're like my demographic is 25 to 34 on youtube something like that but it's so interesting to talk to young men about responsibility and purpose and to see them respond with nothing but enthusiasm and and like they're wrapped and enthusiastic and i think that's just you

couldn't possibly ask for a better response than that so a typical assessment of millennials is you know they're entitled they have this you know oh yeah participation trophies etc etc that doesn't sound like your opinion well it you know ex-hippies should not be lecturing young people about being entitled jesus i don't think you could have possibly invented a more entitled generation than the people who grew up in the 60s you know i mean yeah the civil rights movement but a small proportion of people participated in that, you know, and so they didn't call them the me generation for nothing. And so I think that older people often think of younger people as entitled. So I don't really buy that. I mean, the students I see at the university, and this is probably particularly true of the U of T, because a lot of people are children of first generation immigrants.

But Jesus, man, those kids, they're desperate. They're working themselves to death. They're afraid about their economic future. And it's not a party school. And I know there are party schools, you know, but U of T isn't one of them. But my experience with young people generally has been that if you treat them like you actually care about them, they return the favor immensely, you know? So yeah, I don't really buy the entitled issue. I think that, yeah, I don't think it's credible particularly. I don't think they've been inspired thoroughly. I don't think they've ever heard the things you're telling to them because...

Well, that's the other thing that just shocks me. It's like what I'm saying as far as i'm concerned well i mean some of this well there's no reason it's it's shocking and horrifying to me that young people haven't been encouraged and i i mean that word technically people haven't instilled courage in them because the right thing to tell someone young is get the hell out there, man, and like conquer the world. And I don't care if you're male or female. The pathways diverge.

You know, I have a daughter. She's a heroic person, my daughter, man. She overcame limitations and privation in her life that would have killed a lesser person. You know, she lost her hip and her ankle when she was 16. You know, she had them replaced because she had rheumatoid arthritis, and she basically walked around on two broken legs for like three years. And it was awful. It was awful.

And she came through it like guns blazing, man. Amazing. And figured out what was wrong with her. And fixed it. Like, wow! You know, so it's not like i'm only encouraging young men that's not the case at all but i i'm a man so in some ways it's easier to speak to men you know because i understand them better um but it's just appalling to me that well it's part of this anti-human ethos that's emerged that's part parcel say of the environmentalist movement and don't get me wrong i know perfectly well that Well, it's part of this anti-human ethos that's emerged that's part and parcel, say, of the environmentalist movement.

Don't get me wrong, I know perfectly well that there's a variety of things we're doing to the planet that are stupid and counterproductive, like fishing every goddamn fish out of the ocean, which is just so stupid, it's almost, it's a miracle of stupidity that we're doing that. But we've, one of the negative consequences of that sort of environmentalist thinking is the damning of humanity and the treatment of human beings as if they're a cancer on the planet, to use the Club of Rome terminology, and to cast dispersions on anyone's ambition and forward movement through the world. I hate that. So anyways, to answer your question,

I'm absolutely overwhelmed with amazement and gratitude about the response that my actions have received in the broader world. I can't believe it. I don't know what to make of it. I'm not sure what to do about it. It's a healthy dose of truth that a lot of people haven't heard before, but I think at least what you do is you talk about the issues, you talk about the problems, and then you break down why they are issues and problems. You really delineate this thing down to the causes, the root causalities, And sometimes it's evolutionary,

sometimes it's genetic, sometimes it's biochemical. You try to get to why people are feeling these ways about these things and then say, hey, look, you don't like that homosexual man there for the same reason your ancestor was afraid of a snake. He's not an outsider. He doesn't have any fangs. snake he's not an outsider he doesn't have any fangs let's think about what's inside you that's making you feel that bit of like fear and anger and uh the other sort of thing is coming up right now let's because because i feel like if you look at that hard enough it'll dissolve it'll dissolve like an alka-seltzer away in your mind yeah well there's it's definitely useful to know that you have a primitive snake response to people you don't like. That's very much worth knowing and worth thinking about because you don't, well, you want to be careful who you treat like a snake. But there are some people who are snakes.

You can go around in both directions. Like right now, the In America Muslim ban is a big topic right you know they're saying people from syria and whatever iraq and a handful i probably get them wrong they're not welcome in here anymore right this is a thing that that our president is trying to to put into place i'm really torn on it you know there's a leftist part of me that's like that's just mean you know these are refugees these are you know women and children in a war-torn area who are just trying to escape and get into some safety like can't america do its part we can't just dump every refugee in germany and then there's another part of me that you know says hey protect yourself you know but i've got a guest room it's closed man like i'm not just letting you in a lot of

these pictures make it look like fighting age males instead of the women and children I heard about. You know, that is definitely a factor. I cannot discern what's propaganda and what's truth. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm torn on it. It's a big problem, man. Yeah, I really find that about Scandinavia. You know, I've been trying to figure out what the hell is going on in Sweden, and I find it impossible to find credible information about Sweden.

But if you drop the credible on that, you can get all the info you want. If you'd like information that supports your viewpoint, it's all out there. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Because, like, we've got kind of a global audience, and so we end up dealing with people occasionally in friendly little conversations from all around the world. And I was speaking to a guy from Sweden the other night,

and we were all playing this video game where there are four of us and we can all communicate while we play our game and someone said to him how do you feel about Sweden not having the Muslims taken over and I thought the guy was going to be like ah you're so ignorant you don't know anything about my country where are you from but instead he goes it's pretty rough we just don't go out at certain times um you know there's neighborhoods you don't go to because that's their neighborhood. Around New Year's, we know better than to go down to that part of it. And I'm like, whoa, really? There was no hate or vitriol in this man's voice. He wasn't like, he fired up some redneck and said, what about the blacks? And he just went into a tirade of ignorance and stereotypes. No, this guy was like, well, the immigration has caused

these factors, and this is how we get around them now, so that we can all live together. And I was like, oh, God, that doesn't sound like I would enjoy that very much if I were this person. Yeah, well, I mean, there are a variety of very complex things facing us, you know, and one of them is, well, the IQ issue that we talked about. Another is this polarization between left and right that seems to be characterizing everywhere in the West. You know, it's the same in Australia, New Zealand, all through Europe, in Canada, in the U.S. I think you guys are actually a little more protected against it than most places. But and then the other one is well we need a dialogue

between Islam and Christianity well and Judaism for that matter but I mean the big the big clash for the Western world is is Islam versus Christianity and you know people don't think about it in those terms because many intellectuals in the West think of themselves as secular, but it's a massive, it's a massive problem, and I'm hoping to conduct a whole series of conversations with Muslims, former and present, pro and anti, to try to facilitate a dialogue, because there's lots to talk about. I mean, I've studied religious thinking a lot, and I'm pretty ignorant about Islam because it's a complicated system and it's difficult to get into, but I can tell you that what I've read about Islam has not made me feel better about the chances of

reconciliation between the Christian and the Islamic world. So like, I don't know what to make of the fact, for example, I mean, if you look at the figure of Christ, and I don't care if you're religious or not, and I don't even care if Christ existed or not, and I certainly don't care at the moment about claims to divinity or the lack thereof. It's just speaking as, let's say I'm speaking as a secular intellectual. I mean, as a figure, he's a figure of peace. I don't think that that's disputable. I mean, he certainly, he wasn't a warlord. That's one thing that's for certain.

He never led armies, you know, whereas that's not the case with Muhammad at all. Muhammad was clearly and indisputably a warlord. Muhammad at all. Muhammad was clearly and indisputably a warlord. And so it isn't obvious to me what to make of that, except that it's bloody complicated. He had a child bride as well, I believe. Yeah, well, that one is somewhat less problematic to me, because I think that you can write that off to the cultural mores of the time. Now, I know there's a weakness in that, but I don't think we have to address that. But when the founder of your religion spread that religion by the sword, it makes it rather difficult. And when your religion has been embroiled in a vicious civil war from the day of Muhammad's death, which is

exactly the case in Islam between the Sunnis and the Shiites. That war started literally the day that Muhammad died. It's very difficult for me to see how that can be reconciled with the claims that Islam is a religion of peace. Yeah, we saw that one when Martin Luther hammered some stuff on a door a long time ago, and the Protestants and the Catholics just went their separate ways. And I mean, there's been some rough feelings over the years, I suppose, but no generational wars that I can think of. I mean, right? Yeah, well, I mean, there was plenty, you know, as you said, there's been plenty of Christian schisms. But the other thing, too, is that it's not that easy to lay those at the feet of Christ, you know, because even merely as an archetypal figure, you know, as the Western world's

hypothesis of the ideal man, I mean, as a moral character, he was pretty much above reproach. And I don't, well, it's difficult for me to say the same thing about Muhammad now that might be because I'm an ignorant old western white guy but like I'm doing my best man I'm a big admirer of Taoism for example there's great wisdom in Taoism and and I found value real value in in so much of the religious reading that I've done. But I'm really stumbling with Islam. It's really hard for me to see it as other than a primarily political system. And that's how it's being enforced right now.

That's what ISIS is all about. They've established a religious caliphate across the borders of two countries. It's less about, when I think of religion, when I think of the Christian religion and how it's applied here in my home state of Georgia, when we go to church and we tithe, that has very little to do with politics at all. There's this huge, massive separation between religion and politics, for the most part in the U.S.

There are moments of ambiguity and tempers flare over a monument on this piece of property or no. But that's as stiff as it gets. The scariest bit of that that I can remember, some drunk fellow ran over a monument for the Ten Commandments a few months ago and tipped it over.

That's what happens when Christians have an issue. But, like, to your point, like, never, like, if you're not a Christian, Kyle, and you're, you know, Christian kind of alcove there in Georgia, no one ever is going to come to you and say, you have to pay a different rate of taxes, you have to go to different stores, you have to... The religious law will not be enforced as a law, you know. I'm not going to lose any hands. The Bible has many restrictions that it places on Christians,

and I ignore all of them virtually. But I know there's no religious police to come and kick my door in and drag me away and torture me and threaten my family. Well, and it's not you know it's it's also there's other there's other cataclysms that that are on the that exist on the conception in the conceptual realm as well so you know the the the states dominated by islam are not

economically productive and that's quite an interesting mystery and they're not and many of the and many of the Islamic states that we purport to regard as allies hold values that are antithetical to our system and a Saudi Arabia is a classic example of that and I cannot for the life of me understand except in a psychoanalytic manner why the radical feminists tolerate america's ally america's ally the fact that america is allied with the saudis it's just absolutely it's like it's like it's not much different as far as i'm concerned that it would be if black people didn't say anything if America was allied with a slave-owning, a black slave-owning state, which of course also happens in Saudi Arabia, by the way, and not so in the... But the feminists, it's got to be because Muslims right now are higher up on the victim hierarchy than then.

So even if it's way over there, they're not allowed to speak out against... I think it's their unconscious wish for brutal male domination. I don't think so. No, I like that. That's fun. I think it's the left's ability to apologize for anything that's wrong. I think the people on the left, maybe I'm just as crazy as you guys are. The Muslims oppress women. Oh, that's cultural.

We need to understand that. Oh, guys think they're girls. That's, you know, hey, we need to understand where they're coming from. Everything, they're so open-minded to everything. Like excuse making. Even if it's horrific. That's also the agreeableness, say,

that we were talking about earlier. Yeah, because agreeable people agree. You know, that's why the term exists. And yeah, so there is a real... And if you ally that with high openness, which is that open-mindedness, you know, that's associated with creativity, you get agreeable openness.

