The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - An Incendiary Discussion

Episode Date: May 2, 2017

A few weeks ago, Dr. Oren Amitay, who has been defending me in online discussions hosted by the Ontario Psychological Association, invited me to address his psychology class (to which other students were invited). We discussed freedom of speech, ideological possession, unconscious bias and the Implicit Association test, and other issues germane to psychology and the modern world. Apologies for the audio quality, it was cleaned up as best we could, it gets better throughout.

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. This is episode 16, an incendiary discussion at Ryerson University. Originally published to YouTube on March 2, this podcast is a recording of a conversation between Dr. Peterson and Dr. Orin Amitay, who invited Dr. Peterson to speak to his students at Ryerson. The discussion covers freedom of speech, ideological possession, unconscious bias, and the implicit association test, and other issues germane to psychology and the modern world. To support these podcast, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon accounts.

The link to which can be found in the description. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at self-authoring.com. So I've been talking about your cause, I guess, since you started your videos, and since you started having troubles with human rights, tribunals, or threats by U of T. And I just think it's common sense that they said that I think that promoting critical thinking, helping people to be able to tolerate subjects that they may not feel comfortable about,

but that they should be able to hear in process, not based on emotions, but based on an actual analysis of the facts, the evidence, the reality, versus some agenda being shut down their throat, whether it's a little media, through the professors, the evidence, the reality, versus some agenda being shoved down their throat, whether it's through media, through the professors, and anyone teaching an academia knows that there are professors who have no problem with basically teaching their truths as fact.

And so I've been promoting this, I've been promoting it within my own organization or the Ontario Psychological Association. I've got a lot of flack from other psychologists who've gone, no, we can't allow this type of speech to happen. That discussion that you're supposed to have had the Travis DeGroly, who's October, I believe, when you had those other professors coming in and talking about the issue. Some psychologists wrote pieces in National Art Media Publication saying this kind of discussion should not happen. Yeah. Okay. So, and this is from psychologists, the ones who are supposed to be best trained to be able

to tolerate the discomfort that goes along with, you know, discussing uncomfortable topics. So I was hoping for you to be able to share with, you know, the audience, your experience in the last two months in trying to promote this, you know, what you're basically trying to promote, which I think I'll let you describe in your own words. Okay. So what do you think about those videos for a minute now? Well, I think there were two things that, oh, I should give you some background on the videos, I guess.

I mean, I just made them in my office at home. I wasn't, I had no idea what the consequence would be. I was just trying to sort out my thoughts about, partly about not so much Bill C-16 as the background policies that surround it, especially on the Ontario Human Rights Commission website. Because the Bill itself looks rather innocuous. It's only about two paragraphs long. The only part of it that isn't innocuous is the insistence that The insistence on transforming the hate speech codes including including harassment discrimination based on gender What was a gender identity and gender expression in the hate speech codes? I thought that's that's weird that there's something out there under expression in the hate speech codes, I thought, that's weird, that there's something out there.

Anyways, I started digging more into the background on the Ontario Human Rights Commission website, and the policy surrounding Bill C-16 to call them appalling is barely to scratch the surface there. They're unbelievably badly written and internally contradictory and over-inclusive and dangerous. And I mean, they do things, for example, like make employers responsible for all the speech acts of their employees, whether they have intended or unintended consequences. That's completely the only reason you would write a law

like that is to get as many employers and trouble as you could possibly manage, because there's no other reason for formulating the legislation that way. And I've also called a good mind, came in recently at the university, and he's starting to teach a little bit about the background for this sort of thing

in one of his classes. He showed me the developmental progression of the policies surrounding Bill C-16. And originally, they were written in a much more in a tighter format, but then they were farmed out for what they called public consultation, which basically meant they ran them by a variety of people who I would say are very strongly on the out to this end of the political spectrum.

And they basically, in order to not bother anyone who they had consulted with, they decided, for example, that gender identity should be nothing but subjective choice, which is, I don't even know what to say about that. If you're a psychologist and you have any sense at all, that's a completely insane proposition. It's, first of all, predicated on the idea that your identity is your subjective choice. And that's never been the case for any sort of identity anywhere you take your identity as twofold. The first thing that your identity is is a functional set of tools to help you operate in the world.

I mean, read PHA, you know, just scratch the surface of PHA even and you find out that children start to construct their identities really when they're breastfeeding because that's when you first start your social interactions, you start integrating your basic biological reflexes from a de-agentia perspective into something resembling a social relationship because breastfeeding actually happens to be quite a complex act. And then you expand your developing identity out into the small microcosmic social world of the family, basically starting with your mother, but then you have siblings and your father and your relatives, you know, conventionally speaking. And your identity is a negotiated game. And you're not the only one in charge of it by any stretch of the imagination at all.

I mean, one of the things that PSJ pointed out was that between the ages of two and four, and I think later research has really hampered this home that even kids who are hyper aggressive at two, and there's a small proportion of them that are like that, learn to integrate their subjective desires into a broader social game and become socially acceptable to other children and they do that through play. You know what they're doing is playing their identity into being and then once they're older than about four and they become properly socialized so other children actually want to play with them because that's the critical issue, it's the fundamental issue.

Then the peer community of children helps them bootstrap their identity up to something that will eventually approximate an adult identity but that's functional. It has nothing to do with whim. It's a crazy idea. And so partly your identity is the set of tools with which you function in the actual world, and part of it is a negotiated agreement with the other people around you. And that's all being taken out of them. That's all actually as far as I can tell. That's line of theorizing is technically illegal now in Ontario. And I'm not even talking about the potential biological basis of identity because the idea that identity has no biological basis, that's just wrong. It's like factually wrong. And we've written a social constructionist.

We've written a radical social constructionist view of identity into the law, but even worse than that, we've gone beyond social constructionism because Piaja was a constructionist, into just pure whim your identity can be at any moment what you assume that it's going to be. That's not a tenable solution. There's nothing about that proposition that's reasonable. So I was looking into this and I thought, this is just beyond comprehension that we've written that idea into the policies surrounding Bill C16. So that, so I made that video, I was trying to sort that out, and to figure out even what it meant, the terminology is messy in the extreme.

First of all, with regards to gender identity, gender identity is not a spectrum. It's a modified by-mold distribution. And if you're making law, you don't get to mock around with the words. You have to use the right words. And so it's a modified by-mold distribution because almost everyone who has a biological identity of male or female identifies as male or female. It's 99.7%. And you could argue that that's a little tighter than it would be if society was more accepting of gender variation, let's say.

But even if it went down to 99%, which would be an increase of like, well, it would be almost an order of magnitude, the increase. You still have the overwhelming number of people whose gender identity matches their biological sex. And then you can stack on top of biological sex, gender identity, virtually perfect match, then gender expression, almost everyone who is

biologically male or female, who identifies as biologically male or female, expresses themselves as male or female. And then the vast majority of them have a sexual orientation that's in keeping with their, you know, we traditional keeping with their biological sex gender identity and gender expression.

So now we have a law that says those are independent. Guess what? That's not the definition of independence. And you can't just play monkey games with your legislative terminology. It gets people in trouble. So it's not a spectrum, and that's that. It's a modified by mobile distribution.

If there are obviously exceptions, and I never argue once in the videos that I put out despite what you're helping, but reacted to them, that there weren't exceptions. Of course there are exceptions. And if you look at temperament, for example, the big differences between men and women are agreeableness and neuroticism, fundamentally.

Women are about half a standard deviation more agreeable. That's compassion and politeness. And they're about half a standard deviation higher and negative emotion. And that's cross-cultural, by the way. And it also accounts for the reasons why women are about three to four times more likely to suffer cross-culturally from depression and anxiety, whereas men are more likely to be aggressively in prison than to drink and low in real, which is actually

the best predictor of incarceration among men. Those are solid biological differences but if you try to segregate men and women using only those two dimensions you only get it right about 75% of the time. So there's substantial overlap, but that still doesn't mean that it's not a spectrum. And the idea that there are no biological differences between men and women is such a preposterous claim that I can't even believe that we would ever have that discussion. I mean, there's men have wider jaws, men are taller, they have broader shoulders, women have more endurance in endurance sports, women have wider jaws, men are taller, they have broader shoulders, women have more endurance

and endurance sports, women have a subcutaneous layer of fat. The shape is different, the way the arms are placed is different, the voice is different. And that's just gross morphology, I'm not even talking about genitalia. And then you can look at microstructures, there's differences between men and women at every level of the human microstructure from the cellular all the way up to the social.

So like what in the world are we talking about? What's going on here? It's crazy. So that was video number one. Video number two was the bloody human resources department at the University of Toronto has adopted an equity position. Okay, so what equity means is that it doesn't mean equality of opportunity. It means equality of outcome.

And that is, so this is the idea. The idea is that you take us a social institution like a university. And then you look at the organization of that university at every single strat from the executive level all the way down to the student level. Then what you do is you do an analysis of each level by community demography, right? You get to define the demographic characteristics

that you're going to discuss, however, which is actually a big problem. Then you make the presupposition that unless that organization at every level matches the demographic representation of the people at every level, then it's corrupt, oppressive, and discriminatory, and it needs to be changed. Okay, so you think, what's wrong with that?

Every level should have 50, 50 men and women, let's say. It's like, you're really sure about that, or even if you're so sure about that, you don't think there's any natural differences in interest between men and women. Well, if you don't think so, then why are most psychology classes 80% women? And that differentiation is accelerating rapidly, like I've seen it over the course of my career, maybe 60% than at the beginning of my career, to like 80% women now. And men occupy more of the positions in the stem fields, at least for now. It's the same in bloody Scandinavia.

It's 21 women to men, nurses in Scandinavia. And 20 to one men to women in engineering. And that's in Scandinavia. And so what's happened in Scandinavia, as they've made this side more egalitarian in terms of its legal and social structures, is that the gender differences in personality between men and women have got bigger, not smaller. So what that means is that social construction isn't wrong.

That's what it means. Wrong, disproved. It's exactly the opposite of what the theory would have predicted because the theory predicted and God only knew how it was going to sort us tell folks. It's like not like people knew this to begin with. The idea was that as you equalize the social structure, the differences between men and women would disappear. Guess what? That didn't happen and it's not studies of just a few hundred people and a few hundred people and a few locations. Those are population-wide studies and they'd be replicated

multiple times. So, and the funny thing is, is that so there are temperamental differences between men and women. And neuroticism and agreeableness are not the only temperamental differences. So if you fragment extroversion, it fragments into assertiveness and gregariousness, women are more gregarious, men are more assertive. If you fragment conscientiousness into orneliness and industriousness, women are more ornally and men are more industrious. If you fragment openness, which is the creativity dimension, into interest in ideas and interest in aesthetics, you find that women are more interested in aesthetics and men are more interested in ideas.

