The Joe Rogan Experience - #877 - Jordan Peterson

Episode Date: November 28, 2016

Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist and tenured professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. https://www.youtube.com/user/JordanPetersonVideos http://www.selfauthoring.com/ 100% off the Future Authoring Program code: "ChangeYourself" - The offer is extended until the end of December 7th

All right, we're live. Sir, first of all, thank you very much for coming on. I really appreciate it. I've enjoyed your YouTube video. I wouldn't say I've enjoyed. I have enjoyed them, but I've been puzzled by them. I've been puzzled by the subject. And for people who have no idea what's going on, let's sort of unpack this for them.

In Canada, Canada is very different than the United States. I love Canada. I'm a giant fan of Canada. If there's one place I would live outside of the US, 100% it would be Canada. I love it up there. I think the people are at least 20% more polite than America, but you've got some weird shit going on up there. And your king, what do you call him? Prime Minister? Trudeau? That fella? The Castro lover. The Castro lover. I was just going to say that. This fucking guy.

And people have been posting today all the atrocities that Castro committed during his regime to sort of show how preposterous. A few thousand firing squad deaths. A few thousand. How about all the different people that they executed and then sold their blood to the Viet Cong? Yes, yes. I tweeted that one. Wonderful. Wonderful man. 50, wonderful man.

50 bucks a pint. Yeah, he was a wonderful man, that fucking savage. Trudeau, what he represents is, I think, the good side of it, what he's trying to do, they're trying to make a kinder, more progressive, more inclusive country. But along the way, what they're doing is they're promoting what you would call online social justice warrior values. And some of them are a little preposterous. You are one of the very few academics who have fought against some of these ideas that are not just being promoted, but are being enforced and enforced and written into law. And one of them is about gender pronouns.

What we mean by gender pronouns is not just he and she, but a whole slew of invented gender pronouns, gender pronouns that you're going to be compelled to use. Yeah, you're already compelled to use and likely in the States, too, even though people don't know it yet, certainly in New York and the employment EEOC has already ruled on that with regards to businesses for the US. Yeah, businesses and I believe also landlords. I think, yeah, so if your landlord chooses to misgender you, and not just misgender you, like if you're a transgender woman, you used to be a man, now you're a woman, and they call you a he, it's not just that.

Like, you're compelled to use, how many, what is the number of them now? Well, there's no standard nomenclature for the non-gender, for the non-binary types. There's many, many invented words. And which of those you're supposed to use is dependent entirely on the subjective choice of the person that you're talking with. Now, most people, I believe, out there listening are going, what the hell are they talking about right now? We're talking about as many as 70 plus invented gender pronouns like Z, XE, XIR, HIR, a bunch of weird ones. And this is for people that don't necessarily think they're a he or a she. So they prefer these things.

On top of that, you have animal kin. Yeah, other kin. Other kin. Including worm self, which was the one I found most amusing. Worm self, animal kin. Yeah, other kin. Other kin. Including worm self, which was the one I found most amusing. Worm self, fox kin. I guess that's for the low self-esteem other kins. This is people that truly believe that they are in the wrong body and that they should have been born some form of animal and would like you to refer to them as this animal. Or elf. Or elf.

Or elf. Or fairy. I've seen pixie. Yeah. Pixie Ken. I haven't seen pixie Ken. That's a good one. Just get on Tumblr.

Got to get on Tumblr. Yes, absolutely. That's where it all goes down. Professor Peterson, what the hell's going on? What is this? Well, I think it's partly a form of narcissism. Yes. It's partly a consequence of the new rise again of, say, Marxist doctrine, I would say.

It's part of postmodernism. Maybe it's postmodernism more than anything else. Because the postmodernists, that's a philosophical community, let's say, believe that the entire point of human categorization is power, and that dialogue between people is only a power dialogue, and that there's no real reality outside of interpretation, and that basically what we do is exchange interpretive viewpoints to ratchet up our dominance and status. And that's that. And there's no biology as an ideology, and the idea of the objective world as an ideology, and science as an ideology, and it's all interpretation all the way down, like turtles all the way down.

What do you mean by it's all about power? Like, in what way? Well, you imagine that there are groups of people who are competing in the world for resources, I suppose, and that it's a zero-sum game, and it's every group against every other group. And the reason that we engage in dialogue isn't to establish the truth or move towards some closer approximation of reality, but to structure the social interaction so that our group comes up on top. Right. And that is really what the problem is with all this, is that it's not just a matter of choosing to be defined in one way, but compelling others to define you in that way.

Well, one of the most awful elements of it, I think, is the idea that individuals should be defined in terms of their group identity at all. I mean, is the idea that individuals should be defined in terms of their group identity at all. I mean, you could argue, and this is one of these weird inversions that's so characteristic of this chaotic state that we're in, when people originally started fighting against unfair discrimination, and I say unfair discrimination because lots of discrimination is fair. If you discriminate against people on the basis of their competence, is fair. If you discriminate against people on the basis of their competence, that's perfectly reasonable. It's unfair discrimination that constitutes the proper battleground for people who have a more egalitarian viewpoint. But the initial idea was to eliminate the proclivity for

people to be categorized according to their group identity, because that was interfering with everyone's ability to view them as competent individuals. But that got flipped probably in the 70s after the Soviet state so self-evidently was revealed as a catastrophe. That got flipped so that the world was turned into one group against another, power struggle from one group against another,

and then the social justice warrior types and the lefties, even the Democratic Party, started categorizing everybody according to their ethnic or sexual or racial identity and made that the canonical element of their being. And that's an absolutely terrible thing to do. It leads to, in the Soviet Union when that happened, for example, when they introduced that idea along with the notion of class guilt. So, for example, when the Soviets collectivized the farms,

they pretty much wiped out or raped and froze to death all of their competent farmers. They called them kulaks, and they attributed class guilt to them because they were successful peasants and they defined their success as oppression and theft they killed all of them pretty much shipped them off to siberia and froze them to death and they were the productive agriculturalists in the soviet union and then in the 1930s in the ukraine because of that about six million ukrainians starved to death but the soviets were big on collective guilt and all of these things that you hear about now, like white privilege, for example, they're variants of collective guilt. I pick your bloody identity, whatever it happens to be, and then I make you a guilty member

of that category, and then you and the rest of the guilty members of that category are judged as a unit. It's absolutely, it's murderous, pushed to its extreme. And we've seen that many many times yeah you're oppressed or your your your opinions rather suppressed and you are automatically put into this category of people who should be dismissed because of the fact that you have white privilege you should step back and let others talk you should step back and this is a narrative that gets repeated over and over again in the social justice warrior culture this idea that you should just step back and let these others talk because they understand

as long yeah and the others are always other group members right and somehow their their discourse is to be privileged in reverse because hypothetically they're a member of an oppressed class right of course and you can multiply the numbers of oppressed classes ad nauseum, which is another part of the problem. Yeah, like the idea is that in giving them privilege because they have been marginalized, you will balance things out. You will somehow or another reverse the scale. Yeah, and that's another example of the class-based guilt idea. You know, it doesn't seem to me self-evident that I'm to blame for slavery, for example. I mean, being a Canadian,

it's a slightly different situation, I suppose. But the idea that as a member of a culture, that you're somehow responsible for the past sins of that culture, let's say, it's a very, very anti-Western ethos. It goes along with this idea of class guilt, because your group membership is the most important thing. If your group at some point in the past did something reprehensible, which of course every group has done, that's for sure, then you are de facto responsible in the present for that. How do you think we got to this point where people are repeating these patterns that were ultimately incredibly unsuccessful and dangerous and deadly in the past, like Marxism, for example. People proudly proclaim themselves as having Marxist ideology.

One in five social scientists claims to be a Marxist. How do they not understand the history? Why don't you fill people in on how that went bad? Well, the estimates vary, but in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959, somewhere between 30 and 50 million people were killed in internal oppression alone. So that's pretty bad. And then in China, which was operating under exactly the same principles, it might have been up to 100 million killed during Mao's time. And of course, Mao is still revered in China, appallingly enough. during Mao's time, and of course Mao is still revered in China, appallingly enough, and Vietnam and Cambodia, and wherever these ideas were implemented. Cuba, wherever these ideas were implemented, the result was absolute mayhem, absolute mayhem. And I think what happened

is that the Marxist ideas are actually quite attractive if you're an intellectual, and if you're, I would say say if you're tilted towards compassion from a personality perspective because they're based on doctrines like from from each according to his ability to each according to his need and the idea that you should fulfill people's needs or that society should fulfill people's needs is on the surface of it an attractive idea of course the problem is who gets to define the needs and who gets to define the abilities, and that really is a big problem. And well, and then those ideas were put into practice first in the Soviet Union, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wrote the Gulag Archipelago, did a very lovely job of detailing in horrifying detail how those initial doctrines were transformed into legislation

and then how those legislation was transformed into endless genocide, essentially, and almost destroyed the world. Let's not forget that. Partly with the help of Castro, who just died, the doctrines, when put into actual practice, were murderous instantaneously. Now, what happened? There were always apologists for the left in the West,

especially in France, especially among the French intellectuals, especially in the late 1960s. And then when all of the information about what was happening in the Soviet Union came flooding forward, and that culminated, say, in about 1973 when Solzhenitsyn's book was published. The French intellectuals changed their tune. Instead of agitating on the part of the working class, which allied them with murderous Marxists,

they switched and started to talk about power and to talk about group identity. It was like a sleight of hand. The underlying pathological philosophy remained exactly the same, but the surface nomenclature changed, and that became very attractive. And at the same time, the Soviet Union dissolved. And so one of the problems I think we have now, a perverse problem, is that these Marxist ideas

are very attractive to compassionate intellectuals, and we don't have good bad examples like the Soviet Union around that everybody can point to and go, yeah, yeah, well, that sounds good, but, you know, what about the murderous death camps and the millions of people who are suffering? We still have North Korea, but, you know, people treat North Korea like it's a joke instead of like it's an exemplar of a pathological system. And people have no historical memory.

Like my students, and that's partly because they're taught so badly in schools, is they have no idea what happened in the Soviet Union. They have absolutely no idea. They know a little bit about the Second World War, maybe. And, of course, people generally know about the Holocaust, but they have no idea what happened in the Soviet Union. So they have no idea where these ideas could lead.

And the universities and the high schools are so full of people who are radically left-leaning that students are never taught any proper history. You know, they're taught about the evils of capitalism. And, you know, I mean, it's not like any system is perfect, but there's a difference between imperfect and consciously murderous. I think one of the things that you just said that's very important is that it's attractive

to compassionate intellectuals, people that without really looking at what the potential for these laws and regulations, what the negative potential for them is that the underlying inclination to lean towards that is that you care about people and that you want people to be okay. Yeah, well, you're kind of treating them like they're your children. And I don't mean that in an entirely sarcastic manner. It's reasonable in some sense to treat other people like people that you love, although it's not reasonable in very many other ways, which is why you don't invite every stranger on the street to come and live with you in your house.

I mean, everybody puts up boundaries, and you have to do that. And people tend more than we ever expected. I've done a lot of research in this in my lab, but people do tend to vote and think their temperament a lot more than anyone really realizes. And if you're kind and that's your highest virtue, then you tend to treat people like they're kin, because that's what kind means, right?

It's an extension of the word kin. But that doesn't work well in larger groups. You need other principles. And so you look at something like the idea of equity, which is equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. On the surface of it, it seems perfectly reasonable to say, well, if every resource isn't distributed absolutely equally to every group, then the system is unfair. And on the face of it, that's a reasonable proposition,

but it falls apart under minimal examination. So here's something to think about for everyone who thinks that equality of an outcome is a good idea. It's like, why the hell are you striving for anything then? Because the reason anyone strives to better themselves or to develop a skill or to move forward in life at all is to produce inequality. You're trying to rise above the mediocre masses every time you make an effort at anything. And so everything that we associate positive movement forward to, or positive motivation,

is actually an attempt to render the world more unequal. Now, you're rendering it unequal in a just way, right? Because we might say, well, if you work really hard, you deserve an unequal outcome. Well, yeah, unless you want people to stop working hard. And that was the old joke in the Soviet Union, you know. They pretend to pay us. We pretend to work.

So, it's so thoughtless. That's the problem. That is a big problem with the phrase income inequality. it's so thoughtless. That's the problem. That is a big problem with the phrase income inequality. You never hear effort inequality because effort is not the same. Well, you know, on some campuses and this is true in California,

it's now considered a form of aggression. It's classified under the microaggression to say that hard work is one of the reasons that people accumulate more, accumulate more, accumulate more value, accumulate more property, accumulate more money. It's an aggression. It's aggressive to say that,

because it implies that people who are poor don't work hard. Now, see, that's another terribly fuzzy form of thinking, because there are lots of reasons for people to not have money. Many. To be poor, let's say, which is even different than not having money. Alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, physical illness, intellectual incapacity, and lack of work. All of those things contribute.

Also environmental factors, what communities you grow up into, what you're being exposed to. People imitate their atmosphere. You're around people that are constantly in trouble with the law, and you're dealing with horrible environments. There's a lot of factors. And I think one of the things that's really important about having these discussions is that they break down these rigid ideologies that a lot of these kids that are going to these universities are sort of being shoved into. They're being shoved into these ideologies.

You're either on the left or you're on the right, and there's very few on the right. There's no open market of ideas when it comes to discussing these things. You're compelled and enforced into certain categories. Jonathan Haidt, he's a psychologist at the New York University Business School. He's done a really good job of documenting the dearth of ideological viewpoints, let's say political or temperamental viewpoints, because that's more accurate in the modern university. And it's appalling, because along with all this push for ethnic and sexual and racial diversity,

which I think is just a mask to enforce a kind of ideological homogeneity, there's no even understanding that ideational diversity is the only relevant value for a university. The rest of it's all predicated, say, on the assumption that if you do select people because of their ethnicity or racial background or gender, that that will in and of itself produce diversity of ideas, which is another really pernicious idea because it assumes that, and it's so contradictory. The left describes anything that's associated with the assumption that someone who's female, for example,

will think in a female way. They regard that as an unreasonable prejudice. Yet they're perfectly reasonable to say that we need more women in X discipline because they will bring in female ideas. It's like, well, what the hell are female ideas? You can't have it both ways unless you're completely, are female ideas. You can't have it both ways unless you're completely unless

you don't care at all about coherence or consistency and ideologues really don't because they care about putting their ideology forth. But the idea that you're going to get a diversity of ideas because you have a diversity of class of people assumes that ideas

and identity are the same thing and that's an absurd proposition. In fact, that's an essentially racial, racist proposition. Black people think differently than white people. No, some do and some don't, and the overlap is substantive, and the difference between the individuals is far greater than the difference between the groups. I think we also need to make a very clear distinction between discrimination and people that are just inclined to gravitate towards different careers and different focuses.

There's a big difference between women being forced out of tech and women being not as compelled to enter into tech careers as men. Yeah, well, the tech issue is a really interesting one for a couple of reasons. I mean, one is that, of course, high tech basically developed after the playing field for men and women was more or less leveled. I mean, that happened in the 1970s. And despite that, there aren't anywhere near as many women in tech. There's far more women in caring professions, and you see that particularly in Scandinavia, where they've done everything they can to equalize the playing field. It's 20 to 1 female to male nurses and 20 to 1 male to female engineers.

Explain that, if you could, the Scandinavia issue, because it's very interesting what they've done over there and what the results have been. Yeah, well, imagine that there are two reasons that people differ. There are more than two, but just imagine for the time being that there are two reasons that people differ. There are more than two, but just imagine for the time being that there are two. One is for environmental reasons, cultural reasons, and the other is for biological reasons. What happens if you flatten out the environmental reasons, which is what's happened in Scandinavia, is you maximize the biological differences.

You don't get rid of them, you maximize them. And so what's happened in Scandinavia is that men and women are more different from a temperament and personality perspective, and also in terms of their interests. They're more different in Scandinavia than they are anywhere else in the world. And what have they done to try to flatten things out, as you say? Well, they've transformed their social policies so that men and women have as close to equal opportunities, say, as any society has managed. But that hasn't produced the hope for equality of outcome. Quite the contrary, in many situations it's exaggerated it.

