TRIGGERnometry - Jordan Peterson: Order and Chaos in 2021

Episode Date: March 14, 2021

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson joins us! Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/  OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ ADVERTISE on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin. And this is a show for you, if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. We're delighted to say that our guest today is a very special man. It is, of course, Jordan B. Peterson, author, psychologist, and in inspiration to a lot of people, he's just written a book called Beyond Order, Twelve More Rules for Life. Here it is. Thank you for the advance copy, Jordan, and thank you for coming on the show. Thank you guys for the invitation. I'm very much looking forward to it. It's very kind of you to accept. Let's get straight into the book, first of all. One of the themes that you've explored most of all in your last two books is, of course, order and chaos. And that tension that exists, I think, within societies, but also within individuals between the safety, your boredom of order and the danger and simultaneously excitement of chaos. What is a healthy balance and how does one get there at an individual level, but also the level of society? What does that look like?

Well, I think you're actually calibrated to detect that healthy balance with the deepest of emotional and cognitive instincts. And I mean instinct. I think it's biologically based. So you have two problems, at least two problems as a living organism in an environment that's too complex. You have to maintain security, but you also have to stay updated as things around you change. So you want things to be stable because otherwise it's too unpredictable and dangerous, but things can't be stable completely because you don't know everything. So you're stuck with the limitations of your knowledge. So then the question is, well, how can you survive when you don't know enough

and when the consequence of not knowing enough is danger? And the answer to that is you establish stability, but you explore. And so you have the security that you need, but you update that security and keep it living. And the instinct that governs that, as far as I can tell, is the sense of engaged meaning. And why wouldn't there be an instinct for that? It's so crucial to your survival.

It's as crucial as anything else. You obviously have to eat and you have to drink. You have to regulate your temperature. There's these fundamental biological necessities. but you have to you have to master the environment in order to do all of that and then that leads you into the problem of security and exploration. And even if you look at it neurobiologically,

the system, for example, that governs exploration is unbelievably archaic, ancient, from an evolutionary perspective. It's half the hypothalamus, roughly speaking. The hypothalamus is a very old brain area, sits on top of the spinal cord, essentially. It's, in some sense, it's the master control system for motivation. It governs hunger and thirst and defensive aggression and temperature regulation,

and sexual arousal, these very, very fundamental attributes. But half of it is devoted to exploration. And in that system, there's a neurochemical system that emerges out of it, which runs on a neurochemical called dopamine. and all of the drugs that people like to abuse, like cocaine, for example, activates the dopamine system. That's why people like it. And so you can tell when you're in the right place doing the right thing

because you're actively engaged. And that is a signal that the balance between stability and incoming information is optimized for you. Jordan, don't you think one of the problems that we've got in our society at the moment is we tend to celebrate chaos. We tend to celebrate, because I associate, creativity with chaos. But order is seen as dull, stayed, boring. But order is what is needed to get things done. And if you look at what is happening now within our institutions, our systems,

it seems that order is unraveling. Well, look, the critique of order, which is its stultification tendency, right? Look, you zero out everything that's predictable. Right. It becomes boring. It becomes so boring, you don't even notice it. So, for example, if you're lecturing to people in any given room and you ask them to close their eyes and then you ask them to imagine the color of the wall on the right of them, most people can't remember. Because who cares? As long as the wall is standing, it doesn't matter what color it is. And right now, you and I, the three of us are talking. And we're attending to the words. We're not attending to anything around us. You're not attending to the fact that the floor beneath you is stable.

but it's stable because you can rely on the engineers, and the engineers are encapsulated within a legal system that has certain building standards, and the reason that that floor is stable is because you live in this unbelievably developed country where you can take such things for granted, and you can't help but be bored by that. In fact, if you weren't, you'd be attending to everything at once, and, well, that would be absolutely overwhelming. And again, in our society, too, it's very, very hard. not to take things for granted. Right.

And I've tried to train myself to do that, partly by reading a vast amount, I would say, about what happens in societies when they become too chaotic. You know, we don't expect to see a riot when we go outside. But the riot, in some sense, is the default condition. And we're so protected that we're so protected, as modern Westerners, let's say,

that we don't even know what the walls guard us from. And that's also a very typical narrative idea. So in the Lord of the Rings, for example, the hobbits are protected by these warriors, the striders, who patrol the borders constantly. They're descendants of old kings. Aragorn is the foremost among them. And they protect the hobbits from all the darkness and unknown

that's outside the kingdom, but the hobbits don't even know. And that's us. we're protected from things we don't understand at all by things we don't understand at all. And we'll tear down the walls because we don't know what's behind them. But, you know, it's not an easy problem to solve. Gratitude solves it to some degree. Historical knowledge solves it.

Historical knowledge to solve it. But wouldn't you also say that exposure to other cultures and society solves it? So for me, my mother's from Venezuela. I've seen what happens when society unravel. I've seen what happens when bad ideas are allowed to run rampant, and that has very much inoculated me, it's inoculated Constantine, against this type of thinking. But wouldn't you agree that in a way we're privileged to use that word? Because most people in the UK or the US or Canada, they haven't been exposed to what

happens when society unravels. Well, that's very fortunate, obviously, but it does have the effect that we've been discussing, which is that people take things for granted. and they celebrate chaos, well, I want freedom. It's like, no, you don't. You want a tiny bit of freedom, meet it out in very calibrated doses on one dimension now and then. And you want everything else to be as stable as possible. And some people can tolerate more chaos than others.

You know, if you're extremely open in your personality, that's the creativity dimension, and you're highly intelligent, and you're conscientious, and you're emotionally stable, so you don't suffer from negative emotion in too excess amount, you can handle more chaos than someone who doesn't have those attributes, but still most of the time, well, look, what do you want when you sleep? Silence and predictability. That's not chaos. That's a rarity, right? Just think about how difficult it is to set up a situation where you can reliably have temperature regulated silence 100% of the time at night for your whole life. That's such a luxury. And of course, unless you lose it, for some reason, you become, you develop insomnia or, or you're in an unfortunate situation where you don't have that piece anymore. You won't even notice that that's a privilege. It's an, it's an unbelievable privilege. And it's so unlikely. And that's partly, I guess, why my books concentrate to a large degree on gratitude. It's like so many things are going right while you forget about them. You know, that's, and you have to be reminded.

It's a fundamental purpose of education is to remind you what you have to be grateful about. And I think that's the proper basis of patriotism rather than pride. Right. You can have pride in your country. It's like, yeah, well, that kind of rubs on upon you. You know, it's like, rah, ra, England or Canada. And then, you know, that makes me part of what I'm shaking my fist in favor of. but gratitude is a different thing.

It's like, well, thank God. Thank God that I don't have to think about the damn floor. And you know, you go to third world countries, badly run countries where the building standards are non-existent or the entire construction company infrastructure is corrupt. Well, then the earth shakes a little bit and you have to worry about the damn floor. Jordan, you use the word education.

I think in the context of this conference, This is something that I've been thinking about because one of the shocking things to me, as someone who was born in the Soviet Union, I remember talking to my grandmother, still alive, she's going to be 95 this year. She lived through the German occupation of Ukraine. And I remember talking to her about her childhood. And she said, the thing that me and my girlfriends were discussing when I was 15 was, will we ever eat bread again? Will we ever eat bread again? And that has always stayed with me. And that's why for me, gratitude. for everything we have here in the West has never been difficult. But I wonder, is there a way we can transcend the fact that I had to hear that from my own grandmother? How do we educate other people about what happens in this sort of society? What happens when you let identitarian ideologies take over these large swathes of Europe and Asia and come into conflict?

What happens when this sort of way of thinking takes over? Because you've been very interested in the Soviet Union. educated yourself into it, but I don't see that happening, particularly with young people in the West these days. No, it was shocking to me that, so I lectured mostly to students about the Soviet Union, especially under Stalin, but certainly also under Lenin, about the horrors of the Soviet Union. I lectured about that in my personality class in the second year psychology course. and that was a valid enterprise because totalitarianism is a personality attribute in some sense as well as the social system. But it was often the first any of the students had heard of any of that, you know, which to me was just absolutely, well, it's so outrageous that it's virtually unbelievable, especially when you think that we put the entire planet at risk for 50 years at risk of,

total annihilation because of what happened in the Soviet Union. And we're barely out of that, if we're out of it at all. I mean, the Russians and the Americans still rattles sabers at each other. I think the possibility of anything other than an accidental nuclear exchange has decreased immensely since the mid-80s, let's say. But how is it that we could be so blind that we would forget to notify our young people? people that we fought, like the Second World War really didn't end until 1989. That isn't how the history books look at it yet, but that's the case. And it's just stunning that none of that is common knowledge.

You know, there's a little bit more historical knowledge disseminated about what happened in Nazi Germany, but the deafening silence on, with regards to Maoist China, which is still an immense threat, not least in the form of North Korea, and the story. Soviet Union, it's so remarkable that it's a kind of miracle. So, but it is the responsibility of the education system, as far as I can tell. Where else are you going to, I mean, it's the social responsibility of the education system. In terms of individuals, well, you know, now everyone has access to all the communication technology they could possibly want.