So, because you're contraction of the big five into 10, you get gender differences across all of them and they're not trivial either. They make a difference. So, okay, so anyways, back to the equity thing of all the preposterous and idiotic ideas. So, first of all, to make gender equity across every dimension of an organization who have to assume that men and women have identical interests and temperaments, and that if they

don't, the state should intervene to bloody well ensure that they do, which is something for all you women to figure out, because now there's many, many, what, positions in society that women preferentially occupy. So what are you going to do about that? And what are you going to do about the Asians? Because they occupy preferential positions as well. They're overrepresented in all sorts of professional institutions. And the probability is that that's going to increase.

What are you going to do about that? What about the Jews? What are you going to do about that? What about the Jews? What are you going to do about them? Because they are in the same position as the Asians. You're going to put quotas on all those people. What kind of stupidity is that? And then it's worse too, because let's say you equalize women, just for the sake of argument, across all these different dimensions of society. Well then what are you going to do? Are you going to be going to equalize for black women and Latino women and Asian women?

Are you going to subtype black women? Because it's not like they're all the same. Are you going to ensure that women from lower classes are represented just as much as women from upper classes? And how many generations back are you going to go to check that? What about intelligence? What about attractiveness? How about intelligence? What about attractiveness?

How about height? How about weight? So the problem with the fractionation by group identity is that it's endless. There's no way of insured equality across groups because there's an infinite number of groups. You can fragment group identity all the way down to the level of the individual, which

is exactly what you should do, which is what we already did in the West. We figured, well, the ultimate, diverse population is a population of individuals, so you let the individual sort it out. No, no, we're going to replace that with group. Well, what that means for the bloody social activists is that they'll be able to play this game forever because you can continually fractionate group identity, ad nauseam, and so the system will never be equal. And you can bloody well be sure that as we implement social policy to make sure that all outcomes are equal, that the amount of space that you personally are going to have to maneuver

in is going to shrink and shrink and shrink and shrink. We've already seen that happen in many societies. You think we would learn from the 20th century. So that's the equity issue, and then worse even, this is the HR and equity people. They're actually mucking about with people's unconscious biases. So this is what we want, right? We want your employers and the state to re-educate you so that your perceptions,

because that's what we're talking about with regards to unconscious bias, so that your perceptions fall into accordance with their demands. And not even your voluntary perceptions, by the way, your involuntary unconscious perceptions have to be retrained. Okay, so maybe that's not so good, especially when you look at that bloody implicit association test, Mazarin Banagy from Harvard and Anthony Greenwell from the University of Washington. So Bonagy is an afiled Marxist and Greenwell and Bonagy, both bloody well-known, have written that their implicit association task has neither the reliability nor the validity to be used as an individual diagnostic task.

They know it. Sorry, just something. I collected about that in like last but not everyone is aware of that. Do you want to just do it? I can bring up a PowerPoint slide or do you want to do that? Yeah, why don't you do that? Do you want to do that? Yeah, so I'll let you take over when you do that.

So despite the fact that, sorry, so we've got all of it. You'll take a few minutes. Yeah, well, despite the, okay, so the implicit association task in principle is this word association game. It's actually predicated, I would say, on psychoanalytic ideas, most particularly on union ideas, because young developed the association test many, many years ago. But it purports to investigate whether you are unconsciously biased towards one group or against another group, could be gender, could be ethnicity, could be race, could be attractiveness, whatever.

But the problem is that when you give the same person a damn IAT twice, they don't get the same results. So there's a rule for diagnostic tests. And the rule is the reliability, test-retest reliability, has to exceed something like 0.8 or 0.9, 0.8 at least. So the big five does that. test do that, but there's a damn, there's damn few tests that pass that reliability criteria. And the IAT is only reliable. I don't remember precisely, but I think it's about 0.5,

which isn't even, it's not even near close enough to be used as a diagnostic test. Plus, it's not valid. So what does that mean? Let's say I assess your unconscious bias and give you a diagnosis. Well, there's no evidence that it predicts your behavior. So, so what did what good is it? What good is it? Well, it's good if you want people to send you to retraining exercises so that you can have your perceptions adjusted in the direction that your organization in the state thinks is proper. And that's happening everywhere. I got letters this week already for people at CVC. It's becoming mandatory there. St. Mike's hospital, same thing, and they've decided that all of their micro institutions within the hospital will be equitable.

There will be 50 percent women and 50 percent men at every single level of the organization or the organization is corrupt and oppressive. It's like, and that, it's spreading so fast, you can't believe it. I wrote, Maserid Binagian, Anthony Greenwald yesterday and sent it off to some of my colleagues, saying, are you going to come out and make a public statement about the fact that your damn test is being used by pathological people for nefarious purposes. It's like, well, we'll see what they have to say about that. I was a bit more polite with my letters than that.

But there's no excuse for it. There's absolutely no excuse for it. And as far as I'm concerned, as part of the broader corruption of social psychology, you guys may know or may not. The social psychology has been right with controversy and scandal over the last three or four years, and a big part of the reason for that is it's damn corrupt discipline. And the use of the IET for political reasons is a perfect example of that. There is no excuse for it. And the people at St. Mike's, they say, well, this is scientifically validated.

It's like, no, it's not. And worse, let's say you do have unconscious bias, just for the sake of argument, and you could measure it reliably, which you can't, and then it was valid, which it isn't. Let's say all of those things were in case. There's no evidence whatsoever

that those damn unconscious bias training programs, retraining programs have the effect that they're supposed to have, and there's some evidence that they actually have the reverse effect. And maybe that's because people don't really like being marched off to re-education by the employers after they've been diagnosed as racist, even if there's no evidence that they in fact are. So it's an absolute misuse of psychology and insanity.

It's politically motivated. It's politically motivated. It's an assault on freedom. Anyways, I made those two videos and I took, tried to take the HR and equity people at U of T to task because they made that training mandatory for their HR people, I thought, you don't have the right as an employer to invade the unconscious structures of your employees' minds and alter their political perspective even though you can't do it. You don't have the right to do that and to think about it as something you should do as a matter of course as part of your ethical duty is you really want that? You really want that. That's what you want your employers to be able to do.

Figure out independently of your behavior whether or not you're like a your erasus or a classist or a misogynist or whatever that happens to be and you really think that the bureaucrats at the university for example or bureaucrats anywhere for that matter are actually capable and qualified of doing such a thing properly. If I'm doing far more damage than than any possible good., so anyways, I made those two videos trying to sort this out and to investigate it and then for whatever reason, you know, the proverbial well, you know what happened. By within two months there was a hundred and eighty newspaper articles written about it and I don't know how many millions of people have watched these things online now, but it's plenty. And so what that also means is I put my finger on something because who cares when a

div-winning professor from the University of Toronto does with his spare time at midnight? No one should care. I should have had my 15 minutes of no driving, if that. But that doesn't what happened. It was major news in Canada for three months, and I'm still talking to people all over the world about it. I get 100 letters a day, at least. I can't keep up with them.

But people from people who are being cornered in all sorts of ways by their idiot employers and these safe space propositions at universities and the restrictions on their speech, they tell me constantly, well, I really agree with you, but I'm afraid to say anything about it. It's like, oh good, that's a wonderful position for us to be in, where people are afraid,

they're afraid to speak their minds. What the hell? And it's not getting better. And if we don't do something about it, it's gonna get a lot worse. Do you saw what happened in Berkeley? That's just a taste of what's to come. One day, there's gonna be an antifas demonstration

with a little bit of violence. And the bad guys on the other side are going to come out and We're not gonna like that very much So maybe we should get our acts together and stop that from happening before it actually happens unless that's what you want And I wouldn't recommend it. We have a pretty sophisticated society and you wouldn't take much to put a spanner into the spokes and flip everybody on their forehead so Wake up for Christ's sake. This is not good. And the fact that the fact that you know the bloody federal government has decided that they won't let people pick the judiciary anymore unless they take unconscious bias for your

training. Right? What a hell! It's crazy. So anyways, that's what happened. In addition to this ideologically driven, just to that, do you think, I'm always quite cynical, do you think it's also a make more project for a bunch of people that they figure we can create these tests that aren't valid, aren't reliable, but we've got an industry. That's going to keep going forever now. You never expect social psychologists to be careerist, would you?

Yes, yes, definitely. Well, I mean, it got out of hand, too. It's not, you know, people don't necessarily plan these things. I'm sure that the Ontario Human Rights Commission, when they were talking about preferred pronoun use, had known, ideal whatsoever, that, you know, within four years of introducing the policies, that there would be 71 different gender identity categories no one saw that coming how could you possibly see that coming and I don't think Bonnagy and Greenwald had any idea that their test would be

transformed into an implement public policy so rapidly all right, so Okay, and just for those who are interested the implicit associations or the implicit attitudes test, my students, I always give a link to that. And if anyone's interested, I can give you a link where you can go to the test and actually do it yourself and find out. Because the assumption is that if you are implicitly racist, so explicitly racist, you would say, I hate blacks, I would say, implicitly racist, oh no, some of my best friends are black. But when you do this test, the idea is that,

if you're shown a black person's face, versus a white person's face, you're more likely to associate that black person with, I think, violence. So you're basically being primed unconsciously. So when you see a black face, if you subsequently see a weapon and you're asked to decide whether this is a weapon or a tool, you're more quickly going to say weapon and you're asked to decide whether this is a weapon or a tool, you're more quickly going to say weapon because you're already thinking dangerous,

violence, weapons because you know you have this negative association of black with weapons. And you'll do that faster than when you see a white face. Because the white face is going to be more neutral. So whether you see after the white face a gun or a weapon in theory, should be able to take equal time to determine whether it is one or the other. Things like that, this is the kind of test that they do and they've associated or they've done this test as Dr. Peterson said with countless other types of constructs.

And again, the reliability, the validity is not just suspect, it's just it's not existent. And as I said, if you'd like to try it out, if you're a student, check out on the right space page. If you're not, email me, Facebook me, I'll give you the link. And you can, they've done it to like, I think 50 different at least, Democrat, Democrat Republican, vanilla, strawberry. There's all these different things that you can do

and see where your implicit or unconscious biases are. And as Dr. Peter said, saying, it's getting out of hand. And it's all I get with the gender pronouns because during the debate that you had or whatever that was at the U of T, one of the people that I think is a lawyer, very condescendingly, a person.

