The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 254. The Adventures of Pinocchio and Free Speech Part 4/4

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

In the finale of the Adventures of Pinocchio and Free Speech series, we visit many different episodes of this podcast. From the UK to the US and from Cambridge to Canada; we are fighting against the (not so) slow erosion of one of the most powerful forces that many would consider inalienable. The power with which God created the world. The power that can combine a family through marriage or tear it apart through war. The spoken and written word. The pen is mightier than the sword.—Links—Understand Myself Personality Test:https://understandmyself.com—Chapters—[03:14:44] Ideologies of good & evil [03:20:50] Student organizations vs. Dr. Rima Azar [03:26:11] Cancel Culture with Dr. Julie Ponesse [03:28:52] A relationship with the Great Father[03:30:12] Dr. Azar speaks up [03:38:40] Defining hate speech with Andrew Doyle [03:49:01] Tyranny & free speech with James Orr & Arif Ahmed [03:51:36] Corruption of critics in film distribution with Prager & Carolla[03:56:58] Truckers & Joe Rogan with Dr. Julie Ponesse [04:03:04] The master of fire and Pinnochio turning a whale into a dragon [04:05:30] UK legislation post-Cambridge with James Orr & Arif Ahmed [04:11:48] Pinnochio’s choice [04:12:13] Would I do it again? with Bret Weinstein[04:15:22] Pinnochio’s finale

Okay, so now there's a shock here because essentially in some sense, the entity that's going to provide the solution to this very complex problem has arrived on the scene. But it's quite damaged. First of all, it's been speaking improperly, right? So that's an adolescent representation. So it brazed a lot of nonsense. And it's been corrupted in a variety of ways. And so, you know, to some degree, what that means

is that as you mature and you're moving away from your mere, mere net status, your interaction with society, like Rousseau said, corrupts you in all sorts of ways. I mean, you're participating in that corruption, but it still happens. But in the representation in the movie, the truth of the matter is,

it doesn't matter if you've been corrupted to some degree, as long as you haven't absolutely sacrificed your capacity for true speech and vision. So, you know, that's a pretty hopeful message because Pinocchio is by no means a perfect entity, but he might be good enough. One of the things that disturbs me constantly about ideological representations of the world, broadly speaking, is that their fundamental danger is that they always contain a two-convenient theory of evil and malevolence. And for me, any theory that locates the fundamental problem of evil somewhere other than inside you is dangerous.

Now that isn't to say that social structures can't be corrupted and aren't corrupt. That's an existential problem in and of itself. It's always the case that our social institutions aren't what they should be and they're outdated and they're predicated to some degree on deceit. People who use power can manipulate them sometimes successfully. That problem never goes away and it never will. But the, when the evil can be easily located somewhere else, then you have every moral right to allow your unexamined motivations to manifest themselves fully because you can

punish the evil doers and always remain on the moral side of the fence. There's a huge attractiveness in that. I think, I mean, this is something you've explored a lot with the idea for the assaults and it's an idea about the good and evil cutting through the hearts of every human being. Because that, to me, it really gets to the heart of a lot of what I would call a kind of infantile culture. I think this is a symptom of childishness. Whenever I was learning about literature and what constituted more sophisticated literature and what didn't, Disney films, childish films, let's take Tolkien, for instance, good people look bad, they look

like orcs, they're ugly, and there are villains, and then there are heroes, and they are good. There isn't complexity, and if you have a more complex novel, like a Mervin Peak novel where people aren't necessarily good or bad, they're both, they struggle within themselves and with other people, that is a mark of an adult novel, as opposed to a childish novel, right? And that's quite an important distinction. And I think most of the political and ideological battles that I find myself in the middle of, and I'm sure you do as well, are because people are just reducing everything to this binary of good versus evil and putting themselves on the side of good.

It is a very infantile, almost almost like a caricature of religion. And I see it again and again, we had it in this country with the Brexit vote. Effectively, what happened in the vote here, and the reason why it became so toxic and families fell apart and you wouldn't believe, I know it wasn't reporting very much elsewhere, but it was like a kind of ideological civil war here, but not a very sophisticated one, because it came down to this narrative that if you voted to leave the EU, you were evil, racist, stupid, and if you voted to remain, you were good and progressive and all the rest and noble and virtuous, right? And of course, there are all sorts of good reasons to have voted either way and this kind of caricature and it happens again with the old year. Well, you described it as a caricature of religion. And I think that's what an ideology is.

And this is one of the reasons that I've been inclined, let's say, to go, to have my shot at the Russian latheists, much as I'm a fan of enlightenment thinking. I mean, I was convinced as a consequence of reading young as primarily, but also Dostoevsky and also Nietzsche primarily. And Solzhenitsyn, I would say, as well, that, and then biology as well, as I studied that more deeply, there's no escaping a religious framework. There's no way out of it. And if you eliminate it, say, as a consequence of rational criticism, what you inevitably produce is its replacement by forms of religion

that are much less sophisticated. I mean, let's not think about it. Well, it's a fundamentalist, really. It's, you know, if I look back to my Catholic upbringing, actually, acknowledging your own capacity for sin is at the heart of Catholicism, that's why we have the confessional. That's why you sit there and tell this stranger all these things you've done wrong. Because it's reckoning with it. That's far from trivial. It's unbelievably not trivial.