And so if you have a particular interest in making something. known, you can just do it. And so hopefully people will do that. You guys are obviously doing that with your YouTube channel and your podcast. Agreed. I was going to ask you actually, just as a personal thing, really, what made you interested in the Soviet Union? How were you drawn to reading about it and educating yourself about it, first of all? It's really hard to tell. You know, I think, well, curiosity, just general curiosity is one driver. So I'm curious about virtually everything. And I also have a proclivity towards depression.

And I think that maybe that makes negative things hit me harder in general. Well, Russian history will help you very well with that or literature or anything else. So I think that it's possible that I was sort of wired to take these things more seriously because they hit me harder. You know, like I noticed in graduate school, for example, that I was obsessed with the shortness of life. That was an idea that was in my head constantly. That it was not appropriate to waste time because time was fleeting and short. And I thought that pretty much every morning I woke up for years when I was writing my first book. And that was definitely a motivating force to write that book, which I really did on.

spec over about a 15-year period. But I had all sorts of friends in graduate school, and they were very smart people and admirable people, as far as I was concerned, hardworking and curious and good research scientists. McGill had an excellent clinical program, and I had an absolute riot. It was such fun going to graduate school there. But my friends weren't consumed by darkness the same way I was, even though they were clinically interested. I was obsessed with. I was obsessed with, it and specifically with the issue of individual motivation for atrocity. I was interested in the sociological elements of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and Mao's China, interested in the political elements. And my first degree was actually in political science. But I soon found that I was

much more oriented towards Dostoevsky, let's say, than Tolstoy. I like Tolstoy, but Tolstoy is basically a sociologist, right? He writes about these wide, swaths of sociological occurrences, sort of at the level of society. But I like Dostoevsky because he got inside people's heads. And that's what I was really interested in. It was like it wasn't how the concentrations camps were set up politically or even what ideology motivated them, but what was the guard thinking when he pushed people to the right rather than the left. What was in his head as a person? What would, and as if I was there.

And it was always personal to me. And not even so much on the victim side. I always thought of it on the perpetrator side, because it was such a mystery to me. How could you be like that? And while that was very illuminating to me, I mean, it transformed my personality entirely, I would say, studying that, partly because I realized that. that you don't have to be that different than you are. And that's a very, that makes you different than you think. And in some ways, it's, you take yourself a lot more seriously when you understand that, right? As soon as you understand that you're a loose canon, in a really fundamental sense, you start being more careful.

And so that was really helpful to me. And I think I became much more careful, perhaps. Careful with, more careful with what I said for sure. I, you know, as much as I was able. And Jordan, do you think part of the problem with today's society is that we don't acknowledge that we have this in us? We like to pretend on social media, on Twitter, whatever it may be, that we're this, you know, really moral, woke, good people without any shadow. But the reality is that we are all dark, we're all complex. We all have shadow within us.

and the propensity to commit both beautiful acts, but also acts which could easily be described as evil? Well, I think that it's better to identify the enemy within than the enemy without. That doesn't mean that you should never identify the enemy without, right? Sometimes your group matters and the enemy is at your gates and you have to take action. but in peaceful circumstances, let's say, well, then I think it's an individual matter. And so this is one of the things that's made me ashamed of the universities in large part, too, I would say,

because there's such an activist culture in the university. It's almost like a moral right of passage. You become adolescent and late adolescent on the steps into adulthood, and you're encouraged tacitly and explicitly by the university culture to protest. to find the perpetrators, to alter the system. It's like, no, I don't think that's a good idea. I think there's something deeply wrong about that in all sorts of ways. First of all, you know, you don't know anything at that age.

Well, it's true. You just don't know anything. And look, the thing that we should make clear here, Jordan, is when we laugh at that, we're laughing at ourselves from 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, whenever it was for each of us. We know that we can laugh at the idea that students don't know anything because we were one students who didn't know anything. Absolutely.

Well, and it's not like I don't take undergraduate seriously. I love university teaching. And I took the undergraduate seriously. I never thought of them as a burden to my research career, say. I love teaching. And my experience with undergraduates was you pretty much got back from them what you gave. So if you were intent on teaching, they responded unbelievably positively. And so it's not like I have contempt for undergraduates, quite the contrary.

And one of the things I taught at Harvard for a while, and that was quite an experience. The university was exceptionally well run at that time. Hopefully that's still the case. The undergraduates were at the top of the power hierarchy, and they were treated. And you could be cynical about it. You know, I used to joke that Harvard treated its undergraduates like baby 40-year-old millionaires. And they did. And part of that was pure economic calculation, right?

Because Harvard has a huge endowment, and it has that endowment because it's so good at treating its undergraduates properly and selecting them as well. So it's a great deal for Harvard, especially if you're thinking over decades. But that's the right way to treat undergraduates. is not as 18-year-olds who knew nothing, but as future incredibly competent adults. But that still, having said all that, when you're 18, you haven't had a child, it's unlikely that you've engaged in the kind of long-term intimate relationship

that requires adult-level compromise over, let's say, the years. you haven't worked or if you have minimally and often not at all you certainly haven't started a business you haven't written anything you haven't created anything with exceptions so it's not time to be thinking you know how to reconstruct the world and why we think that's okay is just beyond me it's like it's not okay and i figured that out when i was about 17 16 17 i worked for a socialist party when i was a kid. And I had a career there if I wanted it. It was quite obvious. But I woke up one day, partly under the influence of this roommate of mine, who's still a really good friend of mine. And he'd been kicked around a lot. He was from a really poor background. He was a tough guy.

He'd worked on oil rigs and lead smelters. And he'd banged around a lot. And he was a little older when he went back to university. And he was a cynical, compassionate optimist. And he ended up working with like the worst delinquents in Canada, and he could really do that well, because he was a tough guy. And he told me one day, um, um,

you just don't know anything. Like, you have this theory, which was a socialist theory, but it certainly wasn't mine, although I knew it, and I could say it, and I could argue for it,

and win the arguments for that matter. So that doesn't explain the world. And I'd already kind of figure that out. I noticed that, I worked on this board, Board of Governors for this little college I went to. And all the people on the board of governors had been appointed by the government, and the government was conservative. And so they were all small businessmen who'd done well on the frontier of Canada, essentially, because it was in this

town called Grand Prairie, which was pretty new. A lot of them were immigrants, because Alberta is an immigrant province. It was only established in 1905. They'd all kind of lifted themselves up by their bootstraps. And I'd also worked for guys like that who owned, like I worked in restaurants from the time I was 13 to the time I was about 17. And I admired those guys, even though I didn't agree with their politics, but I admired them. And that bugged me. It was like, Jesus, here, I don't agree with them intellectually, but I admire them. And then I'd go to the socialist meetings and I knew some, like, committed working class hero socialist types. You know, they were the real. And they were the real. deal. But a lot of them were activists and they just drove me crazy. I didn't, I couldn't stand them.

They were whiny and resentful and they weren't admirable at all, even though hypothetically we shared political view. And so that really put a knot in my tail. And that was another realization that, well, I just didn't, I realized that I was like 16, mouthy, smart. I could formulate an argument. I could speak, but I didn't know anything. And thank God for that. So I I figured I'd try to see if I could learn something before I dared to do anything political. But doesn't that speak to another quality, which is humility, which is something that frequently in a lot of our young people that are lacking as well, that ability to look in on oneself and realize that they don't know the answers.

The fact that you may have this confidence, you may be bright, you may have the ability to articulate, you may be able to win arguments. You're describing me, mate. Well, you know, it's not that easy to figure out that just because you win an argument, you know, if you win an argument, you think, well, I'm right because I won the argument. I can tell you that's not going to go very far in your marriage. So one of the things I learned in my marriage quite quickly was that sometimes, and it was the same on my wife's part,

sometimes your best bet is to help your partner make the best argument they can to defeat you because just because you can win the argument doesn't mean you're right. It really doesn't mean that. It might be that your partner has got a handle on something. They can't articulate it very well, but their intuitions, their ability to detect patterns, is spot on. And you can crush them verbally, let's say, or using other techniques at your disposal, whatever they might be.

And you think, well, you know, I proved my point. Yeah, fair enough, perhaps. but if your wife isn't on board, well, good luck for you. And just because you proved your point doesn't mean the world is going to accept that conclusion. And that's also something I think that we do a bad job of teaching young people. You know, because we teach them that if you win the argument, you're right. Sort of the hallmark of being intelligent. And fair enough, it's better than losing the argument, but it's not as good as learning something.

that's for sure. Jordan, we were circling around the idea of socialism and communism a little bit. I wanted to ask you, given what you as a psychologist know about human beings, do you think that there's something fundamentally incompatible in that worldview with humanity, or do you think, quote, unquote, it hasn't been tried properly? Oh, well, it hasn't been tried properly. means that the world hasn't been fortunate enough to have me run it. That's the constant claim.

Well, it hasn't been tried properly. What that means is, well, I understand this system deeply. And if I was in charge or people like me, then it would work. It's like, no, it wouldn't. That's what would happen is you'd be wiped out by the next batch that were even worse than you. That's what would happen. So it's such an arrogant claim that it hasn't been tried properly. But having said,

that, like, it's not, I understand the motivation for, like, the desire for an egalitarian distribution of valuable resources, and we should walk through that. So, systems have a tendency, Marx commented on this, but it's much deeper than Marx's realization. Systems have a tendency to radically distribute resources unequally. And that's really, destabilizing. Yep. So, and there's a couple of reasons for that. One reason is, as you get more, you're offered more.