A very good person. A brand across. That's right. Oh, this kind of thing would never happen. You don't know what you're talking about. Well, first of all, on Terry Human Rights Tribe, you don't page, they specifically say that you have to identify people by their preferred identity or expression,

which includes pronoun use it. It's there on their pages. It's not explicitly stated in Bill C16, but the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, who will, in fact, enact any type of action against somebody who's violated these policies, it's on their very page. And I know you spoke about your own experience.

I hope that it's not everyone saw the debate. Do you just talk with that part where, speaking to other professionals who don't seem to be ideologically driven like Cosmin, what they said about the risk of this actually, this is so important. Well, it was, Cosmin was interested. I mean, she's definitely not looking at this the same way that I do. But one of the things she said, in a rather condescending manner, was that I wouldn't be sent to jail even though I wanted

to be. I'm paraphrasing what that's roughly what she said. But that human rights tribunal could take away my property and my wages and all of that. But that seemed to be okay for her as long as it didn't extend to jail. But that's also nonsense because if you're found guilty by the human rights tribunal and you don't pay, then that's contemptive court and that goes to a different court and then they put you in jail and that's already happened.

So it's crooked lawyer hand waving, fundamental. And it's an attempt to play down the significance of the law. You go and read about, you go online and read about the powers of the human rights tribunal, and then see how safety feels. So here's one of the things they can do. This is section 1.6, it's in a document about powers of the tribunals. They call them social justice tribunals, in Ontario.

They actually call them social justice tribunals. It's my lonely. They can suspend precedent, normal legal precedent, and jurisprudential tradition in the pursuit of their age. That's one of the, it's actually documented as one of their powers. Think about that. Like, we live in a society that's essentially bound by the restrictions of the English common law. An English common

law is one of the most remarkable developments of civilization ever period. Because what see in the English system basically the presupposition is that you have all the rights there are. They're not enumerated. You just have all of them, except when one of those rights imposes a restriction on someone else, and then they get irritated that you would take you to court. And then the judge sorts out who has which micro-right, and then that's laid out as precedent. And so English common law is this tremendous body

of evolved doctrine about how the infinite number of human rights that each individual has interacts with everyone else's rights. And like back when Trudeau, when the first Trudeau, brought in the human rights code, the Bill of Rights, the Canadian Bill of Rights, there were lots of people who were upset by it because it's a different form of legal reasoning. The Bill of Rights says, here's the rights you have that the government is granting you. That's not how it works under the English code.

The English code is, you have all the rights there are, but they rob up against other people's rights, so we have to sort that out. We do that with court and precedent, and that's what the Human Rights Commission and Tribunal in Ontario can dispense with if they want. And the reason they're, I know the reason that they put that line

in there, it's because the social justice hypothesis is that the legal structures of Western civilization are oppressive patriarchal. Are oppressive in patriarchal. And so it's perfectly reasonable to toss them over if you're in pursuit of something like social justice. It's like, that's fine. People sure go ahead and do that.

But if you think that you can transform what we have already now into some kind of utopia, then you're dangerous because that isn't how the world works. And utopians, if you're more dangerous than any other people for the last 100 years, that's for sure. Like there's all sorts of things wrong with Western society. Always, and there always will be, but compared to 85 to 90% of the rest of the planet, this is bloody heaven. And that's why people

want to move here. So you can say, well, it's corrupt compared to my imaginary utopias. Like, yeah, that's for sure. It certainly is. But if your imaginary utopia was realized in hardcore politics over a 30-year period, everyone would be able to be able to be starving to death. We already know that because it happened multiple times throughout the 20th century. And societies that were, well, they weren't as sophisticated as our society is now,

but they were plenty sophisticated for their time. And you'll hear the Neil Marxist types. This is the most annoying argument, anyone ever makes, they say, well, what happened in the Soviet Union, that wasn't real communism. It's like, first, oh yes, it was. That's why it also happened in China,

which was a very different society. But what they really mean when they say that is, well, you know, that's Stalin character. He wasn't such a good guy. He didn't really know how to implement the Marxist doctrines. But me, I'm pretty pure of heart. And if you would have made me dip-taker for 20 years, then the utopia would have arrived as promised. It's like, first of all, if you think that there's

something wrong with you, you're dangerous. And second, let's just say for a minute that some saint did get a hold of the tools of power and try to implement from each according to his ability to each according to his need and actually did that in a pure and saint-like manner. Here's what would happen. The next people in the revolutionary string like Stalin would come along and stab them in their bed in the middle of the night and that would be the end of that. So well so there's absolutely no excuse whatsoever for that sort of thinking. And if you read Solzhenitsyn's schoolyard archipelago, which you should

do like everyone should, because it's like the definitive document of this sort of thing emerged from the 20th century, Solzhenitsyn laid out with extraordinary clarity, first in his writings on Lenin, and then in his writings on the Soviet Union more broadly, exactly how the pernicious and pathological Marxist doctrines were transformed logically and systematically into the sorts of laws that killed millions of people. Millions of people. There were people starving so badly in the Soviet Union

by the 1920s that they had posters telling them not to eat their children. So we've beaten down that road already. So what the hell are we doing? We're going down that road again under the guise of equity, right? And equality. Well, that was their doctrines that promoted those laws to begin with. Not good. Okay, so when you talk this way, some people are going to say either you're blowing things out of proportion or you make a huge leap from where we are now to where we should be.

And so I think there's a lot of room for misunderstanding for people, especially if they have certain ideologies that they like to protect. So one of the reasons I wanted my people over was to be able to ask questions. You've heard some of Dr. Peterson's tenets that he's trying to, you know, convey. And he said, you know, and I don't have a video that each person has watched. But you have an opportunity right now because that's okay. Someone has a specific question, either from something that Dr. Tepeter has said today, or things you've heard in the videos, it's me, nagging at you, and you're like, I really want to ask him face-to-face,

straight up, what do you mean by this or what is your solution to that? Please, I'm opening up the floor. Just talk really loud, please, so that Mike can pick it up, and then everyone is to come here. Does anybody have a specific question that you would like to ask? Okay? Oh, sorry, I'll let you sorry. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. It's a little bit a sidebar, but I've watched several videos. They're brilliant. Some of your longer ones I'm explaining. I'm intrigued by your, I know this is one of your heroes. I know this long-knit son was a great man. I'm a little disturbed. I love to know why was he anti-semitic? You know the book that he wrote in which he was accused of anti-semitism has not been yet translated into English.

It was only one place? Well one of the things that he did he certainly there's certainly no sign of anti-semitism in the Goula Garcopalago not as far as I could tell and I don't think in the other books I've read, I haven't seen that either. He did write a book near the end of his life on the role that Jewish intellectuals played in the establishment of the Soviet Union, but you can't get it in English.

So I don't know what to say about that. I know that it's been criticized from both sides, I would say. One side saying, well, this was a story that needed to be told, and the other side saying, well, this was a story that needed to be told and the other side saying, well This fears it to anti-Semitism. So, but you would ask that question. That's the most important thing. Okay, so I'm going to venture out on a limb because I've been thinking about this for a while. Am I going to venture a teacher all the way up? No, I've no, I haven't got my thoughts formulated well enough. The leftist doctrines tend to be very attractive to intellectuals.

And so any group that's overrepresented in intellectuals is likely going to be overrepresented on the leftist end of the spectrum. And there are temperamental reasons for that. We know that if you lean leftist because you're higher in openness and lower in orderliness, and that seems to be associated with IQ at least in part. But I don't want to go into it any more than that because I haven't thought it through sufficient,

but I also haven't been able to get a coffee and solstice in this last book, because you can't get it in English. It hasn't been translated for one reason or another. But I don't think you'll see anything like that in the Goulai Garter Bell. OK, thank you. There's another question. Before we're going to have you ask the question, but I have to, I want to get back to this because you mentioned this a number of times

about the corals between IQ and the left, and that the people who believe in the support, thought police are not actually just, they're not left as they're a whole other category. But it's such an important statement, like you didn't turn to it in a few minutes. But first, this question, please. So if the current proposition is to extreme view,

have a theory with regards to how we do expand equality without going to such extreme? I think we're doing a good job of that right now. I mean, how fast do you think things, how fast could you even hope for things to change? Look at what's happened to the situation in women since 1970. That's changed so fast that people can't even keep up.

It's not obvious, by the way, either, that it's being particularly good for women. Now, you could make a case that it was good for society. Maybe it's a tough one, eh? Because the birth rate is plummeted. And so maybe you don't care about that. Maybe think there's too many people on planet already, whatever. But it isn't that easy to figure out

when something is working properly. What one of the things we do know, we seem to know, is that to the degree that rights are extended to women, economic prosperity follows. So you can see worldwide that the societies that have extended the rights to women most extensively are also the societies that seem to be flourishing economically, and there does seem to be a causal relationship. But women have paid a big price for that. So what's

happened in part is first of all for say women who are middle class or lower, their lives have essentially fallen apart because marriage is now restricted to the rich, which is also something to think about for those of you who think marriage is an oppressive, patriarchal institution. It's like, okay, then, why are only the rich people getting married? They're oppressing themselves? I don't think so. And so the women who are in a lower socioeconomic

status are suffering madly and so are their children. And they have terrible jobs most of the time, like jobs in retail, where they're called in every day for the next day. They don't have a schedule that's set out ahead of them. They get paid very badly. They've got kids to take care of. And so they have no free time. It makes the really easy targets for useless predatory males.

And it's really hard on the kids. And that's like 40% of the female population, something like that. You guys, you know, well, I don't know about all of you, but you're in university. You're part of the privileged cognitive elite, you know. So these sorts of things don't really touch you the same way they touch other people. And so women are much more happier if you look at national polls than they were, say, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. And I think that's partly because freedom and happiness, those are not the same thing.

They're not even close. And I see young women all the time struggling to figure out what to do with their lives, because they have no idea how to have a job, a slash career, and a family. So, and there's no answer to that. It's a really difficult problem. And there's all sorts of ideas. Like, I did a lot of consulting for law firms for a long time, about a decade. And I had a lot of clients who were extremely high functioning female lawyers, younger ones

trying to figure out how to balance their career with their desire to have life. And you know you hear all the time about women being denied access to positions of power and that's the consequence of prejudice and oppression. It's like yeah, yeah, everything is caused by the same thing. First, right, you have got one causal principle. Wonderful. Now you're a philosopher. You can figure out everything with it.

