Transcript for #1070 - Jordan Peterson

There's only 12 things you need to do in life, right? That's it?

Yes. Well, I was the hypothetical villain of her imagination essentially. Well, what happened was interesting, too, the way it played itself out. I met her in the green room beforehand, you know, she was being made up and then they put a little bit of powder on me and we had a friendly kind of interchange and then we went and sat in front of the cameras and for a couple of minutes you know before before the show got rolling and we had a pretty pleasant back and forth and then as soon as the cameras went on she was a completely different person and I thought oh I see, to try see what's going on. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so, so that kind of alerted me to, well, the fact that there was something rotten in the state of Denmark, let's say. Yeah, but, you know, this is also why YouTube is going to kill TV because television by its nature, all of these narrow broadcasts technologies they rely on forcing the story right because it has to happen now it has to happen in like often in five minutes because they only broadcast five minutes of that interview they did put the whole thing up on YouTube to their credit It hasn't ceased to amaze me yet. I think that they thought that the interview went fine. That's the scuddle but I've got from sort of behind the scenes because I know some people who know what's going on at Channel 4 and they're shell-shocked by the response. You know, and then, of course, there is the counter response to the Guardian the next day published a paper published article saying that, you know, the head of Channel 4 had to call in police security because of threats. You know, well, first of all, you can call the police in about anything. And they never did detail out exactly what the threats were. You know, but then about 20 newspapers picked that up and went for the, well, Kathy Newman is now being harassed by an army of online trolls for doing nothing but doing her job. which, well, and then there was a backlash against bat in the press, and so it's been a...

Yes. That we're seriously negative.

It's not like she's not successful.

You know, at some point you think you should have to hand in your victim card. I think like when you go to an Ivy League university, it's like right then and there. Yeah, because you don't get to be oppressor and oppressed at the same time, that's just too much.

Of course. I can't imagine anything we could possibly strive for in our society that would make it into hell faster than equality of outcome. Like the historical, the historical evidence for the pathology of that route is so strong. It's like You have to be historically ignorant beyond belief or malevolent or resentful beyond comprehension in order to think that that's a good idea. I argue for that.

I mean, he's just, well, that's what Kates just said to, in a recent interview. And I know some guys that are, you know, they're in approximately the same universe as those two. And they just work all the time. That's all they do. And they don't just work. They work so efficiently and so effectively and make use of every second in ways you can't even imagine unless you're in that sort of position. So, you know, doing that doesn't mean that you will succeed, but not doing it certainly.

Yeah, you can stop them. You can try to stop people from winning crookedly, which is what you should do. You know, there's a couple of things that are really worth delving into with regards to that, too, because there's this sort of Marxist notion that all this inequality is generated as a consequence of capitalism, and that's actually technically false. Because if you look at, there seems to be something like a law of nature that's described by this statistical model called the preto distribution, and it basically suggests that in any creative domain, There's going to be a small number of people will do almost all of the output. But it doesn't just apply to human beings. It applies to the heights of trees in the Amazon rainforest. It applies to the size of cities and it applies to the mass of stars, which is something like the more you have the more you get. It's something like can imagine how that would work with a star as it gets bigger and bigger and it's gravitational mass increases. It's going to attract more and more matter. And then as a city grows, well, more and more people are excited to move there because of all the opportunities. And so some cities start to grow tremendously and others and others don't. But this this This phenomena where a small number of people end up controlling a tremendous proportion of the resource is not only limited to money and it doesn't only occur in capitalist societies, it occurs everywhere. It's like a natural law. So you see the same thing with a number of points scored by a spectacular sports figure. There's always a tiny proportion of people who are way ahead on the curve, or people who make records, or people who sell paintings, or people who compose music, or people who sell music online. It's all the same. It's the 1% gets 80%. And so, well, first we can't blame them on capitalism. and second we should note that it actually does constitute a problem which is what the left wingers are always jumping up and down about right like too much inequality starts to destabilize your society and it isn't obvious how to shovel money from the top and maybe the one tenth of one percent who have almost all the money down to the people who have almost nothing in a way that's effective so that they don't get thrown out of the game completely and so that the whole society doesn't destabilize we don't exactly know how to do that It is a problem because inequality does exist and it does tend to magnify across time. And then there's another problem too which we haven't figured out is imagine that in order to make everyone rich. You have to tolerate a certain amount of inequality. It seems obvious. We don't know how many units of inequality you need to tolerate per unit of wealth generated. But the answer is definitely not zero. It's definitely not zero.