So I'm in a position now where I am offered an indefinite array of opportunities. And I don't need them. I'm not ungrateful for it. But once you're saturated with opportunities and your time is completely taken up, more opportunities can't be utilized. And so, and if you have money, well, it's way easier to make more money. I mean, you can lose it too, but it's way easier to make more money once you've got started. And so once you are educated, you have some capital, you have a connection network.

And then let's say, in addition to that, you're well known. You can just multiply that endlessly. But then on the other end of things, if you have nothing, well, you can't even afford to get started. Yeah. So like if you start a business, the most difficult customer to get is the first one. Once you have 10, getting 100 is not that hard, but getting from zero to one is virtually impossible.

And so zero is a really tough. It's a hole that's really hard to climb out of. And it's not good for society to have a lot of people at zero. So there's this propensity for people to fall off the air. end and to degenerate down to zero and another propensity for resources to aggregate in the hands of very, very small number of people. And look, it doesn't matter what dimension you measure that on. So if you look up among basketball players, you look at successful number of points scored.

There's a few people way out on the extreme. If you look at number of records sold, records produced, songs written, popular songs written. It's like five composers account for 95% of the classical repertoire, but it's only 5% of the music they wrote that's played. And so you see that happening in two ways there. And the problem with that is that it produces this radical inequality in society, and that's really unsettling because you have a mechanism that's very deeply embedded within you that runs as far as we can tell on serotonin, a fundamental brain chemical.

And the degree to which serotonin regulates your negative emotion is dependent on your status within the group that you strive for status within. And what that means is that if you're on the bottom end of the status hierarchy, you're much more prone to negative emotion. and that actually hurts you physically. You'll die sooner. You'll age faster. You'll develop all the age-related diseases faster.

It's a real calamity psychologically and physically. And so there's endless motivation to work against that tendency for resources to be distributed so unequally. The problem is we don't know how to do it. It's so power, such a powerful force. we don't know how to do it and simultaneously maintain creative and productive endeavor, for example. So, because you want, you want everything to be more productive, right? Because you try to wipe out absolute poverty and maybe even give everyone you can a certain amount of luxury. And maybe that's even better for the planet because richer people tend to take better care of the environment.

So you want absolute wealth to rise and you don't want inequality to, become too extreme. But the systems that have been set up to manage that are not good at it. They don't work. And Marx, he attributed inequality to capitalism. That's wrong. It's seriously wrong. So the diagnosis is right. Well, inequality is intolerable psychologically, or at least it's extremely costly. But that doesn't mean we know what to do about it. Jordan, let me just jump in there very quickly because this has always been the problem for me. When I look at like free market right wing people, I go, you expect everyone to pull themselves by their bootstrap. That's not going to happen. That's not.

Well, lots of them can't. That's my point, right? Lots of them can't because we understand people have different IQs and different genetic basis and different experiences and childhood and whatever. And on the other hand, you've got people on the left who say, well, inequality isn't tolerable. And I agree with that. But as you say, the systems that they try and to apply in order to address that don't work and don't make any sense and create terrible outcomes. So where is the golden middle? Well, that's, look, the reason that I'm an advocate of free speech is that the golden middle moves.

And so how do we find it? Well, we talk about it. Where is it? It moves all the time. Yesterday's solution isn't going to work today. So that golden solution is genuinely a mobile point because inequality even changes with time. And the conservative viewpoint is inadequate.

I was watching the Crown and the seasons with Maggie Thatcher. And Thatcher is extraordinarily conscientious person. That's her fundamental attribute. And that is a predictor of conservatism. And that's dutifulness, industriousness, orderliness, by the book, patriotism, all of that. If you want someone to run your company, you want a conscientious person.

If you want a teacher, you want a conscientious teacher. It's not associated with artistic creativity. That predicts liberalism. That's openness. In any case, Maggie Thatcher is extremely conscientious, and she believes that hard work will get you there, and that should be encouraged. And everyone can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

And look, there's truth in that. If you look at what predicts people's success across time, this is where psychology is actually reliable as a science. We know some of what predicts life outcomes, and we know it validly and reliably. So the best predictor is IQ. And that accounts for about 25% of the differences in outcome between people. So a lot's left unexplained, right?

75%, but 25% is a lot. the next best predictor is conscientiousness, and it accounts for about five to nine percent, which again, leaves a lot unexplained, but it's not nothing. And then the third one is how sensitive you are to negative emotion, and it accounts for something like three to four percent. So it is definitely the case that if you took two people that are equal in some valuable domain, the one that works harder is going to do better, and that might even compound over time.

But if you take two people of radically different IQ, and they both work equally hard, the person with the higher IQ is going to crush the person with the lower IQ. And, you know, you said we know that, but we don't, because you can't even talk about IQ in modern society. It's such a hot topic, and it's not. surprising. I know the IQ literature for a variety of reasons, partly because I built tests to predict performance and studied that for 15 years. And my tests couldn't sell, at least in part,

because they actually worked and were too threatening because of that. Well, and there's reasons for that. But if you have an IQ of under 82, you can't be inducted into the American Armed Forces. and the reason for that is the armed forces have done IQ testing for a very long time and they're hungry for people always. So they're not going to throw away anybody that they can use. They found that they couldn't teach anybody with an IQ of under 82, anything that made them valuable. They were a net drain.

And that's 10% of the population. So there's about as many people with an IQ of 82 or lower as there are of people who are capable of doing well in an institute of higher education. So, and among that population, those who work harder are going to do better. But, but in a cognitively complex environment, they're at a marked disadvantage. And the conservatives can't deal with that. They don't know what to do about that. And fair enough, you know, it's like, it's a very hard problem.

And the liberals, they say the liberals take the opposite tack, which is, even more annoying in my estimation. It's like, well, you can train anyone to do anything. And that's so wrong that it's hard to even know where to begin. I'd love it if it was the case. I'll give you an example of this. So the Americans in their war on poverty ran a program called Head Start. And Head Start was a program that everyone wanted to succeed, conservatives and liberals alike. And so the idea was get disadvantaged kids early and enrich their education, say between the ages of three and five, preschool. So the Americans poured immense monetary resources into this project, and it has been studied in terms of outcomes for decades. And its goal was to increase cognitive performance. That was its goal.

and it did, but the differences went away. So the hope was if you got the kids early and taught them, they'd develop an advantage and then that advantage would compound across time, and it would ameliorate the worst effects of poverty. And who wouldn't want that, right? Like, I don't care who you are. Everyone wants that. The kids did leap ahead academically,

but all the other kids caught up by grade three or four. And then after that, there was no differences at all between the Head Start kids and the non-Headstart kids, except the Head Start kids were less likely to get pregnant and drop out of school, and they were more likely to graduate. But that looks like it was a socialization effect. Probably some of those kids were shielded against the worst of their family environment by being in daycare, but there was zero effect on cognitive ability.

Very unfortunate, right? Because that was a large-scale social experiment. Everyone had the highest hopes for it. No effect on cognitive ability. I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world, so let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being,

rather than someone who's been thrown down a staircase. Most mattresses are just layers of synthetic foam and crossed fingers. You're spending a third of your life on the thing, and most people have no idea what's actually in it. Avicardo green mattress is different. Their mattresses are certified organic, built from natural materials, designed to actually support your body properly rather than just hold you in one position until morning. The craftsmanship is real.

These are mass-produced objects. Someone has put thought into them. I'll be honest. I'm not the person who thinks carefully about where he sleeps. My dating history will tell you that. I'm the person who's been on the same mattress for eight years and called it fine. But the older I get, the more I notice that fine isn't actually fine. Your body tells you, if you're going to invest in anything for your home, your bed is a little.

a one that pays you back every single night. Avocado products are made, not manufactured, and thoughtfully crafted with real materials to deliver lasting comfort and support. Go to avocadogreenmatress.com slash trigger to check out their mattress and furniture sale. That's avocado greenmatress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Hey, Constantine, do you love trigonometry? Of course. Incredible. interviews, hilarious live streams, hard-hitting satire, plus my handsome jawline. Whatever takes away from your hairline. But if you do love trigonometry and you want to support us, there's only one place to do that,

and that's on Locals. Yes, Locals is a brilliant platform that has been incredibly supportive to our show and other problematic creators. The great thing about locals is that it's a community for people who love trigonometry. That's right. It's a place for you to hang out with like-minded people. share thoughts, memes and discuss the show. You can enjoy it for free,

but it also gives you the option of supporting us for as little as $7 a month. And if you want to give more, you can. We have incredible rewards for our higher tier supporters as well. We've got everything for mugs, monthly group calls, and one on two chats with me and KK.

Get in. Join our community by hitting the link in the description and the pin comment below. See you there, guys. What you're talking about, Jordan, is actually the great taboo in education. I was a teacher for many, many years.