Yeah, that's definitely... And then anything goes when you're agreeable and open. You know, I'll call you a zur and I'll forgive you beating your wife. If you're low in conscientiousness everything anything really goes then bill moore puts it nicely when he says you know the left would not for one second be okay with apartheid in south africa right they were just banging that drum hating it every second of the way but for some reason, the oppression of women in Saudi Arabia has gotten a complete pass.

Yep. And it's a real deal, you know? Yeah, it's a real deal, yeah. Heck, just the driving thing alone. Yep. Taylor, can you hold that? They like her. Yeah.

You broke up. You broke up. We couldn't hear what you were saying. You're still a little frozen. But yeah, just take away their ability to drive, right? Women don't have mobility without men. That is hugely oppressive. If you made that change in America and none other,

then women would be stuck at home. You actually don't see a more concrete embodiment of the idea of individual autonomy than the automobile. You know, I think maybe it was the Soviet Union's import and then manufacture of the automobile that doomed communism, because nothing screams autonomous individual like a car, right? You drive it yourself. You can go on any road.

No one tells you what to do. It's like it's freedom. And the fact that women can't drive in Saudi Arabia tells the entire story. And so the fact, I cannot understand for the life of me why we are so blind in the West that we make the assumption that those people are our allies. It's like, in what way just the other day just the other day here in the u.s and st louis i was driving down the street and i saw three muslim women in full burqas this is a week ago we're in the middle of a huge heat wave it's like 105 degrees and humid as as can be and it's like what the hell? Someone at home told them, you can't leave unless you put this on. I did not look in the mirror and go on this wonderful, hot, muggy Missouri day.

Black polyester, don't be horribly uncomfortable. If it was just about covering up, why can't it be made of linen or cotton or something comfortable? Because it's not about that. It's about controlling people and oppressing them. And to see people making excuses constantly about it. All the burgers shrink and they're really tight all of a sudden.

It's a weird thing to see when these people who are very progressive in every walk of life other than that, then they see that. And because they're in the wrong place on the hierarchy, they have to do weird excuse making. Instead of just going, yeah, that is oppressive. When you make someone wear a garbage bag in the Midwest in summer, you're kind of being an asshole. This may be a completely foolish question, but so the women can't drive automobiles. That's been made clear to me. Could they ride a camel or a horse? I'm not even teasing. Can they hop on a camel and go? Because I heard one of the Saudi princes the other day, that was part of how he made his argument

he was like look we should allow our women to drive our grandfathers allowed their wives to lead the camels and I was like through the minefields women shouldn't be out of the supervision and protection of a of a kin male

I think that is yeah I think that is the case. And so driving won't get the problem solved necessarily. And it's a hangover from the time when, well, the time still exists in many countries where an unaccompanied woman is a fair game. I mean, you saw that happening in Europe with those mass sexual assaults that were absolutely unbelievably scandalous.

That is a mindset that is very common in the minds of young Middle Eastern men. I had a friend from Morocco, which is certainly not a war-torn region. It's a very nice country. But he was Muslim, and he told me. He was like, oh yeah, in Morocco, you see a pretty girl? You just grab her breast.

Just grab her breast. And she can't tell anybody because you can be like i'll tell your brother that you came on to me and i'm just like whoa fuck bro like like this sounds horrible he's like no no no they like it and i'm just like jesus to me you're a sexual predator at five foot two that sounds like a hell of a thing for radical leftists to apologize for. Yeah. So we've got a lot of discussion to be had about issues of that sort. And they're very, very difficult discussions. I was going to say, there's something complicated

about our relationship with Saudi Arabia, right? Apparently Saudi Arabia and Iran have been mortal enemies since the beginning of time. And now they've been having proxy wars since the get-go, right? When Iran was at war with Iraq back in the 80s, Iraq was fueled by Saudi Arabia and they just had that proxy war. Now in Syria and previously in Kuwait, these were all Saudi Arabia and Iranian proxy wars. I just learned about this recently. Hope it's right. And the U.S. has been on the side of Saudi Arabia from the beginning, and we view Iran as this big problem that needs to be solved. And objectively, I don't really see why Iran is better or worse than Saudi Arabia. I don't know.

Six in one hand, half dozen in the other. But they're our teammate now, and if we don't have one of them being a teammate, we probably have big energy problems for now. Well, you know, those are the sort of energy problems that we should probably have sooner rather than later, in my estimation. You know, and I mean, and things have switched around a lot. I mean, America is now an oil exporting country again. And you guys have been doing pretty good on the fracking for natural gas front. And you know, the other thing that's quite a bit worth considering is that if the West wanted to reduce its reliance on Middle Eastern oil, it could turn to Alberta and the tar sands.

There's enough bloody oil there for the rest of humanity for the rest of time, you know, and it's a bit messy. But it isn't obvious to me that it's better than it's worse than dumping a trillion dollars every five or six years into the coffers of the saudi princes you know especially given their their obvious responsibility for distributing the most the most vicious wahhabist propaganda all over the world with which is which is something that a fair chunk of that petro money goes to. And the rate at which renewable resources are improving, you know, solar, wind, etc.,

makes it a viable contender to bet on as well. Yeah, well, go Elon Musk, you know. That's my theory, my idea, or my opinion. It's hardly my idea. You know, he's working hard on the battery solution and on electric cars. It seems to me that I could foresee a future where oil isn't worth a damn thing in 20 years. Yeah, that very well could happen. It would be great for us. We'd no longer be beholden to Middle Eastern, what are many of them, basically war chieftains, who take this huge amount of money and then have state-sponsored terrorism like iran does and just hand it over to isis hand it over to al-qaeda boko haram whoever

like yeah we do need oil but think about what we're we're not just feeding a prince's pool like scrooge mcduck pool full of gold like we imagine you know and his 10 gold bugattis like people die because of that money yeah yeah well canada has been very bad in that regard too we just sold a whole boatload of weapons to the saudis we did too yeah they needed them yeah to bomb us with right it's it's like if your friends like hey man i really want to borrow a handgun i like oh okay sure you need to keep yourself safe huh like yeah it's scary over there at night alone but when saudi arabia is like we need uh 50 tanks and uh 38 attack helicopters and we want the big missiles what do y'all call hellfire yeah those we're gonna need a lot of those trust me it's like what are you doing with them what are you

doing with all that over there saudi do we even ask they're bombing yemen if someone comes over here and wants to borrow one of my weapons i'm i what what are you gonna do with it yeah cool i want to know where you're headed with my my assault rifle like going to shoot some targets yeah i guess you could call them targets all Alright then, you will not be getting a gun today. Yeah, I'm looking at you sitting there, none to spare, really. One of your big taglines that's obviously huge in the comment section of every video you post, the whole clean your room, sort yourself out. I think kind of in the vein of what we were discussing earlier, especially Kyle saying that especially for young men, that's something that they haven't heard before. You know, it's like a realistic, you know, a lot of millennials have been their parents have tried to keep them in this box of cushy padded nonsense.

And then you come in and say, no, the world has edges. It's dangerous. You need to, you know, bolster yourself against that. What because they are kind of a little bit vague topics you know clean your room do that and i know they're kind of meant to be but what are some first steps you think well the first thing is is that i i don't believe that you it's very dangerous to mess with systems that you don't understand i mean most people won't have to open their macbook and like poke around in it and it actually turns out that socio-political entities are more complex than the MacBook. So you know you mess with them at your peril and one of the things you might think is well

you don't know you wouldn't take apart an army helicopter. So what makes you think that you could run a nation by your utopian principle? I would say, but by the same token, the desire to improve the world, let's say, is an admirable desire, and it's characteristic of young people, and it's a good thing.

So the question is, well, where should you channel that and my sense is well you should start humbly and and I don't mean that in the Goody, goody naive harmless sense that it's usually meant. I mean that you should start Building yourself into the sort of person who can make intelligent and competent decisions that will make the world better and you start by doing that locally and you start by doing that by understanding that what you have right in front of you is already a tremendous amount and the idea of cleaning up your room i mean it's become this really funny meme i suppose you know and it shows

up on t-shirts and all of these things but i'm dead serious about it it's like it's not that easy to organize your room to get it right because you have to know what you in order to organize a room properly the room you live in you have to know what you're going to do with your life because the room serves the purposes of your life you need to know well what clothes you're going to wear and why and what decisions you're going to make about those clothes how are you going to present yourself in the world and why and like how are you going to organize your your compute computational resources and and how are you going to organize your sleeping space and when are you going to wake up in the morning and what are you going to eat and like all these things are part of getting

yourself together. Like, I think of the individual as a world-creating force, and I think that that's an idea that's integral to Christianity, that whatever our soul is, let's say, whatever our logos nature is, is this incredible power that enables us to take hold of reality and reconstruct it. Human beings can do that, power that enables us to take hold of reality and and Reconstruct it human beings can do that and we can reconstruct it according to our own vision. It's unbelievable it's a miraculous power and we and we all have it and

Because we have that power because reality is in many ways in our own hands We should learn how to interact with it properly and you have some reality right in front of you that you have dominion over it's like perfect it man put it together make it beautiful make it functional get everything right and then you'll learn something and and that also means at the same time getting yourself together like stop doing stupid things drinking yourself into a coma and and chasing impulsive pleasures like i don't have anything against that. Don't get me wrong. I don't expect people to be well-behaved and nice. I think that's contemptible.

Like, it might not be as contemptible as being an antisocial criminal, but it's sort of like the goody-two-shoes version of the same thing. I think that the man should be a monster. I really believe that, that the man should be a monster i really believe that that man should be a terrifying force but that that should be controlled and the most admirable men i know are like that it's you don't mess with them and it's not because they're going to take you in the alley and beat the hell out of you although maybe they could and maybe they might if you push them too far but most of it's just the kind of power that's quiet that resides inside of

them because they've become disciplined and because they are forces of nature and that's what i see as the proper destiny for for young men it's like jesus get your act together christ you've got the whole world at your fingertips and you really do because the individual is so powerful now and so do you think you're almost do you think you know in your own mind where let's say that you did a good job cleaning your ruin up and getting your life on track do you think it's something that you kind of just intrinsically know like a sensation in your head when you start to fall off that wagon or be like you know what my room's getting dirty well it happened to me over the last eight months you know because things have got beyond me and well i was in the middle of a house renovation and quite an extensive one because we tore the roof off our house and put a third floor on which

is the room i was in when when we were talking earlier and i haven't had my room cleaned since october i can't get on top of it and it is emblematic of the situation in my life. Like I'm tearing it apart, restructuring and all of that. But for me, there is no distinction really between my surroundings and my psyche. They're the same place. And it is symbolically appropriate that my room isn't clean at the moment and I'm spending hours every day putting it back together and when you feel that your room is in order yeah is it more a feeling of just internal kind of satisfaction or is that you're noticing oh productivity is up I'm getting all that stuff done well the thing is you know part of like I think of a I think of my house as a

tool or a set of tools, you know, and There are tools that I use to live to to What would you say to engage with the world and like I have a tool shed out back It's kind of it's kind of beautiful. It's got stained glass windows and and But the tools have to be where I can see them because if something's in the house that I need to fix, I don't want to spend 15 minutes looking for the damn tool, because I have something I want to do with that 15 minutes. I don't have time to waste.