And well, even deeper that the right narrative is the way that we should view the world is victim versus oppressor because that's the basic postmodern neo Marxist template. It's the right way to view the world is that it's a power ground. It's a battleground of power interests competing constantly. The ones that win or oppressors, the ones that lose or oppressed. That's the way you look at the world. And I think that that's wrong. That's a bad way of looking at the world. Psychologically, sociologically, politically, economically, ideologically, you name it. It ends in nothing but catastrophe. I mean, first of all, because it puts your group identity as something that's paramount. And I mean, that's just not, well, that is what we do in the West, let's say. We put your individual identity paramount. And then, well, that's just, that's just, for starters, fundamentally. And then, I guess the other reason that people are on my case to some degree is because I have made a strong case, which I think is fully documented by the scientific literature that there are intrinsic differences say between men and women. And I think the evidence and that, this is the thing that staggered me is that no serious scientists have debated that for like four decades It's that argument was done by the time I went to graduate school. Everyone knew that human beings were not a blank slate that biological forces, not parameterized the way that we thought and felt and acted and valued. Everyone knew that. The fact that this has become somehow debatable again is just, especially because it's being done by legislative fear. They're forcing it to me as a scientist. It's just, well, in the States, too, with Title IX, for example, because Title IX has sort of predicated on that viewpoint. What is Title IX? Oh, Title IX was originally just a piece of legislation that mandated that female sports teams were funded to the same degree that male sports teams were funded in American universities. But it's been expanded out so that if there's any differences in any areas whatsoever between the genders, then the universities are being taken to court. And like 200 of them, I mean, last I looked about 200 of them were up And they can have their funding revoked if they violate Title IX provisions. So it's become like a vicious weapon for social justice warrior equality of outcome types.

No, it's got way way beyond that. Yeah, it's it's become an equality of outcome issue fundamentally.

Probably the last part of that might be true.

Yeah. It's a pathetic study.

Well, the thing is like most things, it's complicated. Yes. You know, so are men and women more similar or more different? Well, it depends on how you define the terms first. But they're more similar. Well, why? Well, they're the same species. So we could start with that. Like, but the question is, what are the differences and how do they manifest themselves and are those manifestations important? So here's an example. If you took a random woman out of the population and a random man, and you had to bet on who was more temperamentally aggressive. If you bet on the man, you'd be right 60% of the time. But you'd be wrong 40% of the time. And that's not a walloping difference, right 6040. It's not 9010. So there's quite, there's a lot of overlap between men and women in terms of their levels of aggression. And you think, well, they're more the same. Yeah, except. So then let's say, no, no, let's play a slightly different game. Let's pick the one in a hundred most aggressive person from the random population. Well, they're all men. And that's why all the people in prison are men. So even though on average men and women, yeah, 90, 90 to 95 percent, right? So, and often if the women are in prison, it's because they got tangled up with a really bad guy. You know, so, so one of the problems is that differences at the extreme are where the differences really start to manifest themselves. And so you can have a small difference at the level of the average. But out at the extremes, it starts to make a massive difference. So let's say to be a Google engineer. which is hard, right? Because you not only have to be an engineer, but you have to be a very good engineer. Say, well, you have to be interested in things rather than people. That's a huge difference in interests, like men are more interested in things, generally speaking, and women are more interested in people, generally speaking. Now, there's still a lot of overlap between them, but that's one of the biggest differences between men and women. It's been demonstrated cross-culturally. It's also very big difference in the Scandinavian countries. on average the difference isn't that great even though it's a relatively large difference but at the extremes it's the same thing almost all the people are hyper what would you call hyper focused on things they're almost all meant and all the people who are hyper focused on people are almost all women and so how does that play out in the world well in the Scandinavian countries it plays out this way about eighty five percent of nurses in Scandinavia are female and about eighty five to ninety percent of engineers are male It doesn't mean women can't be engineers. It doesn't mean men can't be nurses. It also doesn't have anything to do with intelligence. But it does have to do with interest and the differences in interest are big. at the extremes in particular. So when you read a review like that, the one that was pointed out, the first question is, well, what do you mean by big and little? There's more overlap. There's more overlap between men and women than there is difference, on virtually every parameter. Okay, fine. Are there remaining differences significant in how they play out in the world? Are the answer to that is overwhelmingly significant because you select for extremes. So here's another example. Ash can as he Jews have an average IQ of 115. So in the typical population overall has an average IQ of 100. 15 points is about the difference between the typical college student and the typical high school student. Okay, so it's not a massive difference. But if you go up to the extremes, say, well, let's go look at people who only have an IQ of 145, which is kind of where you hit the beginnings of genius level. It's like the Jews are overwhelmingly overrepresented. So relatively small differences in the average can produce walloping differences at the extremes. And people don't understand that. It's not surprising because it actually requires a fairly sophisticated grasp of statistics. But when we're talking about things like differential outcome in the workplace, Then you have to take a sophisticated statistical approach to it, or you don't know what they're talking about. And unfortunately, many of the people who are talking about things like gender differences, they have no idea what they're talking about. They don't know the literature. They don't know there is a literature. They don't understand biology. Like the social constructionist types, the women's studies types, the Neil Marxists. They don't give a damn about biology. It's like they inhabit some disembodied universe. So the review was poorly written at best, and did not show the very poor grasp of the relationship between group differences and economic and practical outcomes.

