The Joe Rogan Experience - #958 - Jordan Peterson

Episode Date: May 9, 2017

Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist and tenured professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. All Dr. Peterson's self-improvement writing programs at www.selfauthoring.com 20% off for Rogan listeners until June: code joerogan Dr. Peterson's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/JordanPetersonVideos Support Dr. Peterson's work at www.patreon.com/jordanbpeterson

two one boom welcome back mr. Peterson thank you how are you not too bad how are you doing doing good man you look like a man who is dealing with a considerable amount of stress but is handling it well yeah well I hope that's true. I think the first part of it's true. I hope the second part is true. I read that you were denied a grant for the first time in your history as an academic. Yes.

And you think this is all based on your outspoken and very public denouncing of the political correctness and of all this stuff that you've been going through over the past more than a year now? I don't know, because I haven't got the full commentary on the grant yet. I only found out that it was denied, and it takes the granting agency a while to send out the full report. I've heard from other people. I know some other people who I would consider relatively high- researchers who also didn't get funded this round. So there might be multiple reasons, but I can't help suspect that the fact that the grant application concentrated on delineating the personality characteristics of politically correct belief might have had

something to do with it. Still, still a taboo subject. It's fascinating that thinking and pondering and examining certain types of behavior would still be a taboo subject. Yeah, it is amazing, all right, and becoming more taboo all the time, I would say. I don't think the universities have, I think they're getting worse still, and it'll be a while before they get better. I shouldn't say that so globally, but it's certainly the case with the humanities and much of the social sciences. Well, it seems globally. I mean, not necessarily in terms of all the different subjects, but certainly in terms

of what you teach and what you're involved in. And it just, it's so, I mean, I hate to use the word, but it's so regressive to put restrictions on the examining of thinking in a university. I mean, it's kind of crazy. I mean, what you went through in one of your most recent public speeches where they allowed these kids to be in the room with you with bullhorns and they were screaming. Jamie, see if you can find the video of that. What was the name? McMaster. That was McMaster University. Yeah. And you were giving your speech and there were supposed to be some other people involved. They backed out and you decided to continue on. So you're standing there in front of these people that were there to hear you talk. And there's a group of kids with bullhorns, like literally, and shouting and yelling and chanting

with signs in the room, just completely disrupting what you're doing. And they allowed this all to happen. Air horns as well. So yeah, they were blowing air horns quite close to me. That was the one thing I really objected to because air horns actually happened to be quite loud. close to me. That was the one thing I really objected to because air horns actually happen to be quite loud. No, not like that. It's actually an assault on your ears. It's very bad for your hearing. You're not supposed to be in a room with those

without hearing protection. They're supposed to be for scary things. Play some of this, Jamie, so we can hear how crazy it is. I'm a psychologist. Once you start to regard yourself as a human being... So they're yelling, shut him down, no freedom for hate speech. And the hate speech thing has like the prince symbol meets some sort of Martian language. Like what the fuck is that that they have on that? No freedom for hate speech. I guess it's a polygender symbol of some sort.

There's a fist in it. But one of the things that was really not so good about all of that was that a lot of the people who were protesting were standing behind a hammer and sickle banner, which just absolutely amazes me because I still haven't been able to quite figure this out. I can't figure out why you couldn't do that with a Nazi symbol, but you can do that with a hammer and sickle. You know, there's a reason, and maybe it's because

the Nazi doctrine was so explicitly racist, but God, it's not like the hammer and sickle wasn't equally murderous, or actually quite profoundly more murderous as it turned out. So, and how people cannot still know that is beyond me. And to rally behind a banner like that without realizing what they're doing or even worse, realizing it and still organizing themselves behind it. Did you ask him? And then to complain about hate speech. No, there's no real communicating

with people who are demonstrating like that. They're in a kind of trance, you know. And I went up to try to talk to a couple of them. But when you look at people who are in that state of mind, they're not looking at you as if you're a human being. You know, you're the target of their conceptualizations. You're the realization of their conceptualizations. Of course, they didn't listen to anything I said. Well, hardly anyone did, although I got to talk outside because I took everybody outside and then spoke out there for a while. And when you were outside, were there still yelling and bullhorns and the whole deal? Oh, yeah, but what happened, I went outside and I stood on a couple of benches.

a couple of benches, and the people that wanted to hear kind of made a circle around me, and that more or less, by chance, pushed all the protesters to the back so that I could address the people that actually wanted to listen to what I was saying. And so did you have a dialogue with them, or did you give a speech, and how did that work? I didn't have a dialogue at all with the protesters. I mean, with the people that came to see you? Yeah, yeah, that worked out okay once I got outside. And I mean, I wasn't particularly upset with the fact that the protesters had showed up. I mean, practically speaking, because I'm in this peculiar situation where if the protesters show up, that's good, and if they don't show up, that's good too. It's good if they show up because I have access to a YouTube audience, obviously, and then it gets filmed and the films get put together

and that gets put online. And generally speaking, when the social justice types have come after me, they've done a pretty admirable job of discrediting themselves. And so that seems to be all to the good. And then if they let me speak, well, then I get to speak and I can put that on YouTube. So it's a very strange situation for me because as long as I don't do anything too stupid or anything any stupider than I have done, let's say, I seem to come out okay. And like, I'm not, I'm certainly not counting on that continuing. And I'm not, I'm surprised by it, but so far it seems to be working out.

So, you know, hooray. Well, I think the way you handled it is admirable. The way you kept your cool and just continued talking and didn't flip out and didn't give in, didn't succumb to the provocation. It's because they were obviously provoking you and they're obviously, I just don't understand how the university allows them to do that, how they allow them to be in that room, first of all, with those air horns, which are really bad for anybody in that room who's near them. It causes hearing damage. Yeah, well, and the one person who was air horning me was really quite, I would say, let's say forward about it, You know, they were coming close enough to me to do some damage.

But, you know, I have seen the odd person at those rallies that really isn't well put together. You know, people, I look in their eyes and I think, no, you're definitely here for the wrong reasons. And I think it's more characteristic often of the guys that I see at the events rather than the women. I mean, I'm not sure about that. I'm obviously speculating. But, you know, I have a reasonably good clinical intuition. And some of the guys I see at those events, I don't know what their story is, man. I don't know what they're up to.

I guess they're, what are they trying to do, be allies of the women for their own nefarious purposes? I mean, that's what it looks like to me, you know. Well, there's certainly an issue with that. Yeah. It's a common thread with men, especially in the male feminist category, that they align themselves with these women as allies and as this, you know, they take this moral high ground and they're this person that's going to show, you know, other men how to do feminism and how to behave with women. And they're really just sort of they're mining the situations for social points. Yeah. Well, for social and sexual points, my guess is absolutely.

There's something seriously creepy about it. I mean, I saw, too, that guy at the Berkeley, the recent Berkeley demonstration, the guy who hit someone with a bike lock, remember, in a bag, and he was hiding behind some women, and then he darted out and just nailed the guy with a bike lock, with what turned out to be a bike lock. Yeah, a guy. He was just hanging there talking. He wasn't being violent. He wasn't doing anything. And by the way, that guy turned out to be a professor. They found that guy. Yeah. And so has that been like, communist slash socialist professor who's very adamantly against right-wing ideology and this kind of shit.

So he, they're pretty sure that that's the guy. Yeah, yeah. Well, I kind of followed that and I noticed all that. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, watching what he did, that's the true face of those people. It's assault. I mean, he hit a guy with a deadly weapon. Yeah. I mean, look. I also thought it was blackly comic that it was a bike lock. I mean, that just figures, you know. Well, it's just the idea that you could just walk up to someone you

don't like the way they think and hit them in the head with a metal thing. It's just so it's so crazy and so delusional and so indicative of someone who looks at a person as the other you're not looking at as a human being who disagrees with you like in not not only that a young human being like we talk about a lack of empathy yeah I mean you're expecting this 20 year old guy or however old the guy was got hit in the head you're expecting him to have his ideology down solid and not be influenced by peers or not be curious about what this argument is about. The guy wasn't even yelling anything. He was just standing there. Yeah, well, that's kind of what I thought about the protesters at McMaster, too.

You know, it's partly why I don't get upset. It's like I look at these kids that are out there protesting, you know, apart from the professional protester types, and I think, well, Jesus, they've been served so badly by the education system that it's absolutely beyond belief. They're basically being sent out as avatars of this pathological postmodern movement by their professors who are themselves too cowardly to show up, generally speaking, and certainly aren't brave enough to debate me. Or if they do show up, they're like this guy with a mask on hitting people in the head who was a professor. Yeah, well, they don't believe in dialogue.

It's not part of the postmodern ethos to have a dialogue with people you don't agree with. So you weren't able to talk to anyone that opposed you? Not so far, not in any serious sense. Were you able to talk to anyone that had the hammer and sickle sign and ask them, like, do you understand what this stands for? What does this mean to you? Like, what are you trying to project by having this sign?

Yeah, no, no, it wasn't possible at that venue. I mean, like I said, whenever I got close to anybody that was protesting, there was no one-to-one human interaction, you know. I mean, I can tell when someone's going to be willing to communicate with me and when they've kind of got cold eyes like a codfish, you know. Whatever they're looking at has nothing to do with me or very little to communicate with me. And when they're, they've kind of got cold eyes, like a cod fish, you know, whatever they're looking at has nothing to do with me or very little to do with me. Well,

that seems to me to be one of the weirder aspects of this thing that you're going through this, this, these, all these, this series of altercations that you're going through is the lack of discourse. And there was this one that you went on, on television. We talked about the last time you were going through, is the lack of discourse. And there was this one that you went on television,

we talked about the last time you were here, with this very bizarre androgynous person that was saying there's no gender, there's no biological basis for gender, which is just complete insanity, and you shooting that down. Yeah, it might be insanity, but it's Canadian law now, or soon to be federally, so it's insanity for sure, but it's the kind of insanity that's going to have legal force very soon. What is, specifically?

Well, with Bill C-16, which was the bill that I was complaining about, or criticizing, let's say, there's a variety of surrounding policy documents that are derived from the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and they indicate quite clearly that you're to regard biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity as varying independently, which, of course, they don't. By any stretch of the imagination, they're so tightly correlated that, well, you can't use correlation to imply cause or to infer causality. But Jesus, when the correlations are above 0.95, you have to start wondering if there's actually not some causal link. And it's absurd to me that we really even have to have that discussion. But the notion, and this is being taught to school kids, this is mainstream doctrine, Joe.

I mean, the gender, look up the gender unicorn. That's a fun thing to look up. What is the gender unicorn? The gender unicorn is this little happy symbol that's being marketed to children, you know, in elementary school, describing to them the fact that biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity vary independently. They're going after them very young. And so that's part of the school system now in many, many places. So in many ways, it's sort of an indoctrination. You might say that. The gender unicorn. The gender unicorn,

man. Check that thing out. Gender identity, female, woman, girl, male, man, boy, other gender, gender expression, feminine, masculine, other, sex assigned at birth, female, male, man, boy, other gender, gender expression, feminine, masculine, other. Sex assigned at birth, female, male, other, intersex. Ooh, like aliens. Physically attracted to men, women, other. Other gender, S. Emotionally attracted. So what you do if you're a kid is you put a little marker there on the arrow to show where you're located on all those independent dimensions and obviously if you look at the at the style of the gender unicorn you can tell what sort of age it's aimed at because that looks like it's aimed for certainly not aimed at

kids over i would say 10 yeah why does the gender unicorn have a double helix dna symbol where it's penis or vagina should be that's to indicate that to indicate that there's no such thing as biology, I presume. But why? Oh, wow. That's how ironic. Yeah, you might say so. Yeah. It's a weird place to put it, over the crotch of the unicorn.

Yeah, there's an indefinite number of weird things about that. Yes, there's the gingerbread gender-bred person that's a oh gender-bred person has a male symbol female symbol and then a what am i all together with a circle where the is that a hole it's not a whole circle it's a strange problematic place for the circle i would say very assumpt. I would say so, yes. I don't like that at all. I feel triggered. Well, the whole thing is it's so bizarre, but what's even more bizarre is the lack of dialogue. I feel like you're in a weird position where there's a tremendous amount of support for you

outside of the academic system. People like me, people like, so many people that like me, people like so many people that support your YouTube videos, so many people that read about you online. You're experiencing all this backlash at like McMasters and these sort of things, but there's people are not engaging you. And the way they're keeping from engaging you is saying that you are demonstrating hate speech. Yeah. Well, there's hate speech there's racism the reason i've been called a racist is because i complained i criticized the university of toronto's decision to use the toronto chapter of black lives matter as policy advisors

and the reason i did that was because the two women who founded black lives matter in toronto um let's say they're they have let's say they have questionable reputations and leave it at that. And so apparently that makes me racist because, well, for obvious reasons. You're not allowed to question them because they're black. Apparently not. Well, yes. They have carte blanche.

One of them has publicly stated that white people are inferior to black people because they don't have enough melanin in their skin, and melanin is the chemical that communicates cosmically so that you're spiritually enlightened. That was one essential claim. And the other one is embroiled in a lawsuit with the University of Toronto Students' Union for, essentially, she's been accused of embezzling with a couple cronies about $400,000 from the coffers of the Students' Union. So I felt that perhaps those weren't the best people for the University of Toronto to be associating with when they're formulating their anti-racist policies. Well, clearly that makes you racist.

Clearly, clearly. Well, it's fascinating. And transphobic as well. Oh, altogether? Yes. In one little lump sum? That's me, man. What's really fascinating about that is you're not saying anything about black people.

You're saying about two individuals. Two individuals that you're, and you're having very specific things. You know, everybody that makes up a group is the same. You see, you have to understand that. Except men and women. Right. That's right. Except men and women.

Because men and women can be anything. Well, there's an interesting angle on the transsexual thing, too, because these activists, they stand out and claim that they're standing for oppressed communities, right? And first of all, they identify the identity group that they're activating on the part of as a community. And then they imply that it's a homogenous community. And then they state that because they happen to be members of that community by their own admission, let's say, or by their own declaration, that's a better word, that they are now legitimate representatives of that community. And one of the things that's been quite fascinating to me since this has occurred is that I've had a very, a comparatively large number of letters from transgender people, about 35 so far, and every one of those except one was positive.

They're not happy about, like, my sampling of the trans community, which isn't, you know, it's not a random sample or anything like that, but 35 letters is a lot when the community of people is actually quite small. And they're not happy at all. They don't, they don't, they're not happy to be so publicly discussed now, because many of them would just as soon have some privacy, you know, and they're already having trouble fitting in. They don't regard these people as legitimate representatives.

They don't believe, they're not homogenous in their political viewpoints, you know, and they're not necessarily fans of the people who are playing gender bender games, because many of the transsexuals who are, let's say, serious about it, you know, for lack of a better way of describing it, aren't happy that this has become a kind of a fad, essentially, and that they're being used by the politically correct types to further their political agenda. So that's quite cool, too, because it isn't obvious to me at all that the attitude that I have towards the situation is actually different in any genuine sense than the attitude that at least a substantial minority of the transsexual people themselves have.

And there's plenty of them on YouTube who are complaining about the social justice appropriation of their identity. Well, I don't even know if they have a movement. They're not a community, right? I mean, they're not a community. I mean, a community is in continual contact with one another. They have something that directs their actions in common. I mean, but, you know, on the postmodern end of the spectrum, if you have some identifiable group feature,

then that means you're one of that group and that everything that you do indicates only that. I mean, there are believers in race and gender and sex. They believe in the reality of those categories far more than anybody on the right, as far as I can tell. So it's very peculiar and unnerving. So, and widespread and powerful and all of those things. Well, it's very peculiar that they are not into labels unless it suits their purposes.

They're not into labels or into generalizing behavior unless it suits their purpose. gender people out of the bathrooms that associate with that identify, you know, but that they identify with, with whatever gender it is. Whenever there's some sort of a hot button issue, there becomes this thing where a bunch of people seek attention through those issues. And these people use whatever issue it is to, it becomes like a part of their identity, like becoming an activist

and really being very vocal about it. Whereas the actual cause itself gets muddied in the cult of personality and it gets muddied in these personal wishes and ideas that the people who are seeking to get attention by communicating about these ideas, sort of soak in. You know, it just becomes a lot about human nature and human behavior more than it is about the actual issue itself. Well, it's an opportunity. Each of these hypothetically contentious issues is an opportunity for a certain kind of sterile drama to unfold.

And the drama is always the same. I mean, you can see that in the demonstrations, say, with regards to my talks. It doesn't matter what I'm talking about, and it actually doesn't matter what I've ever said. All that matters is that there's an occasion and an excuse to trot out the ideology and to pathetically mouth the same unbelievably sterile and chaotic phrases. I mean, I think the people at McMaster, the protesters, could only muster about three chants, and two of them were seriously obscene, which I don't care about, except that it's so mindlessly unimaginative. They're operating at such a low level of intellectual effort.