And my head, the head deputy head would go to me in the primary school. Why is it that, you know, this cohort aren't doing as well as last year's cohort? And it was seen as taboo to just go, well, last year's cohort was smarter. Yeah. No one can tolerate IQ. Look, it's the only thing psychologists have ever discovered, really, except for maybe the big five. it's like these are facts say IQ is unbelievable it's easy to measure to measure IQ all you have to do is take any set of questions that require abstraction to answer and so you can take 20 questions you can do that

you know better or worse but with 20 random questions you're going to get a decent estimate so take 20 questions ask 100 people the answers sum up the answers rank order the people that'll be correlated with IQ at something like 0.8, 09, really high, really high. That's all you have to do. And then that'll be predicted with their life, or that'll predict their life outcomes, like economic, economic success, for example, that'll account for about 25% of the difference across people. It's unbelievably powerful. And it's unidimensional as well. You know, you hear all these appalling claims that there are multiple kinds of intelligences and multiple kinds of learning, learning styles and skills. Look, people different are in their abilities and they're not all

reducible to IQ. But in the realm of intellectual endeavor, it's one factor. It's one thing. One thing. It's not decomposable. Not really. And that's harsh, man. It's harsh. Let me ask this question, John, because I feel like it's begging to be asked. And you've teased that you've put us in a position where I have to ask you this question, given the way that you've been talking about this. And that question is, I mean, it comes obviously, what is our fear of this conversation? There is, I feel it, I sense it as we talk about this.

There is some kind of Pandora's box at the end of this conversation. It violates our moral sensibility. You know, we deeply believe that human beings are of equal value. It's a predicate of, well, I think it's probably a predicate of human biology in some sense, but maybe not. but in any case, because you could make a case that we're aristocratic by nature too, but forget about that. Certainly, it's the fundamental axiom of the West. Everyone's equal before the law. We're all of equal value in that transcendent sense.

Okay. Well, what does that mean practically? Well, what we hope it means is that we're sort of roughly equal inability or trainability at least. And we're not. and no one, that doesn't sit well with us. We don't even know what to do with it. We're very uneasy with it. And it's no wonder. Now, ignoring it isn't going to help.

And also, what also isn't going to help is, you know, in Boston, for example, recently, they shut down a lot of the gifted programs because the ethnic makeup of the classes was unacceptable. It wasn't randomly, it wasn't randomly selected, let's say. or it wasn't representative of a broader community. And it's no wonder that that bothers people. Who wouldn't that bother? But what are we going to do? In that situation, you shut down the gifted classes.

Well, who are those gifted classes for? Are they for the gifted kids? Or are they for society at large? There isn't anything more valuable than human intelligence. And if we don't utilize it, well, then we let it go to waste. Well, how can that be in anyone's interest? It's a resource that we should maximally exploit, even for our own narrow self-interest.

But we can't. And so gifted programs, they're always, people are never happy with them. Or even with the idea. You know, you can celebrate differences in athletic ability, and we certainly do. We're very uneasy when we celebrate differences in intellectual ability. it's kind of a non-starter.

It isn't part of the problem that we don't want to admit that we all have our limits. We like to pretend that we can go out, we can achieve anything. In fact, isn't that the basis of the American dream? But the reality is we can't, and that's not simply the world that we live in. Well, this is a nice, upbeat conversation,

inspiring people all over the world, isn't it? No, like, working hard helps a lot. So, hooray. I mean, there's one example, for example. In general, the offspring of first-generation Asian immigrants to the U.S. outperform the offspring of Americans, but also the offspring of second-generation immigrants. Why?

It looks like it's because they work much harder. And they work harder enough to give them what's roughly a 15-point IQ advantage equivalent, and that's roughly the difference between a college student, average college graduate, say, and the average high school graduate. It's a big difference. And it's a big difference. So, so work hard, set your sights, you know, 60-hour weeks, discipline, all of that, no doubt. And, but, you know, there are pretty pronounced individual differences in the ability to do that as well. So even that, That's a rough. Even your ability to focus and concentrate in a disciplined way seems to be quite

affected by underlying biological factors. And that's also unjust. It appears unjust in a fundamental way. So it's tough and it's something that I used to talk about. We used to go over this again and again in the Star from all the time. The question that frequently came up was in a world of automation, you have these people who have got low IQs and before they used to be able to go and do menial jobs in a factory and they used to be able to do that job and work brings dignity. It's one thing gives people a sense of purpose. What are we going to do in a world of automation with these people who have lower IQs when they simply can't access jobs? Well, it looks like what we're going to do is give them phones. I mean, we all have that problem in some sense, right? It's like,

It's not like any of us is occupied fully by our jobs. And so we have free time, spare time, time to waste. You know, I ask undergraduates on a pretty regular basis how much time they waste a day. And the average is something like six to eight hours a day, which is a lot. Well, what do people do with that? Well, they're on their phones. They're on their computational devices. Now, will that provide purpose and meaning and productivity?

who knows? The technology is so new and so rapidly changing that all you can say is, well, look, it's really absorbing. Everyone's glued to it. It's addictive. And it's just getting going. You think it's addictive now. You wait till the AI algorithms learn how to manipulate your attention

by watching your eye movements because that's coming down the pipeline so fast that, well, Facebook owns Oculus, the VR company. and the VR headsets can read your eye movements, and your eye movements are a direct pipeline to your attention. And so, and the AI systems are going to figure that out real fast. So, now, does that deal with the productivity issue?

No, probably not. You know how it is in the tech world, unless you're on the cutting edge, you can't monetize your action. You know, you guys have this relatively new podcast. That's a pretty new world. You can monetize it because you're on the cutoffer. cutting edge. You're on the leading edge. In five years, people who start, that's going to be

much harder for them to do what you did. They may have other advantages. Yeah. Well, we wish we'd started when Joe Rogan did. That would have been great for us as well. Jordan, you bring up technology. I was going to move on, but let's talk about that a little bit. I think we've seen the impact of this modern technology and particularly social media on the political landscape on the mental health landscape on almost every area of our life. Hey, I've got something horrible to say about that. We've kept it upbeat so far, Jordan, so let's carry on down that part. Well, I'll let you guys see what you make of this.

About three years ago, I was interviewed by the economist, and we were talking about aggression. And I said that men are on average more aggressive than we. women, or they're more physically aggressive. So among children, for example, boys are more likely to kick, hit, bite, and steal. And that's not a bad operationalization of aggression, let's say. And then if you look within boys, a small proportion of the boys are that way at two. Most of them get socialized out of it, but those that don't are stably antisocial and criminal into the adolescence and adulthood. And then that burns out around 27, 28. That's the developmental trajectory of aggression. Doesn't look like it's learned. Okay, so however, there's something else. So that's interesting enough. It's like it's there at two.

It's a rage circuit. It's an old, old biological circuit. And it gets controlled. And most aggressive kids are socialized by the time they're four. And if they're not, you can't socialize them after that. That's also very interesting and rather disheartening. But women, girls, However, they are more aggressive than males if you measure aggressive aggression differently. They use reputation destruction. So, well, we've seen what happens with social media. Physical aggression doesn't translate to social media. But reputation destruction, that translates to social media unbelievably well.

So maybe it's time to have a little chat about toxic femininity. Well, there we go. I've got a little piece of paper here with some of the questions we were going to ask you. And the next one on my list is, why do people hate you? I think you've answered that. Why? So why do you think? Why do you think?

Well, I was going to ask you this. What would you point to? Well, let me ask you this because I think this is an important part of it. Helen Lewis, who's interviewed you and who wrote a review of your book. She hates me. Yeah, she hates you. I've met Helen Lewis and she's interviewed me and of all the things you might say about her

you wouldn't say that she was stupid and you wouldn't say that she was poorly educated right? I might say that I was being generous She took advantage of the education that was offered to her but I wouldn't, but education is so corrupt that mastering it makes you an expert at nonsense.

Tushay, Alex. But let's just go with the she's intelligent point. So she should be able to understand your arguments, and I'm sure she does. And yet I noticed time after time where an intelligent person, even Cathy Newman, you wouldn't say that she's stupid. And lots of others come after you with a vitrile and a visceral, you can feel it. You can when you're watching. You should be there. Yeah, right. Well, when I went to the GQ interview, look, I've got to say, when I went to the Kathy Newman interview. Kathy Newman was very professional. We met in the green room beforehand. She was perfectly polite in a professional sort of way, you know, but that's fair enough. Professional politeness beats the hell out of, you know, random rudeness. So I'll take it. When I walked into the GQ interview, and this was, I was already pretty worn out at that point, there was a photo shoot first and then the interview. And that place was hostile, right from the moment I walked in.

And so I'm kind of on edge in that interview because I could feel that. And it was like the stage was set long before I walked into that. And so there wasn't even professional politeness. It was, you know, people can freeze up a room. Some people are really good at that. I think maybe it has to do with smell. You know, I lived with someone once,

and you could tell if they were upset when you walked into the house, you'd get kind of an uneasy feeling. And the only explanation I have for that is that it's related to smell at some unconscious level. In any case, the GQ interview atmosphere was unbelievably tense. And I was sort of in there for 45 minutes before I started talking. So I was already in the position of a cat who hears dogs barking down the street. So in any case, it still isn't obvious to me what it is that causes such animosity.

Well, let me posit a theory, Jordan, because this is what I really wanted to ask you. You tweeted the other day when Helen Lewis published a review of your book. You said, why do you hate me? I've tried to be a good man. And I replied saying, I think you've answered your own question. And my fear is, and my question to you is, do you think that fundamentally you mentioned toxic femininity? I don't like to get into this whole gender thing in that way because the whole gender war is a stupid thing to me as far as I'm concerned. But I do think it's possible that we live in a society where some people, those people that I'm talking about, they don't want strong men.