And that's because I don't believe that time should be wasted. And the reason I don't think time should be wasted is because there are things to contend with in the world there's evil and suffering that need to be addressed and constrained and those are noble goals and I don't I don't believe that a human being can live without a noble goal without being corrupt becoming corrupt and I think that people know this I mean I think that's part of the reason why what I've been saying on YouTube has become so popular is that because I'm telling suggesting to people particularly young men it's like you're

the you're that you're the child of heroes get the hell up and get moving there's in the child of horrible villains. Who were heroic in their villainy. There's some utility in monstrosity, man. There's so many people who I don't think can think big enough to understand that, that like, your genetic line

didn't just crop out of nowhere in the last hundred years. Like, all of us, every single one of us, has this ancestry that goes back to some of the most badass creatures that ever walked on two legs we these these warlords and powerful men and ruthless conquerors that have been lost to time you know forget about Genghis Khan who came a thousand years before him and got every caveman tribe together and conquered everything like we're the product of all of that yeah well you're every single one of your forefathers

reproduced successfully in an unbroken line stretching back three and a half billion years do you know how unlikely that is the odds of that are infinitesimal and here you are you know and there's great things to be done i'm tired of-weary nihilistic pessimism that's descended over the West and this guilt about our own existence. It's like, yeah, people are, we have our problems. And we're a little rough on the planet, let's say. But it's no bloody wonder because the planet's a little rough on us. And that's no excuse, but it's a reason. It's like, it's only been 50 years since we've had enough self-awareness

to even understand that we were starting to have an effect on the planet. 50 years, that's nothing. Jesus, that's within my lifetime. You know, so I'm not going to go to the humans are a cancer on the face of the planet end of the ideological spectrum. I like people. Yeah, I believe in global warming, certainly so, but it might have been you who said it before. It's certainly better than global cooling. And it seems like the worst case scenario is increased weather events and we move our cities a little further away from the coast, right? Well, the thing is, you know, what's going to happen in the next hundred years is that the population is going to peak out at 9 billion. And then in all likelihood, it's going to collapse precipitously.

And so 9 billion, that's about 2 billion more than there are now. It's coming. It's right around the corner. You know, and it could easily be that in 100 years, the biggest problem that human beings have is that there aren't enough of us. You know, and cities will start to shrink. And, you know, that causes a lot of economic disruption when cities start to shrink because the real estate values fall very rapidly towards zero. So we're not going to overpopulate the planet and exhaust all the resources. We might do in a lot of the big mammals. That's happening. And I do think that

what we've done to the oceans, and I've done a lot of reading on oceanic mismanagement because I worked for a UN panel on economic development and sustainability for a couple of years. I worked for a UN panel on economic development and sustainability for a couple of years. What we've done to the oceans is absolutely criminal. But a lot of it's ignorance, you know, and economic miscalculation, and the tragedy of the commons. There's lots of reasons contributing to it. But I'm very, very tired of this anti-human doctrine that's taken hold, especially of the Western world, where we're guilty, reprehensible, world-destroying creatures. It's like, yeah, yeah, true. All of that's true.

But what about the other side of it, man? There's something about human beings. I mean, we stand up under the weight of our own self-conscious tragedy and move forward. And there's something that's divine about that, the ability of human beings to even work, even go to work. You know, there's so many people out there that are suffering from some catastrophic illness, personal illness, or in their family. You know, they're bearing up under a tremendous load, and they're still going out there and doing their goddamn duty and trying to make the world function. And it'd be nice to have a little respect for that, a little admiration for it.

Yeah, it's not like humans got where we are because that fork in the road came and chimpanzees were like, oh, no, no, after you, you guys take the world. You build and create and everything. It's like, no, we were the only ones that could do it. We're the only species that's able to make vending machines and cars

and those things that help you walk faster at the airport and all the rest of the things we made. You really hit the big three right there. I hit the big three. Bubble tea. Stamps. You're right. There is a lot of human guilt out there

thinking like, oh, who am I to do this? And it's like, everything you do as a human is bad for the environment. Like how many fucking squirrels could live in your apartment if they needed room? Like the best thing you could really do for the environment if you really cared is probably kill yourself because humans are vulnerable in the environment. And let yourself decode properly. Yes, well, that's the most honorable solution to the overpopulation problem. It's like there are too many damn people on the planet.

It's like, well, I can think of a place to start to fix that. And it's in your own hands, man, if you're really concerned about it. But then I hear what you said there, where you say that you're an unbroken line of like billion of years. And then that makes the prospect of like, maybe I don't want kids seem silly.

Because it's like, well, everybody else did. And it's clearly a part of life that people get a part of life that people get a lot of fulfillment out of. Everybody else who needed a team of people to till the earth, everybody else who needed to overcome the fact that like most of their kids were going to die anyway, like they needed helpers. They needed and they needed those helpers ASAP because by the time, you know, by the time they hit 50 or 55, the arthritis is kicked in. their backs are going from bending over in that field and they're going to need though at least two or three of those young men to like help daddy I'm not necessarily saying like having a lot of kids

I'm just saying like choosing to have children instead of choosing no children you know like you'd want to keep this billion year streak alive right well and what else are you going to do exactly like the one of the things that's also kind of appalling about the way that western people operate is that our time horizon is so damn short like most most young people live like their own that they're not going to live past 40 you know like i'm 55 now and my daughter's going to have a baby in the next two weeks, I believe. And my son and his fiance are planning the same sort of thing for not too long in the future. And like one of the and I've had a great career.

Like my career has been everything I could have possibly hoped for for a career. It's been so interesting that I could barely stand it, you know, and I've run a business reasonably successfully and i'm a i have a clinical psychology practice and i've done lots of consulting and i i'm a professor and i have a big clinical practice and i've written books and it's like you know i'm not saying that i'm saying that to indicate the wealth of opportunities that have been placed before me you know and still with all that as you get older what you have you have your wife you have your kids you have your grandkids you have your family it's like it's very very difficult for anything to take precedence over that and it's necessary to know that and it's it's and the other thing i don't like about our culture is that kids get a bad rap, you know.

People act like having kids is a burden. It's like, I love kids, man. Kids are so much fun. When I had little kids, I stopped seeing anyone, really, because it was so much fun to hang out with my kids. They were absolutely enthusiastic about whatever we did. Like, they were just on fire looking at everything, which is really fun to be around. They love you ridiculously, you know, and you have a chance to guide them and it's wonderful. It's wonderful.

I loved it and I'm really looking forward to having you. Do you know what I want to do instead of that? I watched a documentary the other night about these African guys who were being moved to Boston. They barely spoke. It was called The Lost Boys. They were from Uganda, I believe. The man told his story of escape in a TED Talk, like in modern days, because this documentary I'm referring to is from the 80s.

And there's a part where they're literally running from the government, swimming across a crocodile-infested body of water. He's like, some of the boys the crocodiles ate, some of us made it here. And it's like every step of the way through this man's story, it's like, yeah, the crocodiles ate my friends, and then there was starvation, and there was rape, and there was disease. And this documentary follows this maybe group of four or five Ugandan guys, about 18 years old, who are just dropped into Boston, given an apartment, and they have this man

who's trying to like get them up to speed. And he's trying to explain to the camera what it's like. He's like, you know, my five-year-old asks me what makes the plane fly. And I say lift and drag. And it doesn't matter that she doesn't understand those things. It's, we just don't have enough time right now to go over them. So we try to keep it simple with her. I'm at about a five-year-old level with these gentlemen. He's like, and the trash goes in the trash can, not out the window. He's teaching them how to use potato chips and all that stuff. And I was watching it really envious of his position because these guys had such excitement and wonder and hunger to learn these cultural tools to live their lives. And I feel like maybe I would have taught them things that were more relevant than others.

I don't know. That looked like that would be really promising work to do. Well, one of the things that's really delightful about having children is that it's so cool. And you don't get this like okay so the first thing is is that as soon as you have a baby you understand that you now have a relationship with someone that's just as important as any relationship you've ever had with anyone ever as soon as you have a baby well with woman for sure with a guy it takes like you know it takes a little while well you know, it takes a little while. Well, you know that. It takes a little while for that to really kick in.

Most guys lie about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm not going to lie about that. I mean, the thing's like an ungainly football when you first get it. It's like, what the hell do I do with this? And it's boring. It's just like luggage you have to carry everywhere

that leaks. It sucks. With men, you know, most men aren't that wired for infants, you know, so it takes, it takes a while to develop that relationship, but you, I'm, so I'm using a shorthand, essentially, but, but the other thing that's cool about, about that relationship is that you have the opportunity to keep it relatively pristine, because that child actually loves you you and you can maintain that if you're careful if you use truth and and you're careful and fortunate as well and so you can foster those relationships

so that they are the most important thing that you have in your life and that's a wonderful opportunity and children are extremely amusing they're very very comical they have great senses of humor they're really playful. You laid it out better than I could, the case for having kids. Like you, I've also had a pretty interesting career. I've had a couple of businesses that did pretty well. A couple of different careers, really. An award-winning dancer.

A lot of silly things. That one's kind of bullshit, but it is true. I mean, you won $25,000. You're an award-winning dancer. $37,000, yeah. That's pretty good. That'll do, man. That'll be the dance stratosphere. And this has been a lot of cool stuff.

But here I am at 44. My oldest daughter's going to college in less than two weeks. And it's really the family thing is my life's achievement. It is the thing that my life's achievement. It is the thing that kind of takes precedent. You know, my obituary will have more to do with my kids than any of the businesses I've run.

Yeah, well, wait 15 years because it even, you know, well, I think that magnifies as you get older, which is one of the catastrophes of fractured families, you know, but that's been my experience. And so it just sort of seems like the point of life after a while, you know, I can see when you're 24, the point of life is, I don't know, dance clubs or something. Getting laid. Yeah, yeah. But when you're 44, the point of life doesn't seem to be like a singular entertaining night. It's, you know, it's sort of like, this is the project that I've been working on for 18 years now. Isn't she cool? Right. Yeah. Right. Right. Well, well, you know, the thing about life too,

is that although it's very complex, in some ways it's very simple. It's like, okay, what's life? It's easy. Friends. You know? Who are you going to surround yourself with? Intimate relationship. Hopefully that lasts, because you tie the cords of your life together with someone.

That makes you both stronger. Family. Your family, including your parents. How are you going to manage those relationships? Education and career. Mental and physical health. And that's about it. I've done it in three.

And I make them all with F. Family, finance, and fitness. And family is just an encapsulation of relationships in general. Family, finance, and fitness. And family is just, you know, an encapsulation of relationships in general. Family, finance, and fitness. Those are the three pillars of the stool. Any one of them sucks, it falls over. But you get those three in order, and you're in pretty good shape. Yeah, yeah.

And if you miss one of them, that's a big hole. Like, you know, people on YouTube, they comment when they hear me talking about why people should have children They say well, you know, I decided not to have children and here's all the things I'm doing with my life It's like yeah. Yeah, I get it man It's like not up to me to say that it's absolute necessity for every individual to have children. It's like that's not the point it's a rule of thumb and there may be and there may be levels of attainment that justify missing friends missing an intimate relationship missing having children fine but it's not a good rule

of thumb and the probability that you'll pay for it is extremely high but some people are better wired to be that fun uncle yeah look fair enough and people have to make that decision for themselves you know it's like there are people that i've no know of who've taken themselves out of the the child rearing realm because of the experiences they've had when they were young or because they're afraid you know they there's a lot of mental illness or physical illness in their family people have to make harsh and stark decisions but but we're talking about general moral guidelines, essentially, and the proper aim for life.