And, of course, egged on by their pathological postmodern professors who are hiding behind them like scared weasels. Yeah, they shut him down. That was the big one. Racist, transphobic, homophobic. All these things without substance because there's no... Piece of shit was the other one that was quite... Transphobic piece of shit or just piece of shit period? That's right, yes. No, no. It was more specific.

Yes, it was more specific, which was, you know, rather flattering and all of that. Yeah. Well, you don't seem to have any hate towards trans people at all. No, I mean, from the discussions I've had with you both on and off the air, the idea of you being transphobic seems so inaccurate because you seem pretty accepting about anybody, whether it's a trans person, a gay person. It's not the issue, is it? Well, I'm more concerned about whether or not people are honest. I mean, you know, that's my fundamental orientation. And so, or my fundamental concern.

I mean, I don't expect people to be 100% honest, because, of course, who is? I mean, that's a hell of a high standard to hold anyone to. But all of that is smoke and mirrors, and I think the people who are after me know it. Well, let's get through some of that, just to sort of establish it for people maybe that don't know. What issues do you—do you have any issue whatsoever with someone being transgender? No, I don't have any issue with that. What I have an issue with is that I don't like to see the postmodern neo-Marxists use the transsexual issue as a lever for pushing forward their political nonsense. And I said that right from the beginning in the videos I made to begin with. The reason I wouldn't use the words Z and Zer and all those other made-up words, however many there are now, is because I'm not willing to cede the linguistic territory to postmodern radicals.

I'm not doing that. And they say, well, we're doing it on behalf of the oppressed transsexual people, and I think, yeah, well, that's what you say, but there's no reason I should believe that. I don't believe anything you say I think you're contemptible cowardly uh ideologically motivated cult-like corruptors of the youth so why would I use your language well let's let's unpack that because one of the things that I find fascinating is how few transgender people want to use those words the transgender people seem to want to identify with whatever gender they, like if you are a male to female transgender person,

you would prefer to be called a she. Right. Like Caitlyn Jenner, right? Right. And pretty much everybody calls the artist formerly known as Bruce Jenner, Caitlyn Jenner, right? That's just, it's like if you had a look at how many people just openly accept that it's it's it's pretty well accepted. Right. Most transgender people prefer that.

They prefer female to male. I prefer they prefer to be a man now. I'm a man now. OK, Bob, Dick, whatever your name is. That's in. There's not a lot of Zzer talk. Well, maybe I'm out of the loop. No, you're not out of the loop.

The other thing is those are all third-person pronouns. It's like, I'm not going to call you a third-person pronoun while we're sitting here. I never would. If I'm referring to you when I'm talking to someone else, I might... Call their name, right. Well, I could use your name. I might use he then, but I don't know... Well,

it's just all of it is palpably absurd. I think it's always hard to get the level of analysis for this sort of issue correct. You know, because the people who are pushing it forward say, well, we're against harassment and discrimination. And they attribute all the moral virtue to themselves, but then what I see is that they're utilizing a group, a very small minority group,

who already have enough problems, in my estimation, for nothing other than straightforward political purposes. I don't buy the warm-hearted, you know, all-inclusive love that the people who are pushing this sort of thing forward claim to display. I don't see that at all. What I see mostly is resentment and the desire to undermine. And I'm quite familiar with the postmodern philosophy, not as familiar as I could be, and also reasonably familiar with its underlying Marxism. And there's nothing touchy-feely about any of that, I can tell you. The best you can do with postmodernist philosophy is emerge nihilistic. That's the best. The worst case is that you're a kind of anarchical

social revolutionary that's directionless, except that you want to tear things apart, or that you end up depressed, which I see happening to students all the time, because the postmodernists rip out the remaining structures of their foundations, of their ethical foundations. So just to be really clear for anybody tuning in, your issues are absolutely not with someone who identifies with a gender other than their biological gender. As long as they're not using that to promote a political agenda. But I don't care about the gender thing.

Right. I mean, that's something. It doesn't mean anything. Well, it's someone, it's a personal issue. Right, a personal issue. It's a personal issue. It's a personal preference. It's a personal issue.

Right, a personal issue. It's a personal issue. And I would also deal with it on an individual-to-individual basis. Because it varies just as much as there are extremely masculine men, extremely feminine women, and there's a broad spectrum of human beings in between. And each one should be dealt with on an individual basis. Yes. Based on what they want. basis based on what they want. But when you're talking about these made up words, what it seems like is that some people are trying to push these made up words and turn them mainstream. Now, the question is, what's the motivation behind that? Is this a necessary thing? Are there so

many people that are of asexual or of some sort of, I mean, what would be a Z or a Zer? What is that supposed to be? Is that supposed to be a male or a female? Is it supposed to be asexual? Or is it supposed to be a non-conformist? I mean, what is it? Well, it's supposed to be someone whose gender isn't specified, right? Who's neither male nor female.

Or maybe, they say technically in the policy guidelines, is anywhere or nowhere on the spectrum. And that's actually in the policy guidelines in Ontario. Anywhere or nowhere. Right, and the nowhere, I mean, these are policies that are going to determine law, right, within which the law is going to be interpreted. I don't even know what nowhere on the spectrum means. I don't understand what that means.

It doesn't mean anything. It's nonsense. It's nonsense. So you have, so here's the options, right? There's someone who identifies with the opposite gender of their biological birth. So there's a man, for instance, who identifies as a woman. Everyone's cool with that. Whatever your name is, whatever you would like to be called, whether it's Wendy or Mike or whatever it is, that would be the noise that you want people to make with their mouth that means you. That's it, right? Now, whether you're a he or a she outside of that, that's where things get squirrely. So third person is the only issue. The only issue is like, say, if we were talking to Jamie, Jamie just decided to, he's going to be Jamie now. He's still Jamie. Jamie's a girl's name too. I know a girl's name, Jamie. So he could be Jamie and Jamie decides he's a woman. And now he wants to be called she,

and we're like, okay, okay, she. All right, Jamie, now you're she. But when it gets to like zur and z and the 78 different gender pronouns it seems to a person outside of it a person who's cisgendered it seems pretty pretty bizarre and it seems pretty preposterous and it seems pretty indulgent and it seems like there's something else going on and this well that's the thing it's that it's the something else going on. Well, that's the thing. It's the something else going on part that is what concerns me. There is something else going on. If there wasn't something else going on, a relatively obscure professor's amateurish YouTube videos on a relatively obscure piece of Canadian legislation wouldn't have had any effect, right? It would have just disappeared. But it didn't.

wouldn't have had any effect, right? It would have just disappeared, but it didn't. And that's because there's more going on than the straightforward issue surrounding the pronoun use and everybody knows it, or everybody feels it at least. Well, what it seems like from someone who's outside of academia, someone like me, is it seems like you're pushing back against something that they are really trying hard to establish. And then it's some kind of control. It's some kind of control with how people behave and communicate. And it's not like a societal thing. It's a very small, isolated group of people that seem to be trying to indoctrinate others into their ways. And they're becoming very vocal and very angry and in a sense like verbally violent about your opposition to their controlling the way they

commute that other people yeah well they don't like me poking holes in their ideology and the post the post here we could lay it out quickly okay you know because i've been i've been thinking about how to communicate this properly and so so the thing about the postmodernists, and I'm going to speak mostly about Jacques Derrida, because I'll consider him the central villain. Now, he actually, they make a point. Explain who he is, please. Well, he's a French philosopher, French intellectual,

who became quite popular in the late 1970s and then was introduced to North America through the Yale Department of English, and of course English literature is one of the disciplines that has become entirely corrupt. And so, Derrida was a Marxist to begin with, but that fell out of favor because it turned out that Marxist political doctrine kept producing evil empires, and even radical left French intellectuals were forced to admit that by the mid-1970s. You know, they'd put their head in the sand for 20 years, 50 years

really, thoroughly in the sand and made sure their ears were full too. But by the mid-1970s, the evidence that that was the case was so overwhelming that even a French intellectual couldn't deny it anymore. And so they started to play sleight of hand with the Marxist ideas. So instead of trying to promote the revolution of the working class against the capitalist class, let's say, they started to play identity politics and said, well, we can just separate everybody into oppressed versus oppressor, but we don't have to do it on economic grounds. And we can call it power instead of economics. So that was part of it. And then the other thing, but the fundamental critique that Derrida focused on, this is really worth laying out, because the problem that he discovered, the postmodernists discovered, was discovered by a variety of other people at the same time in

other disciplines. So for example, among the people who were studying artificial intelligence, since the early 1960s, it was always supposed that we'd be able to make machines that could move around in a natural environment without too much problem. And the reason we could do that was because the world, in some sense, was just made out of simple objects. There they are, and all you have to do is look at them and you see them, and that's vision. And then the complex problem is not how to see or what to see, but how to act in reference to what you see. But it turned out that the AI people ran into this problem, essentially sometimes known as the frame problem. And the frame problem is that there's almost an infinite number of ways to look at a

finite set of objects. So the fact that vision, for example, turns out to be way, way, way more complicated than anybody ever estimated. In fact, you can't actually solve the vision problem until you solve the embodiment problem. So an artificial intelligence that doesn't have a body can't really see

because seeing is actually the mapping of the world onto action. And so that was figured out more or less by a robotics engineer called Rodney Brooks. But what's at the bottom of this is the idea that any set of phenomena can be seen a very large number of ways. So like there's a bunch of pens in front of me here. You know, and when I look at them, my brain basically notes that they're a grippable object with which I can write.

So I see the function. Like if you look at a beanbag, you see a chair. Not because it's got four legs and a seat in the back, but because you can sit on it. And most of what we see in the world, we actually see functionally, rather than see as an object and then interpret the object and then figure out what to do. So the function of the object constrains our interpretation.

But there's an endless number of interpretations. So, for example, if I was going to paint that, you know, paint on canvas this set of pens and try to do it in a photorealistic way, I would be looking at tiny details of these objects, the multiple shades of red that are there and the multiple shades of white and black. And, you know, I would decompose it in many ways. shades of white and black, and, you know, I would decompose it in many ways. And so, the AI guys ran into this problem, which was that looking at the world turned out to be exceptionally complex, and that's still being solved now. Okay, in literature, the same thing happened. What the postmodernists realized was that if you took a complex book, let's say the Bible, for example, or a Shakespeare play, there's an endless number of potential interpretations that you can derive from it,

because it's so complex and so sophisticated. So imagine that, well, you can interpret the word, you can interpret the phrase, you can interpret the sentence, you can interpret the paragraph, you can interpret the chapter, let's say. You have to interpret that within the confines of the entire work, then of the entire tradition, and then within the context of discussion that you're currently having, and all of those things affect how you're going to interpret the play. So their conclusion was, well, there's an infinite number of ways to interpret a text. And then their conclusion was, well, there's an infinite number of ways to interpret the world.

And there's a way in which that's correct. And so the next conclusion was, there's no right way to do it. So you could do it any old way. And then their next conclusion was, oh, and this is where the Marxism creeped up again, oh, people interpret the

world in a way that facilitates their acquisition of power. Now that's where the bloody theory starts to get corrupt. Because, people interpret the world in a way that facilitates their acquisition of power. Now, that's where the bloody theory starts to get corrupt. Because, yes, a bit, but also no, right? Because, and this is why they're wrong. This is why they're wrong. You see, the world is complicated beyond our ability to comprehend. So there is a very large number of ways you can interpret it. But, but, you have to extract out from the world a way, a game from your interpretation that you can actually play. So if the lesson that you extract from Hamlet is you should kill your family and yourself, then we might say that that's not a very functional interpretation, right? Because first of

all, people are going to object to that, right? It ends your life, it ends many people's lives, people are going to object to it, and it isn't a game that you can play over and over again in the world. So when we're interacting with the world, you see, what we're trying to do is to extract out a set of tools that we can use to function in the world, because we're constrained by the world, so that we don't suffer too much, and so that the things that we need in order to continue can be provided. And we need to extract those out in a way that other people will, so that other people will cooperate and compete with us in a peaceful and maintainable way. So then you think, well, we have to extract out an interpretation that

allows us to live and thrive over multiple periods of time in multiple environments while we're doing the same thing with other individuals who are motivated the same way. So there's a tremendous number of constraints on our interpretations, and the postmodernists don't care about that at all. All they do is say, well, no, no, you can interpret the world any way you want. All people are ever doing is playing power games based on their identity, and there's going to be no crosstalk between the power hierarchies. It's not even allowed. That's why they don't engage in dialogue.

See, just to talk to, like, let's say if you're a postmodernist, just to have a discussion with someone like you, you know, a heterosexual, what do they call this, cisgendered male of power, you know, and white to boot, it's like, that's an evil act in and of itself, because all you're doing by engaging in dialogue with that person is validating their power game. That's all. You see, and this isn't, this is no aberration that these people don't engage in dialogue. It's no aberration. It's built right into the philosophical system.

They regard the idea of, the idea that if you're in one power group and I'm in another, the idea that we can step out of that group, engage in a dialogue, have our worlds meet, and produce some sort of... Understanding of each other. Yeah, and produce some sort of... Understanding of each other. Yeah, yeah, some sort of negotiated understanding. No, that's part of your oppressive patriarchal game, that idea. That whole idea is part of your game. So, if I even engage in the dialogue, I'm playing your game, you win.

It's a complete assault, it's a complete... People don't understand that post-modernism is a complete assault. People don't understand that postmodernism is a complete assault on two things. One, it's an assault on the metaphysical substrate of our culture. And I would say that the metaphysical substrate looks something like a religious substrate. So it's a direct assault on that. And the second thing it's an assault on is everything that's been established since the Enlightenment. Rationality, empiricism, science, everything. Clarity of mind, dialogue, the idea of the individual. All of that is not only, you see, it's not only that it's up for grabs.

That's not the thing. It's to be destroyed. That's the goal. To be destroyed. Just like the communists wanted the revolution to destroy the capitalist system. It's the goal, to be destroyed, just like the communists wanted, you know, wanted the revolution to destroy the capitalist system. It's the same thing. These people, now you might say, well, does every social justice warrior activist know this? It's like, well, no, of course not.

It's not any more than any, every Muslim knows the entire Muslim doctrine or Islamic doctrine or every Christian knows the entire Christian doctrine. You know, it's fragmented among people. But then when you bring them together, the fragments unite and the entire philosophy acts itself out. So you don't think that this is a nefarious plot by a few well-planned out individuals that have some sort of an agenda that they're going to promote this ideology and they understand what they're doing? You feel like it's what you're saying, that there's a bunch of different factions,

a bunch of different parts to this. And it could be a lot of it is that people feel disenfranchised socially. They are empowered by their positions in universities and by these insulated environments and groups. They're intoxicated by the power that they have over young people and shaping their minds and imposing their ideologies. They receive feedback from these kids. It builds up.

Everything strengthens. They shore up the walls around them and they push this forward. And then when they have something like this speech that you gave at McMaster's, and they get to actually act, it unites them. It unites them. And this is what you're getting from this glazed eye, you know, cod look that you described. Well, it's as if, it's like Richard Dawkins' idea of meme. You know, if you imagine that in your neural structure, whatever ideas that you're manifesting are represented neuron by neuron, let's say, it's a web of neurons.

Not any one neuron has the entire idea set. This is obviously an oversimplification, but you get the point. There's a network from which the idea emerges. Well, the meme idea is that an idea can rest upon multiple individuals as if each individual is a neuron. And so, I mean, there are people who are more or less fully informed as to the nature of postmodern doctrine, and they're pushing it forward consciously and unconsciously. They're consciously pushing it forward and acting it out.

And so there are individuals who are more representative of the entire set of ideas and individuals who are less representative. But if you get them together in a group, the thing that animates them and unites them is the common set of ideas. And those ideas were produced by the postmodern French intellectuals in the mid-70s, roughly speaking. Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault. Foucault was the person who famously pronounced that psychiatric diagnostic categories were primarily social in origin rather than biological. And, you know, I read Foucault's work.

I think it was Madness and Civilization where he advanced that particular doctrine. You can actually read Foucault, unlike Derrida and Lacan, but I just found what he was writing obvious. I knew from my clinical training that psychiatric categories have a heavy sociological construction, partly because psychiatry isn't a science. Medicine isn't a science. It's an applied science. Those aren't the same thing at all. You know, a pure science is a pure science. It deals with scientific categories, like atoms. But an applied science, well, it's a compromise between all sorts of different things. And mental illnesses themselves are shaped by the social environment, even though often they have a biological root.

The way they manifest themselves is clearly shaped by society and language. I didn't find his work the least bit surprising. I thought, well, really? I mean, everyone who's a sophisticated medical professional, psychiatrist, psychologist, everyone knows that. It's like, I mean, there's a book called Discovery of the Unconscious by a guy named Henri Allenberger that was written in the, I believe, in the 60s. Great book on history of psychoanalysis. And like, he covers the shift in diagnostic categories across time. It's self-evident. So anyways, there's all these French postmodernists. They were all Marxists. Most of them were student revolutionaries in France in the late 1960s, before that all fell apart. And they did two things.