You could say that that's actually okay, is that what you want is to have a society where the genuine differences between people are free to manifest themselves. So, for example, if you have three or four kids, say, the kids are going to be different from one another genetically. That's why they're not identical twins. They differ genetically.

And if you set the environment up so that each child is supportive, the children actually turn out quite differently. Now, if you're an absolute brute and you beat them and you abuse them, then they'll all turn out the same because there's tremendous environmental influence on them then. But if you form an individual relationship with each of them and allow their strengths to manifest themselves as they will in a supportive environment, then the kids are going to turn out very different. And so a free society is actually one that produces massively unequal outcomes

because it allows the genuine differences between people to manifest themselves. These people who are pushing equity, which is equality of outcome, that's what the word equity codes for, by the way, equality of outcome and not equality of opportunity. I don't know what in the world they do with regards to the fact that a very large number of professions are, you know, high-quality, high-pay professions are female-dominated. Physicians, for example, psychologists, any of the disciplines that have to do with human care are almost inevitably dominated by women, and that's increasingly the case.

Is it we're supposed to stop that? Is that also a sign of oppression? We're going to force women to do things they're not interested in? Well, there's also a very disingenuous way of framing it here in America, where people consistently, even the President of the United States, Obama, was talking about income inequality. And the way they frame income inequality, they talk about the 79 cents to the dollar. But what they don't discuss is that we're talking about completely different careers. The way they frame it, they frame it as if two people are working side by side, one is a man, one is a woman, they're both doing the same job, the man makes a dollar, the woman makes 79 cents. That is not the case.

Well, it's typical of ideological conversation, because what happens technically, like, imagine that a given, we talked about poverty a few minutes ago, and we said, well, there's many, many reasons that one person might have more money than another. There are many, many reasons why women might make less money on average than men. There are small businesses that reasons why women might make less money on average than men. There are small businesses that women run, for example, make far less money than small businesses that men run. But that's partly because a lot of women run their businesses part-time because they have kids.

It's also partly because men do all the horrible, dangerous jobs, the ones where there's a high chance of dying. Men are much more likely to work outside. Men are much more likely to move in pursuit of a career opportunity there are lots of reasons that men and women differ in terms of their income but if you're an ideologue you can only handle one variable oh, men and women

measured en masse don't have the same incomes therefore the system is corrupt Jesus how much thinking does it take to come up with a with a theoretical scenario like that? It's so boneheaded, and it just pushes the ideology forward with no thought. Now, as a professor, why is this sort of objective reasoning and really absolutely honest assessment of this situation.

Why is this so rare amongst professors? Why is this so rare in universities? Why is this such an unusual subject? Well, I think the reason is that when people first encounter a complex topic like income differences, it's like imagine you were drawing a map of a territory and you don't know the territory very well. The first thing you do is just roughly

sketch out the shapes of the continents. And maybe you're wrong, like the early European maps of North America. You know, you kind of get one coastline right and you guess in the rest. It's blurry and gray. And then as you investigate more and more, your picture of the situation becomes higher and higher and higher and higher in

resolution. It's hard to go from a low resolution representation to a high resolution representation. And ideologies are low resolution representations. So the thing about a low resolution representation is it looks like it covers everything But it doesn't the closer you look the more details there are you know if you get a three-year-old to draw a helicopter They put it like a little cross on the top and a circle and a stick and another circle, and that's the helicopter Well, you know when you look at it That's a helicopter But no one would expect that thing to fly if you want to change that into a real model of a helicopter you have to expect that thing to fly. If you want to change that into a real model of a helicopter, you have to increase your focus and concentration on every single element of the entity. And that takes a

tremendous amount of cognitive effort. And sometimes you don't even know what you don't know about something. You know, I could say, well, there are 50 reasons why men and women's income differ. Well, that doesn't mean I can say all 50 of those differences, and each of those 50 differences are fragmentable into maybe another dozen categories each. Maybe there's 600 reasons why men and women's salary differ, but you have to spend a tremendous amount of time paying attention and thinking to build your model of reality into that level of resolution and basically what you do is default to temperamentally influence ideologies they give you a one-bit answer to everything why are men and women why do men and women salaries differ oppression it's always the same thing and it makes it makes you

feel like you know something and people like that because they don't like the i the feeling that there's something they don't know they don't like the feeling that there's something they don't know. They don't like to be in chaos. That's basically chaos. They like to be in order. And order is where you know everything. And professors are no different than people, obviously, given that they're people. Maybe they're more intelligent on average. They're also more sheltered, I would say, in many ways on average. And they're also not challenged as often. Tenure.

Tenure's an issue and also not competing in the marketplace, not being in the workforce, going from being in high school to being in universities to getting a degree to teaching to being a professor to getting tenure, staying inside of that intellectual bubble? Yeah, well, it's complicated. Often these things happen. They're like positive feedback loops, you know, when you bring a speaker too close to, or a microphone too close to a speaker, and it starts to howl.

And I think something like that's happened in the universities, is that they started to tilt towards the left in the 60s. And then as they tilted, they tilted harder. And as they tilted harder, they tilted even harder until all of the diversity was forced out of the universities. And I don't know if it's so much a consequence of the actual policies of the university as just a feedback process that got out of control.

I mean, if it's 50% Liberals and 50% Conservatives, no problem. But if it's 70% Liberals and 30% conservatives, no problem. But if it's 70% liberals and 30% conservatives, maybe it rapidly goes to 99% liberals and 1% conservatives. Is that what it's like right now? I mean, when you look at the University of Toronto, where you are, what is the number, if you had to guess? Well, it would depend to some degree on the discipline, but professors also tend to be characterized by personality traits that do tilt them towards liberalism. They're higher in trait openness, which is both creativity and interest in ideas.

That's one of the things that temperamentally distinguishes liberals from conservatives. Conservatives are more conscientious. They're more orderly and industrious. Liberals are more open, so they're more interested in aesthetics and ideas. And, of course, being interested in aesthetics and ideas. And of course being interested in aesthetics and ideas does tilt you towards an academic career. It's hard to tell. I mean it's certainly the bulk of the bulk of intellectuals are are liberal and liberal left. Virtually all of them I would say. And that's probably not that's not as true, we know

this, it's not as true in the hard sciences. But in the social sciences and the humanities, it's the overwhelming majority. I mean, I could see that even in this battle that I've been in in Canada with regards to Bill C-16 and these compelled pronouns. I've had almost no support from my faculty colleagues.

Now, I didn't expect any. I mean, and I'm not shocked by that. But it's an indication that if you put to them a choice between social justice slash all-consuming compassion and freedom of seems like they're politicians. It's almost seems like they they're wetting their finger and going with the breeze. There's some conversations that you had that were just I had to stop and rewind them because I couldn't believe the arguments. There was a woman. I don't know. It was. Was it a transgender man that you were having a discussion with that was saying that there's no difference, no biological difference in the sexes? Yeah, no biological difference.

He said that the scientific consensus for the last four... Is that a transgender? I'm not sure. I don't believe so. He was a professor who taught transgender studies at the University of Toronto. And yeah, he said outright that there were no biological differences between men and women and that that was the scientific consensus. And he believed that he had the qualifications to say that

because he was a historian of medicine, which hardly qualifies as a scientist. Not that you have to be a scientist to notice that there are biological differences between men and women. It was very bizarre for me at that point in the last few months because I was under substantial pressure from the university to stop repeating my claim that I wouldn't use compelled pronouns to refer to people

because the university regarded that as against the university policies and also against the Ontario Human Rights Code, so also illegal. And as my employers, they're responsible for everything I say, whether or not there has been a complaint made, whether or not the consequence of my speech is intended or unintended, because that's built into the legislation. And believe me, that's coming your way, because this legislation spreads like mad.

But on the one hand, I got two letters of warning from the university for refusing to use these compelled pronouns, which I regard as the ideological constructions of radical left-wingers. And this professor went on the agenda, this Ontario news show, and announced publicly that there were no biological differences between men and women. It was like, huh, you'd think maybe the university would have had something to say about that, since they do, in fact, have a biology department. But oh no, that went by without notice. That was perfectly fine. It is. It's insane. It's such an insane thing to say. If there's no biological difference, then why are they taking hormones?

Well, that's a good question. Why bother with the surgery and the hormones, especially the hormones? Yeah. Because that's not, like, you could argue with surgery that that's cosmetic, right? This person, whoever this professor was, this expert in transgender studies. Nicholas Matt. I'm pretty sure that used to be a woman, or she, they. You're not allowed to say that.

If you say that, you're a bad person. If you say they. And they and them is the most reasonable of these pronouns, these alternative pronouns, they and them. Like you could say, if you know a guy and he doesn't know how to swim They should probably stay out of the pool right right well and say that you could use that in a non plural form Yes, and they is used to repair awkward sentences basically, but it's never been used despite the claims of the of the gender bender activists It's never been used for the singular and and we shouldn't we shouldn't we shouldn't

We should alter language. We shouldn't give up the distinction. We shouldn't give up the distinction between the plural and the singular. No, it's ridiculous. We need to know whether it's one person or more than one person. Do you think it's reasonable for people that are asexual, people that really are uncomfortable with the idea of being a man or a woman, is it reasonable that we come up with a distinction for that? I mean, that seems like it would be nice.

And this is one of the things that you've said. One of the things that you don't like about this is that you're being compelled to use these made up pronouns. And that if we as a society, as a culture, as a civilization sort of adopt a new phrase that you would be fine with that. Well, we kind of had one. We had transsexual. Yeah, but- I know, I know. That's problematic because it's not asexual. You know, transsexual would be transition.

And here's the other distinction. This is another important thing. Those aren't the people that have the problem with it. The people that have the problem with these pronouns, the transsexual community almost entirely, or at least, I shouldn't say entirely, but predominantly prefer the alternative pronoun. A male-to-female transgender person prefers to be called a woman or she and use the female pronouns.

It's the whole point. Yes. So there's some tiny fraction of the transsexual community, or we could say there's some tiny fraction of people who are identifying themselves with the transgender community, which is already a tiny fraction, who claims that they have an identity that doesn't fit into either binary category. Well, it's a proposition that I think bears some scrutiny to begin with, because I don't believe that the claims that that tiny community is making are coherent in any sense, because they say, well, you could be man, woman, or neither, or both. Those aren't coherent claims in my estimation. And what they're saying is, we don't fit into a category, and therefore we get to invent our own plurality of categories. It's not logically tenable. That isn't how it works,

because you get an infinite number of categories out of that. And that's what's happening already online. One of my favorite stories came out of an all-girls university in Massachusetts where a group of women, where they were trying to pick a president of the student body or whatever, and one of the girls who went to that school decided that she identified as a man. So she changed her name. And I don't believe there was any hormones or anything involved. I think she just changed her name. She called herself masculine of center, genderqueer, changed her name to a masculine name, ran for president of whatever the hell this is.

I think it was Wellesley. Yes, I believe you're right. She won and then was denounced by the rest of the class because now it was Wellesley. Yes, I believe you're right. One, and then was denounced by the rest of the class because now she was a white male. So she was a part of the patriarchy and she was a part of the whole problem with society and that she should not be allowed, or he should not be allowed to take that position, which I just... Well, that's a really good example. We've read it on air and I couldn't stop laughing. Right, right. Well, that's a really good example. We've read it on air, and I couldn't stop laughing. Right, right. Well, that's a really good example of the chaos that ensues when you start to blow apart standard categories.

There's a chaos in between categories that's made of an infinite multiplicity. That's why you see, too, with the LGBT rainbow, they're getting caught in their own metaphor. So there's an infinite number of gradations in a rainbow, and there's an infinite number of letters that are accumulating on the LGBT rainbow. And there's an element of clear absurdity to that. And one of them is, I believe it's Q+, that includes the other kin types.

It's like, well, the claim is, well, I'm marginalized. And then that sort of becomes normalized. And then there's a group right outside of that that says, well, I'm marginalized too. And another group says, well, I'm here I am, I'm also marginalized. And there's absolutely no logic. Once you've identified yourself as marginalized, there's no logical way that you can exclude anyone else who regards themselves as marginalized. And so the marginalized, the community of the marginalized expands and expands and expands and expands. And part of the reason for that is that people are, every individual is a multiplicity. And there's an element to every

individual that's marginalized. You know, so for example, it's clearly the case that when a child is socialized, there's pros and cons to that. The pros are the socialization turns the little beastly two-year-old into a four-year-old that other children can play with. And that does happen between the ages of two and four, if a child is socialized properly. Then what the child does is kind of turn into a clone of everyone else so that he or she can benefit from being able to interact with everyone else. Now that builds up a certain amount of individuality because kids learn to talk and they learn to play and all that, and it destroys a certain amount of individuality. So everybody sacrifices a certain portion of their peculiarity to become a socialized creature. And some of that's good and some of it's bad.

And we know that. That's the standard story of the rebellious adolescent against society for crushing their individuality, right? And there's an such thing as society. Everybody has to live on their own. Everyone is in their own subjective bubble, which is, of course, now required by this law. And society itself breaks down. And so you can't have a society without marginalizing people. Or you can't have a society without making everyone, part of everyone, marginalized.

And so then when you start to concentrate on the marginalized, it just grows and expands and grows and expands and grows and expands until everyone becomes marginalized. And that just highlights a real problem with quote mining, that someone is going to take that, you can't have a society without marginalizing people, quote, and put it under Dr. Jordan Peterson, this is what he believes.

Well, that's actually what Jacques Derrida said. The most famous of the postmodernists. That's why Derrida is such a invasive force. He said, well, you can't have a society without marginalizing. It's like, well, that's true. It's true, comma, but, dot but dot dot dot right but the fact that you can't have a society without

marginalizing doesn't mean that you shouldn't have a society and it doesn't mean that the only reason that society exists is to marginalize and that was derrida's claim that that's what makes him so he's absolutely pathological to the core, Jacques Derrida. And apart from his claims that all we do is trade power games, because that's another one of his claims, his other claim is that the purpose of

categorization, the purpose of society is to marginalize. And that's absolutely absurd. The purpose is so that we can all play a moderately mediocre but productive, homogenous social game. Is it perfect? Well, obviously not. Does it require the sacrifice of individuality? Yes. Is some of that sacrificed individuality valuable? Absolutely. What's the alternative? No society. Well, I don't think so. That doesn't seem like a very good alternative to me. Or maybe some sort of egalitarian utopia. Well, yeah, we had 100 years of that, and 100 million deaths as a consequence. And so maybe not that either. What we have right now is a flawed system.

What we have right now is a flawed system. But it's the best flawed system that anybody's ever come up with. And of course it marginalizes people. How could it not? You know, if kids organize themselves in a playground to play hide-and-go-seek, they've marginalized all the kids that wanted to play tag. Obviously. But that doesn't mean that they shouldn't come to a consensus and go ahead and play a game.