That's exactly the difference in interest that I just pointed out.

You know, you know, the, you know, the door stores really interesting, you know, because I think it's such a classic story of of an engineer getting tangled up in politics. So, Demore went to this diversity seminar, and he wasn't very happy about it because he knew the literature. And so, at the end of the seminar, they asked for feedback. Well, James Demora is an engineer. So when you tell an engineer that you want feedback, the engineer thinks, oh, you want feedback. And you want like facts and stuff, right? Because that's what feedback would be like. So Demora went and wrote this like thorough memo and gave it to me and said, well, you know, this is what I think, here's some feedback. And then it traveled around. He got no real response from the diversity people. And then he posted it on one of these internal boards at Google where people can discuss things, which people at Google do all the time. So it was perfectly reasonable for him to post it because he didn't get a response from the diversity people he thought, well, let's see what other people think. And then it was there for a long time until it was leaked. into the outside world. It wasn't like Demora was trying to expose Google for what it is. He was just doing what an engineer type would do with someone asked him to provide feedback because he's not thinking politically. He's not thinking, oh, they just want to hear what they already said. He thought they actually wanted some facts. Anyways, I think they picked on the wrong guy, because the ball turns out to be pretty damn tough.

Well, there's a good study done a while ago, and unfortunately I don't remember the author, but they were looking at junior high math prodigies. And they're pretty equally distributed between boys and girls. But by the time university came along, the math prodigy boys, they tend to go into the STEM fields, but the girls wouldn't. And it isn't because they lacked ability, because they had stellar ability. It's because they weren't interested. And it turns out like the interest thing turns out to be a big one. So with personality alone, if you measure men and women's personalities and then you add up all the differences in personalities, you could tell with about 75 to 80% certainty by looking at a full personality read out whether a person's male or female. So you'd be wrong 25% of the time, something like that. But if you add interest to that, you can get it up to about 90%. And so you say, well, are these differences large? Well, individually, they're not that big. They make more difference at the extremes. But if you add them up, then you can almost completely differentiate men from women. So by that, they're very large. And the interesting actually turns out to matter a lot. Like it's probably the most important individual difference that has been discovered between men and women at the psychological level. It has real decent explanatory power because you might say, Well, men have a slight edge in spatial intelligence, and that's why they're overrepresented in STEM fields. And women have a slight edge in verbal intelligence. This is debatable, but literature kind of indicates that. And that's why they're overwhelmingly the majority of fiction readers, for example. Is that the reason that there's differential representation in the STEM fields? No, it doesn't seem to be. It doesn't look like it's an intellectual issue, which is also what demore pointed out, by the way. He never said once that this was a cognitive issue. But it's a matter of choice, matter of interest. And women tend to be more people oriented. Now, the thing is, this has also been discovered in chimpanzees and other primates. Like if you offer baby or child chimpanzees, juvenile chimpanzees, the choice between thing-like toys, like cars or people-like toys, like dolls, the males will go for the thing-like toys and the females will go for the people-like toys. So you see that in primates. And you think, well, is that surprising? It's like, well, no, it's not that surprising. Really, I mean, women have to take care of infants. Tiny infants. And you have to be really people-oriented to do that because a tiny infant isn't unbelievably demanding social relationship. And it's a primary relationship for about two years. And so women are tilted towards the kind of temperament that makes that possible. It's like, well, is that such a shock? Really? That's such a surprise.