They pulled out this frame problem issue, the issue of multiple interpretations, and said, well, there's nothing that's canonical, there's no overarching narrative, there's no real interpretation. And I already said why that's wrong. And then the other thing they said was, they did this sleight of hand, so instead of the working class against the bourgeoisie it was it was race against race or or gender against gender unbelievably divisive it's all they believe in is identity there's no individual man that's gone with post-modernism this isn't an accident all of this stuff it's not random it's driven by these ideas. Like, ideas are always at war. Always.

And we're in a war between these ideas. I mean, Marxism, we already know, was a tremendously powerful doctrine, and this is its newest manifestation. What is the motivation behind the individuals that are at the heart of this movement? at the heart of this movement? Well, I would say that the motivations are as complex as human motivations are in general. But they seem to have solidified into a movement, right? Well, I think the dangerous part of it is that

it's almost like a scapegoat mentality. It's almost like psychoanalytic projection. That's another way of thinking about it. It's like, one of the things that I've come to learn, and one of the things I talk about a lot, is that the battle between good and evil, so to speak, isn't between states, and it's not between individuals, precisely. Although it manifests itself at those levels. It's an internal battle, a moral battle that happens inside people. And so people have a broad capacity for malevolence and for benevolence. And that's a terrible war for people.

And it's a terrible thing to understand and realize. In fact, often, when people realize their capacity for malevolence, if they're not prepared for it, they develop post-traumatic stress disorder. So that happens to soldiers in battlefields. So they go out, they're innocent guys, you know, naive guys, young guys, and they go out onto a battlefield and they get put in a really stressful situation. And, you know, they step outside themselves and they do something unbelievably vicious and brutal, and then they're broken. They can't take that manifestation of themselves and put it with like Iowa corn-fed, you know, nice guy. And no wonder, because one is like a flesh-eating chimpanzee on a war rampage, and the other is, you know, a relatively well-brought-up and polite farm boy from the middle of the United States. It's like,

how in the world are you going to put those two things together? Well, you can't. That's post-traumatic stress disorder. And to treat that, my experience with post-traumatic stress disorder is that you have to teach people a philosophy of evil, of good and evil, because otherwise they can't recover. And I've had, by the way, in the last four months, I've had two letters from soldiers with PTSD, and I met two personally who said that watching my lectures had brought them back together, because they couldn't understand what they had become before looking deeply at their malevolence. Now, so I would say, with regards to this movement, this postmodern movement,

the malevolent aspect of it, there's a couple of them. One, it's unbelievably authoritarian. I got a letter today from a university student in Italy. I don't know what university, but she'd been having kind of a flame war on Facebook with a social justice warrior, and at the end, she recommended that this particular social justice warrior

seek out a local mental health counselling unit and put a link to it in the exchange. And then she got a letter from the university. I guess the other person, the SJW type, turned her in, but she got a letter from the university saying that that violated university policy and constituted harassment, and that she should seriously consider retracting it. And that, you know, future employees, employers might be looking at what she posted, and it was inappropriate to put that on a public site. And it's like, I thought, wow, if you, how could you be so clueless as a, as an administrator, say,

to think that your monitoring of your students' private utterances, you're monitoring it at an institutional level, and your intervention and threat at an institutional level is less dangerous than letting two students, you know, troll each other on a public social forum. It's just, I just, I don't know what to think about it. It's just unbelievable. It happened, and it's happening all over the place, this sort of thing.

And so there's the authoritarian element to it, which is a hatred of, I think it's a hatred of competence, because competence produces hierarchies that aren't based on power. I think it's a hatred of clear intellect. Hatred of clear intellect? How so? What do you mean by when you say clear intellect? Well, you have a clear intellect, as far as I'm concerned. I think that's why you're so popular, is because you pay attention and say what you

see, and you're not too concerned about doing anything other than that. I mean, of course you have an agenda, because everyone has an agenda. You can't help but have an agenda if you're alive. But you can temper the agenda. Like, you can be clued in enough to try to listen and learn and watch and pay attention to what your own senses are telling you and try to articulate that. And that's what the Log logos is, technically speaking.

And the reason I'm bringing this up is because Jacques Derrida described Western culture, in a famous phrase, he described it as phallogocentric. P-H-A-L, logo, L-O-G-O, centric. Phallogocentric. And it needs to be brought down. Well, the phallus part, that's male. The logo part, that's logos. Now, that's partly logic, because the word logic comes from the word logos. But logos is a deep, much, much older concept than logic.

Like, logos is, it's essentially, it's a theological concept, and that's where things get complicated. It's essentially, it's a theological concept, and that's where things get complicated. But you could describe it as the manifestation of truth in speech. And the postmodernists, they don't like any of that. So foul logocentrist would be the ultimate mansplaining. Yes, exactly. As it were, right? Like any man who expresses or tries to correct a woman in any way, becomes a mansplainer.

Or maybe to correct anything in any way. Yeah, but particularly where the Ted Cruz, Sally Yates testimony that's been going on in America. It's pretty fascinating. No, no, I'm not aware of that. I saw an example of that in an Australian congressional debate where a guy was accused of mansplaining by one of his colleagues and really like tore a strip off her quite nicely Yeah, what's happening in the state? Well Yates has just been pretty brilliant

she was fired by the Trump administration because she rejected this idea of What was the the very specific thing was about? restricting immigration about shutting down different people that are trying to come into the United States. And she had this debate with Ted Cruz where she, you know, just brilliantly shut him down with, you know, her knowledge of the Constitution and knowledge of what is and what is not legal or should or should not be allowed to happen. And she was fired for it. And he was grilling her. And he's a very smart guy, Ted Cruz,

although I don't agree with him, and I agree more with her. The way it was going down, this debate was described as mansplaining because it was a man talking to a woman. It's just a recent example. Yeah, well, I also read about something like that with regards to the Supreme Court because somebody did an analysis showing that the female Supreme Court justices spoke less than the male Supreme Court justices, and immediately attributed that to sexism, because you know how oppressed female Supreme Court justices are.

I still want to get back to this, that the hatred or the dislike of clear thinking. Yeah. Do you think that this comes from people? I'm not even sure. I completely wrapped my head around this. But do you think this is from someone with, they understand that their logic is muddy. They understand that their imposing of this muddy logic is illogical in some sort of a way. I think they feel it.

They feel it? They feel it rather than think it. I mean, that's the other thing, is that there isn't a lot of clear thinking on the side of the social justice types, because a lot of what they're doing is reacting at an emotional level. Yeah, well, the best personality predictor of politically correct belief, because we've done this study, although it's not published yet, is trait agreeableness. And agreeableness, I would say, the best way to think about it is that it's the maternal dimension. That's an oversimplification, but not much of one. And so anybody that, and the maternal viewpoint is something like anybody who's part of my in-group is an infant in trouble, and anyone

who's outside of it is a predatory snake. It's something like that. And so you're seeing that manifest itself in a political doctrine. Well, you're clearly seeing that today with what's going on with these, like say the Berkeley Milo rally, where people who are on the left, who you would think of as being pro-woman, pro-anti-violence, are more than capable of committing violence against women who support Trump, because then they categorize them as Nazis, and we're supposed to punch Nazis. And I mean, there's been a bunch of instances where you've seen video footage of people getting pepper sprayed and hit with sticks because they were wearing the wrong, you know, they're wearing a, it wasn't even a Make America Great Again hat.

It was actually a Make Bitcoin Great Again hat. There's a very famous video of a girl getting pepper sprayed. Yeah, I think I've seen that one. It's fucking crazy. And by the left and by people who are supposed to be, you know, quote unquote progressive and people who are supposed to be pro-women's rights, you know, anti-violence against women, anti-domestic violence. But yet they have no problem doing it to this other person because this person becomes the other because they're on the other side. Yeah, well, this I was talking about this line between good and evil that runs down people's hearts. It's a terrible fault line, and it can be shocking to see that it's the case. And so it's much more convenient for people to divide the world into the righteous and the damned, let's say,

and then to persecute the damned. Well, it's convenient, too, because whatever resentment and hatred and bitterness you have in your heart, and you have plenty of that, generally speaking, if you're a social justice type, because you regard yourself as oppressed. And that's a great starting point for resentment and hatred, right? To be a victim. We know that one of the precursors to genocide, and I'm not saying at all that we're near that state, I'm not saying that, but one of the precursors to genocide, and I'm not saying at all that we're near that state, I'm not saying that, but one of the precursors to genocide in a genocidal state, or in a pre-genocidal state, is the acceptance of victim status by the eventual perpetrators. Because the idea is, well, like we're innocent, we're being persecuted,

and those people are going to get us, so eventually that becomes, well, we'll get them first. And it gives you, so you have a target for all your resentment and your hatred and it's a justifiable moral target and so all the part of yourself that you don't recognize as contributing to whatever problem you think you know now pollutes the world you can ignore all that you're on the side of the good there's no moral effort required and then you have someone to conveniently hate and hit and hurt and all the while you can look at yourself in the mirror and say i'm i'm on the side of the good i'm just punching nazis right right what is there hitting them with bike locks you know while you dart out behind a woman who's conveniently standing in front of you is there an evolutionary origin

for what we were talking about in regards to a soldier being able to commit these horrible atrocities in the name of war to these people that are able to look at someone who has a differing ideology as the other and attack them as almost like a subhuman. Is there some sort of an evolutionary origin for this disassociative sort of thinking and behavior that some people seem to... I mean, it seems like a very common thing throughout history. Sure, anything that isn't part of your dominance hierarchy is a snake. It's that. And it actually makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. I mean, first of all all we are tribal primates right and our optimal group size seems to be something like 250 we can keep track of about that many

social relationships and that's that's also also that's right exactly and that's correlated with brain size right yeah so all right and so you might say well why that, and so you might say, well, why that size? And then you might say, well, a hierarchy has to be optimized for two functions. And one is, well, you want to be able to climb the damn thing. So if it's really, really big, the probability that you're going to climb it is really low. And if it's too small, well, who cares if you climb it? So you want it somewhere that's big enough to climb and powerful enough to make the climb worthwhile. And so there's some optimization there. Now, so you might think of everything within that hierarchy

as explored territory. And the reason for that is that explored territory is where, when you do something, you get what you want. So think about the conditions under which the limits of your knowledge manifest themselves. I mean, there's all sorts of

things you don't know. You know, a trillion things. But you're not sitting there, like, torturing yourself to death because there's a trillion things you don't know. But then if you go out in the world and you act something out, and the outcome isn't what you desired, then that registers an error. So, let's

say you're at a party and you tell a joke, and no one laughs. Well, the party, see, think about what happens to the space around the party. When you tell the joke, the second before you tell the joke, you're in one place. And the second after you tell the joke, when there's an awkward silence and everybody's looking embarrassed, you are no longer in the same place. You've stepped outside the protective embrace of that particular hierarchy. And you've made yourself an alien. And the thing that people use to

process the alien is the snake detector, the serpent detector, the dragon detector. And it's always been that way because anything that's outside the hierarchy is a threat. Any stranger, any strange idea, any animal manifestation, any noise, any spirit, it's a threat to the integrity of the dominance hierarchy, and in many, many ways. So, for example, it's deeply rooted, because that was your question, what's the evolutionary basis?

There's a great paper published in a journal called PLOS1, P-L-O-S-1, about five or six years ago, looking at something absolutely terrifying, in my estimation, which was, there's this idea that part of what motivates the authoritarian end of political conservatism, so let's say the right-wing fascist end, is associated not with fear but with disgust. Disgust is an entirely different emotion. And so these researchers did this fascinating

study where they went to a number of different countries and also looked at states within the same country, looking at the relationship between the prevalence of infectious disease and authoritarian attitudes at the individual level. The higher the infectious disease rate, the more authoritarian the political views. And the correlation was really high. It wasn't like 0.1. It was 0.7. It's one of the highest correlations between two phenomena I've ever seen in the social sciences. And you might say, well, why? Well, here's one reason. I said that the strange idea and the stranger and the pathogen, let's say, are all the same thing.

Well, it's all because they're external threats to the structure of the dominance hierarchy. You know, when the Spaniards came to the New World, 95% of the natives died. They died from smallpox, they died from measles, they died from mumps, they died from chickenpox. Because you don't know what the hell is coming at you when you let something new inside the dominance hierarchy, whether it's an idea or a disease. You know, words are a virus. I think that was Laurie... No, that was...

What's that heroin addict author? Burroughs? Burroughs, yeah, that was his phrase. Laurie Anderson made a nice video about that. Words are a virus. And so we respond to them with the same circuitry that we use to detect pathogens. And I'll tell you something even more frightening when we were working this out, because it's

associated with this trait called orderliness, which is actually a good predictor of right-wing political belief. I went back and looked at Hitler's Table Talk. It's a book, Hitler's Table Talk. And he wrote that. It was derived from notes that were taken by his secretaries between 1939 and 1942, when he was eating dinner and spontaneously expounding on the structure of reality. He was very open, Hitler, a very creative person, but also extremely orderly. And I looked at the metaphors that he was using to describe the Jews and the gypsies and all the other people that he burned and destroyed. And it was all pathogen. It's all pathogen metaphor.

The Aryan race is a body. It's a pure body. The blood is pure. The Jews are rats or insects or lice or disease. And so are the gypsies and everyone else. And they need to be eradicated and burned out, essentially. And here's something even more frightening. So when Hitler first took over Germany, he was kind of a public health freak. And he also washed his hands a lot every day. And he was also a worshiper of willpower.

So he was a really orderly guy. And he started this public health campaign in Germany. And he put together these vans that would go around, like screening people for tuberculosis, which, you know, was a perfectly fine idea. But then they started a beautification program of the factories, because he didn't like how messy the factories were in Germany. So he had people clean them up, you know, sweep them out and plant flowers out front and fumigate them for rats and insects, right? Parasites. Oh, and the Jews were always compared to rats and insects as well.

They used Zyklon B to do the insecticide. Well, Zyklon B, that was the gas that was used in the death camps. So it went like pathogen, insect, rats, then it went into the asylums, you know, so that people who were mentally deficient, they were like parasites and rats.

And then it was Jews and gypsies and parasites and rats. They were using Zyklon B and not Zyklon A? I believe they were using Zyklon B. I don't know. I know that the gas was Zyklon. Zyklon A was the gas that was formulated with a very extreme smell so that people would smell it and know because it was extremely toxic. Zyklon B, it all came from Fritz Haber. Haber was the guy who created the Haber method of extracting nitrogen from the oxygen that

we use for fertilizer today. Haber created Zyklon A and made it extremely toxic smelling so that you would know to avoid it. Zyklon B, that whatever element was removed from the smell so that it would be used in gas chambers, they'd have no idea that they were being gassed. Haber, who was a Jew, ironically, did not know that his Zyklon A was eventually going to be used on his own people. Yeah, well, I suspect they probably used Zyklon A doing the fumigations, you know. But the thing is is that, well, so, you know, you said what'sations you know but but the thing is is that well so you know you said

what's the biological basis and the biological basis is that like we're basically wired in some sense also to to for the domain of order or the domain of chaos that's another way of thinking about it the domain of order once again is where you are when what you're doing is working. Because, you see, because our environment isn't just natural, it's also social. So not only do you have to deal with the vagaries of the natural world properly so that it gives you what you're aiming at. That's how you know if you're right. It gives you what you're aiming at. But you have to do it in a way that other people approve of and support.

That's a very tight constraint. We talked about that as a constraint on the interpretation of the world. But then, now and then, something happens to disrupt that stability. So that's like the white circle. That's the black circle in the white serpent in the yin-yang symbol. You know how the white one, that's order. The white one has a black dot in it, and that's because chaos can come pouring through into order at any moment. And you have a circuit that detects that. And that's the same circuit that detects snakes or predators. And obviously, why wouldn't it be? You know, an intruding force, an intruding force has to be responded to right now.