At least they're bloody well playing a game that, you know, pretty much everybody has access to. I think marginalized is a lot of times associated with oppression. That term marginalized. And it's not necessarily the case. And I think that society as a whole and civilization is sort of a work in progress. We're working all this out. We're working all this out, and that's one of the beautiful things about you being able to discuss these things on your YouTube page as opposed to just having to battle it out inside the echo chamber of the universities. You're able to express this stuff out in the world where people like me that are 49 years old and aren't in college have a chance to read this and see like, wow, what is this guy going through over there at the University of Toronto? And then you start to examine the laws and you start to look at what's going on here. And this egalitarian utopia idea, it's beautiful in its concept that we should all be able to get

along and everything should be equal. The problem is it defies human nature. It defies the 200,000, 300,000 years of DNA that we have bouncing around inside of our bodies that demand certain types of behavior. And I think it's so important that we discuss these things. And I think that society and civilization as a whole, this thing that is ultimately in this growing state, this constant state of improvement and objective interaction. I mean, there has to be some sort of discussion. One of the problems that I have with the so-called social justice warriors and with this movement is that they're enforcing a certain type of thinking and behavior, and they're incredibly aggressive about it, hence the warrior term. Yeah, well, I think a fair bit of that is grounded again in temperament,

which is quite comical. I mean, one of the things that our research indicated, research on political correctness indicated that this trait agreeableness is a good predictor of holding politically correct views, and also that being female is a good predictor of holding politically correct views, and also that being female is a good predictor of holding politically correct views. And I think part of the reason for that, and the warrior aspect to it too, is that agreeableness is a maternal instinct trait, roughly speaking. And, you know, human beings have very powerful maternal instincts. That's true for women and for men, because men are very involved. Male human beings are very involved in the raising of their children, which makes them quite different than many large animals. On the one hand, if you're very maternal, you're very compassionate and protective of those that are within your kin boundary. And you can try to include more people

in that if you want. And that's the political goal. But you're unbelievably hostile to anyone who's outside of that, that you regard as a threat slash predator. And so agreeableness makes you divide the world up into protected children and predators. And you see that on social justice warriors' Twitter pages. I mean, I follow a bunch of them, and I go to them, and I watch this. Incredibly supportive, ridiculously so, in terms of mediocre expressions, tweets. Oh, my God, it's so brilliant. And it's like you're saying almost nothing. And they're so incredibly supportive of the people that think along their lines and so incredibly hostile and this idea of shaming people that

don't agree with them, not interacting with them, but almost immediately insulting them, almost immediately marginalizing them, which is ironic. This is what you see constantly is like super supportive and super aggressive against people that have any sort of an opposing viewpoint. Yeah, well, they're all predators, the ones that have an opposing viewpoint. And that's how they define them. It's one of the things that's very comical about this, from my perspective, is that it's such sex stereotypical behavior, is that at the same time that the social justice warriors

are denouncing the idea that psychology, for example, might have anything to do with sex differences, they're acting out sex stereotype behavior like mad in terms of their persecution of predators and their protection of the kin slash in-group. And you are a social psychologist? No, no, no, I'm not. I'm a clinical personality psychologist. What is the difference?

Well, one of the differences is that personality and clinical psychology isn't a corrupt enterprise, whereas social psychology fundamentally is. It's been going through an absolute internal revolution over the last two years because of its own discovery that many of its fundamental studies and propositions are flawed. I would say social psychology is the most social justice slash left-leaning part of psychology, and its methods are generally appalling. They're not well documented, and they produce all sorts of categories that don't exist, whereas personality, I know it seems like a might seem like trivial distinction to people outside of the field, but these disciplines are quite separate from a

historical perspective. They develop quite separately. Personality psychologists are very, very careful about defining what they measure. And so, for example, I study the big five personality traits. That's extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, and under openness falls intelligence. These are very well documented. We can really measure them.

We can't measure them as well as we would like to. We've identified the biological basis for most of the traits, and we understand a fair bit about how they make people different. And personality psychologists have been very, very careful about measurement, whereas social psychologists are, as a general rule, very, very cavalier about their concepts, and that's led to a tremendous pollution, I would say, of the psychological literature.

The implicit association test is a good example of that. That's the test that's being used to assess people's unconscious biases, unconscious racial biases. And so, for example, if I showed you a bunch of pictures of black people and a bunch of photographs of white people, and then I asked you to associate a good or a bad word with the black people or the white people to respond after you've seen the picture. If you are white and you saw white photos, you'd be faster at responding to the positive words. photos, you'd be faster at responding to the positive words. And so they've used that as evidence of racism. But part of the problem with that is that you can't distinguish it from a

novelty response. So I mean, most people in a given racial group are far more familiar with members of their racial group. And the fact that they're more likely to associate negative things with racial groups that are outside of their racial group isn't something that can be easily distinguished from just a novelty effect. But they make wide-ranging claims about the inbuilt biases in people, and that's lent impetus to these movements that are racing through corporations across the United States and governmental agencies, where people are being subjected to mandatory unconscious racial bias retraining. And there's no evidence, by the way, that that works at all. In fact, the evidence that there is suggests quite the contrary. I saw this on one of your videos. You were discussing how preposterous this is on one of your videos, because one of the people that was opposing you was

actually a part of something like this, right? Yeah, well, the human resources and equity people at the University of Toronto have made mandatory unconscious racism training, anti-bias training, and they've made it mandatory for their staff. And I found that absolutely appalling. First of all, it's political re-education. So when you say mandatory, like this is something that you had engaged in? No, I didn't have to because I'm not part of the human resources staff.

But the people that they're consulting with to implement these sorts of programs certainly have faculty and students in their sites. I mean, these are trial runs for much broader rolling out of exactly this sort of re-education process. What's the methodology behind it, and how has this been vetted? Oh, I don't think it's been vetted at all. Like, if you're going to, let's say you want to put into practice an educational process, what you need to do is you need to measure the initial state validly, so you need to use multiple measures, and all those measures need to measure the initial state validly so that your measure so you need to use

multiple measures and all those measures need to say the same thing so if you're going to accuse someone of racism you need several different measures of racism and then you have to show that across all the measures it's like using different meters all the meters should read the same thing then you have to implement your educational intervention, carefully defined, then you have to do, you have to see afterwards if the consequence of the educational effort was a reduction in those initial indices, those initial measures, that sort of thing, when it's been done at all, has showed that educational interventions of that sort that are mandatory actually make racism and bias worse rather than better. But why let a few facts stop stop you because we already know from the post-modernists that

there's no such thing as facts anyways so there's look in canada here here's something this is one of the things that really makes me proud of my country our government has now announced that the judiciary in Canada will be selected. If you're going to be a candidate to be a judge, you have to produce a dossier that specifies your identities, whatever they happen to be, racial, ethnic, religious. And then the committee that's going to appoint you to the judiciary has to have undergone mandatory anti-racism and bias training

before they're allowed to serve on the committee. So basically, we've set up a situation in Canada where the people who select our judges have to go a kind of indoctrination that has no validity from a scientific perspective before they're allowed to select our judges. Now, who's enforcing this? Where did this come from?

The Justice Minister. The Federal Justice Minister. Where did this program come from? There's all sorts of people who are offering these programs now. It's become a growth industry. But what is their qualifications? That's a good question, right? None.

Qualifications. Zero. The eyebrows are raised. Yeah, well, there's no way of having qualifications for doing this sort of thing because it's not a valid procedure. So how do they... They're people who claim to be qualified. So they claim to be qualified. There's no way of having qualifications for doing this sort of thing because it's not a valid procedure. So how does... They're people who claim to be qualified. So they claim to be qualified. They come to the university and they say, I have a solution.

The university says, finally, just run with it. That's exactly right. And they just implement it because to question anything that would absolve racism is racist. Yes, right. Yes. And they did that in collaboration with the Black Liberation Collective, which is... Explain that one because that one's adorable. The Black Liberation Collective, isn't that the group that somehow thinks that white people are inferior because they don't have enough melanin?

Yeah, it was started by a woman who said exactly that. She's a black supremacist, and she said that the reason that white people are inferior is because they don't have enough melanin in their skin, and melanin apparently is this agent. Obviously, it's a pigment, but it's apparently this agent that transforms cosmic energy into wisdom. I mean, she's completely... You can make up your own mind about her,

and then the other person who started the Black Liberation Collective is a woman who used to work for the University of Toronto Students' Union, who is now being pursued by that Students' Union for embezzling $300,000 from that organization with the help of a couple of her cronies. Well, why let a few facts stand in the way of abolishing racism? Yeah, well, they also are perfectly willing to promote violent means of social transformation. And the university claims that it's in favor of safety, you know, because they've gone after me because my refusal to use compelled pronouns has apparently made the campus unsafe. But they're perfectly willing to take advice from the Black Liberation Collective.

And not only are they willing to take advice from them and not disavow them, despite their support for violent means of social revolution, they're also pushing equality of outcome on their employees. And the people who taught their mandatory anti-racism and anti-bias training program said outright in their training material, which I have copies of, that any institution that doesn't have equality of outcome as part of its characteristic at every level of the power organization is corrupt and should be restructured. But that pales in comparison to my refusal to use compelled pronouns, obviously. I just don't understand how this gets so far.

I just don't understand how no one has, there's no rational thinking involved in the administration and the people that are implementing these ideas. I just don't understand how it gets to the point where... Well, things get to terrible places one tiny step at a time. You know, if I encroach on you, and I'm sophisticated about it, I'm going to encroach two millimeters. I'm going to encroach right to the point where you start to protest. Then I'm going to stop. Then I'm going to wait.

Then you're going to calm down. Then I'm going to encroach again right to the point where you start to protest. Then I'm going to stop. Then I'm going to wait. Then you're going to calm down. Then I'm going to encroach again, right to the point where you protest. Then I'm going to stop. Then I'm going to wait. And I'm just going to do that forever. And before you know it, you're going to be back three miles from where you started,

and you'll have done it one step at a time. And then you'll go, oh, how'd I get here? And the answer was, well, I pushed you a little farther than you should have gone, and you agreed. And so then I pushed you a little farther than you should have gone again, and you agreed. And if anybody's interested in this sort of process, and this is a horrifying book, if you want to read about how this process works, you can read a book called Ordinary Men by Robert Browning. And Ordinary Men is about... Browning was interested in how the Nazis trained their... how they train people to kill, basically. And so Robert Browning studied this police

battalion. It's a very interesting book. So these were middle-aged German men. So they were raised and educated really before Hitler came to power. So they weren't indoctrinated Nazis. They were raised and educated really before Hitler came to power, so they weren't indoctrinated Nazis. They were policemen. And when the Nazis went through Poland and then needed to impose their brand of order on Poland, they brought policemen in. They brought this battalion of middle-aged policemen in. And their commandant, their commander,

was by all accounts a pretty decent guy. And he told them that because it was wartime, they were probably going to by all accounts a pretty decent guy, and he told them that because it was wartime, they were probably going to have to do some pretty terrible things, but that they could go home if they didn't think they were up to it. So there was no compulsion, you know, this wasn't a Milgram experiment or an experiment where you had to obey orders. The guy who was giving the order said, look, this is going to be awful, but you can back off. But the guys thought, well, I'm not going to leave my comrades here to do the dirty work, you know, which is kind of a virtue in a perverse way. And then Browning details how they went from ordinary policemen to guys who were taking naked pregnant women out into the

middle of fields and shooting them in the back of the head. And they were physically ill during most of the transformation process. You know, they started out by rounding up the Jewish men between the ages of 16 and 65. Well, you know, you can kind of understand that because you're at war. And then, well, then they put them in stadiums.

And then, well, then they had to shoot some of them. Then they had to load them on cattle cars. It was like one step at a time. These guys were having a dreadful time of it. They didn't stop.

They didn't stop. And so that's how things get to where they are now. I mean, no, they're not at that point. And I'm not trying to make the case that they're at that point. Well, you're one of the first people that's sounding an alarm, that there's a real issue with controlling people. There's a real issue with controlling dialogue,

controlling the way people communicate, and that these ideologies, although seemingly innocuous, they can take you down very dangerous roads. Yes, well, seemingly innocuous ideology, those words, innocuous ideology, those words do not go together. There are no innocuous ideologies. And there are forms of pathological oversimplification. And there are also clubs. I mean, the kind of clubs that you hit people with, as well as the clubs that you belong to. The advantage to me being an ideologue is that I can explain everything. I can feel morally superior. And I know who my enemies are. And you know what you're supposed to do with enemies. They're not your friends, right? You move

against them. And you know, we're approaching a situation, and this has already happened, I think, more in the United States than in Canada, although our countries are competing to see who can cross the idiot line fastest. You're in a situation in the U.S. where 50% of your population won't talk to the other 50%. That's not good. And I would say it's more pronounced on the left liberal side because they regard everybody who voted for Trump as essentially as an enemy. It's like, hey, people, that's 50% of your citizens. You might think about talking with them. You know, people you can't talk to, those are enemies. Well, ironically, I really truly believe that one of the big factors

in Trump's rise to power is that people are sick of this oversimplification and this ridiculous ideology coming from the left. Yeah, they're sick of identity politics. Exactly. And so they've chosen an identity politics that opposes the identity politics that they think is disgusting. Yeah, and that's just starting. It's just starting.

Yeah, it is just starting. That's right. Well, if you teach one side to play identity politics, de facto, you teach the other side to play identity politics. De facto, you teach the other side to play identity politics. And I've seen more and more people who are center people, as far as I'm concerned, pushed to the right because of the continual insistence

that by their mere existence, they're part of the perpetrator group. Just by being a white person who is somehow or another successful, you are a privileged person, you're part of the elite, you're part of the 1%, you're part of the problem. Yeah, you're part of the elite you're part of the one percent you're part of the problem yeah you're part of the oppressors yeah absolutely you're an oppressor by

being just just by person with a home in the suburbs well and it's also extremely annoying for people who've worked really hard and who've made the requisite sacrifices to become successful along some dimension to have that immediately attributed to their oppression. Yes. And it's not it's not obvious that that's something we want to do. It's like for the social justice warrior types out there who might be listening, it's like, do you, are you really willing to say that every single person who's accomplished something has done that as a consequence of oppression? That's again what the Soviets claimed with regards to the successful peasants in the 19, in the, just before the 1920s. It's like, well, the peasants weren't

emancipated. They were serfs until about 30 years before that. They were serfs. They were basically slaves. And some of them had clambered up to the point where maybe they could own their hut and a cow and could, you know, employ someone. Well, the Soviet claim was, well, that's all theft. You got that all because you're an oppress someone well the soviet claim was well that's all theft you got that all because you're an oppressor and so then the soviet intellectuals went into the villages and just imagine how this happened so imagine a village a small town where everyone knows everybody and there's maybe 10 20 people there who are moderately successful okay and so you can imagine that those 20 people have like 100 enemies at the bottom of the socioeconomic distribution. Useless, horrible people who are jealous and resentful about the fact that these people have been successful.

Okay, so now the intellectuals come in and say, property is theft, success is oppression. And then they look for the people in the village who are willing to move against those 20 successful people. Well, those guys at the bottom, those hundred resentful, jealous, murderous people at the bottom, they're just waiting for an opportunity to go kick down some doors. And that's exactly what they did in the 1920s. And as I said, they wiped out all their productive peasants. And then 6 million Ukrainians starved to death. They had posters. The Soviets produced posters in the 1930s that said, essentially, don't forget it's wrong to eat your children. So...

Whoa. Yeah, whoa. There's nothing about the Soviet... There's nothing that you can imagine that's horrible enough so that it matched the reality of what happened in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959. And, you know, the West knew about this too. Early, Malcolm Muggeridge in the 30s was documenting for England,

for English newspapers, exactly what was going on in the Soviet Union. Bloody intellectuals didn't admit it until the mid-70s. You know, with the exception of people like George Orwell. So... Why do these patterns repeat themselves? What is it about human beings? Well, we like things simple. We like things simple. And often, a simple explanation

is a good explanation unless it's too simple. But distinguishing between simple and too simple is no easy matter. We like to know who's our friend and who's our enemy. And we like the feeling of unearned moral superiority. Unearned moral superiority, that's the distinction. Why earn it, man? Especially when there's no such thing as earning anyways. So, and then, I mean, there's deeper and darker things that are underneath that. It's like the human proclivity to pull down those who have more than you. It's like these kids on the campuses who are claiming identity with the oppressed,

you know, somewhere like Yale. It's like, how in the world you can speak of oppression if you happen to be at Yale is beyond me. I mean, first of all, you're North American, which puts you in the top 1%. And then of North Americans, you're in the top 1%. So you're in the top 1% of one percent but yet you you want that you want to have all the power that goes along with that and you want to have the moral superiority that comes from being a representative of the oppressed so that's exactly what you want you want all the power and you want all the victimization at the

same time well yeah yale is a great example because Yale was one of, what happened with the Halloween costume debacle at Yale was one of the first videos that was released that made people horrified, where they couldn't believe how students were communicating with professors. Yeah, well, the student who screamed up a storm about the male professor, who was the husband of the woman who wrote the pro-Halloween costume letter, it turned out she was on the bloody hiring committee that hired him. One of the things she screamed was, who hired you?