There just isn't that much to it, you know? It's like, contribute to the community, establish yourself in a network of familial relationships, and try to act productively and for the good. You can't forego any of that it's it's it's it's dangerous and i think part of the reason that people i guess more and more nowadays are deciding oh i don't want kids you know male or female it's at least partially maybe not because of career but because it allows you to kind of stagnate in that infant stage of life where everything's about you and you can do what you want all the time and you don't really have to you know externalize too much care to someone else

sure i think a lot of the reason that people don't grow up that's the peter pan syndrome is refusal to take responsibility but one of the things that people who are in that state let's say don't realize is it's not that much fun to be the oldest guy at the disco you know there comes a point and it doesn't it doesn't take much it's not much after 30 and it's certainly by the time you're 40 that oldest party animal is a pretty bloody creepy thing to be. It absolutely is. Remember that guy when you were in high school and he'd be like 22, but he kept coming back and talking to the high school girls.

And because he was older than some of the girls would be like, man, he's, he's pretty cool. But then the second you leave that little high school lens, you're like, Oh, this is a complete loser who can't hack it with people their own age, so they have to come be big fish in the small pond. Yeah, yeah, right. Like he said, men go across and down. Yeah.

Well, let me tell you. You know, the other thing that people don't understand about that, like say they want to maintain that sort of self-centeredness, let's say, and what they don't understand is that's also a terrible burden. Like for my wife, for example, and I'm sure this will be the case with my daughter, but for my wife, it was a great relief to her when she was no longer the center of attention, say at family gatherings. You have a little kid, it's like you bring the kid and it's like everybody leaves you the hell alone. It's like everybody's attention's bring the kid and it's like everybody leaves you the hell alone it's like everyone's attention's on the kid and that's that really is i i also well i thought i also

experienced that as a great relief it's like so that's also a plus and plus the idea that the the idea that impulsive pleasure is better than responsibility is really a that's one appalling idea, man. And the problem with it is it just isn't true. Because impulsive pleasure only works in the very, very short term. It's a very bad medium to long term solution. And the thing is, unless you're going to die tomorrow, you know, you've got a medium to long term solution to contend with. I discovered that on a smaller scale.

a medium to long-term solution to contend with. I discovered that on a smaller scale. Like, so you don't know me, but for like 12 years, I went to night school. That's how I got my education. I have two undergrads and a master's and I just did it. Go, go, go, go, go. And then when that finished, I had this tremendous amount of what felt like free time. I was like, oh my God, other people are wrapping their day up at 6 p.m. and I would just like pick up other hobbies and get like deep deep into them the weekends my newly free weekends it used to be I'd always do school work on them now I had a choice and the weekends where I like did woodworking you know for 12 hours over two days or more where the I would go to work on Monday thinking that was awesome the weekends where I watched Netflix for 12 hours and just gave into those like short term pleasure type things.

I would go to work thinking I lost my weekend. Like I'm not, I'm not feeling accomplished or energized or happy. Like, like sitting down and just consuming media all weekend long led to bad Mondays. Whereas accomplishing stuff on the weekends and saying, I did this, that led to great Mondays.

Yeah, well, the thing is, you know, you want to, you kind of, because there's so many reasons to be appalled about being a human being, you know, that we get sick and we age and we make mistakes and we're malevolent from time to time and destructive. I mean, there's lots of things about being human that's self-evidently questionable, let's say. And so you're always faced with this existential question, which is, well, what sort of creature

am I? And the bad news is pretty evident. The good news is harder. But what you do to find the good news is you set yourself against obstacles and you see who wins. So you set yourself a challenge and you master it. You think, oh, hey, there's a little bit more to me than I thought. Then you take on a bigger challenge and the same thing happens.

You think, hey, there's a little bit of backbone and spine there that I wasn't so sure about. And, well, you have to build the nobility up in the midst of the catastrophe and tragedy. But that's the secret to life as far as I can tell. It happens on both the micro level and the macro level. I mean, like the micro level being the weekend type thing. You have a PhD, right? I just stopped at the master's. level i mean like the micro level being the weekend type thing i am you have phd right i just stopped the masters but uh when i finished that like i don't often walk around like proud of me right like pride i'm happy with who i am i think i'm a good guy like i'm okay there but i

don't just sit there and think you are something special right when i finished my master's i thought that i thought like this is this took me a long way to get here i had terrible terrible terrible high school grades i don't know if they do gpas in canada but i was a 1.98 i only got into college because i could swim really well and i just worked hard and and you know i had a lot of courses i just wasn't prepared for and i had to like self-teach things that other people walked in knowing it was very difficult for me and uh when I finished it and I got it like I was really proud of me and you know that that speaks to what you were saying like you know you like wow there was a lot of no quit in me I had yeah right for a decade right absolutely man there were many many times when you know a new movie came out and but the nature of school is like it it invades your free time right you don't just do school from

nine to five school is a take-home project and uh every time i did anything that wasn't studying it was robbing from that study time and and when i stuck through on the macro scale and did that it is a cool thing. Yeah, right. Absolutely. There's a lesson out there for everybody. You'll like it. You'll be happy that you did. Let me slip in an ad read here. Movement Watches was founded on the belief that style shouldn't break the bank. The watchmaker's goal is to change the way consumers think about fashion

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about a project that we've been working on that you may be aware of, but it's a propos to our discussion about responsibility. So about 10 years ago, when I was teaching my maps of meaning class i decided that and i'd be doing some reading in the industrial organizational literature and also maps of meaning maps of meaning yeah okay yeah yeah maps of meaning which is based on a book I wrote of the same name. Maps of Meaning was about, it's predicated on the idea that you live inside a story,

like the cognitive framework that we use to orient ourselves in the world, have a narrative structure, which is why we like stories. And that's why we tell stories about our lives and why we're interested in stories, because they help us develop new ways of perceiving and grappling with the world.

And so one question, this is the sort of question that the psychoanalyst Carl Jung was very interested in was, well what kind of story are you living out? Is it a hero story? Are you the malevolent traitor? Are you a bit player in someone else's drama? Like what's your story? Because you have one. Even if you don't know it, you're acting one out.

Well they're all tragedies, are they not? Well, that's a good question. I would say that's an open question. And even if the answer to that is yes, that doesn't mean they all have to be hellish tragedies. Yeah, it doesn't have to be an overarching tragedy. That's just how things end. Well, you know, that's an interesting issue, too, because one of the things that, and then I'll get back to this other issue, one of the things I learned from reading Socrates' Apology, there's two versions of it, right? There's the one that we got handed down to us from Plato and another one written by a man named Xenophon, two different accounts of Socrates' trial and death. And they're very interesting documents.

They're quite short. And, you know, Socrates knows that the Athenians are going to put him to death if he goes through with the trial. He also knows that he can run away. He can go. He can leave. They want him out of town, man. That's basically what they announced the trial way ahead. And the implicit suggestion is, get the hell out of here, you old bastard, you know, or we're going to do you in. And he goes and consults with his conscience. He calls it a daemon, but it's his conscience for all intents and purposes. And his conscience tells him not to run.

And he thinks, what the hell do you mean don't run? These people are going to kill me, and they will. But his conscience is insistent that he not run. And so Socrates believed that one of the things that differentiated himself from other men was that he always listened to this internal voice, this daemon. No matter what it said, he always listened to it, or at least he always engaged in dialogue with it and moved forward in accordance with that dialogue. So he thought, okay, well, let's assume for a minute that even though I can't see it, that this voice telling me to stick around is right. How could it be right? So he thought it through and he thought, look, you know,

I'm kind of old. I'm an old guy and I'm a philosopher and, you know, my cognitive faculties are going to start to degenerate, and the next 10 years might be kind of rough, because I think he was in his 70s, if I remember correctly. And he thought, well, maybe the gods are rewarding me for my fine service with this opportunity to put my affairs in order, to say goodbye to everybody that I love, to make my last wishes known, and to say what I have to say to the athenians that are going to try me and i'm paraphrasing obviously and so that's exactly what he does and he goes and faces his accusers and he just you will read that account you know why they wanted to get rid of

him because he just takes them to task in a most brutal honest manner and then he goes off and takes his hemlock you know yeah and there's there's a lesson to the story which is something like this and i and i'm not sure about it but but it's it's definitely worth thinking about it's like imagine that you exhausted the possibilities of your life you know you know what i mean so that you had done what you could do Maybe by the time you're old, you're done. And it isn't a tragedy. It's that you're done. Because look, I mean, you know, I've had kids, but I wouldn't have them again. It isn't that I don't love kids, and I'm looking forward to grandchildren and all that, but I've done that. You know, and I wouldn't go back and get another PhD in psychology or another PhD because I've actually done that already and I kind of wonder is it does

there come a point in your life if you've exhausted yourself that you're done and and it's okay and I think that that's that's the underlying message in the Socratic apology is like he had his life he could let let it go. And it wasn't a tragedy. It was the next thing to do. And if nothing else, there was a victory in his own death. That's what I see in that story is that he's found the way to die the best death possible. We all love this TV show called Game of Thrones. And one of the hallmarks of it is that's not awarded to the good characters. The hero's death is very rare. There's one instance of it where a character, they have to get a door down so they can invade the castle, and if they do, the good prevails, and the one character gives his life in totality to get the door down, to absorb as much enemy fire

as he can, and then he dies, And with that death, his side wins. I feel like that heroic death thing is also built into our subconscious. As a man, that's the sort of end that you want. I feel like we all do down at our core. Like if we could picture ourselves old and in that bed, but then the intruder comes in the house, and we have to rise up one more time and to save our family, save what we love with those last moments. That's ingrained

in us to want that. And you see it repeated in story after story, that exact thing where the character that you thought was too old gives his life, the last bit of it to do one more great thing and in doing so gives so much meaning and purpose to all of his days past it also seems almost like a legacy preservation thing on some some level with socrates there where if he is thinking like you know i've built up for myself an incredible legacy one of the most influential you know thinkers of all time. If I do get Alzheimer's or whatever they called it back, just dementia in the next 10 years, and I start rambling like a maniac about things, that's going to undercut everything I've said. Nothing I had

said in the past will hold any credence because they'll go, hey, remember that apologia book? Yeah, but that was certainly part of his thinking. And, you know, I've noticed a shift in my own thinking you know I would say when I was 40 I was pretty enthralled about the possibility of extending my life as long as possible and and and felt that I wouldn't run out of things that I wanted to do you know and it's not like I've it's not like that that echoes of that still don't exist. Like I'm, I'm trying to remain as healthy and together as possible as long as I can. But increasingly I can see that there could come a time when I was done, you know, and that's very interesting to see. And it's, it's because I do kind of wonder if you can live out your life exhausted, you know?