Right. So there's a need for a demand, an instantaneous response. Instantaneous response. Instantaneous. And almost, like you were saying of those kids, like almost an unhuman or a disassociative sort of the ability to act almost as if, like, like something other than a person without reason or logic. Yes, well, that's dehumanization. Yes. Right. And the thing is, another thing that's so funny is that we think that the natural response to looking at a human being is humanization and that isn't right like the default person in some sense isn't human the default member of your

tribe is human i mean most tribes around the world the name for their tribe is the people implying that they're the people and all those other things out there are barbarians right there they're forces of chaos they're the stranger they bring disease and other things out there are barbarians, right? They're forces of chaos. They're the stranger. They bring disease and trouble. Now, I don't want to be too bleak about it, because this is the basic debate between conservatives and liberals, to some degree, is the conservatives take the stranger equals pathogen route more frequently, and they're less attracted to the idea of the free of or they work conventionally

that trade with the foreigner has benefits that outweigh the the the um the risks and generally speaking liberals have the opposite attitude um so but that's because those two things are both true one is that man it's really useful to trade with strangers because they have all sorts of cool things you don't have. But B, well, it might be real dangerous because you don't know what those things are infected with. Like, realistically speaking, let's say, but then also metaphorically speaking. You know, here's an example of how an object can be a virus. Think about the automobile. Like, if you wanted to introduce something into a communist country

that screamed the paramount status of the individual, you couldn't possibly create something that broadcast that more clearly than a car. Right? The car is driven by one person. The person is completely autonomous. They're completely sealed off. They don't need any state support or sanction whatsoever to move around in the car. It's like if you wanted to rescue the communists from their collective pathology, the best thing to do would be to parachute in automobiles because the automobile just screams individual autonomy. And so when you get an artifact from a foreigner,

you don't know what that's contaminated with, let's put it that way. And so we have a circuit for dealing with that and it's the thing that associates the foreigner with the force that eats the sun when it sets at night. That's the most archaic way of thinking about it. But it's the snake or the predator. And what do you do with a snake or a predator? Man, you burn it.

You kill it. You crush it. It's like there's a destructive force that comes along with that that's absolutely, well, it's morally righteous, because, yeah, you know, if it's a poisonous snake and it's threatening the village, obviously you kill it, and then you're celebrated for it. So in a sense, the same dehumanizing force

that allows people to act that way in war also allows people to disassociate between anyone who doesn't agree with their ideology in a school setting in a university like what happened at mcmaster's that's why i don't like that's why i don't like ideologies because the ideology divides the world into those safely ensconced within our dominance hierarchy, and serpents. And so that's dangerous. And the reason that this doctrine that I described about the line between good and evil running down the individual's heart, I mean, I got that particular line mostly from Alexander Solzhenitsyn,

but it's also an idea that's been developed intensively in the west for thousands and thousands of years and i mean maybe it's been developed since far before we we invented the stories in genesis because of course the serpent see in genesis of course genesis is like a paradise right so you can think about it as a well-functioning hierarchy it's also a balance between chaos and order it's got walls and it's a garden. So, but there's a snake that pops its head in. And that's the same as that, as I said, that black dot inside the white serpent and the yin-yang symbol. It's that no matter how, doesn't matter how perfect the environment is set up, something that doesn't fit is going to make its way inside. It's one of the oldest stories of

mankind. And you see, the thing that makes itself manifest inside in the Genesis story is a snake. Now, that snake turns out to be Satan, which is like, how the hell does that happen? It's a snake. Like, where does that come from? It's not actually in the biblical writings to any degree. It's part of the surrounding mythology. Well, it's partly because people started to figure out that the worst snake wasn't a snake. The worst snake was the snake that was inside a person, because a malevolent person is way more of a threat than just a snake. Like a snake wants to bite you, and it wants to eat you, and all of that, and they were hell on our extremely primordial ancestors. But the human race has been trying to figure out where the threat is forever. Well, first of all, it was external, right?

It was all external. It was the snake, it was the barbarian. But then it got localized to some degree inside the individual. It's like, that's a bad person. That person has a snake in them. And then the idea kind of came out, this is so cool. The idea is that, well, the snake that's inside bad person A and the snake that's inside bad person B is somehow the same.

So that's where the idea of an articulated morality starts to come from, is there's an equivalence of evil across individuals. So then the idea of evil itself starts to become abstracted at the same time that the idea of good does. Well, evil gets associated with Satan, and Satan gets associated with the snake. It's mind-boggling. I mean, these are how these—see, we were chimps for Christ's sake. You know, it took us a long time to develop up, say, an ideal. Just to say the word an ideal implies a counter-ideal. Say, well, those things were embodied way before they were ideas.

And after they were embodied first, not as bad, but as a bad thing or a bad person. Bad had to be extracted out of that. And even that was extracted as a drama first. You know, it's like the bad guy in a movie. He isn't a bad guy. He's a composite bad guy. You know, he's a literary bad guy. And the good guy isn't just a good guy in a movie. He isn't a bad guy. He's a composite bad guy. You know, he's a literary bad guy. And the good guy isn't just a good guy. He's a literary good guy. He's a hero. He's got way more

heroic attributes than the typical person. And that's where abstract ideas are born. So anyways, back to your question. You said... What's the evolutionary basis for that sort of disassociative behavior and thinking. Yeah. So I'm afraid that that was a big rabbit hole, man. No, it's a great rabbit hole.

And it makes a whole lot of sense that there's an actual, that there, and I knew you probably knew this, which is why I asked you, I knew you had an answer rather, that there is some sort of an evolutionary basis for that sort of, that ability that people have to look at someone as the other you bet well also how the hell are you going to respond more if you don't have that

right you know like that was always an issue with people uh with invading tribes and like you said with other external threats whether it was animals or insects or snakes or anything they could kill you yeah well and i mean in a in a primordial situation, I mean, guys are in warrior mode a good part of the time and modern people don't even know what that's like. That's why they go out and they go into warrior mode and they get post-traumatic stress disorder because it's so unlike the way they configure themselves that they can't even bridge the gap between the two identities. And for, just for sake of clarity, I think for some folks, post-traumatic stress disorder has actually come from not just that, but also from

the threat of being attacked. From what I understand, people like special ops people, people like Rangers and Navy SEALs and the like are less likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder because they're acting versus reacting. Whereas people that are going on patrol and then they get blown up, those people apparently have a far more likely issue with post-traumatic stress disorder because they're constantly worried about these external threats. And then when they come back to civilization, they have a very difficult time getting back to baseline. Yeah, they're in prey mode, really, in a very serious way. Yes.

So it's not just acting, but it's also reacting, that the reacting issue sometimes is even more problematic for the individual than the acting mode. Yeah, well, there's a funny dichotomy there because very frequently if you're going to encounter a stress, it's best to do it voluntarily, because you use a whole different circuit, use the approach circuit. And so, I mean, that sounds paradoxical, what you just said, because I said that, you know, people often observe themselves doing something, you get post-traumatic stress disorder. And then you said, well, yeah, but if people act, they're less likely

to. But that's part of a more general phenomena phenomena which is that in the face of a stressor you're you're better off psychophysiologically to act voluntarily it's either you're either going to be the thing that advances on the on the anomaly or it's prey that's that's roughly the way to think about it and to be a prey animal is a terrible thing because it's doom. It's paralysis. Like, literally speaking, it's like in the Harry Potter series with the basilisk, right? You look at the basilisk and it turns you to stone. Well, why?

Well, because that's what happens to a prey animal when a horrible predator looks at it. It's frozen. It's turned to stone. That's Medusa with all her snakes, right? She looks at you, man snakes right she looks at you man mother nature looks at you the the like the devouring part of mother nature opens her eye on you it's like you're paralyzed that's an old old story that is a really interesting thing that i never considered that medusa does have this head of snakes and she looks at you she turns you into

stone and that is the biggest issue with people it's not fight or flight people think it's fight or flight it's fight flight or freeze right the freeze thing is very common with people and i've seen it i've seen it with people that just they don't know what to do when they're in a stressful situation and instead of reacting they freak out yeah yeah they freak out or they freeze you know so they just they lock yeah well you can see that if we go back to that example of say someone tells a joke maybe they're kind of socially anxious and they finally manage to mumble out a joke and it falls flat it's like to freeze in the face of that is very common reaction you know the person will freeze then often they'll break into

tears and run so well if they're socially anxious that's exactly what's going to happen because they've now they also know that they've been turned into a predator let's say a snake predator by the whole community and that's very shaming and so that that's that that is dumped on top of them i mean that's socially anxious people are afraid of that all the time that they're going to be regarded by the group as an outcast or a pariah right yeah and it's very hard on people and the paranoid amongst them are always thinking that people are talking about them and trying to make them the other right right yeah yes a very uncomfortable state of mind yeah this is a very i think this is a very important subject and in explaining it this way i think for the open-minded, whoever is willing to

listen to this, who maybe might have opposed some of your ideas before, I think they'll get a better understanding of what's really dangerous about this lack of dialogue and this lack of engaging and this shutting you out and making you the other, as it were. Yeah, well, I mean, it's what postmodernism is fundamentally concerned about. They don't believe there's any other way of operating in the world than that. You see, and this is one of the things that I think Western civilization has contributed so brilliantly to the expansion of knowledge in the world, is what's the cure for the inadequacies of the group? Well, you might say it's the perfect state. So one of the ways, I'm going to do a series of lectures on the Bible starting May 16th,

and for reasons that I outlined to some degree when I was talking about Genesis a little bit earlier. But in the Old Testament, for example, the Israelites are always trying to make their peace with God. So they're trying to live in the world without getting walloped constantly by natural events and by invading forces. Which they attribute to God's will. Yes, yes. Whatever's beyond their understanding in some sense. They're more sophisticated than merely this, but whatever's beyond their understanding.

But they're kind of conceptualizing being as such and trying to figure out how to deal with it. And one of the hypotheses they come up with is something like, well, you can bargain with it. And one of the hypotheses they come up with is something like, well, you can bargain with it. And the thing is, you can. That's one of the things that's so cool. And partly the reason you can bargain with reality

is because the reality that you encounter as you move forward in time is partly the world, but partly the abstract social system. And so you can bargain with the future abstract social system all the time. You do that every time you make a promise. You do it every time you sacrifice

one thing for another. You know, so you forego an impulsive temptation, and that gives you a moral claim that you can redeem in the future. That happens all the time. That's what money is, for God's sake. And, you know, we discovered the future

at some point. As I said,, we discovered the future at some point. As I said, we were chimpanzees at one point. We discovered the future. Then we discovered that you could bargain with the future as if it was a person. That's amazing. It's amazing. And that's partly where the idea of God as a personality came from. I should flip that.

That idea that you could bargain with the future came out of the idea that god was a personality because the god as a personality idea came first but it was a it was a it was a developmental stage on the way to even being able to say the future you know we have no idea how it's like a six million year path from chimpanzee to to self-aware human being you You know, and we have no idea where these unbelievably sophisticated ideas that we have come from, like the idea of sacrifice. Do you know how much blood was spilled before human beings were able to sacrifice abstractly instead of killing something? We had to act out, God enjoys you killing something because he's happy with the blood. We had to act that out for God, who knows,

20,000 years, 100,000 years, before we got anywhere near the idea that you could do that abstractly. So, when I look at these old stories, I look at them like an evolutionary biologist. Now, I'm not trying to reduce them in any way, because what we don't understand about evolution, that could make a very thick book. And there's other strange things about religious phenomenology that we don't have a clue about. You know, like the fact that the drugs often called entheogens or psychedelics can reliably produce mystical experiences. Like, no one has any idea what to make of that.

You can just discount it. It's like, yeah, well, you know, they're drugs. Yeah, sure. People have been using the things for, who knows, 50,000 years, 150,000 years. They might be the source of all our religious ideas. I'm not saying that they are, but they could well be. And so, why do we have a capacity for mystical experience? Who knows?

It's associated with the sense of awe. It's associated with the same feeling that you get when you listen to particularly dramatic music or when something moves you deeply and, you know, the hair on the back of your neck stands up. You know what that is? That's pyloerection. That's the same thing that happens to a cat

when it looks at a particularly big dog. It's awe. You feel that when there's a swell of music. Awe. The hair stands up on the back of your neck. It's like you puff up just like a cat, except, you know, like a bald cat. What do you make of this idea that, well, not the idea, but the reality that these entheogens closely mimic human neurochemistry? No, they do. There's absolutely no doubt about that. But what do you think the reason for that is?

Well, part of the reason is that we share an evolutionary pathway with all these things that we eat, you know, plants and fungi and, you know, look, we're linked evolutionarily to every form of life on the planet, you know. And like serotonin in lobsters has the same effect on lobsters as it does on human beings. So if you up their serotonin levels artificially, the lobster stands up more erect and stronger and is much more willing to fight. And if you decrease the serotonin in the lobster's nervous system, then it gets all depressed and runs away and hides. Think about that. I mean, we split off from lobsters about 350 million years ago, and they still live in dominance hierarchies. That's how old the dominance hierarchy is. That's older than trees.

It's older than flowers. It's permanent, right? We've evolved for the hierarchy. And the spirit of the hierarchy, that's the Old Testament God. That's at least part of it, the spirit of the hierarchy. So these things are, well, they're mind-boggling to me, which is partly why I'm investigating them, but all of our wiring is conditional on that. So, and I mean, women use the dominance hierarchy to select mates. So,

it's so strange because, you know, people think of evolution from a natural selection perspective almost always, but sexual selection plays a huge role. So here, I'll lay out something wild for you, okay? So, we know that you have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. Now people have a hard time with that, but you could imagine that roughly speaking that would happen if every single woman had one baby and only every second man fathered a child. So for men it it would be, you

either have two kids or zero. Well, that's basically what it is on average across time. If you're a man, you have two children, maybe with two different women, or zero. If you're a woman, everyone has one. That's how it averages out. So there's more disparity of success among men, and that's very common in the animal kingdom, by the way. Now. Now the question is how do women select their mates? Now unlike female chimps, female humans are choosy maters. Female chimps will mate with any chimp. They go into heat, they'll mate with any chimp. The dominant males are more likely to mate with them but that's because they chase away the subordinates. It's not because the females exercise choice. Human females exercise choice and that's one of the things that differentiated us from chimpanzees. But how do

they do it? Well, they look at the male dominance hierarchy. And that's where the men are competing. Now, you could say they're competing for power. But that's a pretty corrupt way of looking at it. Like, they're competing for, let's say, influence. They're competing for leadership. And so, in some sense, the people at the top of the hierarchy, if their men are elected by the other men, now, I know there's brutes and there's predators and all of that, but I'm talking on average across time. It's like the men organize themselves,

and there are influential men that rise to the top, and the women take them. Now, you think about that. What that means is that over the millions of years that a dominance hierarchy with those properties existed, so let's say since we split from chimps, let's say that's six million years, that means that the male dominance hierarchy is the environment that pushes the mating male to the top. So that means the male that's most likely to take precedence in the male dominance hierarchy is the one most likely to leave a genetic contribution.

So that means that the male dominance hierarchy is a selection mechanism mediated by the female. So what that means is that as we've moved forward through six million years of time, men have become more and more well-adapted, not only to the presence of the male dominance hierarchy, but to the ability to move up it. And that's the central spirit, you could say, in some sense. That's the central spirit of the individual. The individual is the thing that can move up dominance hierarchies.

It's the thing that's at the top. It's the eye at the top of the pyramid. And it's been selected for. And then what's happened is we've watched, so we get better and better and better for biological reasons, culturally mediated, at figuring out how to climb across a set of dominance hierarchies so we can leave a genetic contribution. That's what's happened to human beings.

Now imagine that that's happened for six million years. So now imagine that we started to watch that. Because we're curious creatures. We're always trying to figure out who we are. And then as we watched that, we started to tell stories about what the people who could climb the hierarchies were like. Those were heroes. That's where hero mythology came from. And the biggest hero is the person who will go out and kill the snake.

Well, unsurprisingly. Because that was a big hero, man. And. Well, unsurprisingly, because that was a big hero, man. And maybe when we were living in trees, that was a hero. So the big hero is the person who goes out, slays the dragon, gets the gold, brings it back to the community and distributes it. He's also the person most likely to go up the dominance hierarchy. He's the person most likely to find the virgin, right? Because it's a virgin that you free from the dragon and you get to claim her. Right? And so the dominance hierarchy is a mechanism that selects heroes and then breeds them. And so then we watch that for six million years.

We start to understand what it means to be the hero. We start to tell stories about that. And so then not only are we genetically aiming at that with the dominance hierarchy is a selection mechanism mediated by female choice But our stories are trying to push us in that direction And so then we say well look that person's admirable Tell a story about him and we say this person is admirable tell a story about him and this person is admirable And at the same time we talk about the people who aren't admirable And then we start having admirable and non admadmirable as categories. And out of that, you get something like good and evil. And then you can start to imagine the perfect person.

That would be not only so, it would be you take 10 admirable people and you pull out someone who's meta-admirable. And that's a hero. that becomes a religious figure across time that becomes a savior or Messiah across time as we conceptualize what the ideal person is and we didn't in the West here's how we figured it out we said the ideal person the ideal man is the person who tells the truth and what that means is that's the best way of climbing up any possible dominance hierarchy in the way that's most stable and most lasting. That's the conclusion of Western culture.

So in a sense, psychologically, when you're talking about postmodernists and their rejection of these classic male structures, what they're doing is realizing that they're not going to compete in the classic, as stated, male hierarchy, so they're creating their own version of it. Sure, that's the creative element. Sure, well, we asked earlier, what's the motivation of these pathological guys who are out there like bolstering up the feminists yeah well you know they don't compete any other way they don't compete they figured out how to compete they compete as allies let's say very sneaky wow yeah wow sneaky yeah and that's how everybody always describes him too

when you i mean it's almost like a we i avoid doing it because i just it just almost feels gross to label them like that but that's that is the way you think of male feminists you think of them as sneaky yeah and yeah it's creepy creepy. And discriminatory towards classic male behavior. Yeah. Well, no wonder. Yeah. They haven't got a hope of competing in that hierarchy. Wow.