It's like the law firms cannot keep their women in their 30s. They cannot keep the big law firms. They all leave. Why? Because the women hit 30. They're brilliant. Conscientists, intelligent, they were deadly in high school, deadly in university, they nailed law school, they went through

their article, they made partner by the time they were 30, it was like they're in a rocket to the top position. What do they find when they get there? 80 hour work weeks, right? Because that's one of the things you want to think about. You know, you think that the people who run things are sitting at home smoking big cigars and telling their minions what to do. It's like that's like the 1920s millionaire that's on the cover of the monopoly game. That's no sociological analysis.

I know lots of people like that, and they work all the time, all the time. From the second they wake up, till the second they go to sleep, and they don't just casually work, because I know some of you go to the library for six hours and you say, well I studied in the library for six hours, like, no you didn't. You studied for half an hour.

You had coffee and you looked through Facebook and you went home and you said, well I studied for six hours and you're happy about it, but you know, bloody well you didn't. Partly because you can't, you know, I can only read for about three and a half hours till I'm done and I'm pretty good at it. So these people who are running things, there's corrupt people obviously, but the vast majority of them first are self-made, and second, they're so bloody efficient and smart, you cannot believe it and they work 80 hours a week and most of them happen to be man. And why is that?

Because there are a small number of insane men who will do nothing but work 80 hours a week. And no matter where you put them, if you put them in the middle of a forest with an axe, all they would do is run around and drop it down trees. So the issue isn't why aren't there more women in positions of power. It's why are there any men insane enough ever to occupy those positions? You know, because we also know, and the data on this is very clear, what's the relationship between money and well-being? Once you have enough money to keep the bill collectors from your door.

So once you have enough money to stave off misery, which is sort of lower middle class, something like that in our society, maybe a little lower than that. Extra money does not help you. It does not improve your life. So why bother with it? Well, that's what the women in the law firms think. It's like most of them, by the time they're in their thirties, are married. Almost all of them are married to men who make as much money or more than they do because that's what women go for, cross-culturally, four to five years older, equal or higher in the cell selectonomic status. So their husband's already made $350,000 a year. It's like they think, well, I don't need much more money. The man used money to keep track of the competition, by the way, because all the mail lawyers that I talked to are usually real hard-ass guys,

really low in agree-oldliness, really high in conscientiousness, like conservative types, low in openness as well. And they want to win. And the reason they care about their damn bonus at the end of the year isn't even so much because of the money. It's because they got a much bigger bonus than the other son of a bitch sitting beside them and they're happy about that So there's a real like a real brass knuckles competition that drives these sorts of things But we get things backwards so often in psychology and in sociology

It's not why there aren't more women in positions of power. It's widening any men want those positions You just have no idea the amount of responsibility that comes along with that. You just imagine for a minute try to run a billion dollar corporation, you can't even bloody well balance your checkbook. And there's dusk bunnies underneath your bed. How in the world would you ever run a billion dollar corporation? Those things are complicated and you have enemies and they're trying to take you out all the time. You look at Apple and Samsung, man, they're just torturing each other in the court's non-stop. You know, if you're running a big corporation, you'll be handling two or three hundred lawsuits

at a time. And that's just nothing compared to the complexity of what you actually have to do. Stay on top of the technology, constantly interact with your large customers, travel all the time because you have to maintain the relationships. You have to regulate the politics inside the business. You have, believe me, it's no pick there. And you think, well, they get a lot of money. It's like, what makes you think that's such a good thing?

You know, like if you're half crazy and you have a lot of money, you're going to be crazy a lot faster. I can tell you that. Because it frees you from all sorts of constraints. You know, we know the data on lottery winners. They're no happier a year later and some of them are done, especially if they had had like a bit of a cocaine problem to begin with. Because, you know, being broke stops you from dying if you're a cocaine addict. You get enough money and the way you go, and you think to yourself, you've got all sorts of bad habits

and weirdnesses. If somebody dumped an infinite amount of money on you, what makes you think you would unravel completely? It's highly probable. So anyway, so back to these women. You know, what they do when they're 30 is they look around and they play hit partner, so they hit the pinnacle of their profession.

They think, what the hell am I doing this for? Why would anyone in the right mind in their 30s, they look around and they've made hit partners so they hit the pinnacle of their profession. They think, what the hell am I doing this for? Why would anyone in their right mind want to be woken up at 3 in the morning and Sunday by their irate Japanese client who wants them to work for the next 5 hours non-stop to fix this damn problem which is going to cost them $100 million right now or we'll find someone else to pay $750 an hour to fix it right now. And you think, well, that's a masculine form of value, because that's one of the criticisms. If the law firms just adopted a more feminine structure of value, it's like, what kind of bullshit is that?

The reason that you get up at three in the morning on Sunday to talk to your Japanese client who's freaking out about their contract. Because if you don't jump the hell up and do it right now, there's some starving associate who's unbelievably ambitious in New York who'll pick up the pieces in two tenths of a second, and they're smart, aggressive, and they'll take you out. So it has nothing to do with masculine structures of values, all the foolish ideas. And it's not just law where this happens. We know, for example, that female doctors were far fewer hours, too. So the more female doctors you have,

the more doctors you have to have. And I'm not complaining about women's priorities. I'm not saying the women are wrong, not at all. It's like the older I get, the more I understand that marriage and family are of primary importance, and the more I see women in particular. You know, they hit 35 or 40 and they're not married and they don't have kids and they are not happy. Because what the hell are you going to do from the time you're 40 until the time you're

80? You got no family? You got no relationships? What are you going to do? Go run your company. Yeah, well, if you're one in a thousand, that will satisfy you. So you bloody well better make sure you're that one in a thousand and you're probably not because those people are rare. So, so, so, them, because, uh, Dr. Peterson, one of the natural response to what you just said would be, okay, well, the, the priorities are, it's a rigged game because only women are the ones who are able to procreate, so what do you answer to that? Of course, it's a rigged game. Obviously, it's a rigged game.

Women have complicated lives, and the pill has made them more complicated. Well, that's not, I wouldn't say that exactly because, you know, 100 years, in 1895, the average person in the Western world lived on $1 a day in today's money. Okay, so those people worked so hard and slaved away to such a degree that you can't even imagine it, and all their kids died. Right, so the death rate among kids below five was beyond comprehension, and so like women had terrible time up at the time of the well-solded man. They got to be coal miners and soldiers. Because now that wasn't exactly entertaining. So life was very, very, very, very, very hard before we got rich.

And we're rich. Even those of you who are in this class who think you're poor, it's like, no, you're not. You're in the top one tenth of 1% by historical standards. And probably thereby, current world standards as well. Of course, you can just compare yourself to the few people who richer than you and feel sorry for yourself. But that's a pretty pathetic in my estimation. So it's certainly historically uninformed.

So yeah, women have a rough, obviously. Now, there's other things to consider. You do live eight years longer. So that's not trivial. Testosterone kills man. That's basically why men die earlier. You know, when men are much more likely to be killed in dangerous jobs, they do almost all the dangerous jobs.

They do almost all the outside work. And there's lots of reasons that men get paid more than women that have nothing to do with prejudice. It's because they take awful horrible jobs like working in the oil rigs in Northern Alberta when it's bloody 40 below and come out of that after five years with two or three fingers missing and all warped up because you really want a wrestle pipe when it's 40 below and it's filthy with a bunch of ordinary men who are hungover beyond belief.

It's like, that's not very entertaining. So yeah, I mean, each gender, each sex has its own unfairness to deal with, but to think of that as a consequence of the social structure, it's like, come on, really? What about nature itself? And this is something that seems to be completely invisible on the left side of the political spectrum. It's like, of course, you're bloody oppressed

and your life is full of suffering, obviously, but to think about that as a direct consequence of unjust social structures is just moronic. It's like that's part of the reason, a small part, but look where you're sitting, people. It's pretty warm in here, and you're so privileged you can come here in Saturday morning and listen to an intellectual lecture. It's like you should be happy about that because by historical standards you should be out lifting rocks in your skeletal form about five foot three with no teeth. So I have coogers. Yeah coogers and lions yeah exactly. So you know there's no gratitude that's the thing There's no gratitude for what our society is capable of doing.

So, is that right? Yeah, Dr. Peterson, tell me what do you think about that? Because I was thinking about that. What happens when the forces of the gender identity gender expression clashes the capitalist market forces, for example? Sports is a multibillion dollar industry. And as some women start saying, we express ourselves as men, we can prevent, and the law is on their side,

do you think that this billion dollar industry is going to put up with some women wanting to be, you know, like football teams on the Toronto Maple Leafs? I don't think so. So I'm wondering if some of the market forces will clash with this and then some of these issues might result that way. Well, market forces will be a constraining fact, partly because the market tends to punish things that don't work in the market very, very rapidly.

And that's another thing with regards to thinking about, say, equality or equity in the workplace. If you believe that there is a equivalent distribution of talent across all possible categories, then you have some reason to wait for the market to sort itself out. Because even if you're an anti-capitalist, you at least have to understand that the people that you despise are motivated by greed. And so they're going to try to find people who will make them the most money, and they basically do that. It's a pretty stupid employer who won't take someone talented when they come along. You might say, well, they're prejudiced, and they're not doing such a great job of sorting out the applicants. It's like, that's fine. They'll be stopped real good by people who are about

better at it. Because like, talent is unbelievably rare. I don't know if you guys have talked about the Pareto distribution at all. But, well, productivity is not normally distributed. You know, you've learned in psychology that's everything is normally distributed. It's like, no, it's not.

Random things are normally distributed, but productivity isn't random and so what you see, if productivity is actually governed by something called Price's Law, which is a variation of another principle called the Pareto Principle, which was discovered back in the late 1800s by Ville Fredel Pareto, who was the economist. What price actually studied scientific productivity and so what he showed is quite cool. At the time when he did this, this was in 1960, the typical PhD student had one publication on graduation.

Half as many as that had three, half as many as that had four massive step down in productivity. You see this in the scientific productivity period. So what happens is that in any given scientific domain, there's a clump of people sort of on the left side of the distribution, the less productive side. And in that clump, men and women are equally productive. But then there's a tiny percentage of people who publish like all papers.

And they're all men. And they're all men. And they're those insane men that I was telling you about before. They do nothing but work for 80 hours a week. And the thing is, if you want to rise to the top of a profession, you think about it. What do you need to rise to the top of a competitive profession? You better be smart, because smart makes you fast. And you're not going to get to the next place faster

than anyone else, unless you're faster than them. You bloody well better be conscientious, industrious in particular. So it should make you feel horrible every second of your life you spent doing something that involves leisure. And there's going to be some people in here that know that because they're hyper conscientious. I can't stand sitting around doing nothing. I've got to find some work to do. And you'll do whatever you have to, that's work, because you feel guilty and horrible if you're sitting around. So you need to be hyper conscientious. And so maybe you need to be in the top 1% for intelligence, and maybe the top 5% for industriousness.