Because it was so common, like a common part of Catholicism, it can be passed over without notice. And so religious, the religious structures that we inherited, I'm going to talk about Christianity most specifically because it's the dominant form of, it's the form of religious belief that primarily undergirds are social structures. It's our operating system. My producer came up with that term the other day and I thought it was apt. And it does localize the drama between good and evil inside

and makes you responsible for that. And makes you, encourages you, let's say, to attend to the ways that you fall short of the ideal. And when you criticize a structure like that out of existence, you don't criticize the questions that gave rise to it out of existence. And the questions might be, well, what's the nature of the good? What's the nature of evil? Those are religious questions. What's the purpose of our life? the good. What's the nature of evil? Those are religious questions. What's the purpose of our life? How do you orient yourself if you're trying to move up, let's say, rather than down? How should you conduct yourself, et cetera, et cetera? Those questions don't go away, and they can't not be answered.

And so the way that a traditional religious structure answers them is in a mysterious way. It uses ritual, it uses music, it uses art, it uses literature, it uses stories, all these things that are outside the realm of easy criticism. And then some of that's translated into, comprehensively explicit dogma, and that's the part that's most susceptible

to rational criticism. What kind of student organizations were they part of? I think I can speak to that part because it's in the media. So divest was one of them, the last month, and the other one was Black Student Association. And the other one, ironically, was the Rose Campaign. It's about the massacre at Polytechnic. And it means the world to me Polytechnic is University of Montreal, right? So every year I commemorate, you know, I participate.

So that one group was that group, saying that I encourage gender violence, sexual violence and through my writing, the blog. So that was because you were pointing out that such activity is not part and parcel of the central culture in Canada, but in aberration. I was perhaps talking about honor killing in some places. So I read a media about a certain young woman who was

getting on and I put a candle, memory, and I wrote something, comment about that. So that's because I didn't, it's like. And how is it that you're glorifying sexual violence by doing that exactly? I have no idea. I wish I could answer, but I... Okay, so that particular accusation, not only... I've been thinking lately that there are about deception, the use of deception, and you know, there are lies that are just

about true, but they're just sort of... they're not quite true. And so you sneak them by because they're close enough to the truth, maybe to pass. But then there are lies that are the antithesis of the truth, antithesis of the truth, right? They're, they're anti-truths. And it seems to me that the accusations that you're glorifying sexual violence fall in the antithesis category of untruth not only is it a lie? It's the opposite of the truth Yes, but when it's about the blog I can understand I can understand Because they don't like it. They're emotional about it. I write I I that I can understand But when we come to talk about a behavior, a situation, an incident that has never happened, that is a different story.

How do you separate out those two? I think it all came in the context of the complaints and the situation of the blog. But I don't know for sure because I remember, I didn't know how it started at the beginning. But logically, it came when through that, you know, the process of, I call it speed-moving because it was like speed-dating. It was so fast, so it felt like, how can I say it, all respect, like having black dogs coming at you all at once and so on.

Yes, so how about we call this assault? Yes. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Look, I've watched lots of people respond to Twitter mobs over the last four years. And my experience has been that being mobbed by 20 people on Twitter, especially when an administrative organization then climbs in, that's enough to seriously damage someone.

And most people climb back and apologize as fast as they possibly can. And it's no wonder because it's very unnerving and destabilizing. And so you're someone who is obviously deeply opposed to such things as sexual exploitation clearly and assault and the use of arbitrary violence, and nonetheless, you're targeted by precisely that kind of behavior. And then it's encouraged in every possible way as far as I can tell by the administration who immediately fold in the most cowardly of possible ways. And so I just, this is just, it's outrageous. And I can't understand why there isn't more noise about it. I can't speak.

I mean, you're the wrong target, clearly. Thank you. I can't speak for the motivation, but I can speak of not standing up for me where I see I saw the whole Canada stood up for me like the people writing amazing comments on the GoFundMe.com people donating people like like like I Overwhelmed by that. I see people standing up right right and I'm the thanking, thanking. And I want to thank them if they're listening, because I didn't have the time to complete or my personalized thank you not to.

Okay, so 10,000 people support you and 20 people complain and yet the university suspends you. So like what the hell's up with that exactly? I mean, how come there's no proportionality of response if the overwhelming body of the population is supportive of who you are, let's say, and what you've done, which is nothing that deserves the kind of treatment that you've been through, why isn't the university as sensitive to the public opinion supporting you as they are sensitive to the hypothetical public opinion, damning you.

This issue of canceling is so abhorrent to me, in a democracy, all of this legislation that focuses on hate speech and then limiting what's can be said on the internet. And what's so ironic about it is that, as you might know, John Stuart Mill, who is one of the fathers of utilitarianism, and very often invoked in this current sort of collectivist setting with the mandates, right?

He himself was an advocate for free speech because he said that the problem with squashing free speech, it's not just that you might learn something new that you didn't know, but you have the opportunity to put your own beliefs under the microscope and to think about new reasons why you might believe or don't believe them. So even on the metric that a collective is arguably a consequentialist, a utilitarian like John Stuart Mill is using, the cancelling censorship is not good for humans, let alone democracies that have free speech

as one of their fundamental pillars. Well, the only real rationale for opposing free speech, apart from ignorance, which is that you don't know that free speech isn't just another right and you don't know it's indistinguishable from thought, is the conclusion that you've already figured it all out. So you don't have to think. Or you're trying to hide something. Well, that's the other possibility. But those two things go hand in hand very frequently,

is that it's very often that people who are trying to hide something justify that to themselves with a kind of totalitarian certainty about their beliefs. They double down on them to hide their own moral inequities. And so you have to believe that people like Rogan shouldn't be allowed to just have a discussion with whoever they want and wing it. And do you think that because you think you already know? And you know, if your life is perfect and you're already living in the kingdom of God, and then more power to you, you know, maybe you're right, and you can shut down free discourse because that heavenly heights have already been scaled. But I haven't met anyone like that yet.