That's deep. That is deep. This is going to be hurtful to a lot of people. There's a lot of people listening to this right now, very upset. Yeah. Well, you asked earlier why the postmodernists don't like blunt speech. Yeah, that's why. Well, that's why, man.

You know, it's like the truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don't like having their dead wood burnt off often because they're like 95% dead wood. And I'm not being, believe me, I'm not being snide about that. And I'm not being, believe me, I'm not being snide about that. It's no joke. When you start to realize how much of what you've constructed of yourself is based on deception and lies, that is a horrifying realization.

And it can easily be 95% of you. Things you say, things you act out, you know, it's... Well, you see that in Pinocchio, which I often discuss. You know, Pinocchio, when he gets corrupt as he matures, he first learns to lie. And then he becomes a braying jackass on Pleasure Island. And he's threatened by the underground authoritarians. They're going to sell him to the salt mines. It's like, yeah, that's for sure.

It's exactly right, man. So then you figure out you're a braying jackass and you're lying all the time. That's a terrible realization. And then all that needs to be burnt away. And the people don't like that. Now you've been embattled in this conflict for quite a long time. And I've got to imagine that the way you look at the world, the way you see things many, many steps ahead, do you see any sort of a logical conclusion to this process? Do you see any light at the end of the tunnel? Or do you see an impossible to avoid conflict? Like, what do you see when you look at this whole thing long term? Well, I would say I can't look at it long term and the reason for that is that and this is why i get a kick out of all the kek kekistan boys you know i do believe

that we're in a period of chaos what's a kekistan kek oh kek is a mythological country that's ruled by chaos by the god kek who's a frog by who's a frog as it turns out um so i don't know i don't know about this oh well you need to look them up that's a big internet it turns out I don't know about this oh well you need to look them up that's a big internet thing Kekistan yeah yeah yeah

a big internet thing all I know about the frog is the frog the Trump frog the Pepe the frog who is apparently so distraught that his frog has been used to align

yes he killed him off yeah he killed him off but good luck he didn't alright so that's stupid because that's not going to work the so the people who were using Pepe, I haven't got the story quite right, but I'll get it mostly right. The people who were using Pepe as a meme.

Here it is. Used, yeah, that's it. Republic of Kekistan. Yeah, so they used this symbol, K-E-K, to replace LOL. And the reason they did that was because K-E-K in Korean means L-O-L. And so it was just this little joke. Kek. K-E-K. Well, then somebody found out these were people who were using pepi, remember.

It's a frog. Then people found out that Kek was an Egyptian god. And he was a frog. And he was between categories. Sort of like a transsexual, by the way. He was between categories. And so now they have this Republic of Keck, and it's ruled by this Egyptian god, whose name is Keck, who's a frog with a make america great again hat and he's he's got like a tombstone it says those who served in the meme war 2015 and 2016 we are the gods of the great meme war we are the shit posters the legion of keck we are the internet the death of the normies lulz and keck we are one why the fuck it's going on that that is the question and that's the

question you asked me and my answer was i don't know we're in a period of chaos we're in a period of chaos and in a period of chaos the time horizon shrinks because no because the outcome is uncertain well this seems to be truly embracing chaos i mean just that statement, the frog, the Donald Trump thing with the hat on, this is one of the things that seems to me to be a reoccurring feature in this whole chaos ballet that we're watching play out, is that people are enjoying the fact that Donald Trump sucks as a president. They don't feel threatened by it. They like it. And they don't like it because they want to burn this motherfucker to the ground and torch this thing and like a phoenix wheel arise from the fire. No, no, it's not that.

It's that they are enjoying that it's falling apart. This is why we are the shit posters. Do you know what shit posting is? Yeah. Jamie, explain shit posting. You're really good at explaining it. Yeah. Posting for like literally no reason other than to get someone mad.

It's almost like trolling, but it's like a separate level of trolling. Right? That's a good way to say it. Yeah, that's a good way to say it. Provocation for its own sake. Jamie's the first person to tell me about shitposting. I wasn't aware. Until about what?

A year ago? Yeah, I think it was, yeah. Probably around about pre-election time. I did not know. So, I mean, there's rules for operating in chaos, right? Because that's when you're in the belly of the beast or the belly of the whale and you're underwater. You're in the underworld. You're in the underworld in chaos.

And so that's a really cool thing to know, Joe. So imagine that the normal world of mankind is inside that dominance hierarchy where everything is going well. Because nothing abnormal is happening. You're getting what you need and you want and your conscious knowledge suffices right okay but then something tilts and that structure no longer works so where do you end up you end up in the underworld that's what happens when your partner of 20 years has a has a long-term um affair and you find out about it it's like you thought you knew where you were But you didn't and now that you found out you don't know where you are Well when you don't know where you are you're in the underworld

Right and that's where the unconscious forces play. Those are the gods That's why there's gods in the underworld and people go to the underworld all the time It's chaos and fear and depression hopelessness and imaginativeness it's everything and this realm is terrifying to people terrifying and promising terrifying and promising because dragons have gold because it's always done the unknown has two things just like the future it's like look out it'll do you in and look out it offers everything to you that's the underworld that's why the hero always goes into the underworld to find a cave full of gold that's guarded by a dragon in the hobbit

literally yeah well and that's beowulf right yeah sure that's the oldest story of mankind it's really the our oldest story wow and so that the underworld is chaos it's it's chaos and down there there's all sorts of play of possibility. And the reason the frog was the guardian of chaos is because the frog is this thing that doesn't fit into categories. You see, because it's partly water, it's partly land, it's tadpole, yet it's adult, right? So it's like a fish and then it's like an animal. It doesn't fit. And it's things that don't fit that blow apart the categories, right? Well, that's what the transsexuals do to the category of gender, for example. And that puts you in this state of chaos.

It puts you in this state of chaos. And that's what we're in now. We're in a state of chaos. So what are the rules for operating in a state of chaos? Well, as far as I can tell, the fundamental rule when operating in chaos is tell the truth. So, for example, if you... For the people that want to navigate this successfully. Yep. All you've got, that's what you've got,

as a shield and a weapon. And that's the guidepost. That's the way through. And you see that in hero stories all the time, you know. So, it's allegiance to the truth, but the truth is a strange thing. It's a very strange thing. Often the hero in a story has to assimilate their dark side before they're capable of telling the truth.

Right? In The Hobbit, for example, he has to become a thief. Right? Because he has to get tough. That's the thing. That's also the thing about telling the truth, is that it's not for the naive. Not at all. And partly it's because it burns off dead wood it's partly because it hurts people's feelings

it's a sword so you have to be a warrior wow, a truth warrior in this time of chaos what emerges from this? Right. Sometimes it's catastrophe.

That's the thing about these categories. They're real. They're real. And, you know, the optimists that I hear say, well, the pendulum swings and then it swings back. And I think, yeah, well, sometimes it takes 100 years to swing back and it takes a hell of a lot of people out on the way. And sometimes it never swings back at all.

So, you know, sometimes people go out to fight a dragon and it just eats them or it burns them. And that's the end of that. Right. And, like, we're in an unstable period of time at the moment, in a transition period of some sort. I can't put my finger on it, but I know that that's partly why what I've been saying has been resonating with people, because obviously it's not about pronouns.

Well, it is. It is, except language turns out to be about a lot more than, like, you can't take a little thing, like the desire to transform pronouns, and think that that's a little thing. It's not a little thing. It's also your disagreement with this use of these new gender pronoun words they're trying to force on people has opened up this discussion where you can enlighten people on your very deep understanding of human psychology. It's not just simply this gender pronoun disagreement. You're transphobic. You're a racist. You're a transphobic piece of shit. It's this opportunity now

because of this. I mean, essentially, they fucked with the wrong dude. I mean, to really, to say it the right way because your understanding of this is... I'd like a t-shirt like that. Yeah, it's not shallow in any sense of the word.

I mean, to engage you in this battle of rhetoric, it allows you to expose your very deep understanding with the problems that are going on right now with human beings in general. Well, it looks like that to me, because what happens, as far as I can tell with my YouTube channel, say, is that people are often pulled in because of the social justice warrior stuff. But then they see I have all these other videos, and they're curious about me, partly because people are calling me names. And so then they watch a video or two, and they think, hmm, I haven't heard that before. Yeah. You know, and then they watch a bunch of them. And then they

write me and say, man, that was really helpful. And I say, thanks. I'm really happy about that because I am. Are you in an unmanageable position now, though, as far as responding to people? Oh, I try to respond to people, but I can't. Yeah, it's not possible. No, it's not possible. I would imagine over the last few months, it must be just overwhelming.

Yeah. Well, I've given up trying to keep up on my email. It's just not. My wife helps me with that. And I've had some other people help me. But, you know, what I do is I look and I try to say thank you to people and write them a couple of lines when I have a moment. But, you know, because I can't get to all of it. They just come in by the thousands.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know that position. Yeah. Right. And it's too bad because people are writing me very heartfelt, long letters. They're often brilliant, frequently, like amazing letters telling me, you know, their experiences with the authoritarian left or the way they've been, you know, cornered in one way or another or how starting to clean up the room changed their life.

That's quite fun because it's something I always tell people to do, instead of going out and protesting. Jesus, I just can't stand that. Cleaning up the room? Yeah. Meaning? Well, my sense is that if you want to change the world, you start from yourself and work outward,

because you build your competence that way. It's like, I don't know how you can go out and protest the structure of the entire economic system if you can't keep your room organized. Yeah, isn't that an issue with people, though, that they always want to enact some sort of control over the outside world when their inside is all fucked up? Yeah, well, it's also— Those are the people that are the most adamant about it. Well, I think there's some truth in that.

I think there is truth in that. I mean, people try to change the outside world for lots of ways, but many of those ways aren't just pure good. But, you know, I've thought about, well, I made a video called, which was called Message to Millennials, where it was called How to Change the World Properly. A bit on the pretentious side, I suppose. But I was trying to produce something that was a counterposition to this idea that what you should do is go out and fix up other people you know that's just not right and there's a new testament line about that

something about you know not worrying too much about the log in your neighbor's eye or about the speck in your neighbor's eye when you have a log in your eye it's like yes no kidding but you know do you really want to do you really want to face that And so what I've thought about is that what you start to do is you start to tell and act out the truth locally. Like within the domain of your actual competence. Because the world presents itself as a series of puzzles, some of which you're capable of solving and some of which you're not. And you have many puzzles in front of you that you could solve, but you choose not to. Those are the things that weigh on your conscience. It's like, you know, I should really do this, but you don't.

It's like, so I had this idea a long time ago, because the world is a pretty dreadful place. I thought, well, what would the world be like if people stopped avoiding the things they knew they should do? You know, because the question is, how much are we contributing to the fact that life is a is an existential catastrophe and a tragedy how much is our own corruption contributing to that that's a really worthwhile question things you leave undone because you're angry you're resentful you're lazy you have inertia well you consult your conscience and it says well you know that place over there could use a little work it's the same as working on yourself and so you clean that up because you can and then things are a little clearer around you and you're a little better off because you've

practiced a bit and and so you're a little stronger and then something else manifests itself and says well maybe you could like take a crack at fixing me up too so you decide to do that and then that gets a little bit more pristine you know and soon and it's it's humble because you're not exceeding your domain of competence you know it's like don't be fixing up the economy 18 year olds you don't know anything about the economy it's a massive complex machine beyond anyone's understanding and you mess with it at your peril so and can you even clean up your own room no well you should think about that you should think about that because if you can't even clean up your own room who the hell are you to give advice to the world that's a very very important thing for people to hear it's a very important thing for people to hear. It's a very important thing for people to hear.

So many times, I mean, here's a perfect example that people will understand and be able to resonate with. It'll resonate with them, rather. When you see people that have a lot of inspirational memes on, like, Instagram and Facebook, they're almost all fucked up. L. Ron Hubbard was completely insane and was self-diagnosing. And one of the things he was trying to do, I mean, if you read Lawrence Wright's book, Going Clear, he was clearly trying to fix himself in creating this religion, this religion that was a lot of it based on self-help principles that he took from other sources, that you see from a lot of these people that are like,

I mean, there's legitimately motivational people that find great benefit in being an example, a powerful, strong example, and they find great comfort in showing people their methods that they've used in order to improve their life, like your own self-auditing system that you're promoting. Yeah. So it's not that it's all not real or, you know. No, it's not like there's no way that people can improve themselves. Right. It's quite the contrary. No, it's not like there's no way that people can improve themselves. Quite the contrary.

People can improve themselves, I think, to a degree that we don't understand. You know, because a human being, for better or worse, is something potential as well as something actual. Right. And that's really weird, that idea of potential, because it's not actually measurable or tangible. But we seriously believe it's something like the idea of spirit. Potential. Yeah, but people believe in it, you see. Because I might say, well, you're not living up to your potential.

And you might disagree, but you would definitely understand the statement. Right. And you think, well, what is this potential? It's like, it's not actual. It's not real. But it is, isn't it? Though, if you see someone, especially artistic, like you see someone who may be self-sabotage after the fact, not realizing their potential. Obviously, they've hit some sort of a frequency where they resonate with people that appreciate them.

Authors, you see that with musicians, comedians, all sorts of people that create things. And then they're not living up to their potential because they've allowed the demons to take over the inner workings of their mind. And again, there's a lot of sincere people that are motivational people that I follow. I think there's a lot of people out there that take great pleasure in expressing to other people the things that have benefited them. So I don't want to sell them short. Well, see, this is part of the reason I like the psychoanalysts, say, Freud and Jung. Because, and I would say particularly Jung, because I haven't read anyone I regard as

deeper than Jung. He's terrifying, truly terrifying. But here's one of the things that differentiates him from the typical self-help person. Here's one of the things that differentiates him from the typical self-help person. I really love this. He believes that the pathway to completion as a human being is through the embodiment of the monster. Embodiment of the monster. That's the discovery of the shadow.

You see, so Jung didn't believe that you could be a good person until you realized your capacity for evil. I don't mean acted it out in the world. But understand that it's possible. Well, not only understand it, but then to bring it under your control. You see, because there's a big difference between someone who's naive and is a good person. They're naive, they're a good person because they can't not be. They're like a domesticated house cat. There's nothing, they don't not be. They're like a domesticated house cat. There's nothing. They don't even have the capacity to be bad.

So there's no morality in that. The morality comes when you're a monster, and you can control it. And that's the Jungian encounter with the shadow. So Jung said, for example, that the roots of the shadow go all the way down to hell. And what he meant by that is that, well, you can think about it literally, you can think about about it metaphorically we'll just think about it metaphorically it's like

if you start to understand who you are then you understand the nazis and who wants to understand the nazis you know i can understand sex criminals i can understand them right i can understand them. Right. I can understand Nazis. And the reason for that is because I can see that as an aspect of myself. Truly. But one of the things that's so interesting, it's terrifying to realize that, which is why it's terrifying to realize the shadow, which is why people don't do it. It's no wonder they don't do it. You know, it's a horrible thing to realize that you're human and what being human means. Like angel, like Christ to Satan, that's the human being. And you might say, well, those aren't real. It's like, okay, well, they're figments of the imagination that the human race constructed

to describe themselves. Fine. Does that make it less frightening? I don't think so. So, and it doesn't make it any less frightening if you take those two extremes seriously. And you might say, well, who's going to take the Christ extreme seriously? It's no problem, man. Dispense with it. You try getting rid of the other side. See how you do with that so jung's idea that you find so compelling was essentially that one has to understand their potential for horrific behavior that it almost exists in all of us that it's a facet of of just the human experience well look i know partly why you're so popular

it's because you're a monster i mean look i watched what you did to the kardashians on your on your uh and jenner on your comedy show man you did this whole gargoyle thing yeah you remember you laugh yeah see you can even laugh about that i mean it was it was horrifying to behold you were crouched up on the back of this chair like a it's horrifying to do oh yeah i couldn't believe you did it well the problem with doing it is this is gonna sound fucked up but while i'm doing it i'm not thinking i'm doing a comedy sketch this is what's fucked up about it while i'm crouched there i'm thinking like a demon yeah like while that's the reason why i do it that way like and the reason why i do it in the like i'm very flexible right so it's one of the reasons why i do it that way like and the reason why i do it in like i'm very flexible

right so it's one of the reasons why i do it in almost because i want it to be in an almost in a way that you don't imagine human beings moving you know that you it's like it confuses the mind because it's not standard human movement. And then on top of that, the way I'm thinking and this explosive, like when he yells out nonsense. And I say he because I don't think of it as me. I really think it sounds so pretentious. But while I'm doing that, my brain goes into another place. You can't do that unless you're a monster.