And so maybe it isn't a tragedy under those circumstances. From the outside, it looks like you've had a heck of a 55, you know? Like you're on Joe Rogan's podcast and you're being heard at a level that you probably haven't ever been heard before right it's always been local now it's global and it well i agree with what you're saying in concept it seems like it's not a fit for you right you know like you peaked at 55 tomorrow right right right i could envision another 40 years but i'm not so sure now that i could envision another 60 years you know and'm not so sure now that I could envision another 60 years. You know, and I'm not saying this canonically, because I'm interested in rejuvenation technology, and I've learned a lot about it. And you can shave years off your life quite effectively in a variety of different ways, and I'm experimenting with all of that.

quite effectively in a variety of different ways, and I'm experimenting with all of that, but I can still envision a time when I've had my life, you know, which is, so who knows if it, maybe a life lived well is not a tragedy, it is possible, and maybe that's a good thing to find out, you say, I'm going to live this life so thoroughly that I have no regrets that's another thing you learn from the psychological literature you know when you when you when you when people recount what they're what they regret it's opportunities untaken it's not mistakes they've made not not usually I mean there are exceptions obviously but generally the mistakes are the errors of omission. Oh, I could have done that, but I didn't. And that's sort of akin to spending the weekend watching Netflix and covering yourself with

Cheetos dust. It reminds me of that old saying, like, youth is wasted on the young, where you look back probably as, know I'm only 26 so I'm obviously still stuck in I'm still pissing it away probably but you know 30 years from now like I just like I've talked to my dad you know older friends and whatnot and they're like yeah exactly that just if you have a thought in your head of should I try this or should I not as long as it's you know not meth or something then yeah give it a go well you'll look back and regret not taking that dance class or not learning should I not, as long as it's, you know, not meth or something, then yeah, give it a go.

You'll look back and regret not taking that dance class or not learning pottery or something. Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, I've been doing lectures on the Abrahamic stories, and I'm doing this biblical series, and I didn't know the Abrahamic stories that well, but I've got pretty familiar with them over the last couple of months. And one of the things that's really cool, so, and of course, Abraham's the father of nations, right? So he's our father, that's the thing, because he's the father of nations. And God basically tells Abraham, right at the beginning of the stories, he says, get away from your father, Abraham's like 75, he should have done this a long time ago. But get away from your father's house, get away from your country and your comfort, and go out into the chaos among strangers

he says you do that successfully and i'll i'll bless your life and i'll make you a father of nations and i think well that's a call to adventure that's what it is it's like get the hell out of your zone of comfort and and and go out there and and if by doing that by by being willing to do that by be willing to move forward, then you do build yourself into the sort of person who can be the father of nations, let's say. And I see it as very concrete advice. And I didn't know those stories well enough to have extracted that before. But do you want your kids to move two or three provinces away? Well, they did for a while.

Okay. No, I wanted them to go where they needed to go. And I mean, I moved a long ways from my parents, and that's actually worked out quite well, because it's given them the opportunity to engage in the sequence of adventures they would have never undertaken. My sister also moved, well, first to Africa and then to California. But my parents have had experiences, partly because of me, but also partly because of her, and then my brother as well, that they would have never had had their kids not widely dispersed because they live way the hell up in a little town in northern Alberta.

You know, it's like it's it's 800 miles from the American border. It's it's way north. Wow. So but my and my kids are in the city, but they live in Toronto. So there's lots of opportunities here. I'm glad they're around, i i had no objection to them my son went to halifax for example for for his university and you know that's a good long ways away so my daughter mentioned something about living in colorado i'm in north carolina and uh i wouldn't like that oh it's beautiful there i'm

look i'm not saying colorado is bad i'm saying near me is good you know i gotta move the whole plan that is that is different well and it's it is nice you know when we had our kids we were a long way from our family and it's nice to have some family around when you have kids so yeah however it worked out so i was i was mentioning we made this program i first of all used it in my classes to help people write an autobiography because that would catch them up but also to help them write a plan for the future you know and so we had people um i had people answer questions about what they would like for their friendship and their intimate relationship and their physical and mental health relationship and their physical and mental health

and their career and their education, you know, those sorts of practical questions. So the idea was, okay, you're gonna treat yourself like you're someone that you care about. So you're gonna try to act like your life is worth getting right. Even if you hate yourself, just forget about that for a minute.

Pretend that you're on your side and you going to do something good for yourself okay so what would good look like to you what do you want from your friends your intimate relationship and so on have a bit of a vision then i had students write think write for 15 minutes about what their life could look like three to five years down the road if if they had what would make life worthwhile for them and then i had them write a counter vision which is okay here's the reverse man all your weaknesses and petty hatreds and resentments and bad habits get the upper hand and you augury and and life is hell three years down the road and it's your fault what does that look like write down that then you know what you want to that then you know what you want

to avoid and you know what you want to move towards and then i had them write out a concrete plan for attaining the positive vision and so students liked that quite a bit and so then we turned it into a computer program and we tested it on university students and tested it on about 5,000 university students in Holland at a business school and we increased the university retention rate by 30% and raised the academic performance by 25%. Yeah, and what's cool, here's what was so cool. So in Holland, the Dutch women in the business school were doing the best and then the dutch men and then the non-western ethnic minority women and then the non-ethnic western minority men and there was a big gap between them and the dutch women like really like 83

performance gap something really a big gap the when the when the all the students did the future authoring program, that's what it's called, the non-Western ethnic minority men passed the Dutch women within two years and stayed there and stayed there. And so this program worked, first of all, it worked as a psychological intervention for a sociological problem, right, the problem of integration. And second, it worked best for the people who were the least thoroughly oriented. And we replicated that in Canada. Anyways, I'm telling you that because I've been, there's been many people now using that program online. And it's one practical

way of helping people develop that, you know, that, what would you call it, that nobility of vision and intensity of responsibility that's part and parcel of having a life well lived. This is also why I'm so annoyed about what everyone is doing is bad and corrupt and oppressive. The real notion of the humanities, and that would be partly the Socratic ideal, is look, man, get yourself together. Put yourself together in body and mind. Educate yourself.

Learn to speak. Learn to think. learn to communicate familiarize yourself with the great works of civilization and get the hell out there and act nobly in the world it's like where did when did we lose that idea when was it in your career academically because i'm i'm sure that you noticed the posts uh or neo-marxism and all that throughout your academic career. What was it, was it one big thing, one big trend you noticed that got you really into combating this, or has it just been a long, slow burn until it just reached a breaking point of, I have to speak up? Well, I've been unhappy about the lack of criticism of Marxist

about the lack of criticism of Marxist doctrine for a long time, because I steeped myself in the literature, especially in the literature regarding the horrors of the Soviet Union, which are manifold and deep. And so that's always been, well, I mean, I think it's not the same thing, but, you know, it's akin in some sense to being a Jew if no one knew anything about what happened with the Nazis. I mean, I'm not a Jew, and I don't have that right in some sense. You know what I mean? But the fact that what happened in the Soviet Union isn't memorized by everyone in high school is an absolute crime. They figure 100 million people died in China

because of the Cultural Revolution. 100 million. That's like as many people died in World War II. Is that when Mao was having everyone shoot the birds? Yeah, that's exactly it. That's what happens when you have one guy just dreaming up his ideals and ideas for what would make this gigantic place even better. He thought the birds were eating his crops. And if you eliminate all the little field birds of any kind, then our productions will go so far up.

But the birds were eating the insects that prey upon the crops massive famine at tens of millions died so so yeah so okay so so there's that always percolating in the back you know and and i i became a great enemy of ideology as a consequence of familiarizing myself with the literature on totalitarianism. And then the PC thing really peaked in the early 1990s. It peaked around 1993, and I was not happy about it at that point, but it receded. I think the economy improved so bloody dramatically that everybody just went out and had a life instead of pursuing this.

But then it just came back with a vengeance like five years ago four years ago And then it manifested itself in Canadian law and this compelled speech thing. It's like well. It made it personal for me It's like Because there was now a legal requirement that I I'm very careful with my language. I've watched myself talk now carefully since 1985. So I'm always watching myself talk, you know, to feel whether or not the words are making me solid or making me weak. And I don't, I'm not willing to have someone extend legislative fiat over the nature of my utterances.

I would rather die, and I mean that seriously. I really mean that, because I can't, I know that what, well, I can't mean it any more seriously than that, and I actually mean that, and I took great risks in the last year. I mean, I'm not complaining about that in the least, and it's worked out wonderfully but I'm not allowing my language to be taken over by ideologues I hear something that happened in 85 that changed the way that you thought about your speech yes what happened was it was I went out to this maximum security prison and I was taken out there by this very strange psychology professor that sort of took a shine to me and he was a very creative person and

he was the prison psychologist and he invited me to come out there a couple of times and so I went out there and I had a number of strange experiences out in the prison one of them was I was in the prison gymnasium which looked a lot like a high school gymnasium surrounded by these guys that were like real monsters you know like this was a maximum security prison the one one of the guys I remember was completely tattooed very muscular yeah like a scar running from here to here that was like this thick you know it's like someone split his chest with an axe. And when I was in the gymnasium, I was wearing this cape that I bought in Portugal and these long boots that I bought. It was kind of a 18-19. Prison clothes, yeah.

And all these guys came around and started to offer to trade me their clothes for mine, you know. And the psychologist just skittered off somewhere and left me in the middle of it and he probably did that he had his own reasons like i said he was an eccentric guy and this little guy came up and said that the psychologist had asked him to accompany me somewhere whatever and so i went with him because he looked preferable to these monsters that were around me and we went out into the yard through the doors just like a high school through the double doors out into the yard and we got about 20 30 yards away and then the prison psychologist showed up at the door and motioned us back I didn't think much of it this guy was

about five six or something like that kind of nondescript guy and so the psychologist took me into his office and said that he had taken two policemen and made them dig their own graves and shot them in cold blood when they were begging for their lives because they had children. And so that really made me think, eh? That sort of thing makes you think. Because I thought, well, that's nondescript guys. Look what he did and then about a week after that i heard that another prisoner that i had met and a second one had taken a third prisoner who they thought was a rat and they had taken a lead pipe and pulverized one of his legs with it so just you know literally pulverized

it at the same time i was having these weird experiences that I was in class and I would get this impulse to jab my pen into the neck of the person in front of me. It wasn't a powerful impulse, but it was a dark impulse. I think people have impulses like that more often than... Oh, I think about tripping people in public constantly. Well, that's not quite as pathological, but anyway, so that was really disturbing me. And then I was thinking about all this, and one of the things I did was decide to... I was trying to understand how someone could do the

trick with the pipe, because I thought i couldn't understand that so i really thought about i meditated on it i would say probably for about three weeks and i can really think about things with a fair degree of concentration and i really thought about that obsession i would say and i thought about that obsessively for about three weeks and what i realized was that because i thought how could i do that that was the thought, how could I do that? That was the question. Not how could someone do that? I wanted to know, because that someone was a person, and I'm a person, and people can do such things. And so I tried to put myself into the mental state that would allow me to do that.

And then what I realized was that I could do it, and that it would be easier than I thought. And that impulse, by the way, went away. So I thought that was pretty interesting, too. What was it that finally got you to that point of like, oh, I could do that? Was it just, you know, ruminating on it for so long? Imagining doing it. Imagining the action.

Imagining finding the pipe. Imagining, like, visualizing it, you know? Was it visualizing the act, or was there any part where you tried to dream up or create a circumstance in which you would be angry or motivated to do so? I wasn't doing that. I mean, I guess that was part and parcel of the background, but it was more narrative-free. Like, it was just the act more narrative free like it was just wow it was just the act because that would be my path yeah if you asked me to do that i would say oh well what if this person did x y and z to me or mine yeah right right then he's lucky i let him keep the leg right

you know it's easy to get there no i was thinking more of the torture routine you know where there's there's no there's no motivation for it. Except when it's complete sadism. It's hard to get into that. Yeah, that's got to be a lot harder to convince yourself that you could do it. Like, it's the same, like, Nazi guard tower kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, that's what it was. I was reading about that sort of thing, you know? Yeah.