So that's 1% to 5%. So you're looking at it. I think that's 1% to 5%. Yeah, it was 1% to 120. 1% to 2000, I think that's one percent, what is that one percent, five percent? Yeah, that's one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one

hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one

hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one and a very small number of people. There's tremendous economic incentive to identify those people no matter where they're from, no matter who they are, and employers who have any sense, know that, and they're hungry. Like these law firms, you know, you don't have no idea that nots they tie themselves in trying to keep

their qualified women, because those women are worth a bloody fortune, you know, they pay them a lot, but they bring in way more business than they bring in far more economic resources than they take. The law firms wanna keep them. Now, that doesn't mean the men, all the men in the law firms don't have their problems

with highly qualified women because they don't know what to do with them. Like if you're a guy and you're asserted a competitive, then you're gonna be asserting yourself and competitive with other guys. But it's a lot harder to do that with a woman because you think, well, how am I going to be hyper aggressive around her? Because that just doesn't work out. And so the guys don't know what to do about that. And I would say there's some residual trouble in law firms and other high end industries because of that. They just don't know how to sort it out.

But mostly the employers are thinking, I don't care if you're green, if you're smart and you can bring in business and you're reliable and you can solve problems like we don't have anybody like you, we need you, please stay. It doesn't happen. So yes, the market forces will, but the market forces, I think, are already going to push things hard in the direction of maximizing the utility of talent. Because you just have no idea how much more productive a productive person is than a non-productive person. It's crazy. It's crazy. I just want to tell you something.

It's supposed to pose that with a publication, which is not to get your blood boiling. It's only sent me Glaciers, Gender, and Science, a feminist, glaciology framework for global environmental change research. You want to talk about productivity and then there's academia. And not to integrate all of academia, but unfortunately, I mean, this is the profession in which people have killed trillions of trees for bullshit bullshit basically. So I just thought that would be a nice ironic twist. Yeah, well, you know, the postmodernists, they don't believe it.

I don't know how much you know about postmodernism philosophy. You're at Ryerson, so probably quite a bit. But not that the U of T is any better, because it's not. But the postmodernists don't believe in science. There's lots of things they don't believe in. They don't believe in logic. And I'm not making this stuff up. Like you can go read it for yourself, dare I tell you in particular. The thing that logic is part of the oppressive patriarchy and that there's no point in dialogue because all the reasons differed power groups identified by their groups and they can't really talk. It's just

a power struggle. And that's why the radical leftists stopped people from speaking on campus. That's why I couldn't find anybody to debate me roughly speaking at the University of Toronto and I went to Queens University two weeks ago to the law school there because I was invited by a group called Running Mean Association and they asked six professors if they would debate me. It's like no, it's why not? I'm not even a lawyer and lawyers can debate like they're good at that. That's what they're trained to do. No, they wouldn't debate me. So they had to get somebody to play devil's advocate. And he did a good job. You know, he did a very credible job, I thought.

But you think, well, why wouldn't they come out and debate me? That's easy. They don't believe in dialogue. Period. It's part of the philosophy. Because you have to believe in logic. First of all, to believe in dialogue. You have to believe that people can communicate, as individuals, fundamentally, and not that you just locked in your identity as group member against all the other identity groups that are struggling for power in the kind of Hobbesian landscape. That's all a part of postmodernism. So, and this, well, this is just the extension of that. It's like science is just a patriarchal, oppressive patriarchal structure.

And so we need to reconstitute it from the bottom up. It's like they type on their computers, well they say this. Not noticing that by the fact that they're using the damn computer, which wouldn't work, you know, people had to figure out quantum mechanics before they could make commuted computers. They used the computer, science doesn't, science isn't real. Tap, tap, tap, tap. It's like, they do the same thing when they're in jet plays. Science isn't real.

And they're like, oh, 600 bottles an hour, typing on my computer. It's like it's six. That's called a performative contradiction from a philosophical perspective. And that's the same as a logical paradox. You don't get to say one thing and do another and say that you've got it right. Well, you do if you're a postmodernist because you can do whatever you want if you're a postmodernist.

And the reason the damn postmodernists are Marxists, as far as I can tell because inevitably they are, is because the problem with postmodernism is it doesn't even leave post modernism anything to do because postmodernists don't believe in overarching directional narratives and the problem with that proposition is if you don't have an overarching directive narrative for your life you don't know what to do and it's really important that you know what to do because you're alive and you need to do things. Well we'll just turn back to the original Marxism and we'll say, well, we'll just, I did, we'll just group ourselves up, you know, press groups and we'll have wars between the oppressed groups. That'll give us a sufficient overarching narrative. Doesn't matter that it contradicts the postmodernist thesis

because they don't care about contradictions. So, well, so, hence this feminist glaciology. Okay, so I've got a few questions I'll be watching, hence pop up. So there's one back there first, okay? Bill? So, where I can tell you, the creative, um, a conflict for violence, for disciplinary conflict, really between determinism and choice, right? Like, you know, it's like psychological and far-lost determinism, where, in fact, the matter is, the woman

is a true, a true based on different stress, and psychological structures, and on the other hand, there's a gender choice, where identity choice is the greatest choice that we can make hope long or in general circumstances. It's a good, it's that dichotomy is that straightforward, because there's a tremendous amount of deterministic thinking on the social justice warrior end of the distribution, too, because they regard you as the deterministic product of your environment. So it's more like the localization of determinism. So you might say that for the more biologically oriented people, there's more biological

determinism. But then, so I think that the conflict between free well and determinism basically runs across the entire political spectrum. But then I would also say it's probably an ill-formed argument because there isn't an absolute paradoxical contradiction between free well and determinism. Quite the contrary, you actually need elements of determinism, I think, for a system to operate freely.

So for example, think about playing chess. You can do a lot of things when you're playing chess, or think about composing music. You can do a lot of things when you're composing music, but there's an underlying rule structure that sets up the environment within which all of those choices manifest themselves. It's the same with online video games,

which are a really good example, I think, because they are micro-worlds. And they're determined, in some sense, because they have an underlying rule structure. That's the rules of the game. But they're free in many other ways. And so I don't think there's anybody pretty much on any side of the political spectrum

who would regard people as entirely possessed of free will. We have constraints and limits, and we're also pretty good at adjusting those on the fly. So for example, you'll be much less irritated if a three-year-old runs into you carelessly while tricycling than you will if a, you know, an adult man runs into you with his scooter because you'll take the constraints of the individual into account very, very rapidly.

So I think so else. It's not as simple as free will versus determinism mapped onto the political spectrum. Sorry, did you enjoy? Alan, you mentioned that if somebody thought that socialism was done wrong because it was done by Stalin, that frequently they're saying that I would have done it right. And then there's something wrong with that person. And it's going to be the same.

But I asked him, he said you say in the video about twisted through passion, about how people get their passion out of twisted. And that you appeal to the individual, it seems that like attacking on that level, not that you, that's not your fear of the thought of it. Yeah. You do think really much. And it seems like you get people on their heels sort of, you heels, or I see some hatred for a bear, and it's something that we're focusing on,

or Muslims, and I think that just makes people, they naturally feel identified with their land or their category. It'll just make them defend that stance even more. It's the reaching for the individual of like understanding some passion. I don't know. Okay, so I have to take that apart a little bit

because there's a bunch of issues in the question. How many people in here are in your psychology course or taking psychology, are most of you taking psychology courses? How many people are taking psychology courses? Okay, so a goodly number. Well, one of the things you want to do with the conception like compassion, is you actually want to start thinking about it

like a psychologist or like a scientist because compassion is actually definable and it I think the easiest way to approach it is to think about it in big five terms because it maps all to agreeableness and especially you can break agreeableness down into compassion and politeness and the liberal, especially the social justice types, are way higher in compassion. It's actually their fundamental characteristic. And you might think, well, compassion is a virtue. It's like, yes, it is a virtue. But any unidimensional virtue immediately becomes a vice. Because real virtue is the intermingling of a number of virtues and their integration into a functional identity that can be expressed socially. And compassion is great if you happen to be the entity towards which it is directed. But compassion tends to divide

the world into crying children and predatory snakes. Right. And so if you're a crying child, hey, great man, but if you happen to be identified as one of the predatory snakes, you better look the hell out. And so, you know, compassion is what the mother grizzly bear feels for her comes when she eats you because you've gone in the way. Right, exactly. So we don't want to be thinking for a second that compassion isn't a virtue that could lead to violence because it certainly can. And the other problem with compassion, this is why we have conscientiousness. There's five canonical personality dimensions. Agriableness is pretty good if you're dealing with getting a kin system.

You want to distribute resources equally, for example, among your children, because you want all of them to have not only the same chance, you even want them roughly to have the same outcome, a good one. But the problem is, is you can't extend that moral network to larger groups, not as far as I can tell. You need conscientiousness, which is a much colder virtue. And it's also a virtue that's much more concerned with larger structures over the longer period of time. So, and you can think about conscientiousness as a form of compassion, too. It's a strange form. It's like straight in the hell out and work hard and your life will go well. It's like, I don't care how you're feeling, how you feel about that right now.

And like someone who's cold, low in agreement, let's say, and high unconsciousness, that's what they'll tell you every time, don't come whining to me. I don't care about your hurt feelings. Do your goddamn job, or you're going to be able to on the street. Think, oh, that person's being really hard on me. It's like not necessarily.

They might have your long term best interest in mind. And you're fortunate if you come across someone who's like not, tyrannically disagreeable, but moderately disagreeable and high in conscientiousness because they'll whip you into shape and that's really helpful. I mean You you'll admire people like that. You won't be able to help it You know, and you think oh wow this person's actually keeping me good information even though, you know You feel like a slug after you after they've taken you apart you know, you feel like a slug after they've taken you apart.

So, okay, so that's the compassion issue. It's like you can't just transform that into a political stance. And I think part of what we're seeing is actually the rise of a form of female totalitarianism. So we have no idea what totalitarianism would be like if women ran it, because that's never happened before in the history of the planet. And so we've introduced women into the political sphere radically over the last 50 years. We have no idea what the consequence of that is going to be, but we do know from our research

which is preliminary that a real one that really predicts political correctness, but female gender predicts over and above the personality trait, and that's something we found very rarely in our research. Usually the sex differences are wiped out by the personality differences, but not in this particular case. And then you know women are getting married or later, and they're having children much later, and they're having fewer of them. And so you also have to wonder what their feminine orientation is doing with itself in the interim, roughly speaking, and a lot of it's being expressed as political opinion. Like it's fair enough, you know, that's fine, but it's not fine when it starts to shut down discussion. You know, also, if you think about politics from a temperamental perspective, it gets to be extraordinarily useful.