It was like, well, it turned out it was you, because you were on the committee just a few years before. I know, and they took, like, that was absolutely appalling. Explain that to people that don't know what the hell we're talking about. Well. Explain this debacle, because it really was about questionable Halloween costumes. Well, it was about questioning Halloween costumes. Halloween costumes are, part of the whole point of Halloween is to have questionable costumes, right?

You play with death, for example, and decay and horror. And it's a time when the norms with regards to the expression of things that are outside of our normal behavior are suspended so that everybody can have a little celebration, as it turns out. Well, you know, campuses have got all upset about things like cultural appropriation. well, you know, campuses have got all upset about things like cultural appropriation. At Queen's University in Canada just the other week, they were going after students who were dressing up as Viet Cong, for example, or Mexicans. It's like, I just don't see what the hell's racist about dressing up like a Mexican. Mexicans have a traditional clothing.

There's nothing wrong with Mexicans. So why is it wrong to dress up like them? If you want to be Pancho Villa for Halloween, what's wrong with that? Well, you can regard that as an homage just as much as a denigration. It's like, why is that such a problem? But anyways, it doesn't matter because nothing's too trivial to be a problem to a social justice warrior and because they don't like to deal with real problems. And Yale went after Halloween costumes. So this woman wrote a letter saying maybe we should

just relax about this stuff and you know not don't put restrictions on what people wear for halloween but let people decide what is and isn't offensive yes and well and many halloween costumes are offensive that's the point but her letter wasn was really reasonable. Yeah, it was perfectly reasonable. It was like an adult wrote it. Yes. Yeah, and all hell broke loose. All hell broke loose. And she ended up quitting.

And I think he did. Did he leave? No, I don't think he left. I don't think he left, but she did. Seeing him bow down to this woman screaming at him, swearing in his face, was so disturbing. It was so humiliating. I felt so humiliated for him because she was screaming, this is our home, what the fuck are you doing?

You're not making this safe. And it's not a bloody home. The university is not a home. Right. It's not a safe space. It's not a secure space. None of that. And if that, when a university isn't a home that's not what it is it's a place

to be confronted by i would say often horrible ideas you want to learn about history you think that's going to be safe do you know what human history is like it's an endless bloodbath with you know with with a certain amount of hopeful progress underlying it. It's a horror show. And great literature is like that. And biology is terrifying. And physics is terrifying. And you want to be safe. It's stay home.

Stay home with your mom. Stay home with your dad. Don't come to university if you want to be safe. Don't even go outside. No. If the university is going to make you safe, then it ceased to be a university. So one of the things I try to do in my class, I have this class called Maps of Meaning, which concentrates on atrocity, basically, on Soviet atrocity and Nazi atrocity, mostly.

And what I try to do in the class is to teach my students that had they been in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, they would have been Nazis. And had they been offered the opportunity to be in Auschwitz camp guard, then maybe they would have leapt at it. And maybe they would have been in the sadistic, in the more sadistic proportion of the Auschwitz camp guard population. You think that makes you feel safe? It doesn't make you feel safe to know that Nazis were humans

and you happen to be one of them. So I think that educators that tell students that they're offering them a safe space are doing them a profound disservice. And you don't, I'm a clinical psychologist, and here's one of the things you do to make people less afraid. You don't make the world safer. What you do is people tell you what they're afraid of, and then you break it into little bits so that they can go confront them. You know, so maybe they're afraid of going to a party, and you break that down, and you say, well, do you know how to introduce yourself?

And they say, well, I don't really even know how to shake someone's hand. And so then you practice having them shake their hand and introduce themselves, because maybe they weren't taught by their half-witted parents when they were young, because they were ignored. And so then you say, well, maybe you can go to a party for half an hour, and all you have to do is introduce yourself to two people, and we'll call that success. And you build up their competence and their confidence one step at a time. And what happens, the clinical literature indicates quite clearly, is you don't make people less anxious by doing that. You make them braver. It's not the same thing.

You don't make the world and its horrors smaller. You make the person and their capacity to deal with horror larger. You encourage them. You strengthen them. That's what you do at a university. You arm people with arguments. You hone their intellect. You help them learn to write so they can marshal their arguments. You help them learn how to engage in intellectual combat.

Because that's better than engaging in real combat. You make them hard and strong. You don't mollycoddle them and make them safe unless you're their enemy, unless you're trying to devour their spirit. And that's what we have in the universities. We have the reign of the Oedipal mother, who's answered everything. He says, oh, just come a little closer, dear, and I'll protect you from the world. It's just like Hansel and Gretel's, you know, the witch in the Hansel and Gretel story. Well, my house is made of gingerbread. Just come in here and everything will be fine. Well, she feeds you candy to fatten you up so she can eat you.

That's the archetype of a modern university. When did this start? When did the trigger warnings, when did the safe spaces, when did all this emerge? Well, it has its roots in the student radicalism of the 1960s, especially the far-left radicalism.

It really popped up in the 1990s, in the early 90s, when I was teaching in the U.S. at that point. Which university? I taught at Harvard from 93 to 98, and there was a fair push for political correctness, especially in the early part of the 90s. But it got pushed back down and disappeared and went underground.

It went underground is more accurate. And then it's just come back with a vengeance in the last five years. And I think it's partly because we have all these radical left political activist departments at the universities, women's studies being at the top of the list, that have done nothing for the last 30 years. It's even longer than that now. It's almost 40 years, 30 years, let's say say have done nothing but produce a never-ending stream of ideologically minded counter-civilization political activists and that's all subsidized by by tuition and by the public purse and that's another thing we really got to ask ourselves is why the hell are we subsidizing revolution? Why are we doing that?

It's crazy. And it's dangerous. It's dangerous. What exactly is going on with women's studies that you believe is fostering revolution? Well, you go on their websites and read. Read what they say. I mean, first of all, for the women's studies types and this is uh what would you call it um false anthropology there's this idea that way back

when there was a feminist paradise uh and that would be like noble savage mode of living where everything was egalitarian and and uh women dominated It was a matriarchal culture. That was put forward by a UCLA anthropologist named Gambutes. I can never pronounce her name properly, but I think I got it. And then that was overthrown by patriarchal institutions, essentially starting at about the time, say, of Judaism. And that was all overthrown, and ever since then we've lived in an oppressive patriarchy and now that's what our culture is, it's an oppressive patriarchy

So they're pointing to one unsuccessful society that they believe existed or did it actually exist? No, it didn't exist, there's no evidence for it whatsoever, it's complicated but it's the telling of a kind of psychological myth as if it was history and anyway

so the basic claim is that Western civilization is a brutish patriarchy, and that whatever positive things it might have managed to accomplish were all accomplished as a consequence of oppression and theft, and that the appropriate thing to do is to restructure it from the bottom up. And they mean that. They mean that. They mean every single bloody concept.

And you can marry that with modern post-modernism and throw in a nice dash of Marxism and you have the ideological and motivated grounds for social revolution. Just go online and look at a dozen women's studies websites. Just read them. You can see what they say. They produce political activists

and their goal is to restructure the patriarchy. Well, what's the patriarchy? Well, the patriarchy is Western civilization. And what does restructure mean? That's easy. It means tear it down and destroy it. Why? Because it's a brutish system

that's predicated on nothing but oppression. It's nothing but a tyranny in the eyes of the radical women's studies types. Heterosexuality, that's a tyranny. Capitalism, that's a tyranny. Democracy, well, that doesn't even exist, and even if it did, it would be a tyranny. Everything's a tyranny. And so you can ask these, and what would they replace it with? They replace it with their own ideological utopia. Well, we've already had 100 years of that. We saw what happened.

Oh, well, that doesn't matter. That wasn't real Marxism. That's what the bloody Marxists always say. That wasn't real Marxism. It's like, oh, how many millions of people have to die before you're convinced that it's real Marxism? And I know what they mean by that, too. They mean, hey, if I was the Marxist dictator,

things would have gone a lot better. It's like, you should think again, sunshine. If you were the Marxist dictator, things wouldn't have gone a lot better. So, and if you're the sort of person that thinks that if you would have been in control, things would have gone a lot better, then you're exactly the sort of person who should never be in control. So, and it's resentment. It's horrible resentment. That's an important point, because I think this is something that you've said that I absolutely agree with, that I think a lot of this thinking and the way people are behaving,

it seems based on revenge. It seems based on revenge for awkward upbringings, social uncomfortability. It seems like there's something about the way they view the world where they want to get back at people that have literally done them no wrong. It's resentment for the burden of being. It's deeper. It's deeper. I mean, human existence is characterized by a fair bit of suffering. You know, we're limited creatures, and life is very hard. Everyone dies. Everyone you love is going to die.

Most of the things you do, all of the things you do will eventually fail. You know, suffering is a certainty and it's very easy for people to become resentful about being, about existence. You know, these kids who shoot up high schools and these mass shooters, they're

the perfect examples of people who run on nothing but resentment. They're out to kill the innocent because that's the best marker of, that's the best way of showing just how much contempt they have for existence itself. Why punish the guilty? They deserve to be punished. It's a lot more malevolent and vengeful to punish the innocent. It's like people are motivated to a great degree by resentment of being. And a huge chunk of that is manifested in,

that's the dark side of ideological possession. So I get to decide who my enemies are, and then I get to go after them, and I can go after them for every single thing that's ever been done to me that isn't good. And, well, a lot of that's just built into the structure of existence. Then they group up. They exhibit confirmation bias.

They all form some sort of a groupthink. And then they act accordingly. And this is what you've been warning against. And this is where I completely agree with you. And this is why I think the subject is so important. And I love the way you've outlined all the steps and the problems with Marxism and ideologies in general. We are dealing with this. These are the beginning steps of it.

And people who look at it now and they say it's social change, it's social justice, it's not. It's not. It's not. That's right. It's not. And this is not going to improve things. Implementing these policies will make things worse. They've made things worse every single place they've ever been implemented. And often they've made things so much worse that you actually can't imagine it.

And people don't do the reading. I've done the reading. I've done the reading. I know how bad things can get. They can get so bad that no matter how bad you think they are, you're not even in the bloody ballpark. Well, it's just so strange that these sort of courses and these sort of ideologies are thriving in universities.

And it's really disconcerting to someone who has children. And you know that your children are going to go there and they're going to be exposed to these ideas. You know, I think that the universities— Wow. A guy who used to teach at Harvard just says, send them to trade school. I think the universities—I think you can make a reasonable case that the universities do more harm than good now. Wow. I hate to say that. Well, there's also, this is a strange time where access to information is so incredibly easy.

You can get, you could educate yourself. Right. Seemingly endlessly online and with books and just, there's so much information available. This is not the 1930s. Yeah. This is not a time where it was difficult to get an education outside of a university the universities may have or the university which is like the repository of human wisdom and the attempt to expand that may have already moved outside the universities you, just because an institution calls itself

a university doesn't mean it is. And many disciplines have turned into ideological factories. And so where's the university? I mean, the university is where anyone wants to learn about their culture and where anyone wants to expand the domain of human competence. And a lot of that's happening online now. So maybe that's the future. The only thing the universities have now, I think,

that people can't get elsewhere is accreditation. But they're doing everything they can as fast as possible to make their accreditation valueless anyways. So, yeah, it's really, yeah. It's a terrible thing to say that the universities may do more harm than good. And I haven't come to that conclusion lightly. Well, there's also... And I hate to say it.

I'm sure you do. There's also a gigantic financial stake, the amount of money that you're... Well, and this is especially the case in the U.S. I mean, one of the things that's happened over the last 30 years is that the proportion of university expenditures that's gone to the administration has has massively massively increased and at the same time the student loan burden has increased and so what's happened in a weird sense is that the administrators have conspired to steal the future earnings of their students and then you can't declare bankruptcy so to me it's indentured servitude you can't declare bankruptcy on student loans right you. That's a very important distinction. That's right.

You cannot declare bankruptcy on student loans. So you think about that. You tell me what difference there is between that and indentured servitude. There's not much because it's the only thing that I can even think of where that's the case. Corporations can go bankrupt. Right. They do it all the time. Individuals can.

Individuals can. Businesses can fail. You can be deemed incompetent or not capable of paying your debt in every other case, but not with universities. Yeah, right. That is crazy. It is crazy. It's crazy because they were just trying to combat the issue where so many kids were defaulting on their student loans. They try to make you perpetually responsible for it or the idea is that these kids have to learn responsibility.

Is that the way to do it? By overcharging them for some useless education? Well, I would also say that it's not particularly useful to burden your citizenry with a massive debt as soon as they graduate at a time when they're most likely to take entrepreneurial risks. Yes. You know, you're not going to take entrepreneurial risks if you're so burdened with debt you can't get yourself off the ground.

Yeah, and we're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt with people that if you're lucky, you're going to make $40,000, $50,000 a year straight out of college. If you're lucky. So you're dealing with the amount of money that you would have to make if you didn't pay any taxes or didn't have any expenses. You'd have to work

for four or five years. Longer than you would actually be in college to get that degree in the first place. It's insane. It's insane. I would say, too, to the university students who are listening, like a lot of your professors are Marxists. Ask them. Ask them if they're Marxists. Read the Gulag Archipelago first, because you need to get your arguments together. And Solzhenitsyn won a Nobel Prize for that book and for his other writing and it was one of the one of the key there was a couple of things that brought down the Soviet Union but one of them was Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book and he demolished the intellectual credibility of of Marxism forever but you have to read the damn book and you got to get your arguments in

order you go after your Marxist professors ask them it's a difficult book to read. It's a very difficult book to read. It's a very difficult book, although it's difficult because it's so horrifying. It's not difficult particularly because it's impenetrable. In fact, it's an absolutely fascinating book in the same way that a terrible horror story is fascinating. But there's no excuse for this. There's no excuse for these professors who claim to be benevolent Marxists. Well, I think the way you framed it is very important. I think the way you framed it is them being compassionate intellectuals that are inclined toward this because on the surface, it seems like it's what a compassionate intellectual would support. Yeah, yeah. And it's the unthinking intellectual would support. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's the unthinking adherence to compassion is the highest moral virtue. And it's also, whenever you have an ideology, whenever you have these rigid, established forms of communication or methods of thinking, you box people in. You box people in and you control them and you get them to stick inside that ideology and in doing so you suppress people. It's so ironic that the people that are against suppressing are actually suppressing people through enforcing these ideologies and suppressing the marketplace of free ideas. You're not allowed to have free ideas. You're not allowed to debate these things. I mean, I've seen, there was that really famous instance at the University of Toronto where this one guy, I don't even remember what his book. Warren Farrell. Yes, what was his book about? Why Men Make More. Yeah, Why Men Make More.

Yeah, it was a multivariate analysis of the income disparity between men and women. He used to be a feminist activist. He decided to go look into the claim that women were making. I think at the time it was 70 cents for every dollar that men were making. He thought, well, I have daughters. I better go check this out and do a little bit of in-depth investigating.

And what he found out was that there were many reasons for the disparity. And perhaps one of them was unfair discrimination. But there were another dozen, and they seemed to account for more of the disparity than the discrimination. I mean, just the fact that men take the more dangerous jobs is a huge contributor to that, and it's not trivial.

You should get paid more if you're putting your limbs on the line. You know, I mean, I grew up in northern Alberta where a lot of young men dropped out of school and went and worked on the oil rigs. It's like, you go try that. Well, maybe you could do it. But, you know, the guys would lose their fingers. They'd lose their toes.

It was 40 bloody below up there, and they'd be wrestling pipe in the middle of the bush. I have a friend who does it. I have a friend who does that in northern Alberta. It's horrific. It is. It's tough work, man. And you're out in the bush for two weeks. And when you go outside, there's temperatures where you literally can't be outside of your truck for more than 30 minutes.

Right. You have to jump back in the truck and you're almost dying. And that was called life where I grew up. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Those are very difficult jobs and they're very high paying because people die. Yeah, they're hard work. And it's not a lot of women taking those jobs. No, and a good thing too. So this guy,

I'm sorry, what is his name again? Warren Farrell. Warren Farrell who wrote Farrell, who wrote this book, was giving a speech about this book, and the response was so unbelievably violent and crazy and aggressive and also ignorant. Ignorant to what he was saying. Ignorant and not wanting to debate the facts, but wanting to call him a misogynist, wanting to call this hate speech. Yeah, that's a favorite, man.