It's a fucked up bit. I'm very happy when I retired it, by the way. Oh yeah, I was really quite taken, I was very impressed by it. I mean, I thought it was hilarious to begin with, but the fact that you would go there, I thought that was really interesting. And comedians are like that, because they go into dark places. They're tricksters.

They're a mediator between the normal world and the world of the gods they're tricksters so it was very funny to watch you do that and i wondered how far you would let yourself get into it but i think part of the reason that you're appealing to people if you don't mind me my me saying this you know i'm not trying to be um particularly, but I thought about it a lot, is that you're a tough guy, and you tell the truth, but it's both of those together that's what's doing it, because, you know, people don't look at you and they, and think, like, holier-than-thou preacher, that isn't what they think, they think tough guy, who's trying to figure things out, like, They think, tough guy who's trying to figure things out.

Like, right on. That's good. That's a good, you're a good figure for the times. Because this whole war against the phallogocentrism, you know, calls forward people who are like you, if we're lucky. And those are guys who have this warrior end. Because, you know, you're a fighter. So, and if you're going to be a fighter, you have to want to win,

and you have to want to hurt people. I mean, not for the sake of hurting them, that's what makes you different than an evil person. But you have to have that capacity, you have to develop that. And, you know, that's the step on the way to enlightenment, weirdly enough, because that isn't what people think. Well, I definitely think that truth is a valuable commodity in this very bizarre time. And I think that's also one valuable commodity in this very bizarre time. And I think that's also one of the reasons why you're very popular is that you have stuck your neck out in a world that does not encourage it. Academia, not only does it not encourage it, it encourages the exact opposite. It encourages you to stick your head in the books and just to, in some way shape or form go with the tide like whichever way it is and you know get your tenure and just yeah well it's intellectual pride yeah you know but i don't consider myself an intellectual precisely what do you consider yourself

what is an intellectual if you're not how about nobody well the thing see because my ideas aren't disembodied i act them out but to be kind of makes me a romantic in some sense well i don't live in my head exactly and i do to some degree but what does an intellectual do then you see do you think of it as a pejorative when you think of the term intellectual do you think of it as a limited person well it's a funny thing. In this book called Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche has his Zarathustra come down from a mountaintop after being enlightened. And he sees this, he goes into the public square. And there's this little tiny being there, like an inch high, and it has a gigantic ear on it.

And it's talking and people are gathered around listening. And that was sort of Nietzsche's metaphor for an intellectual. It was like, mostly little except maybe the rational faculty or something like that expanded to monstrous dimensions, unbalanced in that manner.

And prone to become the subject of totalitarian ideology. That's the worship of the rational mind that the Catholic Church always warned against. You know, it's not like the Catholic Church. Of course I have to say this, but I won't even say it. But you don't need to. No, that's right.

That's right. But the point is they had a warning, and the warning was that the rational mind liked to fall in love with its own creations. Ah. Right? So the term intellectual, the problem is that it identifies one aspect, and it sort of defines one aspect of behavior and thinking. Only one.

Yeah, it's the intellect. It's not a balance. Well, what happens is it's like the intellect is raised to the status of highest God. That's the right way to think. See, the God idea, here's another way of thinking about it that's quite cool. I learned this from Jung. And you can take it for what it's worth. The highest ideal that a person holds, consciously or unconsciously, that's their God.

It functions in precisely that manner. And people might say, well, I don't believe in God. It's like, well, it depends on what you mean. And I'm not being foolish about that. It's like, we're very complicated creatures, and we're run by all sorts of very strange things down there in the unconscious. And the Greeks thought we were the playthings of the gods because we serve lust, we serve thirst,

we serve hunger, we serve rage. You know, and those things all transcend us. So that's why they were gods. You know, rage, that's the war god. Well, why is it a god? Well, it exists forever. It exists in all people. It takes them over and directs their behavior.

It's a god. Well, you can quibble about the details. No, it's not a god. Okay, fine. It's a psychological force. Right. Do people get too hung up on that one word? Well, they don't really.

We have to think about it functionally to some degree. We have to think about what that idea means. I mean, we've had that idea forever. It isn't just some superstition. Jesus, we've got to be more sophisticated than that, man. And that's partly, well, this is partly what I think is unfortunate about the new atheists, let's say, is they don't take the damn problem seriously. They think, well, Christianity, that's just a bunch of superstition. It's like, They think, well, Christianity, that's just a bunch of superstition.

It's like, really? No. Sorry. That's just not deep enough, man. So what it really is is the accounts of people trying to work out the issues of being a human. Let me give you another example. This is so cool. This is so cool. It's Northrop Frye, who is a biblical scholar at the University of Toronto.

This was one of his elucidations of the structure of the Bible. So the Bible is actually a story, which is weird because it's a whole bunch of different books written by a whole bunch of different people, edited kind of willy-nilly over thousands of years, and then assembled, you know, by committee. It's a really strange book, but it has a narrative structure. So, and that sort of emerged as a collective decision across these thousands of years. So, the Old Testament, here's the rough story in the Old Testament. Israel is sort of a middle power, and it rises to power, so, and domination. power and it rises to power so and domination and then it a prophet arises and says look you guys you're all successful now you're starting to get corrupt you're not paying attention to the widows and children you're not running your state according to the superordinate principle you

might say well the superordinate principle doesn't exist it's like okay keep running it that way and see what the hell happens. That's what the prophet says, usually at the risk of his life. He says that to the king. It's like, fine, you don't believe in God. You don't believe in the superordinate principle. Let's say that the superordinate ethical principle. No problem. Keep doing what you're doing. Let's see what happens. Well, what happens is Israel gets wiped out, you know, and then for generations it's enslaved or its population is being destroyed, and then it sort of climbs back up to power, and then it gets powerful for

a brief period of time, and it gets corrupt, and a prophet comes up and says, remember that superordinate principle that you made a covenant with? You're not paying any attention to it anymore. You better look the hell out, and everyone ignores it, and bang. So it's order, corruption, chaos. Order, corruption, chaos. That happens six times now. So here's an idea, there's an idea behind it. The idea, because the state keeps rising, there's an idea that emerges out of that, that the aim is the perfect state. That's a utopian dream that arises out of that, let's call it, learned process over thousands of years. If we could only get the state perfect, if we could only get the state of perfect, well, let's say like the state of Israel,

or the Russian state, the communist state, if we could only bring utopia in at the political level, our problems would be solved. Well, then what happens is, there's a transition in conceptualization. That happens with the New Testament. And the New Testament conceptualization is, wait a minute, the state isn't salvation. The individual is salvation. Now you say, well, we're going to just throw that out, are we? That was a hell of a discovery man It was a root and then there's more to it. It's not only is the individual salvation

It's the truthful individual that salvation you think of how difficult a concept like that is to develop if there's anything less self-evident than that You know because you think well who's gonna run the dominance hierarchy? It's like the biggest bloody monster with a club. It's like, no, it turns out those are unstable. Those societies are unstable. They don't work. They collapse into chaos. They get corrupt.

They lose sight of the superordinate principle, whatever that is. The stable solution is the individual that tells the truth. And it's taken us forever to figure that out. And that's partly what the postmodernists are after. That's their anti-philogocentrism. That's why they skitter off and hide in their ideology. They're afraid to come out. They're afraid to be seen.

They're afraid to speak because they have nothing to say. So, we have to get sophisticated about this stuff, or we're going to throw it away without understanding it. It's unbelievable. Like, that story is... It's the story upon Western civilization. It's the story upon which Western civilization is founded. That's why Nietzsche said when God was dead that everything would collapse into chaos.

He didn't say that triumphantly. He knew what was going to happen. So did Dostoevsky. That's why I admire those people so much. They knew what was coming. So what I've been trying to do, and I've been guided in large part by Jung, because he was the first. Jung took Nietzsche's problem seriously.

Nietzsche said, look, we're losing our faith. We're losing our ability to relate to this superordinate ethical principle. And he actually blamed Christianity for killing itself with the sort of truth that it had produced. He said, so we're going to lose this, and it's big trouble. Make no mistake about it, because our whole society is founded on those principles. We get rid of the animating spirit at the base of it, we're going to lose all of it. So, and Nietzsche thought, well, we're going to have to become superhuman to manage it. That's

where his concept of the overman comes from, or the superman, which the Nazis sort of pulled off and parodied, I would say. Now Jung, you see, Jung was a student of Nietzsche's, not directly, but very much influenced by him. Jung thought that Nietzsche was wrong, that we couldn't create our own values.

Because, look, it's so hard to create your own values. Let's say you're kind of an overweight guy, and you decide to go to the gym for your New Year's resolution. It's like you don't. You go twice, and then you stop. And it's because you can't create your own values. It's hard. You're not your own slave. You can't just tell yourself what to do. You have a nature.

And so Jung's idea was, well, that we had to go back to the mythology. We had to go back to the stories. We had to go back into the underground, unconscious chaos and lift out what we had forgotten. And that's what he was trying to do with his psychology. And he's done it very effectively. Very, very effectively. He was a revolutionary thinker, but very difficult to understand. And so I've been working with Jung's ideas for a long time, trying to, I would say,

make them more rational and articulate. And believe me, that's no critique, because every time I go back to Jung, which I do from time to time, thinking I've kind of mastered him, I learn a bunch of stuff that I didn't know. So what I've been trying to do is to resurrect, God, I'm trying to resurrect the dormant logos, I suppose, if you have to put it that way. That's what I'm trying to do. And it's mostly in men. And they're starving for it. Why mostly in in men i don't know that just seems to be what's happening like about 90 of my viewers on youtube are men but then when i go speak publicly it's all men what the hell are they doing coming to hear somebody speak men don't do that right women do that and so and then i talk to them about truth and responsibility and their eyes light up because

it's like no one ever mentioned that before and i it, it's, it's, it just boggles my mind. I'm asking because, uh, I feel like that's a, that is a gigantic theme today that men searching for some sort of reason or some sort of, uh, I guess without using, without a better word path, some sort of path. I mean, it seems to be very, very prevalent today in almost all walks of life. Men feel disenfranchised with this world that they find themselves stuck in. Well, there's a reason that superhero movies are so popular. You know, that's polytheism. That's the return of polytheism for all intents and purposes. mean what the hell are those things they're demigods obviously one of them's thor for god's sake i mean

how more obvious could it be right you know and so you might say well who's the leader of the demigods because that's the person you really want to follow right yeah yeah well the evolutionary answer to that is well the evolutionary answer to that is, well, the evolutionary answer to that, as far as the Christian route went, was Christ. But there's been lots of embodiments of that. For the Mesopotamians, it was Marduk. Marduk was the savior figure. He had eyes all the way around his head, and he spoke magic words. That was his fun, that's what made him different from all the other gods. And he was elected by all the other gods to be their king. And then he went out and fought Tiamat, who's a great dragon, and made the world out of her pieces. One of his names was he who makes ingenious things out of the combat with Tiamat. Well, that's what human beings do, is they go out into the unknown, into chaos, and they make ingenious things out of it. That's what we do. And so that he's the found Marduk was the founder of Mesopotamian civilization and you could think about all those tribes came together to make Mesopotamia. They all had a God

and so then those gods went to war and out of that war of gods a metagod emerged that was Marduk and Marduk is one of the sources for the figure of Christ that happened all over the place like Marduk, and Marduk is one of the sources for the figure of Christ. That happened all over the place. Like, you see the admirable man, then you see 10 admirable men, and you think, wow, those guys have something in common. That's what you remember about them, you see? You remember the heroic things they've done, because they stick in your memory, because they fit the pattern. And then you start telling the story about the heroic things that a bunch of them did. It all amalgamates together. And then you come out with your culture hero, your god.

Then there's like 50 tribes. They each have their own gods. Well, what are you going to do then? The gods go to war over centuries. And then they elect a new god, Marduk, in the case of the Mesopotamians. And he's the thing that goes out and fights the dragon of chaos and makes the world.

It's like, yeah, that's exactly what he is You do that with truth Because truth introduces you to chaos Why do you think though? It's a so much of an issue with males as opposed to females in our society Maybe females already have enough to do Really really like maybe maybe men have to take this on voluntarily That's what it looks like to me because Because you can screw around until you're 50. You can still have a family.

You've got time. And you can sit down and do nothing if you want. You can do it. But you shouldn't, because it's horrible to do that. And people who do it know it. It's meaningless. It's a funny thing about meaninglessness there's no such thing when people say their lives aren't are meaningless that isn't

what they mean they mean i'm in pain and anxious all the time that's what they mean those are meanings man you don't get neutral you know i'm just sitting around i'm not feeling anything it's like no no one sorry that doesn't happen. Right. So when you say do nothing, that your life is meaningless if you're doing nothing. What do you mean by doing nothing? Well, by not accepting any response, by not lifting a great load, by not acting out the archetype of the hero. That's what people are. That's what men are, if they're anything. They're mythological heroes, if they're anything. Through some path, whatever it be. There's lots of paths. I mean, so look, there's an old medieval

idea. This is the idea of the imitation of Christ. This is something that Jung elaborates on a lot. He believed, this is one of the things that he said, was that the proper goal of a Christian, roughly speaking, is to enact the

meta-pattern of Christ's life in their own, to make it their own story. And so, what did he mean by that? Well, part of it is, see, one of the things that characterizes the mythological figure of Christ, let's say, is that he takes on the burden of mortality voluntarily. He accepts it as a precondition of existence. And we have to do that because otherwise we get resentful. Like, life is hard. Make no mistake about it. People's lives are tragic. You know, if you pick a random person off the street and you ask them about their life, man,

usually there's things that have happened there. You know, they just beggar the imagination. It's no wonder people are angry and resentful and bitter. But the way out of that is to accept it, to accept your mortality. And that helps you transcend it. That's partly what the crucifix symbol means, because it was accepted voluntarily. You have to accept your death voluntarily. That's part of the path of the hero. It's a very difficult thing to do, obviously, obviously. What's your alternative? Yeah, obviously. You know, I think people are constantly searching for that thing that you just described, the thing of meaning, you know, having meaning in this life. And that meaning has a different definition for everybody. I mean, everybody's meaning is, I mean, your meaning might

be very different than mine or Jamie's. I mean, you kind of have to have your own path. And I think that's also one of the reasons why people are so confused is because you're thrust into an early age, into a very rigid system of education and then of jobs and then of career structure, where you're in this place and most people don't feel like that's what they're supposed to be doing and we feel very alienated by the very structure of society that we are embedded in of course of course well one of the you know there's two primary masculine mythological figures and one is the wise king and the other is the king who devours his own son like that's the destruct that's the that's the patriarchy that the feminists are always talking about. Well, of course, it's always there. So society is a destructive force. It doesn't care about you as an individual.

It needs you to be part of society. It needs you to adopt the norms and to squelch your peculiar individuality and to be a cog and to be socialized and to hem yourself in and control yourself and not be impulsive. Yeah, it's a tyrant. But the thing is, society isn't only a tyrant. That's the thing. It's like, how about a little gratitude in there? Well, you know, people have a hard time with this because we like it when a thing is only

one thing. But society is always two things. It's the thing that alienates you and the thing that's your benevolent father. Always. Now, you know, it tilts. Sometimes it tilts harder towards the tyrant and that's not so good. But that's an archetypal reality.

So, you know, what do you have to contend with in life? This is why these are archetypal realities because everyone has to contend with them. You have to contend with yourself and the adversary that's inside you that seems to oppose your every movement The fact that you're not that you just can't move forward smoothly through life without being in conflict with yourself

So there's a hero and the adversary on the individual level and then on the social level. There's the wise king and the tyrant You're always going to run into that. I don't care if you're a Bantu tribesman or a New York lawyer all those things you're going to run into and then in the natural world you're going to run into the destructive element of nature that's the gorgon you let that thing get a glance at you

and you're one frozen puppy but also there's the benevolent element of nature that's feminine, that's mother nature both of those extremes and that's the world that's feminine that's mother nature both of those extremes so and that's the world that's the archetypal world and it's because it's eternal as far as human beings are concerned those things are always there that's our true environment it's not these things we see around us they're they're lasting no time these other things last forever and that's what we're adapted

to we're like we're adapted to the things that last forever. But yet we go through this finite life, searching for meaning. Well, and it's funny to note where meaning seems to locate itself. You want a meaning that justifies the suffering. It's something like that. That's a transcendent meaning. It's like, this is hard, but it's worth it. Okay, so what do you do? Pick something like that. That's a transcendent meaning. It's like, this is hard, but it's worth it. Okay, so what do you do? Pick something worth it, right? That's partly what I

try to get people to do with that future authoring program. To say, okay, look, here's a place to start. You got your miserable self right now. It's like three to five years out. Imagine what your life could be like if you had what you would give yourself if you were taking care of yourself. What would life be like? Just come up with an idea even about that. And so then people do that. And then they write out a plan to attain it.