So, if you're conservative, you're high in conscientiousness, particularly orderliness, and you're low in openness. Okay, so what good are you? Well, you're not great if you have a wonderful philosophical conversation about ideas and then go ahead and art movie. It's like, no, conservatives, you're wrong date for that particular bit of business. But if you want someone to run a company that's already been established or to make sure that algorithmized processes are being undertaken properly, you want conservatives.

They're very good at managing and they're very good at administering. Conscientiousness is the best predictor of those two domains, apart from IQ. Okay, so far, what do you need the damn liberals for? Conscientiousness is the best predictor of those two domains, apart from IQ. Okay, so fine. What do you need the damn liberals for? Well, you don't want them running anything. But you want them thinking up new things. Because the entrepreneurs and artists are high in openness and low in conscientiousness, especially orderliness. And they have to be. Because if you're starting something new new you don't want to have everything in the neat little boxes. You have to break rules, you have to take things apart. And so the liberals need the conservatives to run enterprises and the conservatives need the

liberals to start them. And it makes sense from a temperamental perspective if you think about it too because there's five basic personality dimensions they're all normally distributed. And what that implies is that there's a niche for every personality type in proportion to the frequency of the occurrence within that normal distribution. There's some places for really extroverted people. There's more places for people who are moderately extroverted and moderately introverted. But there are places for everyone in that dimensional structure. And there's utility for all of those people. And so that's why you have to keep the dialogue going.

It's like if you hyper-liberally have to talk to the damn conservatives because sometimes they're right. Sometimes you're right. But sometimes they're right. And so if you don't talk, then the system tilts off to the to the to the extreme that's represented by that temperament. And so what you'd have is a bunch of liberals talking about new things. Well the buildings were falling down around them. So so we meet each other and that's see part of what's happened in

the West is we figured that out a long time ago. We figured out oh well yeah I'm gonna talk to those stupid people who don't think the way you do because sometimes despite the fact that they're annoying and nowhere near as smart as you, they're actually correct. And so here's another way of thinking about it. Imagine the environment does this, like a snake. It's always moving, right? You don't know where the ham things going, and you want to be in the middle. It's like two cliffs. They keep shifting. You want to be in the middle far from the cliffs. They keep moving around and you're trying to walk forward. Well, sometimes it's over here so the conservatives they have to pull it back and sometimes it's over here so the liberals they have to pull

it back. But because it keeps changing you don't know who's right and so you have to keep talking. And that's what a democratic society actually allows for. Exchange the opinions, move the damn polity, so that we can stay in the middle of the snake, roughly speaking. And so you've got to have some respect for people who aren't like you. They're actually not like you. So I figured out recently, I think that I couldn't figure out why

openness and conscientiousness are the dimensions that are determining political belief because they're not even correlated. So why the hell do they clump for political belief? And I think I figured it out. I think it's because of a borders. I think the fundamental political issue is how open versus closed borders should be. And I don't just mean borders between states. I mean borders between states. I mean borders between institutions.

Be borders between genders, borders between sexes, borders between ideas. The conservatives say, keep everything where it belongs, because it's working. And the liberal say, yeah, it's working for now, but unless we make some adjustments, it's not going to keep working. And they're both right.

So we better have to dialogue. Because otherwise, we wander off the cliff on the left or the right. And we know where that goes. That goes just flames down at the bottom of those cliffs. And people die horribly down there. And we've seen that on the right-hand the left. We've had plenty of evidence for that.

So I have a bunch of smart sort of friends who believe in the left. And I have, it feels like their compassion got twisted somehow. And I have compassion for that. I know I want to speak to that. These are people that I love and stuff like this. I think that they are kind of ideologically

distanced as well. Well, one of the things I've also spent a fair and a bit of time thinking about is the role of the resentment plays in political ideology. I have recommended in my lectures, but I'll recommend it here, too. There's a great book by George Orwell called Road to Wagon Peer, which I would W-I-G-A-N, which I would highly recommend.

But Orwell did. He was a leftist. He went and fought on the Communist side in the Spanish Civil War against the fascists, roughly speaking. I mean, Orwell was a tough guy, very, very smart, super smart. And he went up to visit the coal miners in the 1930s in northern UK. I mean, those people, they had to crawl to work for two and a half miles in a tunnel.

It was like three and a half feet high, just to get to their shift. And then that meant breaking rock for seven and a half hours. Then they had to crawl back and they didn't get paid for the commute. So they had rough time. They had no teams by the time they were 30. And they were done and old by the time they were 30 and you know

They were done and old by the time they were 40. It was rough And so you know, Warwell went up there and said Jesus in the industrial nightmare is just killing these poor oppressed people He's like, yeah, that's for sure and he lays it out You can't read that without thinking a thank God. I'm not a coal miner and be yeah It's pretty rough at the bottom of the industrial revolution. Like, seriously, rough. But in the second half of the book, he did an analysis of socialist philosophy. And one of the things he pointed out was that his observation was that the sort of middle-class

ideologically bound socialist types didn't care for the poor at all. They just hated the rich. It's like, yes, that's right, not everyone. Not everyone. I worked for the NDP when I was young, and I met a number of the leaders of the NDP, including Grant Notley. I knew him quite well, who was Rachel Notley's father,

because we come from the same town. And I had a lot of admiration for the leaders of the back then, because they were really trying to give a voice to the working class. It's like you better give a voice to the working class. It's like, you better give a voice to the working class. Or you have never electing Trump, for example. But the socialists have banned in the down working class. It's like, no, we'll go play identity politics.

And that worked out really well for Hillary Clinton. I noticed, because it was identity politics that had certainly shifted the election towards Trump. She lost the working class people. Well, someone has to give them a voice. So there are genuine, there are people on the left who are genuinely working to better the lot of people who, because of situation, haven't had the opportunity they might have. But so many people are resentful.

It's like, no, there's some people out there that have more than me. That's a terrible thing for North American to think. It's like, we're so goddamn privileged that, you know, we should spend at least one extra day in hell after we die, every time we complain about how poor we are. Right. Oh, there's some people who are richer than me. Yeah, that's pretty rough, man.

That's a rough break for you. You're still, it's the funny thing you hear about the 1% all the time in North America. It's like, oh, the 1%, first of all, that's a moving target. People in the 1% shift like crazy. You have a think about a 10% chance of being in the 1% at one point in your life, and about a 40% chance of being in the top 10% for at least one year of your life. So there is a 1% but it's moving. But you're the bloody 1%. All you have to do is compare yourself

with the rest of the world. So like, what are you complaining about? These tiny proportion of people have more than you. Like, what's up with you? How can you be so clueless that you would do that? How can you be so ungrateful, an arrogant, and blind? It's terrible. I mean, people have rough lives in the rest of the world.

I mean, we're making people richer very fast. You know, 300,000 people a day now can connect to the electrical grid, and about 250,000 people are lifted out of that jet poverty. We're wiping out an object poverty faster than ever before in human history by a huge margin. So that's all for the good. It's really impressive. But a huge chunk of that twisted compassion is just resentment. So there's a few people who are better off than me, maybe if I compare them to myself across one dimension.

Jesus, dismal. But that's just getting lost in the discussion today. It's all deflecting outward. It's all trying to, you know, it's, say, it's this resentment, it's this wanting of something that, it's this lack of gratitude for just how lucky we really are. And it's this complete lack of insight and reflection. I think that's a big problem. Well, it's a heart-partly lack of insight and reflection? I think that's a big problem. Well, it's partly lack of historical knowledge.

It's like, people, it's easy to take what we have for granted. Here we are. The lights are on. It's like some stupid poor son of bitches out there climbing some power line in the freezing rain, you know, with this damaged arm to make sure that we can all sit here and complain about how oppressed we are. You know, it's pretty pathetic. But it's no wonder you take it for granted.

That's the funny thing because your minds are organized so that if something always works, you ignore it. Because why would you pay attention to it, right? It always works. You don't have to pay attention to it. So as soon as something is predictable, you zero it out. And so then you think, well, of course it's like this. This is just how it is. It's like, no, this is not how it out. And so then you think, well, of course it's like this. This is just how it is.

It's like, no, this is not how it is. It's a bloody miracle that this stuff works ever. It's crazily improbable. And it always breaks, right? Everything is always breaking all the time. And somebody's out there feeling away trying to fix it. Yes. So we're ungrateful partly because we take things

that work for granted. If our systems worked only 99% of the time our society would probably be better because when the lights went off everyone would go and the heat they go, oh yeah, you can't see in the dark and you get cold and there's no furnace and then it comes back on and they go, oh yes that's much better, but it always works. So. OK. That's very great. Yes. Speaking of Andy and resentment, which you're going to comment on the apparently well-established neo-mortezist idea that men have a collective conflict of interest and women have a separate conflict of interest,

a class interest, and that these interests are becoming the conflict that there's competition. Sometimes on a collective level. Well, I think there is competition sometimes on a collective level? Well, I think there is competition between men and women, but it's nested inside a broader arena of cooperation. You know, this is another thing that you learn from reading PHA, if you're careful, is that because PHA was smart enough to understand that there is no dichotomous opposition between cooperation and competition. So, of the sort of tenets of the kind of leftist mumble jumble that I hate is that you should kid should play competitive games.

It should be cooperative games. It's like, okay, let's take that apart. Let's take hockey. Is it competitive or cooperative? Well, it's competitive. Well, wait a second. No one brings a basketball to the hockey game, right? No one brings a chess board. Everyone that comes to the hockey game comes there to play hockey. That constitutes cooperation.

We'll mutually define that aim, but just pitch any incorporation. We'll mutually define the aim. We'll assign each other roles. We will all agree to stick to the roles. Well, that's cooperation. And if you break the rules, what happens? You can stuck in the penalty box. You're not playing hockey. Or if you go and people go off, they go sit in the penalty box. They don't go kill the referee with a stick.