True sadism disgusts me in a way that I have a hard time making that understanding true sadism, just the enjoyment of inflicting pain upon another, like it really disgusts me in a way that's hard to... Yeah, well, right, right. Well, I, to me, I felt the same way. Like that is the other to me, you know, like those people, those aren't people anymore by my definition. The people who have lost that ability um those are the people who need to be stepped on by like snakes right i'm a little different like i like dr peterson i feel

like i could be that guy but the reason i'm not is the thing we mentioned earlier about this whole you are the author of your own life story right you know are you going to be the villain in this story you get you get to decide whether you're the heroic main character or something other than that and that's why i'm not torturing people that's why i'm not beating people because you know as this thing gets written i want to be the good guy i like that well you know one of the things that's that's this is something i learned from carl jung too who i was reading at the time because he talked a lot about the encounter with the shadow and is that it's really useful to know that you could be the villain it's unbelievably useful to know that because it gives you a

aura that might be one way of thinking about it that you can't get any other way it gives you a kind of seriousness that you can't get any other way. Because like, you know, let's say someone's pushing on you and you need to push back. It's like, well, you have to be able to push back. And the question is, well, how much would you push back? Well, if you know that you're the villain, there's almost no limit to how hard you push back. And that actually makes you, that, what would you put?

That puts you into a position where you're someone that has to be contended with. It's like that little flavor of insanity, you know, that's helpful, say, in a fight. Like a Joe Pesci kind of crazy. Yeah, well, that's, look, part of the reason why those movies are so popular is exactly that. Everyone's attracted to that villainous psychopath that's unpredictable. There's a heroic element to that. That's the anti-hero, obviously. But the reason there's a heroic aspect to that is because unpredictable psychopath might be more virtuous in a developmental sense than naive victim.

virtuous in a developmental sense than naive victim and much more likely to survive and much more useful in say a a thief a a village or a smaller community in our past that guy who's thinks of himself as a bit of a villain maybe he's not very nice to the his own people but it's about what he does to the enemies right right? Like, if my tribe is clashing with yours, it might not be enough that we just go and conduct warfare. We may need a villain in charge who says, no, no, no, we're going in there tonight, and we're going to cut all the throats, and we're going to take all the women, and then they'll deal on our terms. Yeah.

You know? You need a Vlad the Impaler out there with those bodies on spikes so that the invaders don't make it all the way to your castle in a way. Well, okay. So then there's a question that arises out of that, and that's part of the question that Carl Jung was trying to answer, which is, well, given the lack of utility of naivety and weakness and the extreme danger of malevolence how do you balance those and his answer to that was something like well I'll tell you something I learned recently so there's this line in the New Testament that reads the meek shall inherit the earth and that's a line that's always I've

always stumbled over that because I thought that there's something wrong with that. There's something wrong with the way that that's interpreted and translated. So when I was doing one of these recent biblical lectures, I really looked into that line and I found the Greek word that the translation of meek was derived from. And I read a bunch about it a bunch of different translations and it doesn't mean meek it doesn't mean like cringing milk soft type of beak what it means the real translation of that is something like the world will be inherited by those who have weapons and know how to use them but choose to keep them sheathed and that is way different man that is way different man. That is way different and so this villainy element. It's something like Men and women know this this is why Beauty and the Beast is a canonical female archetypal story men need to be

men need to develop the capacity capacity for monstrous behavior and then master it and monstrous behavior and then master it and that's that's yugi that's yugin developmental pathway in large part because that's what the encounter with the shadow means like yung said of the shadow that the shadow in in mankind's soul reaches all the way to hell and he meant that is he meant that as much as anyone can mean a statement like that and hell is the nazi concentration camp or the gulag archipelago and and with you as the you know as the guard and that's in you now it's in some of us more than others let's say but but it's useful to know that it seems like the better alternative is at least another alternative is to empower the people situationally right like i had a manager early in my career and before he worked with me, he was

a Marine. And he said that the sort of Marine you want in peacetime is different than the Marine you want in wartime, right? In wartime, those crazy guys breaking the rules and stealing the motorcycles or whatever are perfectly useful. They're fantastic. They're absolutely animals that go in there and ravage the enemy, but they're a real pain in the ass in peacetime. Yeah. Well, that's a problem. and ravage the enemy. But they're a real pain in the ass in peacetime. Yeah, well, that's a problem. Well, you know, so you have different soldiers for different times.

I know a Marine's not a soldier. But, you know, and the same thing could be true in all sorts of scenarios. The person that you empower to be your leader, you know, make sure they fit the situation. Yeah, yeah, well, I think that's certainly the case. Yeah, well, I think that's certainly the case. I think that part of the reason that what I've been saying has resonated with young men, too, is that they're taught now so comprehensively to never be harmful.

And it's very difficult to distinguish that from being castrated and useless, you know, and to be a tomcat that does nothing but lay on the TV and stay warm, you know. And every man knows that that's, that harmless is not heroic. It's not the same thing. And so then the then the question is well what do you do with the fact of your darkness and the answer to that is you don't suppress it you don't hide from it you don't ignore it you master it you integrate as a man there's almost like a measure of shame with harmlessness where you see someone who's harmless who's a man and you almost have like a resentment for them of like you're not really doing your part here like you're you're you're giving me these you know fake smiles pretending to be someone you're really not so he's every girl's friend you know and it's

it's the standard romantic comedy trope is like it's the guy who's the nice guy who's trying to be every girl's friend he's he he does dreadfully in the mating game and that's partly because women deep inside them women know that that's a con it's a real con and that a man like that is only half there and he's saying well why don't you sleep with me i'm nice to you it's like that's the best you can bloody well muster up is that you don't do anything offensive? God, it's pathetic. You're boring.

Well, that's it. There's no adventure there. You know, it took me a long time to realize that Beauty and the Beast was the canonical female archetype, mythological archetype. You know, that a woman wants a man who's a tameable monster. That's what she wants. And why wouldn't she? Jesus, of course. Now, you know, it's kind of a pain in the neck to live with a monster,

but it's much more of a pain in the neck to live with someone who will collapse at the first sign of calamity. You guys said that nice guy is boring. He lacks utility. He's useless. That's my issue with that nice guy. If all you can do is like say kind words and sit on the couch and watch television you're a bum right you know

like you need to be a doer with heartlessness yeah he's probably like not even a funny guy because he's too afraid to step on toes that could we start identifying those men who clearly have penises as women can we just decide that now can we refer to them as trans women not only that i'm mandating that you refer to them as trans i'm mandating like no no no ma'am ma'am we know you're not gonna get physical just stop getting some red face ma'am i do agree with with dr peterson that seems to be a pretty safe bet agreeing with it but like it it does seem like that resentment and then like ironically those guys who are just the quote nice guy to the women eventually they come around and i think every man has seen this

with friends they come around to resent women because they go i'm putting all of these these tokens into women and i'm not getting my sex deposit like what's going on and then of these double spectrums they go from one end of the spectrum to the other those are the guys you see spouting like the most disgusting like vitriol toward females online like like every woman is this every woman woman is that. When I do this, I get that. Look at what they choose instead of someone like me. It's only because of these flaws that are inherent to females. Look how flawed the female race is.

Fuck them. Yep, I agree. And I do think that that's most characteristic of men who do the raping orangutan routine unsuccessfully, and then they take it out on women. And I think that one of the problems with confused women is that they can't distinguish between those mean men and men with true authority and power, because they conflate the meanness with the authority and power. And that's... And then what – go ahead. With the orangutans, the males who appear to be more like females, is that – do the females buy into that, I guess is my clue.

Do the females see these males as one of them? I don't know what their social hierarchy is like, but I imagine like big male with a leather thing on his neck. He's over there on his own doing his thing. And then up in the trees, it's like the females and the beta males. Do the females sort of see the beta males and interact with them as if they are females? Well, orangutans are more solitary than other great apes. So first of all, I would say less is known about their social arrangements, but they're much less social than the bonobos and the chimps and the gorillas. So if you're interested in that, there's a great book called Demonic Males by Richard

Wrangham and Peterson. I don't remember Peterson's first name. Might be Chris, but it's Wrangham anyways. And it's a great book. I mean, it's a wonderful romp through primatology. Another guy that's really worth reading is Frans de Waal, who wrote, I think it's called Chimpanzee Politics. He's looked at partly the biological basis of morality.

That's one way of thinking about it. Does he look into any of that study where prostitution quickly fell into its groove within the chimpanzees that they taught what currency was? I don't think that was DeWall, but his stuff is equally interesting. He's been studying chimps at the Arnhem Zoo. One of the things he found, for example, was that chimp hierarchies that are run by tyrannical chimpanzees are very unstable. And the tyrannical chimpanzee tends to get torn to shreds

by two of his subordinates right and the more stable chimpanzee hierarchies are run by chimps who are very good at collaborative social relationships with other males but that also spend a lot of attention pay a lot of attention to the females and the infants and so it's so cool because he documented the instability of chimpanzee tyranny. It's really important work, man. I mean, that's a crucial piece of... That's fascinating. It is.

I think we're pretty interested in great apes anyway, especially Taylor. Oh, yeah. Taylor's interest in apes and monkeys is off the charts. I'm sorry, Kyle, carry on. I read that demonic book you're talking about. Wasn't that reflected in his taste in women? Wasn't that something we were referring to much earlier?

No, it's tailored. It's totally tailored. It's not me. Tailored like women with hair on their backs. And fatty faces. This episode of Painkiller Ready is brought to you by HelloFresh. HelloFresh is the meal kit delivery service that makes cooking more fun so you can focus on the whole experience, not just the plate.

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Not you, fellows. Not you guys, but for the people you know. That was a long one this has been really really interesting i mean this is probably the most thought-provoking peak well usually we talk about like uh like animals fighting in arenas and and what it would be like if the best baseball team played the best football team in hockey and what we would do with a trillion dollars and this is the first pk where there's been so much information that i'll be sitting in bed tonight and be like but is but is my room clean oh probably probably not if

i'm thinking about it like you're like is is my room set up to do the things that i need to do it's a really interesting question to ask yourself you know when you start to look at Is my room set up to do the things that I need to do? What do I need to do? It's a really interesting question to ask yourself, you know, when you start to look at your... You see, we do have a... What we perceive in the world, we don't perceive things in the world. That isn't how our brains work.

We perceive tools and obstacles. And we don't perceive anything that isn't either a tool or an obstacle. And it isn't that we see things and think of them as tools or obstacles. That's wrong. This is direct perception. It's direct eye-to-brain perception. It even circumvents consciousness. So, for example, when you look at a cup, your eyes map the shape of the cup onto the neural circuits that constitute your grip. And so part of your understanding of how big that cup is is from the felt sense of how you would array your body to pick it up. And that's direct perception.