And then the college kids are like 30% more likely to stay in university if they do that, especially if they're men. Because men need a purpose. I think women have a purpose. Now they have two purposes. They're going to have a family. That's a major purpose, man. Just give birth.

That's no joke. And then you're devoted to something for like 20 years. You got your adventure right there. Yeah, but a lot of women find great offense in someone saying that, especially a man saying that, mansplaining that a woman's purpose is to breed, right? I mean, isn't that a giant issue that a lot of women have? I didn't say that was the only purpose. I know that you didn't. Oh yeah, people have an issue with it, but it's like, grow up. You know, if you're a sophisticated person, as far as I'm concerned,

You know, if you're a sophisticated person, as far as I'm concerned, how many important things are there in life? Well, one of them is family. It's as simple as that. Now, you might say, well, family isn't the end-all solution. It's like, yeah, well, thanks for pointing that out, you know. I've dealt with plenty of pathological families. But it's a huge part of life. You have a mother and a father, you have children,

it places you in the world. And any society that... Look, there's a reason societies worship the virgin mother and the child. It's because societies that don't die. And so people say, well, you know, that relationship between mother and child isn't the only thing. Okay, fine, it's still a sacred thing. And you miss it. You miss it. If you're female, you miss that at your peril. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't women

who shouldn't miss it, because maybe they have another purpose that transcends that. But that's rare. It's very, very rare. And I would caution any women listening, if they're young, not to be deluded into the idea that their career will be of such high quality that it self-evidently trumps having a family. You have to have a hell of a career before that's the case. Don't you think that's unique to the individual, though, that some people just, they'll be more satisfied, I mean, depending on what they're doing artistically or creatively or whatever it is. Yeah, you can't make rules for the exceptional.

Right. You know, they do what they're going to do. Those are open, maybe those are open people. They have genius level IQ. Like, they're spectacular in some manner. And so, there's a reason they're going to step outside the norm. They're shape shifters. No problem.

There's always going to be people like that and we need them. How do they know when they're that? Well, telling the truth is a good start. Because then you don't fool yourself about who you are. You know, that's another... One of the things I tried to think through is why you should tell the truth. So it's not self-evident, man. A smart kid...

The smarter the kid, the earlier they learn to lie. Lying is very powerful. Because you can manipulate the world with your language. And then you can get what you want lots of times. Or escape from things that you don't want. So why not lie all the time? Well, I think the reason is, there's a bunch of reasons. But one of them is that you can't trust yourself if you lie.

And there's going to be times in your life where you have no one to turn to except you. And so if you've stuffed yourself full of lies, then you're going to be in a crisis one day. And you're going to have to make a decision. And you're turn to except you. And so if you've stuffed yourself full of lies, then you're going to be in a crisis one day and you're going to have to make a decision and you're going to decide wrong. And you're going to be in real trouble because you won't have the clarity of mind necessary to make the proper judgment because you've filled your imagination and your perception with rubbish. So, and if you really think that through, you see, there's this old idea in the Old Testament that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and I kind of understand what that means

Because one of the things say we do with the future authoring program we offer people a little heaven. It's like okay Construct your ideal Aim at it come up with a plan you're going to modify the plan. No problem You're going to do a bad job of it. No problem. Just do it Okay, so then now you've got a goal. It's now your approach systems Modify the plan, no problem. You're going to do a bad job of it, no problem. Just do it. Okay, so then now you've got a goal. It's now your approach systems, technically speaking, the positive emotion systems that motivate you are engaged because they're engaged in relationship to a goal.

And the more transcendent the goal, the more they're engaged. But that's not good enough. It's great to run towards something you like, but it's even better to run away from something that terrifies you. So then we ask people, okay, so here, think about this real carefully. Take all your faults and your inadequacies and your hatred for life, all of that, and then imagine that gets the upper hand. And then think about where you could be in three to five years.

Everyone knows, hey, some people know they'd be a street person. Some people know they'd be an alcoholic. Some people know they'd be a prostitute or a drug addict. Like everybody's got their own little hell they could descend into with a fair degree of rapidity and a fair bit of enjoyment. And people know that. And so I say, well, delineate that out too. So you know where you're headed when you fall off the path. And so then you're running away and running towards.

It's like, yes, well, that's heaven and hell. And you need it, and they're real. They're as real as anything that you can... It depends on what you mean by real, I suppose, but they're as real as you make them. How about that? And people can make hell pretty real. People do seem to construct these pitfalls for themselves.

I mean, self-sabotage is one of the most common things that you find in people that are struggling. I mean, you would think that someone who is struggling, the last thing they'd want to do is help themselves towards their own demise. But it's super common. Yeah, well, I thought about that too. you you tell me what you think about this because if you talk to people they say well i i want to have a meaningful life generally people want that but then you think well then what why aren't you and then you think well what does it mean to have a meaningful life exactly and then you think well maybe it means that you have to take on responsibility because your your sacrifices have to be worth something right it has to have some it has to have some meat what you're aiming at it has to be something that can elevate your

worm-like self to the level of tolerability you know you can say well yeah i've got all these flaws but look at what i'm trying to do. That's the real ground of self-respect. Well, I missed, I'm off the track with the question. Ground of self-respect. I can't remember what you asked me. So we'll have to go to a different topic. How did we get on this? We were...

You asked about the evolutionary basis of... That was a long time ago. I know. It's a rabbit hole that just doesn't disappear. But where were we just now? Remember where we were just now? No. Sorry.

I'm distracted by something else that's happening right now. I'll let you know. What is it? Comey just got fired by something else that's happening right now. I'll let you know. What is it? Comey just got fired by Trump a little bit ago. Oh. And Twitter is ablaze about what's going on right now. I'm sure. It's a little off topic.

Yeah. But, I mean, you want to talk about a figure. Oh, I know. We were talking about men. Yes. We were talking about men and what motivates them. Yes. We were talking about men and what motivates them. Yes. And so then we were, I was talking about the fact that, you know, when I'm speaking publicly now, most of my audience is men and that their eyes light up. Yes.

So we were talking about the necessity of taking on the burden of a responsibility. Right. Because people, not only are we, should we be acting out the archetype of the hero, But we should be carrying a weight while we're doing it. Because we're like pack animals. We're not happy without a weight. And I do think it's something like, you have to justify your miserable existence. Do you think, and this is my theory about that,

I believe that there are certain human reward systems that we have ingrained in us and that have allowed us to survive this long. And that these reward systems, a lot of them entail overcoming struggle because struggle was inexorable. It was a massive part of existence. And that without struggle, our body is almost like, well, how come I'm not overcoming something? Yeah, right. So it's almost like a trick. Like you have to trick your body and you trick your brain and trick your humanity, your very existence, into having some sort of a purpose in order to be at a baseline.

Yeah, well, I'm more off. Well, yes, it does make sense, but I don't think it's a trick. Here's why. Because I think there is something irreducible about suffering. I think it speaks for itself as a reality, an unquestionable reality. Nobody says to a child that's in severe pain that it isn't going to matter in a million years. Right. Right.

The pain trumps everything. Right. So then it seems to me that attempts to alleviate suffering trump everything. So if you want a responsibility, it's like, there you got one. Try arguing your way out of that. It doesn't matter. Fine. Your suffering doesn't matter then. That's for sure. None of the suffering matters. You're going to go down that road, are you? matters you're going to go down that road are you you know you know what you know what the face of someone who says that no suffering matter matters looks like it's not pleasant so there there's no neutral position with regards to that so you see the world is full of unrequited suffering let's say and who knows how much of it is unnecessary certainly the stuff you create seems to be unnecessary especially if you create it purposefully. And people are doing that all the time.

So if you need a burden, it's like, how about dampening down the unnecessary suffering a little bit? How about trying hard to do that for the rest of your life? See if that'll do it. And God only knows how far you'd get. You might get a long ways, man. When people talk about meaning, though, when you talk about suffering and this idea, what is going on in the mind that desires this difficult pursuit? What is going on? Why is that a part of being a person? Why is it a part

of your ultimate happiness to have these obstacles to overcome and these character developing moments character building episodes in order for you to manage life and to get through life with the most amount of happiness there's a story about this i think it's a frog and a scorpion yeah you, I like that story. Tell it, please. Yeah, well, the scorpion convinces the frog to give him a ride across the river, and the frog says, well, you're a scorpion. It's like, you know, I'm not going to do that because you're going to nail me with your tail. And the scorpion says, no, no, if I do that when we're in the river, we'll both drown. So why would I do that?

So the frog agrees to ferry the scorpion across, and they get halfway out, and the scorpion stings him. And the frog turns to him with his dying breath and says, why'd you do that? And the scorpion said, well, it's in my nature. And that's the answer to your question, is that it's in our nature. That's what an archetype is. The hero archetype is the story of men.

Right, but do you think that that nature is because that is how we survived? How, over the millions of years we evolved from lower hominids to being a human being, is that we needed to have the mechanisms in our very existence to overcome struggle? Then all of a sudden... Joe, maybe we chose it. You know... You think? Well, I mean, I think it is part of the evolutionary process. You think? everyone respects. It's like an election. Everyone voted on it. We chose that particular type of

person. Well, who is that? Well, that's the heroic type. Human beings have chosen that. And then the women think, oh, look, a heroic type. It's like they grab them before someone else gets them. And so that's been going on forever. So did we choose it? Well, the action of our choice across millennia selected it. These are things evolutionary psychologists, biologists don't think about. They don't think about the role that consciousness played in determining who survived, and how, and why. It's been going on for a long time.

Well, they certainly know about sexual selection by female choice, but the full implications of that haven't been thought through. Like, I've just really started to grapple with the idea that the male hierarchy is a sexual selection device it's like the men are voting on well who which of us deserves to go sleep with a woman it's like well you don't you're kind of a weaselly little snake so you know not you it's like oh joe joe looks like quite the guy let's put him at the top of the hierarchy. That's what men have been doing with each other forever. Isn't there more to it than that? There's a lot to that because the question is,

who is it that they're electing? But is it really just about sexual selection? That's a good question, Joe. Freud thought so. Like, it's half about that you have to say half well you know there's the survival of the individual

and the survival of the species so those are the two things but in the but even with that sexual selection even with that say if a person does rise to the top of the social hierarchy in that small Dunbar's number of 250 people, is that enough?

Does that person still need purpose? Do they still need something, some difficult struggle in order for them to feel fulfilled? For most of human history, that just wasn't a problem. Because you had struggle constantly, right? Man, yes, absolutely. Is that a problem today? Is that the problem, our lack of problems? Sure.

It's something Kierkegaard pointed out like 150 years ago. He said there'll come a time when everything has been done so well for everyone that the only felt lack will be for lack itself. Are you concerned because of that and because you're very acutely aware of this issue? Are you concerned with this potential future that we have in front of us with artificial intelligence and virtual reality and this need to live in a world that's not real like i mean how many kids today listening to this exist for a massive amount of their day watching video games playing video games yeah playing the archetypal hero on yes yes yeah i had a friend and this is a classic story. I'll never forget

this, this statement that he said to me, he was one of the managers of the comedy store. He was a very nice guy, but he was addicted to video games, which I have been in the past. I was addicted to video games for a couple of years. I play them all the time. I love them. They were so much fun, but this guy, he had it bad. I was, I had a career while I was doing it. I managed to figure it out that this was a massive waste of my time and get through. He didn't. And when one day he was like, I mean, pale, like he hadn't been outside in days. And he was hanging out in the back of the comedy store and we were talking.

And he was addicted to, I think it was EverQuest, which is this crazy role-playing game that you just do and people would play it 18 hours a day. And he said something I'll never forget. He said, I'm so successful in the video game world and so unsuccessful in the real world. And he was sitting there shaking his head. And I was like, wow. In the real world, he was very sitting there like shaking his head. And I was like, wow. In the real world, he was like very unfulfilled, couldn't find a girlfriend, was struggling financially.

In the video game world, he was like some warlock. He was out there slaying dragons. And he found great reward in that video game world. in that video game world. I'm very concerned that we will literally almost be like in the Matrix, plugged into some artificial electronic thing, which I think these video games that people are playing all day long,

they're a precursor to that. Don't get me wrong. If you have great self-control, they're very enjoyable, they're fun, they're great social time with you and your friends. You get together, you play, and you have a great... As long as you're actually being productive and active in everyday life i don't really think they're a problem but my concern is that they are a precursor and that we are seeing the beginning steps to this

artificial world that we will be embedded in in the very near future well you know we we decided already that we're in a period of chaos yeah and you know part of the reason i'm loathe to make any predictions is i mean that's one of the reasons it's like how many things need to be going sideways at the same time right lots of things are going sideways i have no idea what's going to happen i mean we're building autonomous cars 70 like that's the biggest employment category. Driver. Yeah. So, what then? You know, but why worry about that? There's 20 other things that are happening that are just as revolutionary.

Right. So what's going to happen? Who knows? I have no idea. I think maybe I know how to steer the boat. You know, that's all. You try to tell the truth. And maybe you'll get through it. And act it out as well, because what else do you have? Isn't that another fantastic sign of chaos? I mean,

I say fantastic, not in a positive way, but that Donald Trump is our president now, the president who has had the biggest problem with the truth that we've ever experienced. We've never experienced a president like this where we know that he has a problem with the truth. And it's open. It doesn't seem to faze us. He has an unstructured problem with the truth. He was preferred as a candidate to someone who had a structured approach to untruth.

Right. Right? So it's like pick your type of lie. Right. You can pick the ideology power-a ideology power aiming lie or a new kind of or or yeah a more personal lie say if you're going to be cynical about it well a new kind of lie too that didn't fit the standard structure that we're accustomed to and felt very disenchanted with yeah or maybe a nakedly self-serving lie it It's like, oh, thank God, that's such a relief after the totalitarian

ideology lies. Oh, God, when you say it that way, it's so fucked up. That's obviously it, though. Yeah, well, that's definitely part of it. And I mean, lots of people did. I know people went into the voting booth and their hand was hovering over Hillary, you know, and it was shaking and they thought oh to hell with it

trump wow and so and you know it's a sentiment that i can appreciate yeah so and so here we are but that's that's only the tiny that's only the tail end of the dragon i mean yeah there's who knows who can look ahead this is a strange time we're in. And maybe it's associated with Kurzweil's prognostications, you know. I mean, he talked about the consequence of an ever-accelerating technological transformation. And, you know, I mean, look, just in the last 50 years, we've had the birth control, the hydrogen bomb, and the transistor thrown at us. It's like, man, those are some pretty wild tornadoes. Yeah.

And that's just scratching the surface. Yeah, the last 100. I mean, if you just go back to the beginning of the 20th century to today, I mean, it's fucking, it's unbelievable. Yeah, well, you know, in 1895, the average person in the West lived on a dollar a day in today's dollars. In 1895, yes, really. In today's dollars. Yeah, yeah. Wow.

Yeah, wow. No kidding. No kidding. Well, that's the other thing with people when they find out how little the rest of the world lives on. They find out that the top 1% of the world makes about $34,000 US. Yeah, well, it depends. I know if you're, you know, for many people, someone who's rich is someone who has more money than them.

Right. Right? Which is one of the things I really find funny about the, like the radical left protests on the campus. It's like down with the 1%. It's like, hey, sunshine, you're part of the 1%. You're just, you're actually a baby one-tenth of 1% or maybe one-one-hundredth of 1%. You're just angry because you're part of the one percent you're just you're actually a baby one tenth of one percent or maybe one one hundredth of one percent or you're just angry because you're not there yet but you will be when you're 40 and you know it and so does everybody else and now instead of

regarding yourself properly as a fledgling member of the elite you want to have it both ways you want to be fledgling member of the elite and champion of the under under privileged so how narcissistic can you get you want to have all the benefits of having all the benefits and you want to have all the benefits of having none of the benefits because just all the benefits isn't enough for you one thing that it's a reoccurring subject that i find incredibly fascinating and it keeps coming up and it's been brought up even more so lately because of artificial intelligence

and automated vehicles and all these different things that are happening is there going to be an erosion of jobs and a subject keeps reoccurring and that's universal basic income. The idea of giving people,

giving everyone a certain amount of money, whether it's $12,000 or $18,000. What are your thoughts on that? I don't know what to think about that. You know, it certainly, it would require a revolution in the way people considered their lives. Yeah.

And then maybe that revolution, like what do people do with leisure time? What should you do with it? Right. Leisure time, it's like, what is leisure time exactly? Is it sitting in a closet like a discarded android? I mean, that's often how people respond when they retire. Right, but would they have to retire, or would they have their needs taken care of as far as food and shelter, and then be able to pursue something that they actually enjoy and are interested in

because the job that they were stuck in doesn't exist anymore? Well, that's the question. And I would say at the moment the data aren't great. You know, what happens to a lot of men who are unemployed? Now, let's say they've had that thrust upon them involuntarily, but most people who we would be talking about would be in that situation, is that, you know, they get depressed. They sit on the couch.