Like they go and sit in the penalty box. You know, six foot seven, three hundred pounds. So, okay, and then you think, well, what about within the team, is that cooperation or competition? Well, each team member is trying to be the best player, but try not passing to your colleagues and see what happens, you know, even if you're really good, they'll just, you're just a diva. And no one's going to be happy with you, you know, they'll put horrible things in your beer after the game. So it's cooperation there as well. And then there's a meta level of cooperation, which is that everybody's trying to improve their skills

simultaneously. And so that serves a higher order of good. And everyone's trying to learn how to be a good player so that they can play many games. It's like, well, we shouldn't play competitive games. It's like, you must have been educated and I know I see. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh say something like that, it's just, what is with you? Where were you educated? Where weren't you educated? Is the right response? And then so with men and women, well, there is group competition. For example, you're competing, roughly speaking, with all your classmates, right? And some of the women are

going to outshine you. And so that's tough for men, which is particularly tough for men, because it isn't obvious how you compete full-bore with women. It's not obvious. And we don't know how to solve that problem. And then, of course, status in relationship to the male hierarchy is more important for men than it is for women, because women pick their mates based on their position in the social hierarchy.

And so that puts men also in an awkward way. It puts women in an awkward position too. Like a lot of you women, let's say there's a fair number of you here, a lot of IQ of more than 130, which puts you in like maybe the top, you know, you're one in 20, 95th percent tile. And then, you know, you've got pretty good career propositions. So like your pool of eligible mates is minuscule. And the data shows that clearly.

50, I don't remember correct, but 50 point increase in IQ for a woman decreases her probability of finding a partner by about 40%. It's something like that. And it has a zero effect for men, by the way, because men made across and downed all in the entire piece, known across and out. So if you're a smart woman and you're attractive

and you're young and you're hardworking and you have a good career, it's like you need a man who's smart, hardworking, young, who has a good career. But he has to be a little better at those things than you, it's like good luck. Good luck, it's gonna be rough because there just aren't that many people like that. And so there's another problem that faces women too,

which is you're not going to be smart, hard working with a good career till you're 30. Well, then you have to compete with 25-year-old women. And so that's also a good soluble problem, because the thing about 25-year-old women is they put less stress on men. Why? Why? Because they can have babies for an extra five years, so every guy in the CIA will have kids sometime. Because he can think that. He can have kids till he's 80. What the hell does he care? Women, no, no.

35, 40. You better get it together by then. And so when you're 30 and you've got your act together, you've got those 25 year old women to compete with. And men don't care about your damn status. So it's rough, it's rough. So there is lots of competition between men and women, but it's nested inside a much broader domain of cooperation, marriages, this fundamental solution to that. And I think the evidence for

that is also clear. It's like it's better for women, you have a better sex life, you're healthier, your kids are better off, you're not nearly as likely to plummet into a lower socioeconomic category, which almost always happens to women who get divorced. Because it's hard to go on income, you've got kids, good luck, like you're poor, and if you're not, it's because you're working so often the only time you have to have a date is with some psychopathic man who's useless and can bend his schedule around yours. Yeah, well, I've seen plenty of this man. I'm not talking through my hat. I know exactly what the hell happens when you're a little older and a little poorer and a little more desperate. It's not exactly fun. So I wouldn't recommend that you end up there. Okay, I'm not happy about Penn State, no.

It's too hard to question. You mentioned you were talking earlier about English comma. About 20 years ago, I read an article from a constitutional expert who warned against the negative repercussions that come from the way we wrote the chart of raising the hand, for example. And particularly codifying selective victim groups. And that we've turned our back on 800 years of English

Hanhuan. And effectively set the way away from the rule law. And the second part that we raised today is there was an actual question last Saturday from the great granddaughter of Robert Baldwin who talked about the lack of stories. And I thought it was a really important question. And how those two related mind life is my illness,

escaped from a communist country. And I've had dinner time conversations for an occasion now with Michael Adderall, but both of them, what that looked like and what that felt like. And I think where while the violence rate granddaughters, Crashel was important, which we don't have

the stories you would inform us and you touched on that. Because some of the stories from the areas of Iran is not really horrible, horrible, and I love those. Yeah. All kinds of Canadians, and they actually are fearful for where we are

in society right now. Yeah, they do. But they're frightened to speak out. And I think bringing that back around to the charter of rights and freedoms, we've codified preferred victim groups, but we've overlooked them that most trauma abuse happens within groups, and also a little back to our case

when I earlier, when we started to overlook it because just because someone's in a victim group doesn't mean that they're also not a perpetrator and that doesn't get a lot of press. Yeah, whenever anyone claims victim status without simultaneously claiming perpetrator status, you should run away from that person. It's like, I'm a saint and everyone's been hurting me. It's not No, probably not. Sorry. You're a saint really. I don't think so. I doubt it. I imagine you have your fair share of

Abstract blonde on your hands just like everybody else. And so people need to take responsibility for that. I mean, it's okay So with the girls. Yeah one more thing. Yeah. So, and I'm wondering if what you're talking about now is basically what I did not change you decades ago without running the charter breaks in free time. Oh, yeah. That was a catastrophe to you, to lay that bit of logical rationality on talk of the English law common law system. It was a catastrophe. It was unnecessary. And it is resulting in much of what we're seeing today. The problem with a codified bill of rights

is the rights conflict, right? Now, English common law dealt with it by just saying, forget, we're not enumerating your dam rights. You have all of them, okay? What problems are, is that going to solve? We don't care. We'll solve them one by one as they emerge. Brilliant. It's an evolutionary approach to law, essentially. English common law is phenomenal. And we made a huge mistake

codifying our rights, I think. And that is part of what's put someone to. You're part of the victim group. It's like, it's so clueless historically too. The Serfs in the USSR, who were pretty much all Caucasian, they were demansicated till the late 1800s. Like you don't have to go very far back in anybody's racial history to find the equivalent of slavery, I mean, okay, Serfs weren't slaves. It's like, yeah, yeah, they were They were they were sold with the property, you know, and so that's 150 years ago

slavery was slavery was not some exception perpetrated on the world by the United States every damn society Virtually that ever existed up until we invented machines ran on slave labor So saying well, you know, some groups have been affected more by slavery in the recent past than others. I think that's fair to say, but the problem is, is well, what exactly do you do about that, Dan? And who defines it? It's a big mess. And besides, none of it's to be trusted anyways, because all it is is postmodern Neomarcs is slight of

hand you know Marxism got demolished in the 70s demolished, ruined, was never to rise again. The postmodernists sneaky French, French intellectuals played a little slight of hand okay it's not the working class against the wealthy. It's the victims against the oppressors. Great. All we did was move the goalpost slightly. Now we get to play the same game. Yeah, well it's all easier than thinking. So yeah. And because we have so many people who have escaped communism, why do you think? That's what they thought. Exactly. So why do you think those stories aren't in help? Because...

That's a good question. I teach about the Gula Garcabella Gourmet, my personality class, of all the dopey places to teach it. It's like at the beginning of the class, I say, well, how many of you know that 30 million Soviet citizens were destroyed through internal repression between 1919 and 1959? It's like four people put up their hands. I say, well, how do you know?

I watched your lectures on YouTube. You know, that's not taught in school. Why? I know why. It's because the bloody intellectual leftists have never apologized for their complicity in the catastrophes of the 20th century. The Germans apologized.

Sorry about the Nazis. Well, the left wing intellectuals, they say, well, that wasn't real Marxism. So like, oh, okay, how many corpses have to pile up around you before you're willing to question your beloved ideological presuppositions and face your resentment and your narcissism and your desire for destruction? You don't like people anyways, The planet has too many of them So like a nice war might clear that up well, then all the plants can grow again You know the

Club of Rome when they talked about the population explosion that was going to wipe out the planet by the year 2000 They said outright that human beings were a cancer on the planet lots of people think that it's like oh boy Let's put the atom bomb phone in your hands. Human beings are a cancer on the planet. What a hell of a thing to say. You can say that to a four-year-old? I saw a bloody professor at Queens University tell a whole roomful of 18-year-olds that if they had an ethical fiber in their body, they wouldn't have any kids, or they'd only have one, because all they're doing is going out there and raising the planet. It's like, what the hell?

I don't understand that. It's like human beings are hard on the planet, but it's pretty damn hard on us in return. It's like we're just sort of trying not to die too miserably. And we make a bit of a mess while doing it. It's like, yeah, Christ, we've only known for 50 years that we were disrupting the oceans. How fast do you think we can learn? You know, 100 years ago Thomas Hartsley, who was a great biologist, said, the oceans are so plant-ful that there's not a chance we could ever put a dent in them. So that's only 100 years ago, 50 years ago we thought, oh man, there's more of us and we're better at this than we thought.

So like okay, how fast do you expect people to learn? You know, one generation, one year, we're trying to do our best, most people are trying to do their best. And some people are trying to do their worst, but most people are trying to do their best. And so we should have a little compassion, a little sympathy for human beings instead of considering ourselves like raping patriarchal, oppressive destroyers of the world. Jesus. You don't like that label? So cruel, it's so mean. It's just no sympathy there. It's like most of the people I know are struggling hard to get by. Usually, the other thing about people is so interesting. And you really learn this if you're a clinical psychologist, is that every single one of you in this room has at least one serious problem that you're laboring under.

And that's why the whole handicap thing is a big problem as well. It's like, okay, you're not mentally ill this moment, but you will be. You'll need to press your anxious, or you'll hit some trauma in your life that'll take you out. And even if you happen to be in the small minority of people who are physically healthy, their whole life, and emotionally healthy, you're going to have a family member, a child, a parent, parent with Alzheimer's, a child who's got some illness. You know, you're going to be carrying some vicious burden for most of your life. And most of the time, you're going to be carrying some vicious burden for most of your life. And most of the time you're going to stumble off to work anyhow and do your damn job and contribute to society. It's like, I can never, I can't even believe that our system works because you just have to talk to someone for five minutes and they tell you, well, here's the three horrible things that happened to me in the last year. And they're horrible things. They're mother died of like you know some degenerative neurological disease. Those are

particularly entertaining and their father was alcoholic and used to beat them up and their sister's schizophrenic and it's like, huh, but away they go and do their minor heroism for the day and the lights stay on. It's like you know human beings were admirable creatures despite the fact that we're finite and useless and vicious and all those things. So... If I'm what to do? Well, you should pay very careful attention to their definitions of diversity.

And then you have to pay careful attention to the criteria by which you choose people. It's very, that's an extraordinarily difficult question, because it's a personnel selection decision. But one of the things I would say is well if you're looking for managers and administrators screen them for conscientiousness You get about a point two five point three correlation. You think well, that's nothing. That's wrong It switches your probability of hiring a An above average employee from 50 50 to 67 point five 32 point five if it's a point three 50, 50 to 67.5, 32.5, if it's a 0.30, let's see, sorry, 65, 35, if it's a 0.30 correlation. And because there's massive variability in the productivity of individuals tilting

your selection up to that degree, we'll have massive, massive economic payoffs. I've done the calculations there, they're, they're crazy. And there's no, there's no bias in unconsciousness. When the court says it. The board. The board. The board. The CEO said, how badly turned the diversity off?