Most people I know think with not too much thought that there's some things they still have to learn and some ways their lives could be improved. And how are we going to approach that? Especially, you want to find out how you're wrong. You should talk to people who don't agree with you. Now, maybe 90% of what they say is not worth attending to could easily be. Probably the same goes for you. But 10% might be just what saves you in the next crisis. See, that's also an indication there of why people are often unwilling to form a representation with, so to speak, form a relationship with the archetype of the great father, because to some degree, the archetype is a figure of perfection, and the individual in relationship

to that archetype is always pathologically flawed. And so the embarrassment of that realization, which is exactly what's happening to Pinocchio right now, is often enough to stop people from doing it. So what that would say, to set what that means, in some sense, is that in order for you to mature, in the fullest possible manner, you have to understand the manner in which you're deeply

flawed in relationship to your potential as it might be historically determined. And that's a very better thing to do. You know, it's much easier, and people do this all the time, to engage in half-witted, formulaic, ideological criticisms of the system as a whole. It's like, you know, the probability that the system is more flawed than you is pretty damn low. So you might wanna start with, you know, getting rid of your donkeys in your tail

and stop bringing nonsense before you judge the entire, you know, historical process by which human beings have come into being. So anyways, that's kind of what that means. If this can happen to you, like the lesson here, there's only two lessons here. Either you're a bad person and you got exactly what you deserved, or this can happen to anyone, and so look the hell out. I totally agree. And I tend to stand up for people. Now I stand up for people in real life but also

on the blog. I write when something is in, for example, I'm to think of a quickly situation, maybe Dr. Matubokute in Montreal, whenever he has stories like being canceled or trying to attempt as a or maybe Dr. Gatzaid again for Montreal, I know your friends. I said bravo to the Jewish public library because they, they, and even the prime minister of Quebec, I may have had a post saying bravo, the University of Laval as well, you know saying that academic freedom that academic freedom must be protected like a academic. It's protected so that I mean, I was a recommitment to it, if you see what I mean. Well, look at the academic. The bulk of the abstract intellectual work in our society goes on at universities.

So that's where the cutting edge is. It's not the only place. It happens in many places, but it's one of the main places. It's certainly the main place where training for that is still instituted, apprenticeship for that is still instituted. And so if that comes under assault, if that's in danger, then what's to protect the same thing in the rest of the culture? If it goes where it's paramount, if it's threatened where it's paramount, it's going to be threatened everywhere. That's why people should pay attention

to what's happening to you. And this should put as much pressure as they possibly can on the administration at Mount Ellison to reverse their insane decision and to have some courage instead of cow-telling to a tiny minority of students who don't even represent the communities they purport to represent. You know, my guess is, is if we took those, and it'd be easy enough to find out, but no one will do it.

If we surveyed these student organizations, presented them with your story and surveyed them. I suspect that the vast majority of students within those organizations, organizations themselves would be appalled at what's been done to you. So there's a handful of students who say they represent a tiny proportion of students, but who actually don't, who complain bitterly in the background and use deception to bring administrative force to bear on someone like you, and somehow that's okay. And despite the fact that thousands of people express their support for you, the university won't change its mind.

And for what? To indicate their commitment to what? To this insane ideology that purports to be anti-racist, you can see how fair it is in your case. You know, we're matching an actual injustice against a bunch of hypothetical injustices. Yes, and my take on it was at the beginning that, OK, they chose whatever path I've never, but now, I am like the target because of all of all of this.

If you see what I mean, like, you're a target, not just a target. You've also been hit. You're not just a target. Exactly. You've been successfully hit. Exactly. Like my career, like when you are a researcher, when you are a faculty member of a research, doing your research, your services across the province

and the country, new reputation, even if you want to go find another job somewhere else, your reputation is all what you have, right? Your reputation is done. Yes. Look, the other thing is, I'm on your unhiring committees, I said unhiring committees, so here's another rule about hiring committees. And so given that there's a preponderance of candidates and that there's a preponderance of qualified candidates, any and all candidates who show any sign whatsoever of scandal are immediately removed

from the pack. Because the hiring committees won't tolerate the risk. So as soon as you've been brushed with scandal, and then here's another question for you, because I've had to think this through, and I'm still not exactly sure what to make of it, I could go back to the University of Toronto. What about my graduate students? What bloody chance do they have on the job market?

It doesn't matter about their publication rates. So let's say they come out with a stellar publication, but they're associated with me. It's like, are they gonna find a job? Well, the answer to that is perhaps not. And so what am I supposed to do with that as a moral person? Am I supposed to not go back to the university because merely being associated with me

is enough to increase the probability that my qualified students won't be acceptable to any hiring committee? These shots are unbelievably effective, even if you can manage them. It's not obvious that you can manage them. I mean, you're still going through this. You have months to go without gainful employment, and the doubts creep in when you're accused of this sort of thing, because anybody with any sense pays attention to accusations.

Right? If you're psychopathic to the core, you don't care what other people think. But if you're a reasonable person, you're modifying your behavior all the time as a consequence of the effect you have on others. Say, well, I'm reprehensible enough so an institution that I admired deeply has a whole Canada, right? But I want to say something, you know, some people believe what they read and they do not, you know, question or apply, say, let's listen to the other side, let's see what happened. Some even, you know, friends that call my

spouse and say, well, even if it has been said, it's too much question, but my spouse will say, she has not said it. Like, so, so, so they thought, because it's written in such a way that is, um, so. Yeah, well, you know what they say, where they're smoke, there's fire. Exactly, but let's assume, like some people are saying, even like the, the method, how can I say, the punishment or the discipline or is beyond is surrealist, disproportionate, disproportionate, severe, which it certainly is. Yes. So, what do you do now? What are you doing?