Yeah, yeah. Well, whatever epithetic, well, I think the other reason that the radical lefties have been going after me constantly is, well, there's one reason is, if you stand up against the radical, radical left, You're in a group that also has Nazis in it, because the Nazis also stand up against the radical left. So it's perfectly reasonable from a strategic perspective for the radical leftists to say, well, you're against us, how do we know we're not a Nazi? It's like, well, statistically, statistically, I'm probably not. So there's that. But you could say, at least the question is open. But then the next part of it comes is that it's motivated, apathetic, slinging, because If I'm reasonable, and I'm standing up against the radical left, and they admit that I'm reasonable, then there has to be an admission that reasonable people could stand up against the radical left, which kind of implies that the radical left isn't that reasonable, and so while they're not going to go there, of course, they're not that reasonable there. unreasonable beyond belief as we saw in this situation with Lindsay Shepherd in Canada. So at Wilford, Laurier University.

Yeah, she's in the communications in the communications department at Wilford, Laurier and they were talking about the role of language in communication, which is kind of what you would do in a communication class, and she decided to show a five minute clip from a program I had done for TV Ontario, which is a public television station, mainstream left-bleaning liberal television station news program and a good one a good one and I had been on there with a number of other people including a professor Nicholas Matt from the University of Toronto who claimed essentially that there were no biological differences between men and women and that had been the scientific consensus for the last four decades so anyways she showed a clip from this and well she got hold in front of two professors and an administrator, Adrian Joel, who was basically hired for that purpose and raped over the calls for daring to show this video. And she had that, wherewithal to tape it? And then she made the tape public. And in that tape, they compared me. It was really blackly comical. You know, they compared me to Hitler. And but then said, well, it's Hitler or Milo unopolis. I thought, you guys, you're so damn clueless. You can't even get your insults right. It's like, you can't say, that's like playing a video of Hitler or Milo unopolis. It's like, first of all, Hitler and Milo Unopolis, they're actually not in the same category, right? Except that they're both human. That's about the narrowness of the category. And then Milo's like a comic provocateur, and you can hate them or love them, or be indifferent. But to put them in the same category as Hitler, just shows how muddle-headed you are, and then to assimilate me to that category. So carelessly. Like, you don't mess about with epithets like that. Hitler was one of the great supervillains of the 20th century. He was up there with Stalin and Mao in the panoply of satanically possessed leaders. You don't just toss that around, especially not when you're torturing your teaching assistant for daring to show a video about language in a communication class. And so that was a massive scandal in Canada. I think it was the biggest scandal that ever hit a university in Canada. And it got a lot of international attention. And rightly so. And she also turns out to be a tough cookie. I mean, the last I heard she was, she'd started a club at Wilford, Laurier. And I think it was last night or the night before, maybe it's coming up. They're going to show the whole video from television Ontario at a club meeting and invite people to come and discuss it. It's like they picked on the wrong girl there too.

Yeah, well, they couldn't have done me a bigger favor than having that scandal because when I made a videos about Bill C. 16, 15 months ago, I said, look, here's what's going to happen because this legislation is written in an appalling manner and the surrounding policies are pathological. So here's what's going to happen. And so I laid it out. And then people came out and said, no, you're being paranoid. It's like, that's possible. No, the legislation isn't going to have that effect. No, you're not a legal expert. What the hell do you know, et cetera, et cetera? You're crazy. You're a big, you're a transform, you know, big, they threw everything, but the kitchen sink out me. And like fair enough, you know, because there's always a possibility that I was wrong. But the problem was, is I read the policies. And I understood them. And I knew where they were leading. But I never imagined. that one of the consequences of Bill C. 16 in its sister legislation was that a teaching assistant at a Canadian university would be pilloried and accused of breaking the law and then accused of all sorts of reprehensible political beliefs by two professors and an administrator hired for that purpose. I'm merely because she showed a video about two people talking about the law.

paranoid as I am let's say that that exceeded the grasp or the reach of my imagination and then of course it was made public and people just couldn't believe it and then you think okay well what's the defense well they misinterpreted Bill C 16 it's like no I don't think so Um, they aren't representative of the university professor administration. Well, all of Pimlot and Rambikanist colleagues rose to their defense, the whole department. The university when they apologized did it in a very mealy mouth way. Like, there's no evidence that it was an anomalous occurrence. So what had happened is they overextended the reach of Bill C. 16 in exactly the way that I said would happen. It was inevitable. and it wasn't an anomaly. It was actually that's actually the way that the universities are and it is the way that they are. It wasn't a one-off. It was exactly diagnostic and it's appalling. It's appalling. The universities have so much to be ashamed of. Well, there was an article in the Boston Globe this week saying the same thing that all of this crazy postmodern identity politics, equality of outcome nonsense is not only disrupted the university in a way that might be irreparable as far as I can tell, but it's rapidly spreading outside into the normal say business world which is exactly what you see for example at Google.