So what probably would be a little bit of that? Well, one of the things you might do is track the shifting ratio of men versus women in the corporation. But that's the sort of thing that requires a microanalysis. There's going to be, and increasingly, there are many disciplines where women are overrepresented at every single level. That's happening in universities so fast. Don't be a damn man left in the faculty of arts and science in 10 years.

It's like, so for all you women who are looking for mates, you better be thinking about that. Because when men are bailing out of the university so fast, you cannot believe it. Like, I've watched the curves for 15 years. It's linear up for women, linear down for men. And so, you can think, well, that's really good for women. It's like, that's so clueless. There can't be anything that's bad for men that's good for women. Advice person, you know? Another thing too, that's okay. So back to the board, you have to say, well, what's the, what's the industry? How does that map on to the valid natural interests of men and women? Is there any evidence that we're hiring

stupidly? And the mere fact that you don't have as many women or as many men in one place versus another doesn't indicate their fault that you're pregnant is, you have to buy the equity argument to buy that. And if you buy the equity argument, well, you're done with anyway. So, because you're going to fall down that spiral, you'll never get out of it. You'll never hit equity. Not a chance. Now a lot of these corporations are doing it out of guilt. And fear, you know, you said, people are afraid to speak up.

Jesus, you just have no idea how afraid people are to speak up. And it's actually no wonder. I mean, I made those videos. It was like I got hit by a time wave. You know, it freaked me right out. And it still does. I can't believe what happened. Like it's been I would say overall it's been good, but it's not necessarily the kind of good you would wish on someone. I kind of would like to have my own life back, but whatever, you know, I knew what was coming, so it was

only a matter of time, but people are so afraid to speak up. You just cannot believe it. Tenured professors, those are the most protected people in the universe and they're afraid to speak up. And that tells you a lot about what people are like, but I should tell you, you should be afraid to speak up, but I'll tell you something else. You should be more afraid not to speak up. That's the thing. It's like you're screwed both ways. Pick your poison. You can either suffer the consequences of having a voice or you can suffer the consequences of not having a voice. And I would highly recommend that you don't pick the suffering that goes along with not having a voice. That's dreadful. And so you might say, well, if I don't speak

up, I'm safe. It's like, can I you are for the next 15 minutes, but you sacrifice the bit of your soul. You might need that thing to get through life without getting all bitter and twisted and resentful. So if you've got something to say, maybe even to your board, you say it. And you don't know what's going to happen. It might be bad, it might be good. But silence has exactly the same consequences. And Dr. Peterson's hiring. So when they get rid of it, they're hiring to replace me.

They're not. By the way, the university is backed off completely. And I'm sure that was a big part of because of the public support. I mean, I'm not trying to paint them as evil villains because they're not But also the students were very welcoming to me when I came back to class Which was a big deal because I was very nervous when I came back to class like very nervous I didn't know what the hell was going to happen or even if I was going to come back

so but Well, okay, there's at least one more question or two questions, and then we'll call her up. Okay. I was thinking about the Joe Rogan podcast that was one of my favorite episodes, but you mentioned that despite it being difficult for you to say, you would not recommend that today's you attend

university in the traditional sense. So I'm not going to know what advice you would have for people who are as far into the clinical psychologists or want to pursue any form of further education. Don't take any nonsense. Read the damn classics. You know now at clinical psychology programs, they're reading that bloody winged derl sue or whatever's name is. That microaggression guy, you know, it's like, here's how you do cross-cultural counseling.

It's like, no, that's a bunch of things you don't do. I mean, that's what the books are. Here's things that you shouldn't do if you're doing cross-cultural counseling. That's helpful, but what are you gonna do? Read, Troy, you know, read Adler, read Rogers, read Maslow. These people knew what the hell they were talking about. Read the behaviorists. Get yourself educated with regards to neuroscience. There's lots of great things out there to read. And if your professors are too stupid to teach you

what they should teach you, you're going to educate yourself in university anyways. to teach you what they should teach you. You're going to educate yourself in university anyways. You know, and so that's what I would recommend. And any institution is corrupt always. And so you're lucky if you're in graduate school with one in five classes is really worth taking. You know, but you can't get too cynical about that. Things don't necessarily work all that well.

But there are great things to read. I mean, read Jung, that'll turn you inside out. You know, read Nietzsche. There's lots of great thinkers there. And you know, you have to read them intelligently. People squawk about Nietzsche because he was slightly misogynistic. But I mean, God, he was sick, he could hardly even see, he could only write it like one sentence at a time. He lived alone. He didn't get along with women. They were always rejecting him. You know, not that has anything to do with the women. And he didn't know if anyone ever was ever going to read what he wrote. He sold like 500 copies of Beyond Good and Evil. It's like so. Now when they go to annoyed and wrote something snippy, it's like Jesus, give the guy a break, you know.

So when you read, Freud as well, you know, the stuff's dated, and so you have to adjust your reading for the context. But when someone comes across a misogynistic statement and says, oh, I'm not reading this person, all they're saying is they're too stupid to separate the week from the chap or too lazy. It's like, oh, I don't have to read Nietzsche. That's a relief. That's for sure. That's a relief, man. So I was thinking more about parents who were trying to make a decision to send their kids to university.

It's like so much of it is corrupt. Social work, anthropology, social psychology, education, like English literature, a huge chunk of the humanities which is absolutely catastrophically. Humanities go to the universities are done because they're the soul of the universities. You can get technical training. You can be trained technically in all sorts of other ways. Corporations are starting to figure this out fast. So we lose the humanities, the universities are gone. And we're losing them fast. Because all they do is teach you identity politics.

Jesus, you can learn the rules to that game in one day, right? Divide the world into a press to an oppressor. That's easy. Man, that's a snap. Assume the oppressors are the bad people, and the oppressors are the good people, that's easy. Make noise about it and feel good. That's basically that. And you know, don't pay any attention to your role. So, it's $1,000. Well, there's that too. Yeah, well, in the universities are in for a big

shake-up because they don't know what's going to happen with YouTube and online lectures. They've got no idea what's coming down the pipes. So because online lectures are powerful beyond belief, and someone who's going to sort out the accreditation problem in the next four or five years, cut the universities off with their knees. So it's certainly going to come within the next 10 years.

My question for you is, as a training therapist and a post-modern program, how do you think that that might affect the process of therapy? Well, it puts you in there with all sorts of ape-prire reactions. You know, one of the things I really like is caro-ro�jers. One of the things ro�jers does is listen to them. That's what you do is a therapist. The better you are listening, the faster your clients will get better, and you have to listen without prejudice. I mean that in the technical sense. It's like, okay, so I'm listening to you. It's like, I don't know what you're gonna say, and I don't know if you're right, and I'm not going to tell you what to do because I don't know what you're gonna say, and I don't know if you're right, and I'm not going to tell you what to do, because I don't know what you should do,

and that's something about being a therapist, is like, you do not want to tell people what to do, because that's their life, and you might screw it up. So what you wanna do is listen to them very, very carefully, and let them unwind their story, and most of them, they'll take care of themselves, because no one's listened to them. And so they don't even know what they think.

Their head is full of jumbo massive thoughts and experiences. It's like a tangling of knots. And maybe the person needs to talk for like three years to sort it all out. And what you should do is listen to them from a different culture or whatever. Like there's going to be friction because of that, because you'll come at it at least to some degree with different assumptions, but read the damn therapist. Those people were smart, man.

They tell you things about it. It's like each of them gives you a different toolbox. They're not scientific theories exactly, but as a clinician, you're not a scientist. You're an engineer of the soul. That's a better way of thinking about it because it's an applied, it's like engineering, it's an applied science. So that makes it not a science exactly, you can use scientific knowledge, but you're still aiming at the good, right? That's what you're doing as a therapist. With the other

person, you say, look, you already know that things are just good for you as they need to be. We're going to work on that, and you're here to make things better, and I'm here to help you figure out how to make things better. Then I'll listen to you, and we'll move towards some place that's lighter and better. And then you have tools that you can use in that kind of analytic and listening process and the great psychotherapist's math. Most people have their ten thousand hours you know and they all come out it from slightly different temperamental perspectives like Jung's work is really useful for dealing with people who are high in openness. So his whole philosophy is you have an open client Jung works. If you have a conservative client, forget it. It's a whole different thing.

So what I'm hearing from you is that the postmodern stance is helpful for the field of psychotherapy. From what you're saying is that you're listening and that you're not giving it absolute truth to these clients. Yeah, but the problem is the postmodern thing works out pretty well, but they keep nesting it in Marxism. It's like, oh yeah, but their primary identity is like sex or gender or ethnicity or race. It's like, no, sorry, we're not going there. So, and it's not exactly postmodernism because the postmodernists are misinformed about the nature of scientific theories, I think, and they don't really see them as tools, but I see the best tools. And so you can have a diverse range of tools.

Each one doesn't have to claim a pistomological or ontological priority, but that means that you have to view those sorts of theories as tools. That makes the appointment is not a postmodernist. So. All right. Speaking of patients, I've got to go see some of this in an hour.

So a few things I want to wrap up. Now, just to that point, I said this earlier today. And first of all, one of the reasons I really wanted to have Dr. Peterson come in. And first of all, Serena, thank you very much for arranging that. I would have preferred to have broadcast this widely. And then I said, look, I want all the Peterson haters to come in. I want you to have a chance to be able to actually face to freight face, confront what you're afraid of. Don't be ignorant. Don't just impose your own beliefs and your biases and everything

onto what you're saying, but actually hear a process that come to a reality and fact-based conclusion about the things that you're trying to promote. Because in today's society, truly everything that you've been talking about, I don't think this is hyperbole. I think that we are going down in dangerous path or seeing the consequences of it. And I mean, you know, all my students know this. I have been promoting this in therapy, in my classes, in my family, this idea that you need to be able to expose yourself to things that make you uncomfortable, that you're not aware of. And that's, again, that's kind of a crown rule of good cycle. It might be the crown rule of circle therapy.

And speaking honestly. I'm being honest. And honest about yourself. Honest about your biases, your fears, your flaws. You can't grow without that. So this to me was a metaphorical, I guess, manifestation of that desire. I wanted to bring you here, and I really do appreciate you taking the time.

I know you've got many speaking engagements. I do appreciate that. I'm glad that so many people had very poignant questions that you're able to address. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you, everybody, for coming. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, the link to which can be found in the description of this episode. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs can be found at self-authoring.com. Thank you.