They don't want men to be better. They want men to be weaker. And they see you as an agent of change who helps men to be better. And they are scared of that. Well, if you've had bad experiences with men, and, you know, that's probably the universal female experience. right? Because we all fall short of the ideal. And of course, that's deeply disappointing to women, just as women who fall short of the ideal

are deeply disappointing to men. But let's say you've had less than ideal relationships, perhaps with any man in your life. It might make it very difficult for you to distinguish between authority and power, right? Because if authority is misused, it looks like power, and misused power is tyranny.

And so the best thing to do in the case of misused power is to reduce the power. And if authority and competence never enter the issue, never enter the question, then you don't ever think you're sacrificing something. You're just dampening down the possibility of tyranny. This is partly why the oppressive patriarchy narrative is so distasteful to me. It's like, look, fair enough, you know. I mean, every hierarchical system has its tyrannical aspect. And you might say, well, let's get rid of hierarchies.

It's like, no, sorry, you can't even see without a hierarchy because you have to decide what you're going to look at. And you privilege what you're looking at over all the things you aren't looking at and you produce a value hierarchy instantly. There's no escape from that unless you could equally attend to everything all the time, which you can't. So you're stuck with hierarchies. There's no escape from them.

That doesn't mean they're universally benevolent because they're not. And they get warped by power. But just because they get warped by power doesn't mean that that's their essence. Authority is their essence. And that's competence, right? And but if you can't distinguish those two, well, then it's all out assault on anything that looks like power. So there's definitely, there's, there's, there's, a huge element of that. It's so unfortunate because you see then that boys get punished for their

ambition, you know, and because that looks like the route to power. I knew, I had friends who were so guilty about their ambition that, well, in one case, it killed him. He committed suicide. Now, he had his problems, you know, but one of them was that he was unbelievably guilty about being white, about being an oppressor about any human activity because he associated that with the despoiling of the planet. And it's not like we don't hear that story over and over and over. But it's so punishing. Jordan, don't you think part of the problem as well is the tribalism that we have nowadays and the narratives that we all speak and that we all seem to ingest entirely without thinking?

And these, you know, they're propagated right the way through the way we interact with each other and so on and so forth in our society, that when someone stands up and goes, hang on, that's wrong. I don't believe in that for X, Y, and Z reason. All of a sudden, you're getting people to think, to challenge themselves, and that's a real shock,

and people react against that really strongly. Yeah, well, there's always taboos in societies, right? And they move around, and obviously I violated some taboos. What exactly they were isn't particularly obvious I think I'm not a fan of the currently promoted social justice theories of identity. And that's also partly why I'm not, why people don't like me or some people don't like me. But that's also a technical issue.

Like your identity, there's an... I stood up against this law in Canada, Bill C-16, which compelled people to use pronouns that other people. people chose, let's say, under the unspecified threat. And I thought, to begin with, that that was mostly a free speech issue. It's really bothered me that I would be compelled to utter any pre-approved phraseology. And I didn't see any precedent for that in English language law, English culture law, and it was actually rejected as a move by the Supreme Court in the United States, and I believe in the 1940s. So I thought it was mostly a free speech issue, but I've come to think more recently that there was more to it than that. There was more bothering me about it than that. There's a theory of identity in the bill, and the theory of identity is basically predicated on the idea that your identity is your choice.

and it's as mutable as your choice and also that your choice is enforceable on others. And you might say, well, look, if I want to be treated a certain way, then why can't people treat me that way? Well, maybe they could, but how much force can you use? That's the real question.

Should they be required to do it? Well, then you might say, well, perhaps if it was in your interest, they could be required to do it. But I don't think the identity theory that's at the bottom of all this is in anyone's interest because it's actually inadequate. Identity is something practical. It's a game that you play with other people. You have to play it with other people.

They have to cooperate. Otherwise, it's not playable. And so if you're going to be successful in the world, and we know this from the developmental literature in relationship to child development, when you're two, you're egocentric, and you tend to impose your game on the world. And that means you can't play with others. And two-year-olds are notoriously non-social. They don't engage in mutual play.

If you put two-year-olds side by side, they'll play, but they won't play with each other. Now, what Piaje, the developmental psychologist, great developmental psychologist, noticed, was that around three or four, children will start to negotiate, the game. So a two-year-old would just be playing with a truck back and forth. And maybe the other two-year-old is playing with a doll, and they're side-by-side. But at three, they have the doll or the truck, and then they decide whether they're going to play with the doll or the truck, and then they lay down the ground rules for the game. And then they both abide by them. And so they have a little identity within that game, but it's shared. And that means that they can cooperate and compete within that game. Well, that's the beginnings of identity. And so your identity is a mode of being and perceiving that opens the door for you in the social world. It isn't. Only a tiny part of it is who you feel you are. Now, it's not like that's an unimportant part, but if you feel you're an unplayable game, that doesn't help other people play with you.

And so part of the reason that that law and all of the philosophy, let's say, behind it, ideology more accurately, has this egocentric view of identity. And it's never made explicit. Right? It's like we use the word identity. We won't even talk about what it means. Well, it means, and then we'll say, well, it means your felt sense of sexual identity, let's say, or gender identity. or however far that might be extended. Fair enough, but no, wrong.

That isn't how identity works. It's way too sparse a theory to be playable. You know, and I insist on this playability because in a marriage, a marriage isn't one interaction. A marriage is one interaction, then another one, then another one, then another one. And that pattern of interactions has to be played in a way that doesn't degenerate across time, right? And there's an ethic that governs that.

And if the ethic produces a deteriorating game, then the relationship will end. So the game you're playing has to be repeatable, and it's out of that necessity for repetition that ethics emerges, actually. And your identity has to be a playable game. That means it isn't something you can merely enforce on other people, doesn't work.

And so the people who are hypothetically being helped by this are being encouraged to adopt a theory of identity, which is counterproductively egocentric. And you say it's counterproductively egocentric, and I would agree with you. But do you not think that the reason we have been, that we have adopted this ideology, as you say, is because it's a quasi-religion,

and that stems from the fact that we don't have religion anymore. in the West. You know, we're more and more living in secular societies. Well, there's a chapter in my new book, Beyond Order, called Abandon Ideology. And it, and Idol are kind of the same thing, IDOL. Be careful what you worship. I think ideologies are crippled religions. So, and I make a case for that in Beyond Order, and in my first book, Maps of Meaning, a religious framework, of complete religious, framework offers you a balanced view of the world. And you might say, well, how do you know if it's balanced? It's like, fair enough, you know, and how do you know that your viewpoint isn't just

another ideologies? These are good questions. I can give you an example of two ideologies that put together make a complete worldview, let's say. It's sort of like joining the philosopher Hobbes and Rousseau at the hip. Hobbes believed that, you know, the state of nature was chaos and that every man would be at every other man's throat without the benevolent influence of culture. And Rousseau believed that human beings were essentially good and that culture warped them. And they're both right. And you say, well, how can they be both right when they say the opposite thing? And well, some things are the thing they are and they're opposite at the same time, unfortunately.

So anyways, consider the environmentalist ideology. So it posits that nature is benevolent and wonderful, Gaia, the interconnectedness of all things, the beauty of nature, the sustainability of the natural world in the absence of human beings. It presents a very positive view of nature. And it presents a view of culture that's like the raping savage. It's something like that. Human culture, you see that in movies like have those blue-haired, the... those blue-skinned aliens. I all remembered.

There was a Freudian slip with blue hair, Jordan. That's another archetype, isn't it? It's Avatar. Avatar, that's right. So this is the theme of Avatar. And so there's this natural world, and there's the military industrial complex that comes in and rapes Mother Nature.

And there's the terrible adversarial individual who's utilizing the social structure to rape nature. And that's one story. So that's the environmental story. In the U.S., there was another story that was dominant for a long time. That was the frontier myth. And the frontier myth was, well, nature was chaos and desolate and waste. And the noble pioneer who was positive would bring the civilizing force of society and make nature fruitful.

And so you have, on the frontier myth side, you have the positive individual, and on the environmental side you have the negative individual. and on the frontier myth side you have positive culture and the environmentalist side you have negative culture and on the frontier side you have negative nature and on the environmental side you have positive nature. If you put those things together, that's the world of human experience.

And ideologies, stories for that matter, use those characters, but unless they use all of them, there's a bias. And the problem with the bias is that something important isn't being taken into account. So, for example, if you view the West as a patriarchal tyranny, it's like, fair enough, man. You could advance evidence for that forever. But, well, the lights are on and it's warm, you know?

So, yeah, the terrible tyrant, but how about a little gratitude for the benevolent king? The same goes for the natural world. It's like, well, of course it's beautiful and it shouldn't be despoiled. But, you know, if someone dropped you naked in the middle of the jungle, that isn't exactly how you'd be thinking about nature, because it'll eat you in no time flat. And so it's doing everything it can to destroy you at every second, despite the fact that you're also dependent on it for everything.

And so it's a religious view, in my estimation, takes all of those factors into account. And then it says, you've got to strike the balance between the tyrant and the benevolent king, between nature as a destructive force and nature as a benevolent force, between the hero, that's the individual, and the adversary,

which is everything terrible about the individual. I was going to say, when it comes, and I've thought about this a lot, and I was wondering what Europe would take on this is. To me, when you look at a lot of religions, it's about the fact that man is powerless before God, and the realization that you are weak, fragile, mortal, and that you need to worship God and salvation lies in God.