I mean, how have you been structuring your life in the aftermath of this? I've never imagined that we can be working as hard as that without having a, you know, being suspended without pay. Like, I'm very busy in order for working, doing what I need to do, time to email, taking people strategizing, doing things, working, basically, on that. So, like, all that time, I'm not putting it on my research. I'm not putting it on the future courses, if I'm still here or on that. So, I'm living day by day, but I am fine in the sense that I know, I know who I am, I know my values, I know the value of freedom, a free expression for me, academic freedom,

slash that are related, right? That I know for sure. One of my friends once said, the truth doesn't matter anymore because it has been a narrative. But luckily, there has been amazing journalists who have had more, I'm not going to be naming, but everyone knows, had more, more than I can very much like I felt that like, you know, those articles fell on me from heaven. I felt that those articles fell on me from heaven. So the narratives has shifted, and if you see what I mean. Yeah. Well, I was fortunate enough to have some of Canada's preeminent journalists. Take a second look what I was doing and actually think it through and come out in support of

me. Thank God for that. And that was definitely a life saver, repeatedly over time. So, so think, you know, that absolutely it's thank God there are people who still want to know what the actual story is. All it takes is a few accusations of your far right or alt right or whatever, and it's there, you know, any prospective employer can Google that and it comes up and who's going to take the risk. The accusation is sufficient to damn you. And that's what the interpretation is.

Well, you put the finger on the absolute catastrophe of the non-crime heat index. It's like, well, it's a permanent stain, especially in a technological universe where nothing is ever forgotten, no matter how long the lag. And it's worse because the government here feels no compunction to address this or to no politician seem to have, well, I suppose they are, well, because the strategy is that if you oppose hate speech laws, you're obviously a hateful person. Why else would you oppose hate speech?

It's the old thing. And that politician doesn't want to stand up in Parliament to be the one who is seen to be siding with the evil guys, the bad guys. So you have to make a very, very subtle argument to stand up against hate speech laws because you're faced with the problem that there is such a thing as hate speech. Yeah, obviously. So when there is pernicious and terrible, it's like, okay, so you're arguing up hill, this is again, why it's such a bloody miracle that we ever had They're in it. They're in it. They're in it. They're in it. They're in it. They're in it. They're in it. They're in it. They're in it.

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They're in it. They're in it. They're in it. They're in it. They're in it. They're in it. that you can go bankrupt and start again, that's a miracle. The idea that you ever had free speech and that that was genuinely the case, that's a miracle. And none of this is given the appropriate respect and awe that it deserves because it's so unlikely. It's hugely unlikely. I mean, I know in the book, I talk a kind of very, very short history of free speech

from the ancient Greeks to today. And the point of that is to accentuate this point that actually the fact that we have it is astonishing and unlikely, so unlikely. And all the more reason why we need to defend it, we need to be really, really vigilant about any cracks that appear in this, because it will go away very, very easily if we don't defend it.

And it's hard, particularly when it comes to the idea of, that's why I wrote chapter on hate speech because, and took the other side's view seriously, because just trashing the opposing argument isn't going to help, we have to talk about it and explain, you know, why it's important nevertheless. Well, before one thing, like you say, hateful speech exists. Let's start from that point. Let's acknowledge that that hateful speech exists and it can be hurtful and it can do damage. But then the alternative is a state that might in the future be completely unscrupulous, that is going to decide for you what you can say. And those are the things that we have to tackle and no, but and the other key thing is that no one knows how to define hate speech. You know, UNESCO, the European Court of Human Rights, they've, they've, they've all agreed. There's no way to define hate speech. Every European country that has hate speech laws has different

hate speech laws, different definitions, subjective abstract concepts such as hate, such as events, such as a perception, you know, and these are on the statute books and you don't want this stuff on the statute books because it's all very well. I mean, I know the and these are on the statute books and you don't want this stuff on the statute books because it's all very well I mean, I know the we talked about the SMP and their hate crime bill the defense. I'm always running into is people are saying yes, okay Technically someone could be arrested and imprisoned for saying some an offensive joke technically. Yes But no one in their right mind. No jury. No judge Is going to the you we've got common sense, it's okay. Well, that's so myopic.

I mean, because you don't know who's gonna be in charge in 10 years' time, you don't know who that judge is going to be. How can you possibly just... You can be certain that someone will be in charge that doesn't approve of you and that you don't approve of. That will in, that will in certainly happen.

You don't want vague wording on the statute books. It's going to be exploited at some point, even though even if it's not today. There's absolutely no way that you can guarantee it against future, against the future abuses of that. And I don't, it is as you say, it's a certainty. So I'm, I'm, yeah, I think it's. I think it's actually one of the most important arguments that we should make and that free speech needs to be defended in every success of generation. It's not something that you know this, you get it, and then it's there forever. No, that's not true. There's something about human nature and something about people in power, there's something about the way that we are, that it will collapse.

It's an edifice that is not secure at any given time. But it's hard, it's that thing of being smeared, the risk is you're going to be smeared, you're going to be associated with the worst possible kinds of people, because of course, it's only really controversial speech that ever requires protection. And people are going to say Well, then you must support what what these awful people are saying and it's it's hard to make the case

But it's a case that nonetheless has to be made and particularly by politicians. I've been incredibly disappointed by the way in which Politicians in this country have not made any kind of effort to to If anything is from what I can see There are moves even in the English Parliament to push through further hate to be sure, we should be repeating them, not pushing for them, but no one wants to have the argument, no one wants to be tainted. Yeah, well, they get identified one by one and taken out. That's what happened. Well, you getading even a label.