Yeah, they give her hell for that. Like all you can't present something like that neutrally. That's like presenting something Hitler said neutrally or maybe Milo Yenopolis.

I think it's about 50 to one, actually. Like I've been watching the comments on YouTube and so forth trying to track this, is like I think that like, I think that what the radical leftists are doing is overwhelmingly unrepresentative of the general population, overwhelmingly, but they're very well-organized and verbal and prepared minority, and they've occupied powerful positions in many, many institutions. HR and one of the things I really can't figure out right now, and for anybody who's running a company that's listening, they should think this through. To let these post-modern neo-Marxists into your company through the guise of human resources, this is an absolute catastrophe. You're going to pay for that. This is the ideology that drives post-modern neo-Marxism, this identity politics, what The identity politics movement and its insistence on equality of outcome is a powerfully anti-capitalistic. It's powerfully anti-Western why you would let that into your company is so that you can look good socially. Let's say it's beyond me. It's a big mistake.

They're concerned with organizing things and keeping their bottom line and making sure they're also concerned with looking fair and making sure that they're not prejudice and all of that, which is lovable. I just don't think they see the wave coming. No, they don't. They don't see it coming. They don't understand it. And they're in cautious about it. But they're going to pay for it. Well, Google is a good example because now Google is in court on the feminist stand for like being prejudiced against females and also on the conservative end for being prejudiced against conservatives. It's like, well, so both camps are after them. And I think well, why is that? It's like, well, that's what happens when you play identity politics. This tribalism. This is really what I can't stand about identity politics and I've been warning about the consequences of on the right wing, too, because what I see happening is that as the left, let's say the left gets to define the linguistic territory, which was what I was objecting to in Bill C-16 when it came out I said, look, I'm not going to use these neologism, zinsur, et cetera, because as far as I'm concerned, they have nothing.

That's right. So there's like 70 different categories of non-binary gender, something like that generated now. And there's lists of pronouns that hypothetically the people who are in those categories can choose to be addressed by And now that has the force of law. And so, and I don't care if they choose to be addressed by those pronouns, whatever. That's up to them and whoever else they can convince or ask or in treat or negotiate with. Fine. As soon as it's law, that's a whole different story. Okay, so now I have to use a certain terminology. So then I look at the derivation of the terminology. I say, oh, that's terminology generated by the postmodern neo Marxists. Oh, well, I think those people are reprehensible murderous. So guess what? I'm not going to say their words. Period. Because I know what they're like. I know where that leads. Okay.

The ideology is murderous. The ideology being Marxism. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Jesus, how much proof of that do you need?

Yeah, like they are in Venezuela. Everybody has an equal chance to starve to death. So you know how the Venezuelan government solved the problem of kids starving to death in hospitals? How? They made it illegal for the doctors to report starvation as the cause of death. Right. Wow. That's Venezuela in a nutshell. Yeah. That's everyone's equal there. They are the same number of bones to know on. That's a horrible thing, but it's a horrible thing.

That's for sure. That's for sure. Well, that's why you have to look at the underlying ideology. When you think, well, what level, what is the level at which these things should be addressed? Well, is it economic? Is it political?