And so your room, you think about it as a location or a territory, but it isn't. It's an array of tools and obstacles. And if you have it set up to optimize the tool-like function, then when you walk into your room, that makes you powerful. It's direct perception. And so to go into your room and to think, okay, I'm going to set myself up in here. Like, I'm setting myself up. I want everything in this room to be directed towards my aim then every time you walk in there the room reminds you of your aim as well

so it's really it's really it's really a worthwhile meditative exercise because it's a finite domain too which is kind of cool because it means you can actually get it perfect right you can set it up so absolutely every single thing is in the location that it should be in. It's a ridiculously useful exercise. Completely excuses how frustrated I get when my wife borrows tools and doesn't put them back. Yeah, well, it's direct perception.

It's exactly right. She's sabotaging me, that witch. You don't have to beat her that hard, though. I've always said a firm word you know the rule of thumb is a thing for a reason yeah and i guess like your room as you age or have different priorities and evolve and what you're trying to achieve in life you may be like well i thought my room was clean but new responsibilities and whatnot have

made it that i have to adapt even further now you could say the same thing about the psychological structures that you inhabit you know it's like something can be good one week and then outdated the next that the other thing that means is that you have to get rid of things you have to sacrifice the things that you've been clinging to that are now in your way and you see this this failure to have that happen often take people over as they get older and their houses get more and more cluttered. And they're cluttered with decisions that haven't been made and sacrifices that haven't been undertaken. I mean, it's very easy to have that happen, but it's not good and it ages you. Obviously, it helped like different things impact

different people. Like some people might be drug addicts or have an anxiety disorder, who knows. Is there a big one you feel, like an umbrella that kind of encompasses everyone, like maybe procrastination or something like that? Avoidance, yeah. And that manifests itself in part as procrastination. It manifests itself sometimes as well in a proclivity just to not look. You know, you'll see, like if you walk into your room and you pay careful attention, you will see that there are parts of it that you don't want to look at.

Those are the parts you should look at. So you'll be comfortable looking at some places and uncomfortable looking at others. And that's because you haven't looked at those places enough and it's the places that you're uncomfortable looking that you should attend to that's another part of union psychoanalytic dark doctrine essentially which is the thing that you want most will be found where you least want to look that's so unbelievably true like when my room, or my closet or something, I walk in there and it's covered in clothes. Like my first instinct isn't, let's tidy this up. It's, let's get out of here. Let's get out of here. This is stressful, and I want to be able to pretend it doesn't exist. chaos in the order of your room because the world really is made out of order and chaos that's the most fundamental level of reality that's yin and yang by the way but so you walk into your room and there's there's there's order and chaos and where the chaos is creeping forward

sort of unbeknownst to you or because you're not paying attention then you're going to want to look away because that's where the snakes are and it's the part of your brain that does the snake detection that doesn't want to look there what do you say to people who say their messy desk is a you know sign of their productivity that you know their messy room is their environment instead of just how it works for them um it's it's highly look it's, people often make virtues out of their vices, but you should assume the worst when it comes to being useless. Like, if you have a messy desk, it's possible that it's because you're this sort of remarkable creature that has subordinated that mess to a higher purpose. has subordinated that mess to a higher purpose. But it's more probable that you just have a messy desk and you're rationalizing it.

Yeah. I think there are millions of messy desks, and then there's like three guys who are actually Leonardo da Vinci, and they need everything spread out because he's going to need to look over there at that drawing of man he did to figure some stuff out for his flying contraption he's rigging up for the Pope. Some people have some stuff on the plates. Right now, if you're a creative person, there are intermediary stages of chaos.

My room right now is a complete disaster, but that's because I've taken all my old electronics out and put them on the floor, and I'm rebuilding my computer. But I wouldn't call that mess functional. I would call it a step on the road to making the thing more functional. So it's useful. I mean, I think that you should have some regard for yourself as a logos-bearing entity, let's say. But it's very useful to be skeptical about your,

about your claims to virtue if they're allied with a vice, you know. That same feeling you're describing of like the snake part of your brain. Now I'm trying to think about it more. And I feel like that same stress of trying to get away from a dirty closet is similar to that feeling of like, you're looking down at the triple cheeseburger you're about to eat the triple cheeseburger you're about to eat and you know that you shouldn't be doing that that it's bad and you made a plan to not do this and you just kind of just forge ahead and then you know 20 minutes after you've finished you go ah i'll be better next time you know it the me of right now would handle it perfectly

it's like yeah because you're full there's full. There's a great Simpsons episode that dealt with that. So Homer, I think he's in the garage, and he drinks a quart of mayonnaise and vodka. And Marge takes him to task force, and he says, that's a problem for future Homer. I wouldn't want to be that guy. That really is. Yeah, you're just mortgaging it's like drinking too much

you're like borrowing happiness from the next morning so that you can get a little more than I before that's what going into debt is like when you buy a new car whatever, finance and put something on your credit card you're just borrowing against your future future you is going to work your butt off

future you, that miserable entity You're just borrowing against your future. Future you is going to work your butt off for this thing that you just got. Future you, that miserable entity. People have so much confidence in the future version of themselves to do things that the present and past version was just like, well, no, I didn't start working out last year or in 2014 or 2013 or 2012, but this is the year. Future me can afford this tray of brownies right now that exact same thing yeah that is a really useful heuristic to look at the world

through the whole keep your room clean like if you feel like self-conscious about something that you're not doing then you're probably not in a position where you should be dictating how others live yeah well you know to go back to that prison story, because you guys asked me about when I started to become careful with language, and that was about the time that I had undergone those experiences, and part of that was to

see if I can tie that together properly. I realized that there was a lot of things I didn't know about myself. And at the same time, I realized that a lot of what I was saying wasn't true. I didn't believe it, or I didn't have the right to say it. Because sometimes you can learn things, you know, that you can parrot, but you don't have the right to say them, because you're parroting them. And I became quite aware of a split in myself at that point that was in some way initiated by this experience that I had out at the prison.

I knew that there was a bunch of about me that I didn't know, And I became more aware of the weaknesses and vagaries of my character. And that seemed to manifest itself first in this realization that many of the things I said weren't things I believed. They were things I was kind of like the raping orangutan. I was using words to manipulate the world, to get what I wanted. And that isn't what you should use your words for. You should use your words to represent the world as accurately as you possibly can. And that's way different, you know. That's way different.

And I think that's the fundamental element of faith in a Christian sense. But it doesn't have to be in a Christian sense. It doesn't have to be in a Christian sense. And that is to speak truth about the nature of existence and let things take their course as a consequence. That's faith. That's different than using your words to manipulate the world to get what you want. So you state what you believe to be true and let the world unfold as a consequence. But that's a very exciting way to live because you never know what the hell is going to happen.

It doesn't mean just use the truth as a grenade. It that's a very exciting way to live, because you never know what the hell's going to happen. It doesn't mean just use the truth as a grenade. It doesn't mean that. That's not sophisticated. But to state what you see happening, and then to watch what happens when you state that, that's ridiculously adventurous. Yeah, you could either totally collapse,

or you could be the first person to successfully monetize SJW. It's up in the air. Yeah, or you're both could happen at the same time, which is kind of what happened to me this year, because, you know, it was well, it's been. Yeah. Do you find that resolve being tested more like now that you're in the public eye? Do you ever find a temptation to be like, man, it'd be so much easier to just toe the line instead of, you know, being the guy making these stances? Well, I have sporadic fantasies about stepping out of this public role, but I don't, it isn't realistic. There isn't any, there isn't any pathway there.

And I also don't, it isn't realistic. There isn't any, there isn't any pathway there. And I also don't want to. Like, it's, it's, I'm exhausted by this. And I, my health has been quite bad, especially in January, December, December. I think I almost died in December. Jesus. And, and, and it was partly related to all of this, but there were other factors. The stress factors that entered your life because of this.

Well, that played a role, but a bunch of things came together at the same time. But no, I don't regret it at all. And it's a crazy adventure. And I have no idea what's going to happen next that's that's also something that's very I have no idea what's going to happen when I wake up and so you sort out my room a little bit I know I'm going to do that you're in the public now right so you put yourself in a position where a lot more people have an opinion on you how's that been for your mental health are you completely unimpacted by it or well mostly it's been terrifying you know like

i i you know i would like to say that i'm not particularly tempted by the temptations of fame but i do think in some sense there's some sense in which that's true so for example and it's partly because I'm older eh I mean I'm not interested in erotic attention from women other than my wife I actually find it um unsettling let's say primarily and you know sometimes there are people that have stars in their eyes. And I'm a clinical psychologist, too, and pretty aware of that sort of thing. And I can see it right away. And I'm not happy about it.

It doesn't make me feel elevated or anything like that. Sycophants don't interest you. Well, yeah. I wouldn't even say that they're sick of exactly it's that they're what they're seeing isn't they're seeing something that they're projecting they're not seeing me and and so so and but mostly I think of it as a real opportunity, you know, because I am extraordinarily interested in helping people. You know, I mean, and I don't mean that in, what I mean is, I'm interested in making men into productive monsters. That would be a wonderful thing, you know. And I mean, I like teaching.

I've always loved teaching and i i see my role as an educator in in the development of of of souls and citizens you know in in a serious manner and i want to see people go out there and grapple with the damn world because there's real problems to be solved that's what you're doing with your platform is your platform doing anything to you? Confusing me. You know, it isn't obvious to me at all what to make of all this. I don't know who I am. I have no idea who I am. I know who I was, but I don't know who I am, and I don't know where I'm going. Well, we perceive you, or at least I perceive you, as a bit of a modern-day Socrates in a lot of ways. They're giving you plenty of options to just,

shh, hey, we don't want you to leave or anything. We value you. Just stop saying those things you want to say, and you can stick around. And you've listened to that voice inside. You've talked to him and he says, no, you need to stay here. This is a rock worth standing on. That's how I perceive you. And the fact that you're so eloquent and so verbose,

it's not that you hit on the issues that are at play and that you try to find solutions to them you boil it down to the root causes and sometimes those root causes go back to our foundations of of early man you know the reasons why these these genders are the way they are these the way men act this way and women act this way. That's why when the trans stuff comes up, it's like, oh man, they don't know anything about their own gender. They don't know anything about one gender, much less 13.

It's very frustrating. And so I'm glad that you're out there and I've been absorbing as much of your content as I can over the last few weeks, taking a stand for common sense, if nothing else. Yeah, that's the vibe a lot of people get from it, I bet, is just watching those lectures and feeling like, huh, these are thoughts that I feel like I've had, but I've never had articulated to me. That's exactly it. Like, you put your finger on it

right there. I mean, I can't tell you how many people have told me that. And it's true. The thing about talking about archetypal realities is that whenever you talk about an archetypal reality, you're talking to someone about the patterns of their soul. And it's a platonic idea that all learning is remembering. And there's truth in that. There's truth in that because you have a nature you're a human being you're not an ant or an armadillo or an aardvark or or platypus even though you're probably as peculiar as all of those things but you're a human being you have a nature and you have to be

reminded of that nature as you as you grow that's what enculturation is to be reminded of your nature and so when i when i talk to people about archetypal realities they i can see the lights go on in the crowd it's so fun you know because people have a facial expression that manifests itself unconsciously when the light goes on so i say something and i know that that's like a it's it's a there's this idea of a super saturated solution so here here's how you make one so you boil some water and you pour sugar in it and you keep pouring sugar in it until the boiling water can't take any more sugar right so and then what you do is you cool it very carefully and without jarring it and if you're

careful you can cool it down so that the water now contains more dissolved sugar than you could dissolve in sugar at that temperature It's like the water doesn't notice that it has too much sugar in it And then if you drop in one crystal it'll all crystallize That's a super saturated solution And that's what people are like and this archetypal information is like the seed crystal say look there's you know a bunch of You there's a bunch of you have a lot of fragmentary knowledge Here's a bunch of you have a lot of fragmentary knowledge here's a little overarching structure that will tie all of that together you go wow that's that's a revelation

right and any archetypal story contains with it a revelation and so people tell me all the time you're you're telling me things that i already knew but i haven't heard it put that way i didn't know how to say that it's like yeah exactly that, exactly. That's the articulation of archetypal truth. It's already built. Did you get to these truths through introspection or through study of philosophy? Like, does this come from reading a whole bunch of Nietzsche? Like, how do you think that you are the one who has found this thing? And you have.