But they like making their lists, they like observing and saying, you are problematic, you have sinned. And now they have an electronic trail. These are the people that absolutely love going through all of your old tweets and messages and anything they can find. And of course, the point about that is you can do that to anyone. There is no one alive who, if you had complete unfettered access to everything they've ever written online or in their emails or text messages that you couldn't construct a case to dam someone. If you know, actually one of the things that's more or less saved me, is that right?

Well, by the time I made my political statement, which was a philosophical statement or even a spiritual statement, not a political statement, I already had 200 hours of lectures online. And so essentially everything I'd ever said to students was recorded. And there wasn't it. It wasn't possible to pull out a smoking pistol. So this is very smart. And also, but this is why it's also astonishing. I find it unendingly astonishing the way you are mischaracterized because it's all there.

Everything you think is out in the open. You've been very, very, very clear and explicit about your points of view. And so when they try and demonize you and turn you into this thing, people can check and they'll realize that you're, I think what they're doing is they're relying on the reputational damage being a kind of barrier to people even investigating who you really are. Yeah, well, to some degree, that works, but it doesn't really work because what genuine generally happens is that, you know, for every person who wouldn't open a lecture because

of my reputation, there's three or four who do because they're curious. And then it hasn't even more perverse effect on in some cases on the true believers because they're primed to find anything I said offensive, but that doesn't happen. Or maybe they even find it useful. And then that's not good at all. It's like, well, he's not interesting when you meet the people, when you get into conversation with the people and you and you can see that you're not what they thought you were. And they don't know quite what to do with that. And that to me is that to me is why another reason why we need more speech, not less, we need

to have the conversation so that people can be disabused of the fantasies that they've been wallowing in. You know, but I do very much enjoy that when people expect one thing and then they actually speak to me and they don't see that. There's no evidence of it because it doesn't exist. Yeah, well, it's interesting to watch that unfold in the public domain too. I mentioned those two interviews, the Channel 4 interview that has been viral and that interview by Helen Luz at GQ. And those interviews basically consists of, consist of nothing but the attempt

by the interlocutor to have a conversation with the person that exists in their imagination. Right. But what's almost no relationship to me at all. That was particularly the case with Kathy Newman. And was less so with Helen Lewis, but that was still essentially the issue. It's quite reassuring though, isn't it? That once it's out there, people can see through it.

It's very reassuring. What saved me, and this has given me an endless supply of hope, I would say, is that all I've ever had to do is be, it's just show everything. It's like, here's the situation, no edits. Like this is what happened. And every time so far, so far, you know, I haven't been fatally damaged. Yeah. I mean, one of the things, one of the things I've learned most, I think since Titania kicked off and it became a known thing is I've learned simply never to trust the perception of someone as constructed

in the media or online or you know, it or you know it's never the same person. I've ended up meeting some coming from the background I did. Most of my friends were always on the left. I didn't really know conservative people and now I have a lot of friends who are conservatives. And they're just not this villain that they were made out to be. And even some famous conservatives who people have said they're absolute monsters, they're evil, they want to eat babies, basically, with the equivalent. You know, and you get to know them and you realize, oh my goodness, the perception is so removed

from the, so far removed from the reality, that even I once had bought into it myself because everyone's telling you this. You know, yeah, the same thing is so. I certainly had that experience repeatedly, repeatedly. I never trust it now. I like whenever I hear the way people talk about people online, I just I never trust it unless I know that someone personally, I'm never going to trust that again. I think that's an important lesson for me.

I think there was a report done last December by Sivita, which is a sort of right-leaning think tank very, very good report on the state of academic freedom in the UK. And I think they've found think tank very, very good report on the state of academic freedom in the UK. And I think they've found, you have a look, 83 out of 140 UK universities were found to have some kind of anonymous reporting system. So it's very, very widespread. And yeah, and it's a huge issue, very, very concerning. And I think that, as Arif says, I mean, a lot of it may well be well intentioned, but I think the point is that it starts off processes and procedures, disciplinary procedures where, you know, the end result may not be anything at all. It may just be a few weeks of having to go and, you know, see the Chair of your faculty, you'll go to see some

committee or you'll have to pay trips to HR. But as a colleague of ours says, you know, if the process is the punishment, yeah, exactly. There's nothing trivial about any of that. That's awful. Without having to someone, it's so awful. It just, it just does the meal. You just toll. Yeah. And it puts a shadow on them. Right. Right. And it has a chilling effect as well. When you see it happen to one person in your department or in your university, you know, you just watch yourself and you don't say things like that, you know, again, or yourself, you know,

what you publish, what you say in meetings, what you say to students, you just become more and more careful. And another thing I think is that, I mean, a top full talks about this quite well, which is the one way to terrorize people is not to control them in big things, but to control them in little things. So that tyranny becomes a habit, conformity becomes a habit. Every time you say something literal, you know, some small interactions, you constantly

can go to your shoulder, worried whether to say this or not, that, top of the set, is the most efficient way to turn people into sheep. Yeah, it's also sort of in some sense the ultimate reach of totalitarianism, because your life is made out of small things. Big things are rare and seldom. And so having to watch that, well, I have to say to watch your sense of humor, for example, and fair enough, you can cross the line and a stoop person reads the crowd properly. But you see great comedians, man, they're right on that edge, right? They're right at the point where they shouldn't be saying what they're saying. Well, some of them far past that line on purpose, you know, but everyone knows. But to chill that is to take almost all the fun, the dynamic fun

out of social interactions, that spirit, that's a free spirit, and that makes all that partly what makes life worth living. It's terrible that these things are happening, and it's more terrible that the universities are doing it. How shameful. I will tell you another institution that's sort of been ruined, and I think Jordan was sort of getting to it, and it sort of gets back to the oboe or the cello player for the New York Phil harmonica.