But the identity ideology focuses you to focus in on yourself. What is unique and different about you, which ultimately breeds a sense of narcissism and therefore a sense of dissatisfaction and hopelessness as well. Have you become religious again, mate? Yeah, I know. Catholic school. He sounds like he's preaching right there.

Well, I would say there is that element to religious people. belief, but there's also an element in it, generally speaking, that's ennobling because there is the constant insistence in Christianity, for example, that you do have the, you know, you are a creature of God, you are assigned a divine worth, you have an immortal soul, and you could be far more than you are. And so there's an ennobling there as well. So I think, I think the religious viewpoint is salutary in the way that you described because it does attempt to remind you that there's something outside of you. I do think that the identity theory that's characteristic of the woke movement, let's say, is narcissistic to its core, technically speaking. It seems very egocentric. And I had this sense when I was

surrounded by protesters at the University of Toronto, for example, some of them were trans people who were protesting me. And, you know, my sense was, you think that I'm your enemy. But I see something wrong with this that's going to hurt you. It's not good for anyone else, but it's also not going to help you because it isn't right. It isn't oriented property. It isn't going to produce the results that you want. But it's taken me a long time to put my finger on exactly what it was that was bothering me. There might be more too, but certainly the identity theory is unbelievably sparse.

And Jordan, do you think the trans issue which you talk about, about, which was sort of the start of this journey that you've been on to some extent. And, you know, I remember Francis and I, when we started trigonometry two and a half years ago, you know, we were saying, should we, should we look into this? Should we talk about this? And we were like, well, this is an issue that affects at that time, very few people. You know, it's a local issue for them. It doesn't really have any impact. And yet over the last two and a bit years, as we've educated ourselves on some of the implications of this stuff, having had transgender and transsexual guests on the show and talked about all of this,

it seems to me like with this trans thing where demands are now being made of us to accept things that are so patently not true, that is where a lot of people are now starting to become aware of this as a breaking point. Because in and of itself, it's not necessarily, as I say, an issue that affects a lot of people. But just that demand, and you've talked about it. in the context of the Soviet Union where people were required to publicly declare things they knew were not true as a method of demoralizing

them more than anything. It seems to me that we've almost got to that point. Is that how you feel about it? Well, I think another part of the reason that the bill that I objected to bothered me was because I saw it as part and parcel of a complete ideology.

And so it was sort of at the vanguard of that ideology. And I felt that once this had been established, that increasingly unreasonable demands would manifest themselves. And I think that's continuing to happen. What would I say about that? Well, I went over the identity issue. That's kind of where my thinking has progressed to with regards to that issue. It's not solving the problem at all,

as far as I can tell. And I don't think that it's been helpful to further confuse young people about who they are. So for anyone you might have straightened out and I don't see any evidence for that yet, I think there's likely 100 people that have been left more confused.

Do you want to promote your business to an intelligent audience who don't need to know your pronouns to buy your product? Here at Trigonometry, we have over 250,000. thousand subscribers across the different platforms, and we frequently get over three million views a month. That's a lot of new customers for your business. We speak with some of the biggest guests

from the worlds of politics, economics, journalism, arts and entertainment. All of them has spent at least one month in the gulag so you don't have to. And we'll match your product to the perfect guest for you. American sponsors will be matched with American guests and so on. That way, you know your advert has the best possible chance of. of getting to the right people. Or as we call them, the wrong people. Advertise with us and we'll get your business cancelled or your money back. Contact us by email at marketing at triggerpod.co.com.

And we'll make your nightmares come true. Well, this is the worry for me because I believe fundamentally in the pursuit of truth. And I believe that's important. And I believe that people who pretend to believe in things in public, but they know are not true or harming society. I fundamentally believe that. But on the other hand, I also want to combine that pursuit of truth with a compassion and respect and tolerance for people

who feel that they are, quote, unquote, in the wrong body and whatever. And I've been trying to square that circle in my head for years. I'm trying to understand how one does that. And I don't know that I have the answer quite yet. Do you? No. wouldn't say so. I just found a limit point for me. The limit point was I'm not going to say words that ideologues want me to say. I don't care what the reason is. And I suppose part of the reason why

it's justifiable to hate me, I suppose, is because that looks like it's uncompassionate. You know, what's the harm? And I was asked that a lot. Well, what's the harm in going long? You know, these poor people are having great difficulty. Well, I'd have to believe that movement in this ideological direction was likely to help them, you know, before I would consider compassion appropriate grounds to go along with it. I don't believe that. I think the whole notion is so ill-conceived. I looked at all the background documents that were associated with the law, and all that did was further my conviction that there was something deeply wrong about what was happening. And even, it wasn't going to help the people that it purported to help. I couldn't see any evidence for that. It's really hard to

help people. You know, it's really easy to make things worse. And there was certainly nothing built into the law to assess whether this change was actually going to be beneficial. It was just the assumption, well, we know how to reconstruct things so the world will be better. It's like, no, you don't. It's way easier to make things worse than better, especially when you're messing around with something as fundamental as gender identity, you know, which children usually have reasonably well established by the time they're three, you mess with that at your peril as far as I'm concerned. So, and then, you know, you've seen this spread of gender transition surgery. We've covered it. We've had someone from the Tavistock Clinic on our show, a whistleblower

from that place where a lot of this stuff was done. Look, it's an impossible circle to square, isn't it? I just, I don't know. We seem to be stuck in this loop and I don't know how it gets resolved and I'm deeply troubled that you, you know, you say you haven't squared that circle either. I really am. Well, the problem of how to fit in is a permanently insoluble problem. You know, we all sacrifice our pound of flesh to adopt a persona that makes us acceptable socially. There's huge benefit in that. No, we wouldn't be able to talk if we didn't use the words that dead people uttered. We were the beneficiaries of socialization as well as the victims, and the victim element of that is permanent.

There's no, and for some people it's much worse than for other people because it's harder for them to match their temperament to the social demand. But it's very seldom the case that radical social transformation is the answer to that problem. Because those radical social transformations tend to go sideways in unexpected ways. Isn't part of the problem, Jordan, that we try and be compassionate with people. And sometimes when you're compassionate, and I've seen it when I was a teacher, where teachers try to be compassionate, and actually whilst trying to be compassionate, you end up making the easy choice or the weak choice, which in the long term ends up damaging people more.

Well, look, if you look at the way people's personalities are structured, you kind of have two exploratory dimensions, openness, so that's creativity. Maybe that's exploration of the realm of ideas and extroversion, and that's social landscape exploration. And then you have three dimensions that are more associated with stability. And those are names. negative emotion, that's neuroticism, agreeableness, that's compassion, and conscientiousness. And conscientiousness and agreeableness are both social virtues. And you might ask, well, why do you need two social virtues? Why isn't one enough? Compassion. Well, the answer is, I think the answer is probably time frame. So conscientiousness, think of Margaret Thatcher. Conscientiousness is a cold virtue. It's like, why do I have to take this medicine? Because it's good for you. Will you force it down my throat if necessary? Well, won't that hurt my feelings? Yes. But if you don't take it, you'll die. And that's a conversation in some sense that you have with sick children. You know, and compassion.

is for infants. Now that doesn't mean that and having said that, let me make no mistake about the fact that we're often reduced to the state of infants. So if you're extremely ill and you need to be taken care of, right, in some sense you've been reduced to the state of an infant and that compassion is necessary for you. But conscientiousness, it says, well, this is hard, but, if you do it, it'll be better next week or next month, or you can make these sacrifices now, and society will benefit as a consequence. You can forego this gratification, which is very frustrating, but the long-term consequences will be better. And so compassion isn't enough.

And so if you bring in a conscientiousness virtue, which might be judgment, for example, or justice, which are both conscientiousness virtues, then it's easy to see. cold-hearted. And we were talking about squaring the circle. It's, well, we don't know how, because mercy and justice often conflict, but they're both necessary principles. So, why can't everybody just do what they want to all the time? Well, that's sort of an agreeableness question. That's a compassionate question. And the answer is, well, it just, it doesn't work over the long run. It generates and deteriorates. I mean, I'll give you an example of the conflict. I remember one time my daughter got ill. She was about three, and she got this mouth infection that was really quite brutal. She had a really hard time swallowing for about two weeks. It was very painful. And so we let some of our rules relax, like we let her come into bed with us, for example, and we let her be more dependent than we had previously. And no wonder because she was suffering dreadfully. But there was a huge price to be paid for that when she got.

healthy again because we had to go through the training again. And we learned then, well, that we learned that was an object lesson in the price to be paid for excess compassion. In the final analysis, it wasn't a helpful move. And so, and the problem with agreeableness, with compassion, too, is that it announces itself so self-evidently as a virtue that if you wave a flag and say, well, wait, here's the limit case for that. It's almost impossible for you not to be regarded as cold-blooded and harsh. And women are more agreeable than men, so they're more compassionate and more polite than men. And the probability that that's associated with the necessity for them to be extremely patient with extremely dependent infants is very, very high.

But that doesn't mean that it's the right principle to be used to govern your relationship with adults. And I can't help but see the spilling over of agreeableness into the campuses, for example, manifesting itself in claims like, well, this is a home. This is a place where people should be comfortable. This is a place where people should feel welcome and everyone should be included. And, well, fair enough, those are virtues. But it isn't obvious that they're the right virtues for. a university or there's certainly, and even if they are, there's certainly an incomplete set of virtues.