Not to toot your own too much, but you have. Because I feel it when I listen to you speak. know, not to toot your own, toot your own too much, but you have, because I feel it when I, when I listened to you speak, you have found that thing that connects all of the feelings that, that were just like bare wires sticking up. And it was like someone had ripped the top part of the mechanism off. And when they all connect and you start understanding why you feel the things you feel when you feel them, then man, you can really become a better person, better man, better whatever. Well, I think, I think there's a couple of reasons. I mean, first of all, I tried to tackle a very serious problem when I was a young person,

when I was about 25, because what I wanted to figure out was whether or not the war between the Soviet Union and the West was just a matter of opinion. It's a postmodern question in some sense. Was it just two equally valid worldviews or equally invalid, depending on how you look at it, competing, or was there something more at stake? So that's the first thing I wanted to figure out. And I spent about, when I wrote my first book, Maps of Meaning, I wrote that for 15 years, and I wrote three hours a day, every and I was absolutely obsessed by it I was thinking about it like I was thinking about it 16 hours a day I had to wait I had to lift weights to stop thinking my thoughts were just constantly racing and I read a tremendous amount and very widely

you know a lot of biology a lot of a of anthropology, a lot of primatology, neurobiology, psychopharmacology, heavy on the biological end, and I read everything by Carl Jung, I read everything that Nietzsche wrote that was published at that point, and a variety of other thinkers who were very influential, and I was trying to weave all that together, you know, in the context of this, what was the most important story of the 20th century because that was the conflict between communism and the west I think and I think I guess that I have this capacity to see patterns in things and and and you know I was very influenced by Jung who was Carl Jung who was an amazing genius and and many of the ideas that I put forward are developments of his ideas, I would say. And the same with Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.

So I was also fortunate to have had these geniuses, absolute geniuses, profound prophetic geniuses as mentors. And I read the damn books and I understood them. You know, like that's the thing. I really read them and i really i mean there are things in jung that exceed my comprehension because he was so unbelievably well read and erudite and and profound but i got a lot of nietzsche i understood a lot of nietzsche and i understood a lot of the biology that i was reading and so there aren't there just aren't that many people who have the biological and symbolic knowledge at the same time. It frustrates me a bit that you struggled a bit reading that because I'm wondering who that literature is for then.

Because I've seen you discuss your IQ and how high it is, especially on the verbal side. Like, that's your bread and butter. And yet, you're like, well, I understood most of it. Who's he writing for? Future man? Who will be able to finally... Yeah, yeah, that certainly. I mean, Nietzsche wrote for future man.

There's no doubt about it. Some people do that. And, I mean, Jung was writing to figure things out. You know, like, when I wrote Maps of Meaning, I wasn't writing for an audience. I mean, it isn't because I didn't care about the audience. It's because the reason I was writing was to figure something out. The book was a byproduct of figuring something out.

This next book I'm writing, which is due January or will be out in January, it's called Twelve Rules for Life, an Antidote to Chaos. It's written much more explicitly with an audience in mind. You know, it's more there's more communicative intent but so i think with jung a lot of what he was trying to do was to figure things out and and you do that by writing it's a great way of thinking like if you have a problem the first thing you should do is write down what the problem is then you should write down what you think the answers might be then you should refine refine it. I mean, that's the purpose. It's amazing what we don't teach students in university. Like, I have to teach my students that that's the purpose of an essay. Okay, here's the purpose of an essay. It's quite straightforward. First of all, pick a question

you care about. So that's the first thing, is like, pick a question that you actually want to know the answer to. Okay, now what do you do? Well, go read a bunch about it to see what you can find out. Then see if you can answer it. Why? Well, because if it's an important question and you know the answer to it, then you've added a bunch of arrows to your quiver.

You've decreased the probability you're going to run headlong into a sharp object. You've sharpened yourself and articulated to run headlong into a sharp object you've sharpened yourself and articulated yourself and made yourself into a more powerful problem-solving entity and that's i try to teach my students that writing is a sacred act it's don't like you you create yourself by writing now thinking and talking the same but writing in particular is a very intense exercise and you're articulating yourself into being by writing. And students should just know that. Because I have students, they'll tell me, and some of my daughter's friends have said

this, my daughter even said this at one point, well we just write what we think the professor wants to hear. It's like, you do not do that. You are polluting and corrupting your soul when you do that because when you write something you come to believe it and there's experimental evidence on that's absolutely crystal clear like if you're let's say you have a right-wing idea about some political topic okay and i bring you into the lab and i measure your attitude towards that topic and then i get you to write a 500 word essay on the other side of the argument then I bring you back in two weeks and test your

your conceptions you'll have shifted way to the left so if you write and it's the same when you speak if you write what you know to be untrue you will come to believe what you have stated that's untrue and it's the same when you speak and then you'll be you'll be full of untruth and that's like how can that be useful i only partially agree right so i i like the way that you're saying hey this pollutes your mind this is where you are etc like i'm on board there yep and maybe i'm a bad person or a bad parent for this but i've also taught my kids that, you know, sometimes life lines up certain obstacles. And if you can go around them instead of through them, that's not the worst thing in the world. If you can find a way to succeed in this world, that's not the hardest way to get through it.

This is a fun one. She's graduated National Honor Society, right? For some reason, her high school decided to make National Honor Society very difficult, and they needed, I think, 100 hours of volunteer time, twice a year or something, something outrageous. And I was like, we have to find a way not to volunteer that freaking much. You know, she's a captain of her speech and debate team,

she's the lead in the high school play, she doesn't have time to do that much volunteer time. So, you know, we volunteered our way around it. And I'm not embarrassed about that at all. You know? I did the same thing. Okay, look, look. A couple of things about that.

The first is... If the best way to succeed is to tell your professor what he needs to hear, that might be how you succeed. I like your first example, but I'm not fond of the second one. Me too. And the reason for that is that that means that the institution has become corrupt, if you have to do that. And because that institution is specifically there to train the Logos faculty,

it's a particularly egregious form of misconduct to allow that corruption to manifest itself. I wouldn't take issue with what you said about the practicalities of life. I don't think you should make unnecessary enemies. And you can't, you have to pick your battles, right? And you have to help your children pick their battles. And so, you know, we can take apart what you said and do a detailed analysis of it, but at first glance, there isn't anything about it that strikes me as sketchy, let's say. We live in the world we have, not the world we want, right? So if she's going to a corrupt university,

I would struggle not to advise her to succeed in that. Well, one thing I can tell can tell you though and this is actually optimistic news is that when i have convinced students to write what they think instead of what they think the professor wants to hear it is almost always the case that they're rewarded with a good grade you have to be a pretty damn corrupt professor to give a student a bad grade when they write a good essay that you disagree with and i would say that even in the more corrupt disciplines and there are plenty of them i think that kind of outright fraudulent behavior is still pretty rare so that's so that it doesn't fit what i'm saying right it you don't have to write what the professor wants to hear to

succeed in that environment right i was just taking what you said and sort of expanding it to the rest of life yeah well it's particularly dangerous with what you write and say though because you are see the thing is when you generate a new thought you generate the neurological structure that gave rise to the thought and it has a degree of permanency. And so if you generate a lot of things, thoughts that you don't abide by, let's say, or agree with, you're actually building mechanisms in your mind, physiological mechanisms that work at counter purposes to you. And there's real danger in that.

Like I see this with university professors. Let me give an example. I mean, your argument is don't be rash. And that's a good argument. Like it really is. Or wasteful. Or fine, wasteful. Sure, sure, sure.

Don't waste your time on futile battles. That's another one. Yes. So here's an example. that's another one yes but so here's an example so you know I've had postdocs sake or graduate students come up to me and say look you know I really can't say what I have to say in my classes but I feel that after I get this accreditation I'll be able to say what I have to say but then they then they graduate from graduate school and then they do a postdoc and they say, well, you know, my career is still in the formation period.

I can't afford to be controversial. It's like, okay. Then they become an assistant professor and they say, well, once I get tenure. Then they get tenure and they think, well, I still have to make the cut off to full professor. So maybe you make that when you're about 32 or 33. Then I'm going to do what I have to do and say what I have to make the cut off to full professors so maybe you make that when you're about 32 or 33 then i'm gonna do what i have to do and say what i have to say it's like no you're not because you've trained yourself for 15 years to shut the hell up and tow the party line and there isn't anything left of you by that point and that's what happens often so that's the counter position so

don't be rash yeah but don't sell your soul that's that's the counter position. So don't be rash, yeah. But don't sell your soul. That's the other one. Yeah. Yeah, that does make a lot of sense. Yeah. Kyle? Yes. So did you guys, was there any other questions that you wanted to ask?

Or should we, I'm starting to fuzz out here and I might say something stupid. Yeah, I think I have to end it. Let's do 20 more minutes. This is about to get good. Thank you so much for hanging out for this long. It would just be a full parent. Yeah, I really appreciated having you on. It was fun to pick your brain a bit. Like I said, I've been

reading, or watching rather, which I think is better for me. Even just listening isn't quite as good as watching. I feel like when I get to see you on the Joe Rogan Experience or in one of your classrooms, I really pick things up and memorize them better. So I really enjoyed it, and I appreciate you coming on. Well, thanks for the invitation, guys. I really pick things up and memorize them better. So I really enjoyed it and

I appreciate you coming on. Yeah, thank you. Well, thanks for the invitation, guys. I appreciate it. Where can our listeners here go to find the things that you would like to direct them to? I know you have a Patreon and a YouTube channel, which should get all sorted and everything. Yeah, yeah. Well, that seems to be functioning. If people are interested in that future authoring program, they could go to selfauthoring.com. That's a good one. The program is inexpensive. And I would say to any of your viewers or listeners who are interested in, hack away at it and do it badly.

It's not something to do perfectly. It's something to do. And you do it completely for yourself right it's it's it's you're envisioning the life that would be good for you and don't you don't want to think of it as an assignment and you don't want to think about it as something you have to get right a bad first draft is like that's what you're trying to do is make successive bad first drafts of your future self yeah that's what you do in your life and so it the program seems to have very very positive effects for people especially if they're kind of chaotic about

their identity and their goals so i would you know uh we've we've put a lot of work into trying to make that work and and we've investigated whether or not it does work and it does seem to work so that's all to the good awesome I have a couple of pre-roll ads or one pre-roll ad here or post-roll introducing the Elder Scrolls Legends Heroes of Skyrim the latest game from Bethesda the Elder Scrolls Legends is a new mobile strategy game

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Welcome, travelers, to the throat of the world. Also want to remind you about those PKA hats. They're linked down in the description below. Apparently Chiz says there's a handful left, so get them while they last. Very cool. PKA, episode 346.