How do you say that one film is definitively better than the other film? You know, it is subjective and or objective and or subjective. Sorry, but you are, you know, so a lot of the answers is sort of make a better film and you'll get in, you'll get on a Netflix or make a better film and you'll get into the Sundance film festival. So I've had five films all turned down from the, from the Sundance film festival. Now, Jordan, the way Jordan's mind is working is you're thinking, well, how do you know? I mean, they could know I'm thinking, why don't you organize your own damn conservative film?

Right. But the, the, the, the academic in you is thinking, how do we define that? And as we spoke about earlier, when the guy hits 40 home runs in a season, that's definable. And when the guy drains 14, three pointers in a playoff game, that's pretty definable. But how do we do it with documentaries? And there's a, well, you could, you could make the case with your film that, I mean, it, it had a reasonable success. I, I hope I've got this right.

It had reasonable success at the box office. I mean, it had enough success at the box office. I mean, it had enough success at the box office, so it should have been economically interesting for a place like Netflix or Walmart. Agreed. So another system that's sort of been corrupted is you used to be able to go on to the website, Rotten Tomatoes, and literally check the score of the film.

And it's not an exact science, but your film gets a score and my film gets a score and her for it's pretty good. It's pretty good. Now, if you look at no safe spaces, the critics have it under 50% somewhere 46% and the audience has it at 99 percent. And I would argue we now must remove the critics from the equation because the critics are so left and so woke that there's nothing, you know, Dennis Prager could make gone with the win tomorrow and it would get under 50 percent on rotten tomato. So they've screwed up their own, they've corrupted their own system or sort of polluted their own system. You must

now go with the audience because there's two scores. There's the critic score and then there's what the people thought and we now have to throw out the critics. And by the way, it's a two way street. One of the, you know, films that would be an Oscar nominated film that started a young gay black man who was struggling with his sexuality. That'll be 96% with the critics and 65 with the people. Well, you know, that's a testable hypothesis. You could rank order films by discrepancy between critics and audience and then rate them according to their political affiliation.

And you'd have the answer right there. You could probably, you know, a good status tradition could do that in a day. Be a very interesting thing to do because you might be right. So that tradition could do it in a day. Yeah, yeah. That's right. You're right. That's a great point, Jordan.

Yeah, it's very simple. It's very simple. It's not only what the theme of the film is. It's does it have Dennis Prager's name on it? Take a look at the arc of Clint Eastwood directed films and watch how they shrank in the eyes of the critics over the years since he spoke to the famously spoke to the bar, the empty bar stool at the convention.

I know his film about that featured the car and the Asian family next door, which I really liked. I mean, that's got slammed for racism. Yeah, Grant Torino, even by some of the actors that were in it, who I thought were extremely ungrateful at my personal opinion, I thought that was a remarkably non-racist film. I mean, Eastwood was played a character who was a standard conservative with the Archie Bunker type

essentially, but as he got to know his neighbors, he placed his allegiance to them over that of his own family, who he saw as becoming morally corrupt. How in the world that's a racist film is absolutely beyond me. But Jordan, I think you're not factoring in, there's two factors. There is what is the film and then who directed the film? Yes, yes. If that film was directed by Mark Ruffalo, there would be no, no issues. He's a progressive actor, Dennis.

I know you don't know any actor. You pick the actor that's on, you know, George Clooney. If George Clooney directed Grand Torino, it'd be 15 points higher percentage points higher with the critics. That's, that's my assertion. And I've done it. Well, if you fun to do the statistical analysis. Maybe somebody listening could whip that up because a good graduate

student in psychology could do that very quickly. Maybe I'll have my one of my people do that. That would be fun. This is one of the things I loved about being a clinician is that I talked a lot of people who were really different than me, like seriously different from me. And if I wasn't learning something from them when I was in discourse with them, it was because I wasn't conducting the discourse properly. So they taught me invaluable things. Even if you don't learn truth, even if you don't learn more reasons for why your position was, right? At the very least, you have benefited from a very rigorous mental

exercise. Yeah, well, that helps you. As you said already, you want to differentiate and assess your own beliefs. Well, why? Well, because your beliefs aren't a set of facts at your disposal. Your beliefs are tools that you use to navigate the world. And the more finely tuned those tools, the more different, like I have a shared at home, a shop, with all sorts of power tools in it. And one of the things I learned, because I've renovated houses a number of times, one of the things I've learned is that if the job is difficult, you don't have the right tool. If the job is difficult, you don't have the right tool. And then you can go down to Home Depot, which has like 50,000 square feet of tools,

which is just phenomenal. And you can find some little gadget that somebody spent half their lifetime divisive that makes that job easy. Well, that's ideas. Ideas are tools. They're not facts. And you have to sharpen them and take care of them and keep them and differentiate them. You've been in the right way. Right.

They maintain them. You've been metaphors beautiful. You know, it seems like so talking about both the trucker situation and then the Joe Rogan situation. It seems in many respects like intellectuals or elites have gotten us into this mess. And it's the truckers and the Joe Rogans of the world that are getting us out of it, arguably. What does this say about education and academia and civil discourse and democracy moving forward? Well, it says that the highest and the lowest always have to be united. And what that means in some sense is that, well, I learned that in part from watching Wagner's Dimester singer, the opera, because he, the libretto elaborates on that theme

in an absolutely stellar manner. Because in his opera, it's the opera details out the actions of guilds of men. And so each guild is made out of domain experts so one of the heroes is a cobbler who's an expert shoemaker you think well who cares he makes shoes it's like well you have good shoes so that isn't a concern of yours but if you didn't you'd think it was very important and if you're a good enough cobbler you get to sing and if you're a good enough cobbler, you get to sing. And if you're a good enough singer, you get to elect a master singer. It's a lovely structured sequence of metaphors. And so one of the things Wagner did so well in that opera

was to point out that true expertise means the differentiation of abstract knowledge all the way down to the point of behavioral implementation. And it's one thing I really like about being trained as a behavioral psychologist. I'm very interested in psychoanalytic theory, but it's very abstract. Existential psychologist, it's very abstract, meaning of life stuff. It's like, yeah, but where does the rubber hit the road? Well, the truckers know that.