And I got accused of that twice in the last two months because I don't want to use these compelled pronouns. Well, the one woman in the debate that you had with the other man that I believe is transsexual. Yeah. sexual, the one woman who was trying to say what is the difference between not using those words and using racial slurs and hate speech to describe these people. The idea that that's a woman who's a professor, who's expressing it in that way, what is the difference between not choosing to use made-up pronouns versus calling someone generally accepted racial slurs, that they're trying to frame that as the same thing, is so intellectually dishonest. Well, the racial slurs are also legal.

So what's happening is the law is already such that not using one of these made-up pronouns is a crime, whereas using a racial epithet isn't. Wow. Wow. That's crazy. That's crazy. So you could use the N-word. Oh, it's legal, too.

Yes. But you can't use, you can't, you have to say Z-er. Yeah. You have to say Z. Ooh. Wow. This is crazy. This is really crazy. This is a bizarre moment in time where the preposterous nature of it is so undeniable that it's forcing a lot of people. And I applaud you for doing what you're doing and risking your status with the university, risking your support of your peers, and sticking your neck out the way you've been doing with your YouTube videos.

Because if you hadn't done that, there's a lot of people who wouldn't be aware of how insidious and what you were describing earlier, the creep. The slow creep towards pushing forward, waiting for you to object, waiting, and then moving forward a little bit more once you relax. Yeah. Because that's what this is. Yeah. Yeah, and it's been bizarre, I can tell you that. I mean, my son and I counted the number of press articles that have been devoted to this.

These are serious press articles. This doesn't count YouTube or radio or TV or any of those things. And I mean, the YouTube coverage has been, I would say, overwhelming. There's been 170 major press articles written about those videos in the last two months. And what's the general consensus? I mean, are they going with... Well, to begin with, in the first two weeks, which was the most stressful part of this for me, I would say, I would say the bulk of the of the press articles were were

ran contrary to my views and their basic theme was something like why doesn't the mean professor just play nice it was something like that but but luckily fortunately i i seem to maneuver past that I seemed to maneuver past that, and then people started to actually read the policies that I was speaking about and started to think about them. And one thing about the press is that they're actually fairly in favor of free expression, given that that's their absolute bread and butter. And so the tenor shifted, and I would say the overwhelming majority of press articles

apart from the first two weeks have been positive. Well, that's great. What you've done in your YouTube videos, which I think is an amazing forum, particularly for what you're doing, is document and describe in great detail the issues with every single one of these problems with no interruption. And I think that's one of the best things about it. The fact that there's not really a whole lot of forums that will give you the chance to express yourself. I've seen some of your videos have hundreds of thousands of views and there's not a whole

lot of forums where you can do that and speak for, I mean, they're all like an hour long, right? I know. I know. I mean, it's amazing. It is amazing. YouTube is, well, I started posting my lectures on YouTube, my classroom lectures in 2013,

and in really bare-bones form, they're just an iPad recording of me lecturing. I didn't edit in the slides or the images, partly because that's very time-consuming. But then I watched it for about two years, and by September of this year, it had climbed to about a million views. And then I really started thinking about YouTube,

because YouTube was cute cat videos, you know, and Justin Bieber songs for a very long period of time. But it's not that anymore. And that's probably been about two years, or maybe two and a half years. But then I realized that YouTube is actually a revolution that's as overwhelming as the Gutenberg press revolution. Gutenberg invented the printing press. And

because for the first time in human history, a lecture can have the same reach and the same longevity as a book. And it's a lot easier for people to listen. And the time lag to publication is basically zero, right? I mean, because you can do it live, I guess, as we are right now, or you can post it in a day or two after publishing it, and you have access to this insanely large audience. And the other thing that's really interesting about YouTube, with regards to my, especially the more academic videos,

is there's only one reason that people are watching them. One, it's not the production quality. The audio is okay, and I'm a them. One, it's not the production quality. The audio is okay, and I'm a good speaker, but it's not the production quality. The reason they're watching them is because they want to know. And that's something that's really cool about YouTube. And YouTube also seems to be quite skeptical about advanced production values.

You know, the people who are popular are often people like you, who are basically sitting there talking, and everyone's listening. It's like, oh, well, people are actually talking about something, and this turns out to be interesting. It's like the rebirth of genuine journalism. So, yeah, YouTube's a... God only knows what YouTube is, but it's a social revolution.

I believe you're right, and I think the Internet in general is this really new thing in terms of the ability to express yourself. I mean, it's only existed for 20 plus years. And in terms of human history, that's a blink of an eye. And it's only really been used, as you've described, over the last couple of years in this form. And I think it also is responsible, I think, for a great deal of the rise of the popularity of the social justice movement. I think it's a double-edged sword. I think these echo chambers and these people that do find these patterns of behavior that they subscribe to.

And I think that's a part of the problem with ideologies in general is that instead of thinking for yourself, you subscribe to a predetermined pattern of behavior and you lock in like, this is what I'm supposed to believe. This is what I'm supposed to enforce. This is what I'm supposed to side with. And you go with that. One of the good things about the internet is that it is potentially possible to see contrary viewpoints and analyze them in the comfort of your own home and being by yourself and looking at maybe one of your videos and maybe someone would come to you, and I'm sure a lot have, come to your videos in anger, mad at you, and then listen to your points of view and listen to how clearly you've established all of these positions and what you actually feel is the problem with these positions, in a very calm and very rational and a very well-educated point of view,

I think these people, they have the potential to be at least informed. I've had lots of letters, obviously, maybe, I don't know, 2,500 letters maybe to my email accounts now about this, I don't know, 2,500 letters maybe to my email accounts now about this. And a very large number of them, maybe 200 letters, 150 to 200, have been from people on the radical left who've written to me and said that they can no longer speak. Because the authoritarian types, the PC authoritarians, have got so controlling that their once fashionable position

is now being deemed unacceptable and and they're alienated and excluded i mean you see that happening with feminists like jermaine greer i mean jermaine greer who's been banned from campuses um she's not very happy with the idea that being a woman is something that's been reduced to a whim right because she thinks that there's more to being a woman than mere subjective choice. Well, that's no longer a tenable viewpoint on the left, and so people who hold that viewpoint, many of them are feminists, are no longer getting along with the, say, radical gender-bender activist types who've got center stage at the moment. Yeah, Christine Summers has the same

issue with that. She's a feminist, and calls herself the factual feminist and she pushes back against it. What her perspective is, is instead of embracing these false narratives and running with them as if they're the facts and just using that to reinforce your ideology, she's saying that does feminism a disservice. Let's look at the actual reality of the situation and let's look at it from a balanced and objective perspective. And she gets so much hate for that. The idea of being rational and objective. Well, that's because as far as the postmodern social justice warriors are concerned, those are just code words for oppression. There's no object. You've got to remember this with regards to having these sorts of arguments. When say objective and rational that's predicated on your implicit belief that there is such a thing as the objective and there is such a thing as rational and the radical post-modernists they do not buy that not at all

not at all as far as they're concerned that's just another power game on your part and built built into the laws like bill Bill C-16 in Canada now, and the same in the laws in New York City that govern the use of these gender pronouns. Built into the law is the idea that there's no biological foundation for your identity, and that it's all purely subjective. They built that into the law. No objective reality. No biology.

That's going to unfold over the next 20 years. Or not. I mean, isn't it possible that these kind of discussions and that your videos and then all the people that agree and all the people that are pushing back against this can have some sort of an effect on this movement? Or do you think it's inevitable? I would say yes.

I mean... Are you cynical about the future? No, no. No, I'm... Are you cynical about the future? No, no. No, I'm not at all cynical about the future. I am cynical about my ability to predict the future. Like when I was younger, much younger, back in the 1980s, I mean, I was very, very concerned about the possibility of nuclear war. As we all were.

Yes, as we all were, yes. By about the mid-90s, though, I realized that things were in such a state of chaotic flux that the one thing I could be certain of was that no matter what I was afraid of with regards to the future, that isn't what was going to happen. And so I'm not cynical about the future, but I do believe that we're in an unprecedented state of indeterminacy and flux, and God only knows what could happen. I'm not, having said that, I wouldn't say I'm optimistic about the possibility that the universities will reform themselves, because I think that, well, even with the free speech debate that the University of Toronto hosted, they did three politically correct things during the

debate which which I thought was really interesting because if I would have staged the debate and been working on their side let's say I would have said strategically speaking no politically correct maneuvering during this debate because all it's going to do is discredit us but that isn't what happened the university opened up by noting that the land on which we were having the debate was once property owned by the original Native Americans, which is something I find abhorrent, because on the one hand, we took it, and now on the other hand, we want to be friends. It's like, I don't think you get to have both sides of that moral

play at the same time. But that's okay. That's how the university opened the debate. And then the next thing that happened was that they announced that there would be counselors waiting outside for anybody who was too traumatized by the contents of the discussion. And then they closed, they closed by announcing the Trans Day of Remembrance. You know, and, but the reason I'm pointing this out is because it just shows you the fact that those things happened. They weren't even strategic. That's just how things are at the university. And they didn't even notice that people were going to turn themselves inside

out noticing that saying, well, God, this is so biased, I can hardly believe it, which is exactly what happened. That's how saturated the universities are with this kind of thinking. And I don't have any idea what can reverse that. Collective decisions on the part of citizens, A, to stop sending their children there, B, to stop donating money and leaving it in wills, and C, to pressure politicians. Like, in my wilder moments, I think, cut the funding to the universities by 25%,

and let the faculty have a war about what's important. And maybe what would be left over was what the university should be. But I really think it's, with the exception of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics ends of things, I think it's come to that. Don't you think that what you're doing when you're making these videos

is, in a sense, branching out away from just a university and teaching online? Because you are. Well, like I said, I think that you could make a case that that's where the university is. Because that's where people are going just to get knowledge. They have no other motivation. And this is a new thing, obviously. But at one point in time, so was the printing press. Right. And this new ability to disseminate information seems to me to be more effective,

more accessible, more reasonable. Yeah. And it's entirely possible that what we're looking at is the future of education. Maybe. It could be. It could be. I mean, I've been spending a lot of time in the last month or so also concentrating on video editing, and so I spent about 10 hours this week editing about an hour discussion with a Russian Orthodox icon carver, weirdly enough, that I'm going to launch in the next three or four days, and

we discussed things that are very image heavy, and so I've been cutting in a lot of images. And it is a technology that far supersedes what... I mean, I like lecturing. And lecturers can be very effective. But basically with YouTube, you can turn your lecture into a documentary. And then instead of teaching 100 people, you can teach 50,000.

It's like, that's a lot different. That's a lot different. And then it's up there permanently. Yes, and that 50,000 can grow and grow and grow. And as it becomes more spread and shared, also the discussions about it become more varied. Yeah. Well, more than 3 million people have watched some element of this in the last couple of months. And in September September I had about

9,000 subscribers that took me about two years three years to build and one of my ambitions which was kind of a tongue-in-cheek and comical ambition is I thought ha you know I bet I can get more subscribers in the next three years than the U of T has students and I thought well that's pretty interesting it's like all of a sudden I could have a body of students, let's say, that's larger than the entire university. It's like, well, just exactly what the hell does that mean? And the answer to that is, I don't know what that means. Who knows what that means? But one of the other perverse things that happened

while I was being warned and cautioned by the university was that my subscriber base grew from 9,000 to 65,000. So now I have more YouTube subscribers than the University of Toronto has students. It's like, so then I think, well, hell, you know, I could do a whole series on Solzhenitsyn. I could do a whole series on George Orwell. I could do a whole series on Elders Huxley.

I could do a whole series on archetypal biblical stories. And half of me thinks, well, if 50,000 people are going to watch each of those, and I can turn them into documentaries instead of just lectures, maybe that's what I should be doing. I couldn't write a book with that much reach. That's crazy reach. It's crazy. Yeah, it's revolutionary.

I believe that. I believe it's revolutionary. I believe that. I believe it's revolutionary. I believe it is too, and I believe no one saw it coming. And I think it's such a new thing that we're all just sort of starting to get a handle on how to use it and what it's capable of. Yes, well, it was like the internet was for pornography. Well, that changed quick. And YouTube was for cute cat videos, and that changed quick too. You don't know what the technology is going to do. Well, it's also, I don't know how much you've paid attention to virtual reality or how much you've experimented with it. But my good friend, Duncan Trussell has one of those HTC Vives.

And I put it on over his house. He runs a podcast and we played with it for about an hour and a half. And then we did a podcast. And I am thoroughly convinced, especially now with new phones. There's a phone that I just got called the Google Pixel, and it comes, you can buy it with this headset. You slide the phone into the headset, you put on this virtual reality program, and you're watching a virtual reality show on your phone, I mean, a regular phone that fits in your pocket, just slides into this headset, you could do not just a two-dimensional thing where you're showing a lecture and showing images and having a discussion and putting these images in the background or in the foreground and have the

audio over it, but rather you could have three-dimensional things where you could show a city, a village, a mountain range. You could show geometric patterns. You could get involved. I mean, it could be used for a million different things. And not just for entertainment, but also for education. And I think that's the next step, I think. I mean, it's an unbelievably fascinating new world. Well, you must be shocked to some degree at how popular your podcasts have become.

I mean, you have, I don't know how many people on YouTube have a larger subscriber base than you, but it's not that many. So, I mean, how do you account for that? And does that surprise you? It's surprising, but it's,this whole podcast thing is very surprising. But it's—the YouTube is only a small fraction of the amount of people that actually listen to the podcast. The numbers, the downloads are insane. Jamie, what was last month's numbers?

What was the— YouTube was around $12 million for the month, and audio is at $60 million. Wow. Yeah, and I haven't done— Like, I haven't played anywhere near enough with turning my online lectures into podcasts. You definitely should. You definitely should. It's, I mean, a lot of it you could listen to when you're in a car. Right. Or when you're exercising or that sort of thing. I know, I know. You're not glued to a screen with the podcasts.

No, I was doing some work around my office when I was listening to one of yours, one of your things on YouTube. And I found that it was just as interesting if I was doing some other things around my office. It's a very good passive, like podcasts themselves are a very good passive form of education. Yes, absolutely. Or entertainment. Well, that makes them different than reading, you know, because reading is faster if you're a good reader, but you can't do anything else while you're doing it. But people are much more naturally attuned to listening than they are to reading. Yeah. Because we've only been reading, really,

human beings have only been reading, roughly speaking, in any large numbers for 500 years. Right. Right, it's a blink of the eye. Whereas we've been listening for a very, very long period of time. And all this new technology, like, puts us right back, it puts us back into tribal mode, basically, except with this incredible technological enhancement.

It wouldn't be difficult at all to extract the audio from any of these YouTube videos and just start putting it online as a podcast. And again, you know, people could listen to it when they're in traffic, when they can't look at anything. Yeah. On planes, on the bus, you know, wherever you are, where you can just sit down and you can close your eyes and you don't have to be paying attention to it visually. Yeah, well, about four or five months ago, I emailed the University of Toronto because they have a kind of a massive online course branch, which they're toying with.

And I said, look, I've got a million people who've watched my videos. Like, maybe you guys should give me a hand. We should do something about this because I got a million people who've watched my videos. Like, maybe you guys should give me a hand. We should do something about this, because I've got a million people who are watching these videos. It's like, that's a significant number of people. It's worth attending to. But perhaps I contacted the wrong people, but I never did get a response.

But it's something I'm, well, I'm doing it actively right now, and I think the quality of my videos has improved substantially in the last month. And I really like doing the video editing editing although it's very painstaking but it's definitely the universities better be careful because they're dumping their content online as fast as they can they're going to make themselves completely superfluous and some smart person I've been thinking about this for 20 years is going to take over the accreditation end because you know all you'd have to do is set up a series of well-designed examinations online and only let a minority of people pass you have instant accreditation credibility it's like here's an entire three years worth of psychology courses

here's the exams you take them only 15 of the people pass. Why only 15%? Why would you limit the number? Because it makes the accreditation valuable. But you would limit the number based on, what if you had a much larger group than 15% that were effectively absorbing the information? Well, fair enough. You'd have to toy with the accreditation mechanisms. Well, fair enough. You'd have to toy with the accreditation mechanisms. But, I mean, part of the utility in accreditation is that it's inequality. If everyone gets accredited, then the accreditation is worth nothing. But wouldn't you just make it difficult? Yeah, that's what you do, is make it difficult.