What about beauty and excellence? What about discrimination? The ability to make value judgments. You know, just that word itself has become a curse in some sense to be discriminating. Well, that means you have judgment. You can tell the difference between what's good and what isn't. And that means you have to admit that some things aren't good. And that's not. And that's not. not compassionate. Jordan, and you've been out of the game for a while. We're so glad to see you on good form and doing well. One of the things I wanted to ask you is kind of a lot happened in the time that you were away.

I hold you slightly responsible for that because things were going all right and then you go away for a year and a half and then things go downhill. You must have, obviously, you've had a terrible experience and I joke, but when you came back and you started paying attention to the things that had happened in the world, what was your first reaction when you saw the BLM protest, the Trump election, and all of that, everything we've seen in the last year or so. What was your first thing that you looked at it and you went, oh? I don't know if I can answer that. I think I'm still probably trying to wrap my head around the current situation and that I don't have any particular.

trench into observations on how things have radically transformed, partly because the COVID virus has thrown such a loop into everything that, you know, who can make any judgment about the state of current affairs? It's impossible. With any luck, the vaccines will work, and there's lots of them. So perhaps we'll beat the virus. That would be really good. If we manage that, that would be a miracle.

And then the world will limp back to something approximating normal, and we'll see what that new normal is. I guess at the moment my judgment is sort of suspended. Plus, you know, the Democrats took power in the U.S. and now the liberal end of the universe has got control again, and that's going to have a transformative effect of one form or another, but it's impossible at the moment to see what that is, especially with all the uncertainty that's associated with the COVID lockdown.

So I would say I'm just sort of watching to see where all of this goes, because we're not in a normal circumstance. And so what conclusions can you draw from it? Who knows what's going to happen in three months? If we're fortunate, everything will reopen and we can go back about our business with maybe a renewed appreciation for just how bloody remarkable walking down a street with open shops really was. You know, I hope we can remember that. But until then, I'm just going to watch and see. And yeah, I don't, I don't feel I'm sort of watching with open-mouthed amazement and, and, and, and,

trying to keep up. As are we all, Jordan. The question, your book strike a chord with me because I see them as a way, especially for a man, as a guide to how to be successful, as a way to make the most of your life, to develop your life, to take responsibility and all these kind of things.

And one of the things I've seen with men of my age, I'm in my late 30s, I know I look younger, you don't have to say it, but you know. But in my late 30s, I see a lot of men struggling with what does it mean to be successful? When we look at that word success, what does that mean to you? And how would you inspire men of my age and younger? It's too late for you, man. Yeah, it's too late for me.

But to actually become a success. Well, first of all, I think it's really worth thinking about what success means. And I tried to do that a lot in both the books. It's really fun to make other people successful. Like that's, this is one of the reasons capitalism, I would say, gets a really bad rap and an unfair rap. Like the people I've known who have been successful in the capitalist enterprise, and a lot of them are entrepreneurs rather than managers, let's say.

It's just, that's the population I've been exposed to. And this was the same among the professoriate, for that matter. One of the great pleasures the people that I've seen who I respect took was in mentoring. And so don't underestimate the radical satisfaction that's associated with helping other people develop. One of the reasons that good professors, well, and good businessmen, love to be in the position they're in, is because they can identify young people who are promising and open up doors of opportunity to them. It's really intrinsically motivating. And so, you know, when you think of capitalism, for example, or success as only a competitive enterprise, that's a real mistake because there's that aspect of it that's there everywhere in every enterprise I've ever seen.

So, success, real success means you're successful in a way that makes other people around you successful. You need both of those. And that's also really good for your conscience because then you're not working at the expense of anyone else. Quite the contrary, right? You're lifting the tide that lifts all boats. Maybe you're simultaneously elevating your own relative status, but it's really, it's not unreasonable to put that in as a constraining requirement. It has to help other people, well, it helps you.

And I would say the way we're wired, now some people are more selfish than others, but I would still say human beings are unbelievably social and reciprocal. that's built into us at an incredibly deep level. And it can go wrong and we can get cynical and malevolent and bitter and work at counterpurposes to it. But to be of service to your fellow man, your family members, your broader community, there are virtually no pleasures that compete with that. So and so that's partly why it is useful to do a critique of me. materialism and materialistic satisfactions are pretty fleeting. They're not non-existent,

but they don't have the deep and lasting satisfaction of, well, of successful mentoring, for example, and the relationships that build out of that. So I think, I don't think there is any success at all without moral success. In fact, I think that success without moral success is actually a form of torture. you know, if you don't, let's say you don't feel you deserve anything, because you know that you're being, you're not being a good person. And that's your own judgment. And let's assume that you're accurate. You're not, because some people will judge themselves far too harshly.

But let's just say, you know, you have reasons to have your conscience bothering you. And you're not successful. Well, at least you don't feel the continual injustice of that. You think, well, I'm a son of a bitch, but I don't have anything. but then let's say you're successful. Well, you know that's all you've gotten. How can that do any? And then maybe you have to rationalize constantly to live with it.

Everything you collect around you is nothing but a source of torment and a constant reminder that you're criminal in your fundamental orientation, that you've ruined people on your mad scramble to the top. Jesus, you don't want that. You seriously don't want that. amount of relative material status is going to even come close to rectifying that. You want your conscience to be clean, clear. You want your interpersonal relationships to be honest. You want to be

reliable and dependable. And if you can add exciting and adventurous to that, so much the better. But success means, to be successful means to be good. And you say that successful means to be good. Isn't that a problem whereby, where in society, particularly our society, where people judge success, they judge it on the acquirement of property, material goods and possessions? And therefore there's that imbalance where someone can be morally good in a fantastic person, but in a materialistic society, seem to be a failure because they haven't acquired a great deal. Well, that definitely is a problem. have productive people. That's a problem in how the, it's a measurement problem in some sense. You know, economic success is generally associated with intelligence and conscientiousness. So there is a rough correlation between ability, let's say, even moral ability and success.

Now, I'm not making too much of that, but I do know, look, if you're going to be a successful businessman, especially across business person, across multiple dimensions, multiple enterprises, you bloody well better be honest, because it's going to catch up with you, man. And the probability that you're going to be a successful crook multiple times is very, very low. You can do that, but you have to move constantly. Right, so your reputation doesn't keep up with you. So there is some association between success and moral virtue, thank God. but it's a rough approximation, and there's plenty of exceptions.

It's very hard for creative people to monetize their productivity, for example. So you have unrewarded virtue, and that's a flaw of the monetary system. It means we haven't been able to. And you might say the same thing applies to such things as our inability to pay homemakers. Now, why don't we pay homemakers? Well, it's because what they produce isn't monetizable for 20 years. and our economic system isn't sophisticated enough to figure out how to pay people

for returns that are that you know pushed off into the future that doesn't make it right but we don't know how to fix it technically right I mean if you're a venture capitalist and you want to invest in something you want a tenfold return on your investment within a handful of years

you can't afford to invest over a 20 year period and so that makes it really rough on homemakers because we're not sophisticated enough to monetize it. So it's a measurement problem. But unless you can figure out a better way of doing it, you're stuck with what we've got. Jordan, I was going to ask you, as we had towards the end of the interview, there's another issue we've been circling around,

and you bring up the issue of stay-at-home moms. And I feel like this conversation, by its very nature, has been quite male-centric. And I said earlier, I think the whole gender wars thing and men and women competing over who's more victim, who's more this, is a bit silly because men and women need to work together and they need each other. That's how I feel. But they have, mostly.

Of course, exactly. But we do live in a society where I think some people don't see it that way and want to disrupt that. What do you think men and women need to do more of to coexist peacefully, if you might, or to build healthy relationships and to work together? Well, I mean, I can only tell you what I've experienced. One thing that people aren't taught to do is to negotiate. And so that's what we need to do.

Look, you're either going to have traditional gender roles where everybody shuts up and does what their mother did or their father did, which works as long as society isn't changing too quickly, that actually works quite well. And it's quite a relief to everyone because how many bloody questions do you want to ask yourself? You know, like, you just have no idea

how much certainty you actually want. You know, if you take a three-year-old and you stand them in front of their clothes closet and there's 20 pairs of, you know, 20 outfits there, say, it's not that pleasant for the child to have to pick. If you throw three things on the bed and say, pick one, they're pretty happy about that

because they get some choice, but it's constrained. And, you know, people say they won't, to be free, but that's just complete nonsense because you run into paralysis of will with an infinite degree of freedom. You want a certain amount of freedom, but not that much. And you sort of want it when you want it. In my marriage and in my relationship with my children and in my clinical practice, it's, you have to negotiate. That's what men and women have to do. And so I talk about that, particularly in chapter three of my new book, which is don't hide things in the fall. It's like, well, let's talk about sex, for example.

That's a good one. There's a stumbling block in a relationship. Let's talk about sex. Well, that's hard. People don't do it. They're uncut—you know, like, they'll have sex. They'll engage in sexual acts, but they won't represent them abstractly and discuss them. You know, so, well, how often should we have sex?