Right, they really know that because they're down there moving goods to people. They're doing the actual work in the most fine grain matter now. They might have a problem with high order articulation, and it's up to their leaders. I'm not so sure about that. I'm not so sure either. I don't have a talent every Canadian to get themselves there and talk to some of these truckers. I think they'd be very surprised. They don't have a trouble with enunciating blunt truths. But you know, you were pointing to problems among the intellectuals. Well, the intellectual chattering class is criticizing the truckers. There's a divorce between the intellectualized framework, ethical framework, and that practical reality that the working class people represent. And I mean, your observation that the truckers and the Joe Rogans are serving as redemptive agents is a reflection of the idea of the brilliance of individual sovereignty, the notion of individual sovereignty as the basis for political stability. It's like, well, who should you consult? Well, not just the people with the ideas, the people who drive

the trucks. Well, why? Because they're navigating the roads. They're delivering the goods in the real sense. Talking to the people. They know things. Yeah, you bet. Well, and they are the people. They have their families. They're, they're, their, their, their life is real. It's not abstracted to the point where the abstractions themselves become a problem. It seems like they're almost like a litmus test for how we're doing and the things that we're getting wrong and they're showing us it in the face. Look, it's almost like a, you know, like a boil that's finally erupting. Look, these are the problems, right?

We would have kept silent if you didn't screw things up so much, but now we have real problems, you're not fixing them. Well, you saw the same thing with the yellow jackets in France. It's like cropped energy policies started to make energy to expense them for ordinary people. It's like, well, we have to save the planet. It's like, well, how about not on our backs there, guys? And so, and we're going to see a lot more of that. I suspect, especially if the elite types and their utopian schemes, if the elite types with their utopian schemes keep walling themselves off from the people that they hypothetically represent. This is why the UK jumped out of, this is why the UK voted for Brexit.

It's like the common people thought, no, two abstract, too much of a tower of babble. The leaders have got too far away from the people they represent. And I think they made the right decision. So more power to Rogan and the truckers. Okay, so this is very interesting too, because so Pinocchio ends up being a master of fire. Well, you can think about that as there is a book written a while back by a primatologist who also wrote demonic males, Richard Rangham, and he talked about the origin of fire. And as far as Rangham is concerned, we invented fire about two million years ago. And that enabled us to cook food.

And that enabled us to swap in test and length for brain. So if you look at a chimpanzee, chimpanzees are like the ultimate in couch potatoes. They're about this high and they're shaped like this. They have this huge barrel body. And the reason they have that is because they eat leaves. And so they have to spend like eight hours a day eating leaves. They will eat meat if they can get it.

They have to spend like eight hours a day eating leaves and just chewing them over and over because like leaves, a, they don't want to be eaten. So they're pretty tough and inedible. And b, they don't haveless endeavor, all things considered. Whereas human beings, two million years ago, were there about invented fire. And as a consequence of that, we could cook meat. And meat is incredibly energy rich.

And so, and it's easy to digest once it's cooked. And so the consequence of the invention of fire was that we're the way we are today. We could have a brain instead of a gut. And so the idea that Pinocchio's mastery of fire, and it's as something more than merely a means of cooking, that's how it started out, right? But you can think of our entire technological capacity as stemming from the mastery of fire.

Now the other thing you can think of, and this is very much worth considering, is that Pinocchio master's fire, and that turns the whale into a dragon. And so the idea there too is that, and this is an old idea, is that our technological prowess is something that makes nature itself angry. And of course, you might say, well, do you believe this and the answer

to that is, well how many of you have environmentalist leanings? And that's exactly the story that you're following. Because you're still wondering about whether or not mastery of fire was in somehow against the natural order and then it will end up in all of our deaths. And you know that's a reasonable thing to worry about, but not mastering it was going to end up pretty badly too. And you were going to talk about the legislation, the potential proposed legislation in the UK that sort of, I understand, emerged out of all this. So what's happening on the legislative front?

Well, should I just say something about that? I mean, just worth giving you, Arif has mentioned it already and it's worth giving you a little bit of background to that. Jordan, it was 2019 that there was, round about then, I think it was short. I think it was May 2019. There was certainly a lot of talk about what had happened to you at Cambridge in policy circles and government circles and out of those sorts of discussions, I suspect, they're kind of crystallized a manifesto commitment in

the Conservative Party manifesto for the December 2019 UK general election, which had a very strong statement about the importance of the university sector, importance of higher education in a post-Brexit economy, and also signaled some concerns about what was going on there, especially on academic freedom. So that was remarkable to see. I still remember when I saw that manifesto claim, I thought that's signaled some concerns about what was going on there, especially on academic freedom. So that was remarkable to see. I still remember when I saw that manifesto claim, I thought that's absolutely fantastic. It looks like they're going to be serious about this.