Yeah, right, absolutely. Well, and I think that's why I recommend it to people continually to read soldiers and hits in school like our capital. So actually, there's a set of books that let lay this out perfectly. You read Dusty Eski's wrote a book called The Pizest or The Devils. And it's a description of the initial breakdown of the Orthodox Christian society in Russia in the late 1800s, and the rise of radical socialist ideas. So it's sort of like the pro-droma to the Russian Revolution. It's a brilliant book, brilliant book, and it concentrates on the personalities that are involved. And then if you read after that, Soljanitz and Skulega Garpalago, where he details what he does in that book is quite remarkable. He says, look, there were tens of millions of people killed from 1919 to 1959 in the Soviet Union. And as a consequence of internal repression. And it's so dreadful that words can't do it just. I mean, it's absolutely dreadful what happened in the Soviet Union. I mean, just for starters, six million Ukrainians died in the 1930s because of enforced starvation. In fact, in the 1930s, here's how terrible it was. So all the food that the collective farmers newly collectivized farmers had produced, which wasn't very much, by the way, was taken from them and brought to the cities. So all the farmers starve to death. Now here's how draconian it got. So let's say you are the mother of some children and all your grain had been shipped off to the cities and you thought, well, I'm not going to have my children starve to death. I'm going to go out in the field and I'm going to have on my hands and knees, and I'm going to pick up the grains that are left over that the harvesters didn't count. Get, and I'm going to feed those to my kids. That was punishable by death. You were supposed to hand in those extra bits of grain so that they could be shipped to the city as well. So that was just the beginning of the fun in the Soviet Union. And what so genitson did was say, look, this wasn't a consequence of the Marxist system gone wrong. This was a consequence of the Marxist system. It was inevitable consequence of the axioms of the Marxist system. And then he'd lay that out. And it's, I think you got it right.

How much tyranny you have to impose in order to produce something like equality of outcome? And Thomas Sewell's talked about this a little bit too. He said, What the people who are agitating for equality of outcome don't understand is that you have to seed so much power to the authorities to the government in order to ensure equality of outcome that a tyranny is inevitable. And that's right. And the other problem with equality of outcome, this is also a big technical problem is like, well, what measure of outcome? You know, there's lots of outcomes, like, how happy are you? How much pain are you in? How healthy are you? How much money do you have? How much opportunity for movement forward do you have? What's the width of your social connections? Like, what's the quality of your friendships? Do you have exposure to our literature? Like, you know, you can multiply the number of dimensions of evaluation between people, innumerably, right? Because there's all sorts of ways to classify people. You're going to get equality of outcome on every one of those measures. is like everyone going to have to be equally happy in their relationship. And if not, why not? Why stop with economic? Why stop with pay? There's no place to stop. So and that's a huge technical problem because there is no place to stop. There will be no stopping. It's like nobody can have anything else. Nobody can have anything that everyone else doesn't have at the same time. That's the ultimate outcome of equality of outcome. Well, you think about what that would mean. It's terrible. Well, instantly, you think, oh, well, there's nothing but a tyrannical system could impose that.

No, they don't debate me. Well, the closest thing I think was to that was the debate I did at the University of Toronto about the Bill C-16 issues. But they didn't actually have a debate. They had a forum, which is the post-modern equivalent of a debate. It's supposed to be friendly or I suppose. But no, I haven't because people don't do it. They don't ask me to do it.

Oh, that's a good question. I think it goes back to the issue of inequality. And this is something that has to be dead seriously addressed. It's like, he might say, well, why is the left wing necessary? Let's put it that way. And so then a subset of that would be, well, why is the left wing attractive? Well, the left wing is necessary because inequality does spiral out of control. And so there has to be a political voice for the dispossessed. And you don't want people to stack up at zero, you know, where they can't play the game at all. It's a bad idea. Not only do you not, if people stack up at zero, they're too poor to get ahead at all, let's say. They're too poor to open a bank account. They're too poor to buy enough food like they're stuck at zero and they can't get out of it. It's a really bad scene because first of all, that's a lot of suffering. And that's not so good. Second of all, at least in principle, a lot of those people might have something to offer the world, or their children might, and you want to open up avenues of opportunity to them so that they can succeed, but so that everyone else can benefit from their success. And then the next thing is, well, if the inequality gets out of hand too much, then the whole society starts to destabilize, because if you get enough people stacked up at zero, especially young men, You get enough young men stacked up at zero. They think, oh, to hell with it, we'll just flip the whole board over. And it'll settle in a new configuration, and maybe we won't be stuck at zero in the new configuration. So it faux men's revolutionary thinking. So there's lots of reasons to be concerned about inequality. And so you need a voice on the left to say, look, we've got to parameterize the tendency towards inequality so that it doesn't destabilize the entire society so that it's everybody has an opportunity to advance. Like, yes, right, you need that. Okay, so that's the technical reason for the necessity of the left and then I think it's attractive because well because young people can be resentful partly because they're at the bottom of the heap so to speak. They're not because they're young like look you want to be you want to be poor in 18 you want to be rich in 80.