It's just a proxy for difficulty. Right, okay. So you wouldn't necessarily be limiting the number. You would just make it so difficult that the number would be limited almost naturally. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Well, I think I'd probably make it, I'd probably, yes, that's exactly right. I wouldn't limit the number of times people could take the exams. That's a great idea as well. So as long as you hit threshold, I mean, that's what happens often, say, with, like,'re trying to trying to pass the bar or something like that.

You get to take it a number of times, but you have to you have to hit threshold. Well, Thaddeus Russell, who's a history professor at Occidental, he he's doing that very same thing. He talked about it here that he's building right now an online university and he is planning on giving out degrees in history through his online university because he's been teaching at universities for a long time. And he has a huge problem also with the politically correct movement. And he was speaking out against this really crazy story where these two kids, adults, got intoxicated and had sex. adults, got intoxicated and had sex. And because they were both intoxicated, for some reason, the boy was described as the attacker and he was being accused of sexual assault, even though it was consensual, completely consensual, even though they were both,

not only did she send him, she sent him text saying, do you have condoms? Come on over. We're going to do this. But because they were intoxicated, he was the one that was the rapist, which is insane. It's sexist. It's 100% sexist. That kid is suing, and Thaddeus Russell came on here and discussed it. But that politically correct ideology where, I mean, it's essentially, it's prejudice against men in that particular, the idea that So he's stepping outside of the university. Yeah, he's slowly moving. Yeah, Gad Saad is doing that at Secordia too.

Yes. And, you know, he gets 100,000 people watching each video. Yeah, he's been on here a few times. I love that guy. And again, he's another one who, like yourself, has stuck his neck out and spoke out about what he thinks is this preposterous movement towards denying facts, denying reality and forming these narratives that are based on their ideologies and sticking within this box and then seeking to find people that agree with it and reinforcing these ideas in this echo chamber. And it's just, for someone who's outside of it, like myself, it's a fascinating thing to watch. For someone who's inside of it, like yourself, it must be maddening. Well, we've tried other online interventions too.

So I have these YouTube videos up. But we also designed, I worked with some corporations a while back because I've done some consulting and I designed tests to help people hire better employees, which I still do. And in fact, I work with this company up in California called the Founder Institute, and it's the world's largest stage early technology company incubator. It's created 2,500 companies in the last four years, and we test now in 135 cities. But when I was marketing these tests to companies, they kept asking me what could be done about their poorer performing employees.

And I said, well, I didn't know because it's not that easy to, if you have someone who's problematic, who's troubled, it's not that easy for a manager to figure out how to straighten them out. And they just don't have the time. They don't have the time. They don't have the manpower. And they don't have the training usually to do that. But I designed this set of programs called the Self-Authoring Suite,

and one of them, the Future Authoring Program, helps people write out a plan for their life. So it helps them, it asks you some questions about six dimensions of your life, you know, your health, mental and physical, your use of drugs and alcohol, your wishes three to five years down the road for intimate relationships, for family, for career, for education, and so on. It asks you, what could your life be like three to five years down the road if you set it up for you like you were someone you were taking care of? So it asks you those six questions.

Then it asks you to write for 15 minutes about your vision for your life. You get to have what you want and what would be good for you. What would that be? And then it asks you to write for 15 minutes about what your life would be like three to five years down the road if you let your bad habits and your, you know, idiocies and your foolishnesses and your weaknesses take the upper hand and auger you into the ground. Because everyone knows about that.

And so it's like you get to design a little heaven to strive for and a little hell to avoid and then you write for then you basically turn that into an implementable plan that's the second part of the program we've used that with about 5 000 5 to 7 000 university students now mostly in europe at the rotterdam school of management and we've raised their grade point average of their kids 25 percent, dropped their dropout rate the same, and it's had a walloping effect on men and on non-Western ethnic minorities. It's moved the non-Western ethnic minority student population performance at Rotterdam School of Management from 70 percent below the average to above the female Dutch natives. And so the reason I'm telling you this,

apart from the fact that it's a very good program, and we did it at Mohawk College in Canada a year ago, and we dropped their dropout rate in the first semester 50%, and that especially, again, worked well for men because men are at more risk of dropping out now, and especially for men who didn't have good grades in high school. So not only is there the possibility for the net to provide tremendous dissemination of intellectual material,

but there's also the possibility for the net to provide dissemination of psychological interventions that have major impacts on people's mental health and productivity at almost extraordinarily low cost. So that's really been fun, too. Well, I think providing that sort of a structure and a framework, giving people the tools just in form of asking them questions. What would you like to do? Please describe this.

Please describe this. When you do that, you sort of allow them to help themselves outline what they would like to accomplish, which most people don't do. No, well, in our education system, our education system was designed in Chicago in the late 1800s to produce factory workers because it was set up when rural people were migrating to the cities en masse because their kids, first of all, were likely to get factory jobs, and second of all, if you were working in a factory, your kids needed to be taken care of. And so the purpose of the schools was to train factory workers,

which is why everyone's lined up in rows and why there are bells. It's a factory model. The problem with that is that now people's careers basically have to be self-determined, but that's never part of the education system. Part of the reason I developed these programs was because I realized this is the same course where I'm teaching students that if they would have been in Germany in the 1930s, they would have been Nazis. I'm trying to get them to design their lives, and it's way better to have someone

articulate their own plan. You actually neurologically rewire people by having them formulate their own thoughts, which is why, you know, your school teachers used to say, put it in your own words. It's actually very good advice if they would explain what that means. It's like, if you have to conjure up the thoughts and you have to articulate them,

then they change you. And so, well, and so this program has had, them, then they change you. And so, well, and so this program has had, the effects have been absolutely overwhelming for us as researchers, because it's very, very difficult to produce an intervention that actually has a positive effect on people. You know, you hope it does, but generally when you test it out, it's like, no, it doesn't do what you thought it did, or sometimes it even has the reverse effect. That sounds fascinating. Now, how do people have, can someone, a regular person have access to this? Yeah, it's called self-authoring.

So that's S-E-L-F, authoring, like writing a book, self-authoring.com. And the programs, I gave away the future authoring program. I think it might still be free. It was, yeah, it is till the end of November. I did a video called Message to Millennials, because one of the things Jonathan Haidt said about, he called Karl Marx the patron saint of the social justice warriors and John Stuart Mill the patron saint of people, say,

who stood for objective truth and freedom of expression. And I thought that was really smart. He said Brown University is number one for social justice warrior universities and Chicago for truth universities. But one of the things that Marx has over John Stuart Mill is that Marx is a social revolutionary, and young people like to think about ways to change the world, right? And that's actually a positive part of their development.

It's a stage that the developmental psychologist Jean Pi Piaget, called the messianic stage, and he associated that with late adolescence. It's like, well, young people want to change the world. The problem is, is that that's been harnessed into attempts to change other people. But that isn't what you should do. If you want to change the world, you should change yourself. And I don't mean that in some clichéd sense.

I mean it in the sense that Alexander Solzhenitsyn said when he analyzed the Soviet Union. He said, don't be thinking that the line that divides good from evil runs down a political spectrum or countries or something like that. It runs down, right down the middle of your soul. And if you want to sort out the world, then what you do is you sort yourself out. It's a serious business, right? They say it's more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city. And that's the truth.

Because you're complicated and there are horrible monsters inside of you that need to be tamed and to be brought into alignment and submission so that you can be a powerful and useful person. And I gave away the Future Authoring Program as part of this video I made suggesting to millennials that instead of rushing out there to change the world by changing other

bad people, that they should look inward and sort themselves out properly. And I think we've given away about four or five thousand of those programs so far. You said it's free till the end of November, and then what happens with it? Well, the future authoring program is regularly $14.95, and the whole self-authoring suite, which involves, it's a program that helps you write an autobiography, so it helps you sort out things about your past that are still burdening you. You can tell, eh? If you have a memory that's more than 18 months old, approximately,

and when you pull that memory up to mind, if you still have an emotional reaction, that means you haven't fully articulated the memory. You haven't analyzed it causally, you haven't freed yourself from its grasp, and you're carrying it like a weight, and your brain responds to that, like the more weight you're carrying like that, more baggage, let's say, the more of the stress hormone're carrying like that more baggage let's say the more of the stress hormone cortisol your brain produces and cortisol makes you old some of this work has been done by james pennebaker at the university of texas at austin because he he started to pioneer these sorts of writing programs and he found that if people wrote about uncertain things past present

or future so they could be traumatic things they could be uncertain things, past, present, or future. So they could be traumatic things, they could be uncertain things, that their physical health improved. And he did a lot of detailed research trying to figure out why that was, and basically came down to the explanation that it was something like an uncertainty reduction mechanism at work. Because your brain is always figuring out how well situated are you in the world? How much do you not know compared to how much have you mastered? And you can tell that you've mastered things

because when you go somewhere and you act, things turn out the way you want them. That's an indication of mastery. And your brain is sort of keeping track across your whole life of how many places you've been where things haven't worked out compared to how many places you have been where they have worked out. And if all those places in your past where things haven't worked out, you need to map and master.

And that decreases the existential load on you, but that actually decreases your psychophysiological load. It makes you healthier. It makes you less stressed. And so we put all that together in this self-authoring suite to help people write about their past, to sort it out in a detailed autobiography. It asks you questions about your past. It says, divide your life up into six epochs,

and then divide each of those, that might be, say, oh, birth to kindergarten, and then maybe elementary school, and then maybe junior high school, however you want to do it, and then to write about the emotionally significant events in each of those epochs, and then to describe their effects on you, and then to analyze how you did in those situations, what you might have done differently, what you might do differently in the future, to straighten out your past. And I've done that with my students in my Maps of Meaning class for about the last 10 years, and some people have written 15,000 words.

It's not that uncommon for students to write 15,000 words in their autobiography. Wow. That's such great advice. That's such great advice about reconciling with your past, because so many people just carry it around. Yeah, well, if you're thinking about your past, what it means is you haven't analyzed the causal change. Because you might say, well, why do you remember your past?

Well, you might say, well do you remember your past well you might say well it's in order to have an objective you know record of the past it's like it has nothing to do with that there's only one reason you remember the past and that's to be prepared for the future that's why you remember the past and so what you're supposed to do is take the past and extract out from it wisdom and wisdom is the ability to avoid stumbling blindly into ditches. And so you think, well, here's a time in my past I stumbled blindly into this horrible ditch and terrible things happened to me.

It's like, okay, you need to take that apart. You need to figure out how was it that events conspired with your participation, voluntarily or involuntarily, so that that terrible consequence emerged. You need to know why that happened and how you could react differently in that situation. And as soon as you do that, your brain will leave it alone. It won't obsess you about it anymore, because the anxiety-producing parts of your brain are basically trying to tell you where

there are obstacles in your environment. It's like, look out! Don't go there! Don't go there! It's like, well, don't go there, there's fire! Well, maybe you could master the fire, right? Then you're a wielder of fire, you're not just a victim. And lots of situations are dangerous or not dangerous, depending on your level of mastery, right? Life is like that. And so, a negative emotion that's associated with a memory is something that's crying out for mastery, and writing can

really help with that. So you're reorganizing your brain when you write autobiographically. You're basically, the emotions, imagine emotion, memories can be stored at different levels of your brain, some from sort of primordial reptilian image-laden areas that are very emotional, up to finely articulated plans for your future life. Well, you want to take everything that's negative and emotional and transform that into a fully articulated vision for your future. And that frees you of your past, you shouldn't be thinking about your past.

I mean, maybe if you're 80 and you're going over a well-spent life, that's a whole different thing. But if you're 30, 35, or 20, and most of the time you're thinking about your past, it's like your soul is trapped back there, and you need to free it through investigation. And the metaphysical language is appropriate, because that is, in a sense, what you're doing.

You're trapped in the past. It's like you've got to break free of that so you can use all your resources to move ahead into the future. Anyways, in these programs, the Future Authoring Program, like I said, has had walloping effects on people. That's fantastic advice. I mean, it's just so logical and it sounds so great. I mean, I think that's one of the gigantic problems

that a lot of people have with education, that you're learning facts, you're learning information, but you're not learning how to use your own mind. Yeah, well, here's something that's really interesting about that. So I spent a lot of time, I'm a scientist, but I'm also, I would say, I'm also a religious person. I'm a deeply religious person. How do you reconcile those?

Exactly. And I spent, literally, I've spent 40 years thinking about that. And for 20 of those years, I did almost nothing but think about that all the time. And I realized something, partly from reading Carl Jung. And what I realized was that even the fundamentalists have have the wrong idea about religious truth. Religious truth is not scientific truth, like the stories in Genesis, which are very old stories, maybe tens of thousands of years old. They're obviously not scientific theories because the people who wrote them weren't

scientists. We didn't have science until about 500 years ago, so the idea that the stories in Genesis are scientific theories is just false on every possible front. So then you might say, well, there's no other truth but scientific truth. It's like, well, wait a minute. That's not true. Because what scientific truth

tells you is what things are. But genuine religious truth tells you how you should act and those things are not the same and so a great story like a great novel which is a quasi-religious construction because it's it's like a distillation of ordinary life into its most important elements that's a map about how you should comport yourself in the world and And you might say, well, what do you mean by should? And because that's the question the moral relativists ask. And there's an answer to that, too, as far as I can tell.

And I got this partly from reading Jean Piaget. So imagine that here's how you should act. You should act so that things are good for you, like they would be for someone you're taking care of. But they have to be good for you in a way that's also good for your family. And they have to be good for you and your family in a way that's also good for society. And maybe even also good for the broader environment, if you can manage that. So it's balanced at all those levels.

And then that has to be good for you and your family and society and the world right now and next week and Next month and a year from now and ten years from now and so it's this harmonious balancing of multiple layers of being Simultaneously and and that's a that's a that's a Darwinian reality I would say your brain is actually attuned to tell you when you're doing that and the the way it tells you is that it reveals that what you're doing is meaningful. That's the sign that your nervous system is adapted to do this. It's adapted to exist, I would say, on the edge between order and chaos. And chaos is where things are so complex you can't handle it, and order is where things are so rigid that it's too restrictive.

In between that, there's a place, a place that's meaningful, where you're partly stabilized and partly curious, and you're operating in a manner that increases your scope of of knowledge. So you're inquiring and growing, and at the same time you're stabilizing and renewing you, your family, society, nature, now, next week, next month, and next year. And when you have an intimation of meaning, then you know you're there. And I can give you an existential demonstration of that. So imagine that each of these levels of existence, the way I just laid them out, are like patterns. They're patterns within patterns within patterns within patterns. And there's a way of making all that harmonious. That's what music models. That's why music is so meaningful. You know, you take a beautiful

orchestral composition and all the instruments are doing different things at different levels, but they all flow together harmoniously, and you're right in the middle of that as a listener, and it fills you with a sense of, it's almost like a sense of religious awe, even if you're a punk rock nihilist you know and the reason for that is because the music is modeling the manner of being that's harmonious it's the proper way to exist and religious writings in the deepest sense so those are archetypal writings are are are guidelines to that mode of being. So they're not true, like scientific truth is true. They're, I think of them as hyper, they're hyper true or meta true. It's like, we take the most true things about your life,

and then we take the most true things about 10 other people's lives, and we amalgamate them into a single figure, and that would be like a literary hero. And then we take a thousand literary heroes, and we extract out from each of them what makes the most heroic person. That's a religious deity. That's what Christ is. He's a meta-hero. And that sits at the bottom of Western civilization.