And indeed, they delivered. They started drafting very important piece of legislation. I think it's really probably one of the first of its kind that is that clear and emphatic in the West, I think the UK is leading the way on this. The legislation itself, you know, some people, you know, my own view is that it's just a shame that it's had to come to this. You know, we do not really do not want governments stepping into and regulating the intellectual cultures of the university. Now, that's not what the legislation does. It just provides a right for academics or visiting speakers

who've been disinvited. Academics have been fired on fairly a kind of direct line of appeal to a non-votsman effectively, an so-called academic freedom champion. And that's, so there's a kind of quasi-judicial process there, which is going to hold in principle open up universities to significant financial liability through fines, if they were found to have breached their duty

to promote academic freedom and protect the rights of visiting speakers, and so on. So I think you, in and principal may have had a line of appeal to that new post as and when it comes into being. Now, there's still some problems with the legislation. For example, I think, Araf and I agreed that it doesn't go far enough on protecting academics from institutional interference or political

politicization of curricular content. You know that freedom of for academics, freedom of speech means freedom to teach, freedom to select content and freedom to deliver it as they see fit. Of course to some extent it's a shared institutional enterprise designing curriculum and so on, but there should be a defesible presumption that academics can teach what they want to teach and how they want to teach it. Nevertheless, I mean, I think it will, it will, I think I hope shift the shift the culture in some of the ways that the equality's legislation shifted culture 10 years ago. And even if it may be imperfect when it gets royal assent, nevertheless, I mean, I think that it will make vice-chancellors and senior university staff throughout the throughout the country sort of sit up and realize

that there are consequences to continuing to allow this culture to flourish in the universities. No, I think it's really appropriate that that initiative came from the faculty of Divinity at Cambridge, that it can be traced at least to the offense, perhaps, the events that took place there. It's quite something when you step back and think about it.

Well, I mean, in its defense, I had a conversation with Roger Sprood and ran about that time who expressed his deep disappointment that the treatment meted out to you. And he said something quite interesting. He said when he was in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, setting up underground universities in Warsaw, Pat

countries, particularly Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. By some kind of strange quirk, although the university of the university of Cambridge wouldn't confer degrees or credentials, it was considered politically too difficult. I think the Divinity Faculty did have some kind of degree conferring power. It was able to a credit or recognize a diploma in theology. And that's exactly how Roger got his his students their their diplomas as it were from the Faculty of Divinity at the University. So it was I think from his point of view, it was especially, you know, heartbreaking that that things developed as as they did in early 2019.

But just to reiterate, I've had no criticisms from colleagues within the faculty, I think there's great excitement that you're coming over and great gratitude to you that you've shown the kind of graciousness and forbearance to, as it were, let bygones be bygones and go ahead with the visit that had been planned back then, which I think you probably wouldn't have been able to do anyway given all the horrible things that started to happen to you and Tammy health wise in 2019. Yeah, well, like I said, I'm absolutely thrilled to be able to do this well because I seem to be able to do it, not something but also that I have the opportunity

again, I think you'd have to be a pretentious fool not to take an opportunity like that and be grateful for it. And like there's mistakes made, you know, and that's that, but who knows, you know, if the upshot of this all is that the protection for freedom of inquiry and speech in the UK is strengthened and maybe that's a model for the West, it's like, well, that's a pretty small price to pay,

even though it was, you know, it was unpleasant. So now, saliv v, you know. So here, what happens is that in the midst of this complete chaos, Pinocchio has a choice. And the choice is he can either save himself, which is a very, very selfish choice, and reduces him to an A historical individual, because he has no relationship left with his father, or he can put himself at great risk risk and rescue his father, you know, finish the process, stop his father from drowning. And your life has changed dramatically. If you could have taken a route, I guess I'm asking, you know, would you do it again? And I do,

but I don't want to ask that in a cliched way. And maybe it's a stupid question because you just don't know, but are you okay? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, on the one hand, if I think about it logically, what I do it again in a heartbeat, there are a few things I might do slightly differently, but I'm not even compelled, I might do slightly differently, but I'm not even compelled, you know, I think it went pretty well in light of what the forces in play were. But, you know, the thing that we've lost is security. Right? The fact is, and the world, I mean, people might, you got a settlement from the university, And the world. I mean, people might you got a settlement from the university, but That was a trivial proportion of your future your mutual future earnings. It was nothing It was enough so you didn't starve to death immediately, but that was all right You know and if I'm honest about it we were forced to move out of our home to a different city

We upgraded our children's lives, which was we were forced to move out of our home to a different city. We upgraded our children's lives, which was quite disruptive. But I really don't feel there was any choice. I don't, you know, if I think about it as a matter of choice, I cannot find the circuit that would have done anything differently. And I'm not... All I can say is our lives are full of purpose. And we're doing fine. The absence of security is something I think about a lot. But yes, I would say there wasn't any choice nor should there have been. And I'm not, I'm not sorry I made the choices I did in the slightest.

Well, you look good, man. And you look, if you don't mind me saying, you look different than you did when I saw you before. Well, I'm older now. Well, but there's a, you're year I've noticed this in my clinical clients when they when they integrate their aggression, their face is hardened. They they they look determined all of a sudden instead of questioning and you look like that more than you did. Now some of that's from getting older, but not all of it. It's... Well, I think, you know, if I'm understanding you correctly, it's probably a lot about, you know, getting catapulted into the big leagues and learning to play that role. It's, you know, it's trial by fire, but certainly it's been fascinating and

I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next Famous last words Yeah, that's ominous coming from you Jordan Pinocchio dies and then his father brings him home and And so because he's rescued his father, the benevolent spirit of nature appears, resurrects him, and turns him into a real human being. So it's pretty funny as far as I'm concerned that the answer to Nietzsche's great question

manifested itself in the mid 1930s and the forms of an animated child's movie. So, you know, that's an example. It's an example of a number of things, excuse me, an example of how archetypes work. It's also an example of how artists are on the edge of discovery all the time, and they discover things they don't even understand. you