They develop chronic pain problems. They start taking opiates for the pain problems. And then soon they're hooked. Like it's not a pretty, I mean, I know that everyone isn't doing that, but lots of people are doing that. Right. Yeah, but that's unemployment. Is it kind of a different thing? I don't know.

Well, my thought is that unemployment, if you've got something like universal basic income, out. Right. Yeah, but that's unemployment. Is it a kind of a different thing? I don't know. Well, my thought is that unemployment, if you've got something like universal basic income, I mean, we're talking about a complete revolution in the way society is structured, right? Because if automation does come along and artificial intelligence does come along, and it really is a situation where a lot of the things that people do to occupy their time in order to feed themselves and shelter themselves, they don't exist anymore. It's unnecessary. So you're not talking about unemployment. Like, Bob, you're not a good enough lawyer. You've been fired. And now you're like, God, I'm a failure. I'm depressed. I am unemployed. We're not talking about that. We're talking about literally society as we know it having a complete reset.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, i have no idea what to say about that i mean i don't either that's why i asked you well well look i mean there are people here's the optimistic end i'll speak as a determinist i'm not a determinist but i'm going to speak that way anyways so there are lots of people who are creative they're high in trade openness from the big five perspective. They're going to go do creative things. But there are lots of people who aren't creative. So I don't know what they're going to do because it isn't going to be creative things. What do you think people, why are people creative and non-creative?

Like, are there people that are just, that it's never been nurtured in them? That they have the potential to be creative? You don't think so? No? No, the literature is pretty clear on that. I mean, the traits are highly heritable. They're modifiable, but if you're really non-creative, it's like it ain't going anywhere for you. And the reason for that is creativity isn't,

like, it's not all sweetness and light, man. I mean, the reason there are non-creative people is because creative people often died. They're out doing, like, screwy things. They attract attention from people they shouldn't attract attention from, like the authorities. You know, creative people are revolutionary. Well, tyrants don't really like revolutionaries. There's lots of reason not to be creative.

Even now, like, creative people, it's hard to monetize your creativity. Artists have a hell of a time surviving, right? And so creativity as such is a double-edged blessing, for sure. And part of the reason that lots of people aren't creative is because it's a lot, let's think about it from an evolutionary perspective, is because it's a hell of a lot easier not to be decked out in bright colors when the predators come along right you want to stay camouflaged against the herd like a zebra you don't want to stand out i'll tell you a little story about that so i think i got this from robert sapolsky and if i didn't i apologize but so let's say you're a biologist you go to study

some zebras you think people think well those zebras are camouflaged because they have black and white stripes well no that's not camouflaged. A lion is camouflaged. It's golden. It looks like the grass. You can see a zebra like 15 miles away. It's black and white. Okay, so you're looking at some zebras and you think, yeah, I need to look at one zebra to figure out what it's doing because I'm trying to understand zebras. So you look at a zebra and then you take some notes and you look up and you think, oh God, which zebra was that? Because the camouflage is against the herd. Just the idea that the camouflage is against the herd, that's such a useful idea to have in your mind, that camouflage is against the herd. So you go up to the zebra in your jeep and you've got a stick with a rag on it. You put a

nice daub of red paint on the zebra's haunch or you clip its ear like with a cattle clip and the first thing that you know you get the hell out of there and the lions kill it because they can identify the thing that stands out and organize their hunt around it and so that's why there aren't creative people i think that is sapolsky and i think it was an ear clip i remember i remember this discussion yeah that um it's it's also the edge detection. There's a type of pattern, a camouflage pattern called ASAT. And ASAT camouflage doesn't look like trees. You know, when people think of, pull up ASAT pattern, first light, L-I-T-E.

Yeah, that's a military camouflage pattern. All season, all terrain. It's not necessarily military. Canadians developed that, and you Yankees stole it. Congratulations. Yes, it's one of our more impressive. I feel like we're all one. I don't believe in borders.

It's actually for animals. There you can see ASAT. And the reason is animals can't, they only see in black and white like predator prey animals like deer and um it's edge detection that they're looking for and these things the hard lines of the black and the brown and the lighter colors it throws off the end that's that's fusion that's a different color um that's a different type of camo but the asat is what we're talking about which is right above it that leg right right no see yeah right there bam yeah yeah, right there. Bam. Yeah. That's it. And I'm also wrong. Canadians didn't invent this. It was the other stuff, the military.

Oh, they've invented a bunch of stuff, I'm sure. I'll give you guys that. I'm a fan of Canada, man. I love it. I really do love Canada. I think people up there are just so much nicer. I've struggled to try to figure out why. I've thought about it many, many times. But I think people in general in Canada are, I always say there's 20% less douchebags in Canada. I mean, there's assholes everywhere you go. But I feel like Canada, for whatever reason, people are extremely polite. Yes, yes. What is that?

Well, I don't know. See, I'm not sure. I'm not convinced of it because I often think the same thing when I come down to the U.S. That people are more polite? Well, that their level of customer service, for example, is better. But I think one of the differences between Canada and the U.S. is like all of Canada in some sense is like the Midwest of the United States. Right. You know, so we don't have this extreme culture that characterizes the U.S. with the great lows and the great highs.

We're like elevator music compared to a full symphony. And there can be some really tragic parts of a symphony. So if you want peace, order, and good government, that's our constitutional credo. Then Canada is your place. But it's a middle class, middle of the road society. And that has some benefits. It's nice and welcoming and not too experimental and kind of calm and secure. And those are good things.

I don't think it's a place that is great at dealing with excellence. That's interesting. Do you feel like excellence is suppressed because people don't like when someone stands out too much? Yeah, I think that's true everywhere, but I think it's more true of Canada than it is of the U.S. I think it's celebrated a lot in the U.S. I mean, I think there's always going to be some resistance, especially from people that don't feel like people always measure themselves against someone. If there's someone who's out there is just some genius in some form or another, there's always going to be people that measure themselves against that person

and find themselves coming up short. Yes. And so they try to attack that individual, someone who has just catastrophic success in some sort of a way. Yeah, well, I think that's another reason for people to be enemies of clear thought as well because clear thought is a good pathway to success. And so if you can go after people who think clearly, it's another way of keeping the dominance hierarchy nice and flat

for your delectation, let's say. So that's the enemy of competence element that I see as part of the social justice warrior movement. Right, right. And the extreme lack of financial success and yeah and even creative success well and even the insistence that hierarchies are always based on power it's like neuro the hierarchy of neurosurgeons is not based on power or yeah it is obviously you know hierarchies are based to some degree on power we don't have to be juvenile about it right but you know the

best neurosurgeons actually know how to do surgery. That's not just a power thing, right? The best farmers, hey, they grow food. So there's no appreciation for actual, the real world. Well, there's no real world in postmodernism anyway, so that doesn't matter. But there's no appreciation for competence or the fact that there is individual difference in competence, even though they're always talking about diversity. And there's a downplaying of competition and the importance of competition. Oh, definitely. Oh, yes. Yes.

Well, that's, yes. And that's something that's particularly, I think, hard on men because men compete. Yeah. And they compete partly because women like winners. I mean, that's part of the reason. So. And you're shamed for that. Yeah.

In this postmodernism view of the world. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, the schools increasingly are non-competitive places. It's like for a guy, that means, well, let's tune out and go watch video games. Because, like, if I can't win at this, why should I play? Well, to cooperate. It's like, well, you know, fair enough, man, but I'd actually like to try to win at something. Oh, well, how evil can you get? Well, it's toxic enough, man. But I'd actually like to try to win at something. Oh, well, how evil can you get? Well, it's toxic masculinity, Jordan. That one drives me fucking crazy.

Like, what does that mean? Toxic masculinity. Toxic has nothing to do with masculine or feminine. If something's toxic, it's toxic. There's no toxic masculinity. If someone's evil, they do something horrible. If they're Genghis Khan or Adolf Hitler, that's not toxic masculinity. If someone's evil, they do something horrible. If they're Genghis Khan or Adolf Hitler, that's not toxic masculinity. That's an evil person.

It has nothing to do with the masculine or feminine. Yeah. Well, you know, it depends on what your political agenda is. I mean, men are more likely to be the type of person that does something awful in terms of dominating or war or violence. It's almost in our nature in some way because of all the things that we discussed before. Well, we're more likely to do something that's really evident. There's plenty of bullying that goes on behind the scenes among women. Absolutely. You know, it can't manifest itself in naked physical aggression. And I actually think

that's hard on women in some ways. I mean, my daughter, for example, is always mad at my son because, like, not chronically, but, you know, he'd have a dispute with one of his friends and maybe it would get physical. And then that'd be the end of it and they'd be friends again. You know, there was a way of bringing it to a conclusion. And without that, then things can smolder on forever yeah that's really rough you know yeah it's sometimes the simplest solution is a fight often and you know i'm not you know advocating violence i know what you're saying i know but i'm embarrassed that i would even think that i have to right you know put some little quote marks around what i'd say developing person too you're talking about the developing person, too.

You're talking about young people. It is an issue, this simmering and stewing of disputes where they never come to a head and they never get resolved. Yeah, yeah, it's a terrible thing. It's a terrible thing. That's part of hell, for sure, to have these things that are just grinding away at you all the time. You know, it's not.

It's definitely not it's not a good place to be in and good motivations don't come out of it that's for sure you've made some some statements and we've had some you've had some conversations about your role in academia and that you might not necessarily be in structured academia forever, that this might be an issue, like that this is coming to a head. Do you feel that way now? Well, the university, I think what happened was the university reacted towards me because a bunch of people got irritated and organized in their irritated way and said that I was a bad person and something should be done about me.

And there was enough of them, so the university thought they needed to react to that pressure. That's a charitable way of interpreting it, but reasonable. But then a bunch of people wrote the university and said, wait a second, I agree with what that guy's doing, you should leave him alone. And not only people from the general populace but soon after i posted the original videos like the press was kind of ambivalent about me for a while in in the first two weeks or three weeks say after i released those videos and there were the protests but then they started to look into what i was doing and they thought oh it turns out that you know freedom of speech actually happens to be quite important to journalists too and they came out like really radically in support of me some of the major journalists in canada and and the whole

post-media system which was about 150 or 200 newspapers and so the university had a reason to back off and maybe they were happy to back off I mean the Dean I was negotiating was you know he wasn't a bad guy he was an older guy I think he's in his 70s and just responding to pressure yeah and he didn't want a bunch of trouble and you know and he wanted the problem to go away right now and that's what you do want for problems to do but anyways all this public support I got gave the university a reason to leave me the hell alone. So they decided to do that.

And partly, I suppose, I was always reasonable during the negotiations because I'm a reasonable person. And so, you know, when they met me, they realized that I wasn't the particular kind of monster that I had been accused of being. And so the universities left me off. And then, so I was, I had a, like a health crisis in December that more or less rectified itself by the beginning of January. But I wasn't sure that plus what had happened to me because of these videos and all the crazy response to them. I wasn't sure I was in a sufficiently together position to go back lecturing in January. I didn't even know for a while until December if I was going to be, let's say, allowed to continue to lecture. So it's very uncertain.

But I decided that it was better to get back on the horse, so to speak. And so I started lecturing, and the students were very welcoming. So thank God for that. What is it like now when you're in school? Is it a completely different experience than before your notoriety exploded? Well, there's lots of things that are different about it. I mean, there's lots of students, there are lots of people who come to my classes just to sit in on the classes. There's people who are stopping me all the time in the hallways and wanting to introduce themselves. And that a lot in public in in the strangest situation so i'm rather unused to that um the feeling at the university well i haven't processed

any of that yet i mean i would say i'm about seven months behind in my understanding of my own life well you know because things happen so many things happened from september to now that I haven't had a time to think about any of them. You know, it's just, it's been a continual, an absolutely continual treadmill of trying to keep up with the requests for speaking and the email. And I'm supposed to be making these YouTube videos because I have people who are supporting me for doing that, so I'm trying to keep that up, and then I'm trying to go speak when people invite me,

but not all the time because, of course, that's a lot of travel. So I'm trying to recalibrate my life. I'm trying to figure out, okay, I've got 10 million views on YouTube. Well, what am I supposed to do with that piece of information? I've got 250,000 like subscribers. So what does that mean? What does that mean for what I should be doing? Maybe I should be doing nothing but making YouTube videos for them. I don't know. It's a tremendous audience. It's unbelievable. It's like, it's unparalleled. Yeah. Just, I mean, think about it

from in terms of, is there any other academic that has ever done anything remotely like that, where you have 250,000 subscribers on YouTube in a relatively short amount of time, and then millions and millions of views on your videos. I know, I don't know. I mean, well, and it's, it's, it's ill-defined territory, right? Because who knows what YouTube is? Right. I mean, you know, you, know, your presence, I don't know what you make of your presence. I mean, you told me, I think, that you're getting something like 70 million downloads a month? It's more than like 120 now. Okay, so you're getting a billion downloads a year.

Something like that. More than that. So what... Right. Yeah. So what the hell? So I could ask you, what do you make of that? Like, are you the most powerful interview So what the hell? So I could ask you, what do you make of that?

Like, are you the most powerful interviewer on the planet? Or are you the most powerful interview that the planet has ever seen? Because, well, the numbers would suggest so. Nobody's had, who has a billion of anything? No one. You know, it's never happened. So so what the hell so what are you doing and why is it working and where are all these people and God

well what I do is just keep doing it that's all I do I just do what I do and I don't think too much about it I enjoy it I try to talk to people like yourself that I really enjoy talking to or the guy before you was a bow hunter which I enjoy talking to him too.

Very, very different conversation. Tomorrow I'm talking about a guy who's a debunker or talking to a guy who runs a site called Metabunk. We're going to talk about people that believe the earth is flat. Literally. We're going to spend about two hours debunking the flat earth theory that is all over the internet. I don't know if you realize that. Yes, I've seen it. There is a rabid anti-intellectual vibe that's going on today.

And this is this flat earth theory. It's no wonder, you know, it's no wonder because many of the prominent intellectual types have become prisoners of their own imagination. You know, and this is partly what breeds that terror of intellectualism. There's something about it that's... We don't want to get too far away from our bodies. We don't want to get too far away from our souls. That's another way of thinking about it.

And, you know, there is this idea that, as I said before, that the Catholics always warned about is that the rational mind falls in love with its own productions, or even more, that it tries to elevate its productions to the status of God. And that's, I mean, that's really what Milton was warning about, at least in some sense, in his book Paradise Lost. You know, these utopias are human creations, and then people fall prey to them. It's like idol worship. It really is very much like idol worship. And it's no wonder people get skeptical of the intellectuals, because they're producing these utopias that are fake,

that they inhabit. They're almost like the abstract equivalent of video games, you know? I think you're right about that but i also think there's something else going on i think people are aware of this chaos that we described earlier and they're terrified and they're clinging to nonsense because of that terror and they're they're embedding themselves in these fruitless pursuits chasing their own tail hey i'm i'm on board with that man that chasing it so your own, that's a symbol of chaos. Chaos is the dragon that eats its own tail. So that came spontaneously to mind when you thought about that. It's because it's a downward spiral, man.

Yeah. Yeah, and the thing is, is that as you retreat from the chaos into your own little prison, you get weaker and weaker, and the prison gets smaller and smaller, and the chaos gets bigger and bigger. You get weaker and weaker and the prison gets smaller and smaller and the chaos gets bigger and bigger. It's really an ugly pathway. And you get more and more bitter and resentful. Yeah. And much more afraid of having your prison walls breached. It's a downward spiral.

And much less interested in pursuing the truth or any sort of objective reasoning. And much more interested in confirmation bias to the extreme. That's right. That's exactly what happens. I detailed out that process in my book, Maps of Meaning. Exactly that. It's this feedback loop, hey? Because the weaker you are, the thicker the walls have to be.

But the thicker you make the walls, the less challenge you face and the weaker you get. So then the walls have to get thicker, and then you get weaker, and the walls have to get thicker and then you get weaker and the walls have to get thicker. And it's not a pretty picture, man. Yeah, that's what I think too. Yeah. And on that note, we just did three hours.

We just did it. This is my favorite podcast of all time. Oh. I just want to tell you. Well, thank you. Thank you. It was awesome. I could, I say it was my favorite podcast of all time. I have a much smaller domain of podcast comparisons. So we did, this is like number 900 and what, what is it? 958. I think you, uh, touched on some things that made me think in a very unique way today. So thank you very much for that. I'm going to listen to this one a couple of times.

Well, thank you very much for both occasions. I mean, you provided a tremendous boost to my presence. So whatever comes of that is to be blamed partly on you. All righty. All right. Thanks, brother. You bet. Really appreciate it.

Really good. Thank you. Jordan Peterson, ladies and right. Thanks, brother. You bet. Really appreciate it. Really good. Thank you. Thank you. Jordan Peterson, ladies and gentlemen. See you tomorrow.