And his archetypal mode of being is true speech. That's the fundamental idea of Western civilization. And it's right. Now, when you say, when you talk about this harmonious frequency that's achieved, how do you reconcile all the stories that were, like, say, in the Old Testament that were extremely violent or they're ridiculous? Like, who was the guy that they made fun of? These children made fun of him, so God sent a bear to kill the children

because they made fun of him for being bald. There's a bunch of stories and ridiculous tales in the Bible that obviously have the hand of man on them. How do you separate those from the beautiful concepts that are outlined in religion? Like, you know, treat everyone as if they are your brother. You know, love and let love. No, it's very difficult because in the Old Testament, let's say, I mean, the Old Testament was obviously written by people who were deeply tribal.

Right. And, of course, we're also deeply tribal, and some of the problems that those people were trying to face, trying to sort out, was, well, how do you organize yourself within your own tribe, justly and mercifully, and at the same time defend yourself against the barbarians who constitute other tribes.

Well, that was the problem that humanity was trying to solve when it was amalgamating all of its tribes, a process that obviously still hasn't finished. And some of the ways that you protect your own tribe rapidly become horrifying, and so many of the stories in the Old Testament that have to do essentially with tribal protection are immediately horrifying. But there's also a developmental pathway through the combination of the Old and New Testament

that show, I would say, how that morality that was fundamentally tribal to begin with transformed itself over thousands of years into a morality that was fundamentally tribal to begin with transformed itself over thousands of years into a morality that was what what that transcended tribal distinctions and so part of the imposition of the new testament onto the old testament was the imposition of a morality that transcended tribal morality onto a morality that was fundamentally tribal in origin. But the New Testament, of course, was constructed by Constantine and a series of bishops. They took things out. They added things.

I mean, how... Well, it's not much different. Here's a way of thinking about it. Okay. So I have a friend who's a comic book writer, and I've talked to him a fair bit about archetypes in comics, for example. He was a student of mine at Harvard a long time ago. And the comic book universe is a very interesting one

because obviously these fictional characters were thought up by single people. And then the fictional characters were transformed into stories. And then the stories were sent out into a broader community. But then what started to happen was the broader community started to stay in contact with the people who are writing the stories. And so if you do something like write Batman now, there's a bunch of things you can't do with Batman, because there's been a collective decision made in the entire community of multiple writers and the entire community of multiple readers that

have decided that there's a core story that has a certain structure and certain elements. And so there's this collective process of imagination that's gone into constructing what you might describe as a heroic meta-narrative. And the reason I'm using that as an example is because there isn't a lot of difference, perversely enough, in the construction, say, of comic book heroes and the construction of religious deities. And I'm not saying that religious deities are nothing but comic book characters, or maybe I'm elevating comic book characters beyond the status that they normally attain, but if you think about this, for example, with regards to something like the construction of the recent Marvel universe, I mean, those Avenger movies are among the most expensive

technological artifacts that human beings have ever made. And they drive our computational capacity to its absolute limit. And the reason for that is because we're using that fictional space to lay out an archetypal and mythological view of the universe. It's a practice domain for modes of being. And I mean, in the Marvel universe, obviously Tony Stark, Iron Man, is technological man, right? He's trying to develop a real relationship with his partner, Pepper Potts, who's, you know, her own sort of independent woman, and he's attempting to use technology to build himself up into something that has the status of approximately a god, to transcend mortal

limitation and all of that So there's a there's a deity like aspect the growth of a deity emerging there And then of course Thor and Loki are they're not comic book deities at all. They're actual deities. They're the hostile brothers It's an archetypal it's an archetypal pair like Christ and Satan or Batman and the Joker or Superman and Lex Luthor and that's the good part of the individual against the evil part of the individual, roughly speaking. That's played out in these myths. And so that collective process that you described, whereby an entire group of people comes together to decide what the central religious text is, I mean, on the one hand, you can think

of that as the gerrymandering of a religious process. Maybe that's something that's only devoted towards the acquisition of power, like that would be a Marxist analysis. But on the other hand, you can think of it as the collective imagination attempting to build an exemplary drama that everyone can act out. And it's enacting out that exemplary drama that we are actually able to interact in a civilized and productive manner.

Like, look at this discussion that we're having to the degree that it's working. We're both trying to articulate our notions of reality. And I do that, and you listen, and maybe you have some comments, and then you do that, and I listen, and maybe you have some comments and then you do that and i listen and maybe you have some comments but together we're building something that's different from what we both came in here with right and in a sense what we're doing is we're participating in the process of articulating each other's spirits and i mean that most technically like part of your

spirit is an amalgam of the information that you've encountered. A lot of that's articulated wisdom. And so it's soul construction. If you're having a good conversation, and that's also a conversation that is meaningful, and you can tell that when you're having it, it's that you're decomposing parts of yourself, your false presuppositions. You're letting them die, and you're letting something new be born as an alternative, and you're participating in this process of death and rebirth constantly when you're having a meaningful conversation. It's like, oh, that was wrong, I'm gonna let that die, oh, that's a

little painful, I was kind of attached to that concept, but I'll let it go, I'll let it burn off, and a new part of you will emerge, and then another part dies, and a new part emerges, and that's this process of eternal death and rebirth that's part of the general mythology of redemption. You see that all the time, too, in the Harry Potter series, for example. At the very end of the Harry Potter series, Potter undergoes a literal death and rebirth, and that's how he finally defeats evil. These stories are deeply built into people. There's a reason that that J.K. Rowling became the richest person in England by, she's richer than the queen.

She got rich by telling the story properly. You know, and the second volume of Harry Potter, when there's the basilisk underneath the castle that turns you to stone when you look at it, that's everything that people are afraid of. That freezes you like a rabbit freezes when it sees a wolf. And the story in Harry Potter is you go underneath the castle to where the thing that frightens you the most resides and you face it

down. And in doing that, you free the virgin, right? That's St. George. He frees Virginia in the Harry Potter story. And maybe you half die because of that, because he gets bitten by that basilisk and just about dies, and then it's the phoenix that saves him, because the phoenix is the spirit of death and rebirth.

These stories, they come up everywhere. There's no avoiding them, and it's because they're true. But they're not true like scientific truths. They're a behavioral truth, or a pragmatic truth, or a dramatic truth. And part of the reason that our society is so damn unstable now,

and part of the reason all this weird chaos is emerging, this is a consequence of Nietzsche's observation back from the late 1800s about the death of God. We blew the metaphysical foundations out from underneath our culture, and the whole thing is shaking and twisting, and it's vacillating between the horrors of the extreme right and the horrors of the extreme left It's been doing that for 140 years and we're in the throes of that again We blew the metaphysical foundations out from underneath our culture And we need to get them back part of the reason that people are so obsessed by things like the Avengers movies and the superheroes and Harry Potter and all of that is

because and Star Trek and Star Wars is because our our collective imagination is trying to regroup at the level of drama and reformulate our fundamental metaphysics. I was reading this thing that was talking, they were equating CrossFit and yoga to religion. And they were saying it's essentially religion for people that have abandoned traditional religions. And they were saying it's essentially religion for people that have abandoned traditional religions. The idea is that what we're seeking is camaraderie, order, and discipline, and some sort of a shared community experience. So what you're talking about when you're saying your religion, you're not talking about a literal translation like a guy actually came back from the dead. like a guy actually came back from the dead, what you're talking about is the concepts and the thoughts and the harmonious frequency that is achieved when people follow the tenets of that religion

and live by these laws, as you were saying, of stacking on these ideas. Is this good for you? Is it good for the community? Is it good for the community in five years, in ten years? And that's what you're saying when you're talking about well your belief in love but the other thing about that is that like imagine that there's there's a pathological mode of being that's so terrible that when you enact you just die a good drug addiction will do that for you if you pursue that meth addiction pursue that for about 10 years you, and you'll descend to the lower levels of hell, and then you'll die, right? Well, so then you might say, well, what's at the opposite end of that? What would be the final manifestation of a mode of life that was revivifying

and healthy? How redemptive and rejuvenating would that be? And I would say the answer to that is that we don't know. We have no idea. And these ideas of death and rebirth are definitely true on the micro level. Like, so the developmental psychologist Piaget said, for example, that when you incorporated new information, however you did that learning or conversation, that that new information would exist in contradiction to something that you already presumed. And so that thing you presumed would have to disintegrate and die. And then something new would be born. That can happen at different levels of analysis.

So sometimes you learn something minor. And sometimes you're shook to your bloody core. And you undergo a descent into the underworld, fundamentally. Sometimes even a descent into hell. That's where you get genocidal and resentful. And then maybe you're lucky and you pop up reborn. Well, those exist as constant metaphysical truths. That's how

human beings transform. And we don't know the upper limits of that transformation. We have no idea what that might be. Because I don't know, for example, how healthy you could be if you were as healthy as you could be, if you straightened yourself out completely. I don't know what limits you could transcend and neither does anybody else. So we don't know the upper limits of the truth of these religious stories.

Now we do know what happens if you let go of them too badly. You end up with something like the Soviet Union or Mao's China. Which were both based on... I mean, they were atheists. Yeah, they were secular. They were, yeah, they dispensed, you know, for Marx, it was religion was the opiate of the masses. It's like, it's not like I don't understand that.

I understand that. But it's another one of those situations where it's like, religion is the opiate of the masses. Yeah, and it's also 50 other things. And you don't want to forget those, like, really we know for example, from anthropological studies, religious belief is a human universal. And the reason for that in part

is because there is a distinction between good and evil. And there is a distinction between good and bad. Otherwise you wouldn't do anything. Like, you're always striving for the good, I mean, unless you've taken a malevolent turn. It's a natural impulse in human beings to make what is better well it means we have an we have a deeply inbuilt sense of what

constitutes better and we're all aware of that harmonious state that's achieved in community well yeah the thing that's interesting about it like what one of the things that nietzsche thought was after he announced the death of god was that people would be able to create new values. And Carl Jung took issue with that. He was a student of Nietzsche's, and he pointed out, basically, that, well, wait a minute. Who says you can create your own values? You can't even get yourself out of bed

to go exercise in the morning. You're not under your own control. Maybe we could discover, maybe we could rediscover the values that we once held, and that's the descent into the underworld and the resurrection of the father. That's what happens in Pinocchio, for example, you know, when Pinocchio goes down into the depths to face Monstro and revitalize his dead father. There's a reason that movie was made in the 1930s, and why it was so popular. It's like, you want to get rid of your damn strings and stop being an erotic jackass.

That's what the story's about, is you go down to the bottom of the ocean, you find the thing you're most afraid of, you face it, you rescue your dead father from the depths, and you rise back to the surface with him. That's what our culture has to do. That's what our culture has to do. Now, when you say that you're a religious person, though, people automatically assume that you, especially in this country, the religious right.

There's a very dogmatic and very simplistic view of what God wants. And, I mean, it's lumped into no homosexuals, certain restrictions on the behavior of women. If you look at the Bible, and the Bible is obviously a reflection of the people that lived at the time where it was constructed, although even trying to figure out when that is, you know, it was an oral tradition for thousands of years before it was ever written down, written in ancient Hebrew, translated to Latin and Greek and Roman, or in English, rather. Well, there's always a tension in religions between the dogmatic element and the spiritual element. Right.

And conservatives, technically speaking, tend to marshal themselves on the sides of the more rule-oriented and dogmatic elements of the religion, and liberals, roughly speaking, tend to marshal themselves more on the spiritual side and that's because of the distinction that you were saying earlier about the the behavior patterns of people that tend to be conservative yeah it's conscientiousness versus openness roughly speaking and i mean the dogmatic structures are necessarily necessary the dogma is necessary because it conserves the structure but the spiritual aspect is necessary because it updates the structure and there's always this is necessary because it updates the structure. And

there's always this tension, and there's a tension in people. It's like, you have to believe things, or you couldn't exist, you couldn't act. You have to hold on to the dogmatic structure of your belief. But you have to be open for its update on a continual basis. And that's, well, that's basically what consciousness is for. Seriously speaking. Consciousness is the thing that attends to the unknown and to the anomaly and integrates it with the structure. And there's meaning to be found in that, too. That's to boldly go where no one has gone before, you know, in the words of the Star Trek writers,

something that deeply appeals to young people when they watch that sort of thing. But so what the fundamentalists are doing is they're trying to hold on to their tradition. And it's no bloody wonder, because if the tradition falls apart, you end up isolated and drowning in the ocean alone. But if the tradition gets too intense and restricted, well, then you're just clones in a prison. And that's these two forms of hell.

In a sense, they meet. If they get extreme enough, they meet. The hell of absolute chaos and the hell of absolute order. And the conservatives tend towards the hell of absolute order, and the left liberal types tend towards the hell of absolute chaos. There's some point in the middle. That's the line between yin and yang, by the way, because that's order and chaos. And the Taoists say, well, that's life. That's existence. Order and chaos. And order is the place you are when what you do works. And chaos is where

you are when what you do doesn't work. And no matter where you go, order and chaos exist. And your job is to be right on the border between those. And that's to live in Dao, that's to live in meaning, and that's that same place where all these things stack up. And so, well, and so with regards to religious tradition, on the one hand, you have to maintain the tradition. It's like maintaining the Constitution in the US. On the other hand, you have to be awake and alert, because the tradition is a dead thing, right? It was composed by dead people in the dead past. It can't respond as flexibly as it should to the demands of the present. That's up to you, and you do that with your vision, with your capacity

to see, and with your capacity to articulate. And forever, forever, really That the major deities that mankind have produced Marduk from up for the Mesopotamians and Osiris or Horus for the Egyptians and and Christ for the Christians and Buddha for the Buddhists these have these have been people who are noted for their Vision for their ability to watch and pay attention because there's nothing more important than the ability to pay attention Pay attention and Speak the truth your truth, and that's how you keep Everything stacked up in order harmoniously. That's how you keep the balance between order and chaos. That's how you articulate your being That's how you revivify the world. That's how you rescue your dead father from the bottom of the ocean

That's how you adopt your responsibility as a citizen. That's how you live a proper life. And a proper life, I know what a proper life is, because I've thought about this for a long time. Life is suffering. And suffering can make you resentful, murderous, and then genocidal, if you take it far enough. So you need an antidote to suffering. And maybe, you know, you could think, well, I'll build walls of luxury around myself, and that'll protect me from the suffering. It's like, well, good luck with that, because that isn't going to work. And maybe you could build a delusion and live inside that, but that's going to fall apart. Well, what is there that helps you fight against suffering? That's easy. That's the truth.

The truth is the antidote to suffering. And the reason for that is because the truth puts reality behind you, so that you can face the reality that's coming straight at you, without becoming weak, and degenerating, and becoming resentful, and wishing for the destruction of being. Because that's the final hell. The final hell is your soul wishing for the destruction of everything because it's too painful and you're too bitter. And that happens to people all the time. Now, as a person who is someone who's extremely critical of ideologies, a lot of people would think it's a contradiction for you to embrace religion because religion being the biggest, the oldest ideology of all. Ideology is a parasite on religious substructures.

You can't, look, we can go back to the Harry Potter example. That's a good example. I mean, J.K. Rowling had kids reading like 400 page books, right? She could fill a stadium when she was reading. Why? Is because she got the archetypes right. She got the religious sub-narratives correct. They're not ideologies.

Ideologies work because an ideology is a parasite on top of a religious substructure. And a religious narrative has a particular set of characteristics. It's very balanced. So, for example, there's the feminist idea of the patriarchy. balanced. So for example, there's the feminist idea of the patriarchy. Well, the religious idea of society has an evil patriarchy notion built into it. That would be the dying king, the once great dying king. You see this in the Egyptian story of Osiris, for example, who's eventually chopped up by his evil brother. You see it in the Lion King with Mufasa and Simba. Simba's father and Simba's evil uncle.

Those are the two representatives of the patriarchy, the wise king and the tyrannical king. In a religious story, properly set up archetypal story, there's the natural world, the chaotic world. There's a positive element and a negative element. There's the social world. There's the wise king and the tyrannical king. And there's the individual world, and that's the adversary and the hero. There's always a positive and a negative at each level.