Well, how are you going to solve that problem? well first of all each person has to admit how often they'd like to have sex they might be uncomfortable with that right off the bat they might not even know because they're so uncomfortable about it they never even asked themselves and then you have to ask yourself well what will i do if i don't get that and people don't like that question either because it means why you're going to get bitter and you're going to get resentful and you're going to get mopey and whiny and you're going to justify having an affair or at least looking elsewhere, and you don't want to admit that about yourself,

so you won't have the damn discussion. Like, as soon as you know that you're flawed deeply, and if you're sexually frustrated, you're more likely to stray, well, then you can be afraid of yourself enough to overcome the fear to have the conversation. It's like, look, a woman, if we don't make love three times a week,

I'm so whiny and immature that I'm going to go to strip bars, and that doesn't work out well for our relationship. And, you know, and she might say, well, why don't you grow the hell up? And, you know, I'm so overworked. I have 50 hour a week, work week, because I'm a lawyer, and I have three small kids, and they're clamoring for my attention. And my goddamn husband is such a miserable wretch

that he threatens me with, you know, marital disintegration if I don't pull out another four hours a week to please him. It's like, fair enough, those are two good arguments. And who the hell wants to have that discussion? But my sense is it's tyranny, slavery, or negotiation. And I've walked couples through this process many times. And I have some, you know, rules of thumb, which my, I've got kind of a kick out of the critical response to the book. And it's been sort of universally, this controversial man is very banal.

It's like, look, guys, get your insults lined up here. Yeah. Which one is it? well, or unless I've managed to elevate banality to the level of controversy, which perhaps is the hallmark of a good self-help book, in any case, you know, my observation of couples has been that they have to spend about 90 minutes a week in practical discussions about their joint life, the kids, the household economics, their plans for the future, all of that.

And they need to carve out two or three times a week in a relatively established, relationship to have a date. And chapter 11 is that in my book. No, it's chapter 10. Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship. You know, it's like you have wants, she has wants, negotiate about everything. Who's going to set the table? Who's going to do the dishes? Who is going to clean the leaves out of the gutter? Who does what? And because you either default to traditional sex roles or you engage in a battle of resentful stubbornness or you negotiate and to negotiate you have to look and see how little and stupid you actually are and you notice oh you know i'm actually annoyed when i have to do the dishes who wants to admit that it's like well why well because i'm kind of macho and that

sort of woman's work maybe i mean who knows what the reason is maybe you're just lazy maybe your mother used it as a punishment. God only knows. You've described both of us in one. You've described both of us in one sentence. He's lady. I'm a bit macho. Well, it's hard to negotiate unless you know how little you are.

It's like, really that matters to you? It's like, yeah. And then I've noticed in my clinical practice, these little things aren't little. You know, you have to clean up the dishes three times a day for the rest of your life. It's like 5% of your life. Cleaning up the dishes.

It's 5% of your waking life. How you're greeted at the door. You know, all these tiny things that make up day-to-day domesticity defines the relationships between men and women. That has to be negotiated. And to negotiate, you have to start out little and demanding. And then listen. And, you know, my experience in my marriage has been with mutual goodwill

and the commitment to radical honesty negotiation succeeds. It's hard, but it succeeds. And that's been true under even extremely trying circumstances. And so I always look at the micro situation. It's like, well, I don't know how to regulate relationships between men and women in the workplace. I don't even think an answer to a question like that is possible.

How do you treat your wife? How do you treat your daughter? Or perhaps how do you treat your... female workers, your, females that you work with. You can, you can, you can, you can address these issues at that level and that's where we have to start as far as I can tell. And I think that's another reason why the activist types don't like me. It's like, I'm not much for social engineering. Start local, man. It's, that's where the action is. Yeah. And look, we've got a couple just questions wrapping up. My final question for you is you've talked about,

your critics and the social activist types and all the rest of it. What do you think is the most legitimate criticism that people make of you? Talk too much, probably. That might be it. I mean, I've been trying to stop doing that when I'm interviewing people on my YouTube channel. Other legitimate criticisms, well, people are quite skeptical of, you know, this comes out quite often. I've had this problem. I took benzodiazepines sort of, It's a complicated story. I had my reasons. I was very ill when I first started to take them.

I had terrible insomnia. And I started taking them, and they were prescribed. I just kept taking them. And that ruined my life. It destroyed my life. And I still haven't recovered, but maybe recovered 10%, something like that. It's absolutely dreadful.

I write self-help books. It's like, get your acting. before you change the world. You know, that's my advice. So, you know, do I have my act together? Well, I certainly appear to have made a mistake. I mean, I've gone over it with fine-tooth comb. I was genuinely distressed beyond my capacity to tolerate when I went to see the doctor. As far as I could tell, you know, I was basically sleepless for about a three-week period. You know, maybe I had microsleeps during that time, but the subjective experience was a 21-day-long day-long day. I was freezing cold. I couldn't pile on enough blankets to stay warm. I fainted every time I stood up.

I was like completely frozen with terror. It was terrible. I don't know what happened. And I went to the doctor and he gave me benzodiazepines. And so I took and sleeping pills. I only used the sleeping pills a couple of times. I used these benzodiazepines and two a day. And that cured the insomnia. And it was very stressful period of my life and much stress. followed and I just kept taking them. I was paying attention to other things. I never gave it a second thought. Really?

Well, that turned out to be a mistake. And then the question is, you make a mistake like that, eh? And you think, what does that signify? You make a mistake. Does that mean that, you know, you're flawed to the core as a character? Maybe. That's certainly possible. It's one possible truth.

So how do I, you know, I was terrified when I wrote this second book because I thought, well, first of all, might be met by a really harsh reception because I've invalidated my claims to any credibility with what's happened in my life. But that didn't happen. People seemed to be forgiving remarkably. And then I guess I was protected in my own defense. I would say I was protected against that sort of criticism to some degree because I never pretended that I was writing the rule. only for other people. And I think, I believe that that's evident in my lectures and my writing is that I'm talking to me too, you know. I'm in the crowd of reprehensible degenerates that need some work. And so, I mean, if they weren't relevant to me, well, how could I even write about them

in any realistic sense? So I'm, you know, among the great. unwashed, who are clearly in need of a little bit of cleaning up and polishing. And that seems to be how the public is responding. You know, I read my comments on YouTube and I take them seriously and the reviews, the public reviews. I don't take the critical reviews seriously because that ship is sailed. You know, I could write the reviews before I see them.

I know what people are going to say because that decision. already been made and some collective decisions already been made. So what I hope people can listen to what I say and read what I read and they can try it out for themselves. And if it works, great.

And if it doesn't, sorry. You know. Jordan, as comedians, we face some of this, the critical reviews. I remember someone told me very early on. He said the story about a critic talking to an artist. And the critic says, would you like to hear

my opinion about your work. And the artist says, yes, go ahead. And the critic says it's worthless. An artist says, I know, but tell me anyway. I found that a useful approach. You know, I also, I know why there are critics. Like, things need to be criticized, because there's too many things. So you have to rank order them.

So you know what to attend to. And there's justifiable criticism, I suppose, and unjustifiable criticism. I think one of the things I have detected, you guys can tell me what you think about this, is I note in my critics' reviews of my work the same contempt for the audience I'm trying to communicate with that drives the populism that the same elites cannot understand.

It's like, because there's this snarky undertone constantly, well he's delivering pseudo intellectual banalities to reprehensible you know to the to the reprehensible unsuccessful unsuccessful it's like well that attitude is exactly what makes you so well

liked you know and I don't have that attitude I'm thrilled to see the people who come to see my shows and I don't feel like I'm lecturing down

and I never do that. You know, I'm always lecturing at the edge of my ability and assuming that my audience will follow along. And this is something, I think this is something that... I've always felt that the people who have written about me have missed the story, really. They're not interested in why what I'm doing has this broad impact. And the reason it has a broad impact is because it's helpful to people.

And so that says something about what it means to be helpful. And there's something really interesting there. But there's something about that kind of help that's viewed with contempt. And I think it is the contempt that drives this anti-elitism. It's not. And that stumps the left so badly. It's like, well, why do the right-wingers vote for Trump, for example? Well, it's because they don't like you.

They don't like you. Why? Because you hold them in contempt. With all your talk of compassion. It's like, well, I feel sorry for them. Well, that's contempt. And on that note, Jordan, thank you so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

The last question we always ask is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society, but we really should be? Well, you know, we don't have much of a view of, what we want to do. And this is a real issue. It's like when I was a kid in the 60s, there was this, I read a lot of science fiction,

there's this sort of technological utopia that Bennett beckoned. And everyone was caught up in it, post-war period, the better future. Well, we seemed to have exhausted that, the power of that, in some fundamental way. Where are we headed? Why?

In some positive manner. We're really stuck on that. No political party seems to be able to formulate it. And so what kind of world are we trying to create and why? That's what we should be talking about. I couldn't agree with you more, Jordan. Thank you so much for your time and you've been very generous with it. I obviously advise everybody to get the book Beyond Order.

And next time you are in London, which I hope you are. We wish you a continued speed of recovery. But when you are next in London, we'd love to have you here on the stand. that. I love London. I love Great Britain. It was so wonderful to visit there. It was great. It's such a great country. And we look forward to seeing you back here, Jordan. All the very best to you. And thank you guys for watching and listening at home. We will see you very soon with another interview. All of them go out 7 p.m. Absolutely. See you soon, guys. And take care.