And it stops it from being an oversimplification, because it says to you, well of course the bloody society has no oppressive patriarchy. But it's also the wise father that has taught you to speak every word you know. It's like you don't get to say only this part of the story without having gratitude for this part of the story. And it's true at each level of the representation, a properly balanced story has got the balance between positive and negative always correct.

story has got the balance between positive and negative always correct. Is that in many ways like a lot of people who are anti-Western capitalism are also the only... They will find that capitalism and Western capitalism in particular is the only culture that has embraced the acceptance of people like transgender people, people who are gay, people who are marginalized. I mean, Western capitalist society is one of the very few cultures that openly abhors racism. Right, right, right. Well, and these people are anti-capitalist on their iPhones. Right, you don't get to do that. Right, it's a performative contradiction.

That's so important. Yeah, they're on their iPhones while they're flying. Yeah, while they're flying. flying yeah yeah it's like i'm anti-capitalist it's like well actually no you're not you're just deeply confused that's what you are just deeply confused it's not capitalism that's the problem it's evil that's the problem it's well it's also the it's a deeper problem evil is a problem so there's a religious scholar named marcia eliada who looked at flood myths because there are flood myths all over the world god gets fed up floods everything it's like just like in uh new orleans so here's a funny thing about new orleans what caused the new orleans flood well a hurricane no yeah no how about human corruption how about the corruption

of of of the state how about the fact that people knew the damn dikes weren't going to hold? That the levees weren't going to hold? How about that they knew that for 100 years and didn't care? How about that they pocketed the money that should have gone for their repair? And so in flood myths, you always see two things. You see that, I'm paraphrasing, say, there's a storm, there's dikes, and there's people responsible for maintaining the dikes.

Well, a storm won't wipe out the city. It could. But if the dikes are high enough, then it won't. And if people aren't corrupt, then they build the dikes properly. And so God floods the world when the dikes have rotted and the people have become corrupt. And it's a very old story, and it's disseminated everywhere. And it's a very old story, and it's disseminated everywhere. And the reason is, well, we inhabit a social structure that's old and dead.

Our infrastructure has decayed. Our political, economic, and practical infrastructure has decayed. Why? It's old. Everything decays. Okay, everything's already always decaying. That's dangerous. And corrupt people don't do a very good job of keeping it in order. And so if things get old and decayed enough, and if people get corrupt enough, then God floods the world. Why? Because that's what happens.

Over and over and over and over and over. And you don't mean God in the literal sense of the word. You mean God as these are the consequences to these type of actions. You are not prepared for what you think. You could say transcendent reality. You could look at it that way. You know, and I mean, the idea of God is a very, very complicated idea, but you could say, if you were thinking about it merely from an intellectual perspective, is you could say that God is what transcends your knowledge. That's all. It's just, it's what you don't know. It's what's outside of your

knowledge structures. And there's a very old story, and this goes all the way back to the Tower of Babel, is that one of the things that characterizes authoritarians is that there's never anything outside of their knowledge structures. They make their knowledge structures absolute. So in the Tower of Babel, human beings build this structure that's supposed to reach all the way to heaven so that we can invade the place of the gods. Well, God has none of that. He just blows it apart and throws people all over the world. And it's a very early, dramatic representation of the danger of human hubris. And the hubris is, we know everything.

There's nothing that needs to be left outside of what we know. It's like, no, that's what God is. God is what's always outside of what you know. Is the problem with the term God? People think of God as being a man. They think of it being a person. They even use the masculine pronouns in reference to God. I mean, that's one of the funniest things about God is calling him a he.

Well, it's a problem. I mean, and that's certainly been a problem. Jung talked about that a lot, about the exclusion of the feminine within the domains of classic Judeo-Christian thought, for example. I mean, you have Mary, who's a kind of a quasi-deity, who pops in sort of like as a

fourth member of the Trinity, but the exclusion of the feminine is definitely a conceptual problem. Is the fact that God is conceptualized as a human being or as a man a problem? It's a problem and a solution. I mean, if you remove the human element of God, then God gets so abstract that it's easy for him to float off into space and to never show up again. You lose the human connection. I mean, the way the Catholics solve that to some degree is that they have God who's sort of at the top of the hierarchy,

and then they have this hierarchy of saints who are sort of like gods, but half human, and then they have human beings at the bottom. And that allows for a, what would you say, a continual chain of communication between the highest level of abstraction and the actual, you know, the actual concrete person. But the other thing that's useful about the conceptualization of God in anthropomorphic terms is that, and this is worth noting, is there is nothing more complex in the cosmos than a human being.

So if you're looking for something to represent the ultimate in complexity, it's hard to beat a human being. So your brain is ungodly complicated, so to speak. So, I mean, these things are obviously too complicated to unpack in a, in a, in a... Yeah, I didn't expect us to even get into this conversation, but I'm glad we did. Do you think that these stories exist because somewhere in our code, somewhere in our very being, we understand that there is a need for this order to find this frequency? Oh, sure. They're an expression of our deepest being.

They're an expression of how it is that we must live in order to live. In order to reach our full potential. Even more than that. More than that. Even more than that. More than that. Even to avoid hell. And you can think about hell as Nazi Germany, if you want. You can think about it as the Soviet Gulag Archipelago or Mao's Cultural Revolution. Like, we can get there, no problem.

If you walk down in some of the seedier areas in L.A., you'll see people in hell, no problem. Sure, go to Skid Row. Yes, yes, and you can tell when those people are there because they will get angry if you look at them. And you'll walk a big berth around them. You're not going to come within 10 feet of the,

let's call it, psychogeography of their existence. Right, and they're in a place. It's a metaphysical place, but it's not defined by the damn geography. Right. You know, Skid Row is as much of a psychological

place as it is a physical place. In fact, it's more a psychological place, but that doesn't make it any less a place. And if you're descend into the hell of Skid Row deep enough, you'll get to the point where most of your thoughts are murderous and that's like that's that's hell as a suburb of the underworld fundamentally those that place exists people visit it all the time and sometimes they don't get out

it's real i've been discussing this a lot recently because people like to talk about the concept of apocalypse, that we're headed towards an impending apocalypse. And my thought is that apocalypse is already here. It's just not right here. Yeah, it's always here. Go to Liberia. Go to Liberia and look at people defecating in the streets and eating human flesh. I mean, I don't know if you've ever seen the vice piece on Liberia, but it's unbelievably terrifying how people live there. The apocalypse is an archetypal idea, and the apocalypse is always here.

And it's here at the micro level. When we have a discussion and our concepts change, those are micro-apocalypses. Little bits of our being are being blown apart and restructured, and that can happen at a small scale or a large scale, or it can get to the point where everything collapses and and is destroyed and life is apocalyptic in that matter because we all get sick we all die you know our families are vulnerable there's an apocalyptic element to being and we and we have to face that and confront it and deal with it properly and and the wrong way to deal with it is to is to is to generate more hell than heaven i suppose and and to do that consciously and people do that all

the time too there's never a situation that's so bad that there isn't something you can do to make it worse and there's very seldomly a time when you're not motivated at some level of your being to put the knife in and twist it just one more quarter turn people are like that and we have reason life is hard it's no wonder people get corrupted by it it's not an easy thing to to live in a it's not an easy thing to live, let's say, in a truthful manner. But the alternative, the alternative is hell. I mean, part of the reason that I made these videos to begin with was because, you know, I learned a lot about the importance of spoken truth as the countervailing

force against tyranny and authoritarianism. It isn't an alternative political structure. That's the countervailing force It's it's this it's spoken truth. That's the countervailing force It's like well, why would I put my job on the line to have an opinion about compelled pronouns? I know why Because the ability to speak your truth is the bulwark against hell and Losing your job? That's nothing. That's nothing compared to where things can go when they go badly. For me, it was just preventative.

It's like, this isn't going in a good direction. Well, should you take a risk? It's like, you don't have that choice. You're silent? That's a risk. Now, most people don't understand the risks of silence. I happen to understand the risks of silence because I've been studying them for 40 years. Is it frustrating for you to get so little support

for these actions and for your protests? Well, I wouldn't say that that's what happened and i don't mean so little support because you get a lot of support outside of the outside of the university it's okay it doesn't matter where the support comes from like i mean it's it's disappointing in the same way that it's disappointing for me to say i think the universities now do more harm than good. That's disappointing. But it doesn't, it's not surprising to me. It isn't as if intellectuals are characterized by an intrinsic moral superiority. Oh, they're smart, so they'll leap to the defense of what's right. It's like, no, there's no evidence for that.

Intelligence and moral wisdom aren't the same thing. And if you're corrupt and smart, all that makes you is way more treacherous. It doesn't make you less likely to be corrupt. It just makes you much more, you're 50 snakes instead of two, or you're 56 headed snakes instead of two. Like I've had clients who were,

who had very serious personality disorders, who were very intelligent. It's like, that's not necessarily a good thing for them. They're just better at arguing for their pathology to themselves. That is a real problem where people automatically assume that intelligent people are going to be healthy. Yeah, well, they're healthy in that often they do better in the world, you know, because their skills are more marketable and so on. But there's no evidence that there's any relationship between intelligence and morality. I mean, God, let me tell you a story, man.

One time I had this client. This woman was just ruined. She looked like a street person, you know, and she had very dirty clothes. And she was so shy that she couldn't even approach you. She had to shield her eyes from you as if you were emitting light and she did that to everyone on the street like she was bent over and and and and humble like a like a chinese peasant brought before the emperor you know and uh one of the things i was doing with her in behavior therapy was trying to just get her to

present herself in a more normal manner so that people wouldn't shy away from her and, you know, be instantly prejudiced towards her. And she'd come to the behavior therapy clinic. And she wasn't bright, this woman. I think she had only had like a seventh grade education. She was quite intellectually impaired. And she lived with her sick aunt who was schizophrenic and who had like a satanically possessed alcoholic

boyfriend that was always tormenting my client she lived in absolute hell but she had this dog and she used to take it out and walk the dog all the time and then she she'd actually come to the behavior therapy clinic partly because of her own problem but but she'd come to this place called the douglas hospital and she'd come to this place called the Douglas Hospital, and she'd been an inpatient in the Douglas Hospital, and in the Douglas Hospital, there were these long-term psychiatric clients, and they looked like something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting or Dante's Inferno. I mean, these people were, this is way worse than one flew over the cuckoo's nest. These people were seriously destroyed, and they couldn't be let back out in

the streets during deinstitutionalization. Like, they were lifers, and they couldn't be let back out on the streets during deinstitutionalization. Like, they were lifers. And she had decided that part of the reason she wanted to come to the hospital was because she had been institutionalized there, and she thought that maybe when she took her dog out for a walk, she could go and get one of those damn inmates and take them out for a walk too. Now, that was a person who was immoral, dumb as a post, just screwed in 50 different directions nothing going for her and she had the bloody moral capacity to decide that

there was someone worse off than her and believe me that wasn't easy to find and that maybe she could do them some good if if the hospital would let her which they didn't by the way yeah well that's the story of the soul. That's not the intellect, that's for sure. So I didn't expect any support from my colleagues. And it isn't that I don't care if I got it, but in some sense it's irrelevant. It's irrelevant to me,

because my goal was, I'm not saying those goddamn pronouns. And the reason I'm not saying them is because they're made up by left-wing ideologues. And I don't like left-wing ideology. I don't like ideology, period. And I know where corruption of speech leads, and I'm not going there. And you know, corruption of speech leads, and I'm not going there. And, you know, one of the things I tried to learn when I was taking apart what happened in Auschwitz and trying to put myself in the position of an Auschwitz camp guard,

which, by the way, you can do if you use your imagination a bit. I wouldn't call it exactly the world's most pleasant meditative experience, but you can call up parts of yourself that would be capable of taking someone who just got off a transport train and having them carry a hundred pound sack of wet salt from one side of the camp compound to the other and back. You can conjure that part of yourself up if you want, and that'll teach you something about what you're like. People don't do it because it's too frightening. But I know perfectly well that I could do that sort of thing. And so once I learned that I could do that sort of thing, and maybe that I could even enjoy it,

I thought, okay, fine, I get it. I'm going to see if I can figure out how to live so that if that opportunity was presented to me, I wouldn't take it. And I think that's the lesson that people need to learn from the 20th century. It's like, that's what human beings did, okay? Well, we're all human, okay?

So how is it that we should live so that we don't do that again? Well, part of that is to try to say the truth, no matter what, because the alternative is worse, and it is worse. The truth no matter what, and that is the real problem that you see with being forced into using these made up pronouns. Yeah, absolutely. It's my language.

I'll take responsibility for what I say. I am not saying your words. And being compelled to say your words by law. Well, that takes it past the point of absurdity to the point of tyranny in my estimation. And I've seen some criticisms where people are saying, you know, he's talking about this, but really he's grandstanding because no one's doing anything legally, but the potential exists. Oh, that's such rubbish. But that is one of the arguments. Yes. They wouldn't have changed the damn criminal. They put it in the hate speech category

and altered the criminal code. It's as simple as that. And then you could say, well, no, we didn't really mean it. It's like, oh, yeah, you did. You really meant it. Two of the social justice warriors that have debated me the last two months accused me directly of hate speech. All I had to do was poke them a tiny bit, and they came right out with it. And then the university's legal team reviewed everything I said

carefully, believe me, and they decided that, oh, it was not only illegal to not use these compelled pronouns, it was probably illegal to make a video saying that I wouldn't use them. Because otherwise, why would they write me a warning letter and tell me that I violated university policy on the Ontario Human Rights Act? I Think they did that lightly? Have they acted on this at all? Well, they've acted in that they sent me two warning letters and told me to stop talking. But you don't. The idea that I was going to be teaching in January again,

because I teach all my undergraduate courses from January to May, that was on the table. And I think the only reason that it hasn't happened, one of the reasons it hasn't happened, and I'm not attributing nothing but malevolence to the university administration, because obviously it's very complicated, and they did agree to host the debate, for example,

but the idea that I wouldn't be teaching in January, and still might not be, is by no means. That was a perfectly plausible outcome. And had this not caused a firestorm, much of which has emerged in support of me, then I would say there was a 50-50 chance that I would have had my teaching privileges revoked.

It's happened to other professors. So the idea that I'm making it like that this is a tempest in a teapot, it's like, yeah, okay, fine. Why'd you change the criminal code then? And why'd you put it under the hate speech laws? Exactly. So, no, doesn't wash. And the fundamental proof of that is the university's response,

because for sure their legal team crafted those letters. You know, it was like, recalalcitrant employee you're responsible for them okay what do you do with the recalcitrant employee you write them a letter telling them what they're doing wrong and asking them to stop then if they don't stop you write them a second letter that's more strongly worded then if they don't stop you write them a third letter even more strongly worded then you take disciplinary action. That's like HR 101. That's how you do it. So here we sit at the end of November, closing on December, you're literally a bit more than a month away, and you don't know whether or not you're teaching your courses in it seems highly probable that I'll be teaching them. I wouldn't say it's certain, but if I'm teaching them,

it's because the cost of having me not teach them would now be too high. It's not because the university believes that what I'm doing is either necessary or acceptable. If someone who's listening to this or watching this feels compelled to act out in your support, how can they do that? I think they could do the future authoring exercise. And that that would be the best way to act out in your support? Yes, and I'm dead serious about this.

It's like sort yourself out. Sort yourself out before you try to figure out the world. And that's the primary objective. That's your most important thing that you can do. Sort yourself out. Sort yourself out and marshal your arguments and put yourself in order so that when someone pushes you a little farther than you should go, you can say no. And you know what's going on now. I think that's outstanding advice. That's very,

very important advice. And I think this has been one of my favorite podcasts ever. I really appreciate you coming on. I appreciate everything you've done. I appreciate you having the courage to stick your neck out. and I appreciate also your incredibly well-thought-out arguments for those actions. So thank you. Thank you. How do people get a hold of your YouTube page? What is your YouTube page? What's the address?

Jordan Peterson Videos. Jordan Peterson Videos on YouTube. And do you use Twitter? I know I put your Twitter page up, but you use it? Yep. And that is Jordan... Jordan B. Peterson. B. Peterson.

Yep. Okay. Thank you, sir. Really, really appreciate it. It was an honor. Thank you. Thanks for the invitation. See ya.