Well, that's the thing, you know, is that most of the people who are have a million dollars or more in the United States are old. Well, why is that? Well, really, do we need an explanation for that? It's like you've had a lot more time to make money. How would that be? That's the explanation. So that's one of the big drivers of inequalities, just simply age. But it's not obvious that the old rich people have an advantage over the young, starting out people. So so anyways, but anyhow, Maybe you're resentful and irritated because you're young and you're still at the bottom of the heap and you've got other problems too. It's more difficult for people of your race or ethnicity or gender, at least you think it is. And so you say, well, I want to make things fair. And then that's also driven by some real compassion because nobody really likes that. The consequences of radical inequality. Like nobody likes the fact that homeless people exist and have to go to the emergency ward to get treated and they don't have medical coverage and they have to live in tents on the street. And so if you have some compassion, then you think, well, we got to do more for the poor and dispossessed. It's like, okay, that's, that's an understandable sentiment. But the problem is is that the people, but the problem is is that It's that desire to help is contaminated by resentment and ideological certainty, and then also by something that George Orwell pointed out so nicely in his book, Road to Wagon Pier. It's like the typical middle class socialist, this was his diagnosis, and he was a socialist, by the way. His diagnosis was the typical middle class intellectual socialist, doesn't like the poor. In fact, they don't want everything to do with the poor. They're contemptuous of the poor, but they hate the rich. And I think it's even more devious than that because I think who they hate are the successful. Some of the successful are rich, but really who they hate is the successful. It's it's like cane enabled. It's the retelling of cane enabled. And so there's some positive motivations for being engaged on the left and there's a lot of negative motivations as well. And the people who are really driven by the radical left ideology, the real radicals, they're almost all driven by by resentment and hatred as far as I'm concerned. Now let's look at both extremes. So back to the idea of the ideological and verbal territory. I said with Bill C. 16 that I wouldn't speak the language of the radical leftists because I don't think that that language should define the game. But let's say it does. So here's the game. The world is a battleground of groups and they're battling for power. That's it. That's the game. And some of them win and they oppress those who don't win. So that's how we're going to view the world. OK, now the left is say, OK, well, here's the oppressed people. The oppressors. the patriarchy, patriarchal types. They should be ashamed of themselves and give up some power. The right wingers, the radical right wingers look at that and they say, oh, I see. So the game is ethnic identity. Is it? It's identity politics. Okay. We're white males. We're not going to lose. That's the right wing version of identity politics. It's like screw you. If we're going to divide into groups, we're going to divide into tribes. And I'm in my tribe. I'm not going to get all guilty and lose. I'm going to get all cruel and win. And that's like, then you think, well, there's people in the middle, they're kind of looking back and forth, which side of the identity politics spectrum, I'm going to fall in. Do I want to go with, do I want to be driven primarily by compassion? Am I going to accept guilt for my historical privilege? So that's one possibility. And then I'm the oppressor. I'm the member of the oppressor group. Or am I going to say, no, to hell with that? I'm just going to play to win. Well, then I'm going to go to the right. It's like, well, my sense is how about we don't play either of those games. And the reason we shouldn't play them is, well, the Soviets played the left-wing game. And like, killed, who knows how many tens of millions of people? You can't even count it accurately. The estimates range from 20 to 100 million. Those are pretty big error bars. And the Maoists may be 100 million, certainly 60 million. So, okay, that didn't work out so well. And then there's the Nazis, like, they played ethnic identity politics and racial superiority. It's like what do we want to play that game? See what I've been trying to do really what I've been trying to do for the last 30 years is say, look, there's heavy temptations to play those sorts of games. But that's not the only game in town. It's a much better game to play individual. It's like get your act together. stand up in the world. Make something of yourself. Stay away from the ideological oversimplifications. Set your house in order. That's rule six in the in this book. So I have a book rule in there says set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. And it's a very dark chapter about the motivations of the Columbine High School killers and this other guy named Carl Panzeram who is a serial rapist and arsonist and murderer. And he wrote an autobiography. And the Columbian kids also wrote about why they did what they did. They're resentful to the core, bitter, bitter, resentful, terrible. And well, I'm suggesting that people stay away from that resentfulness and bitterness, even though life is hard. And there's malevolence in the world. It's like, yeah, you can tell a story where everyone's a victim. Because we all die. We all get sick. And things happen to us that are bitter and terrible betrayal deceit lies like people hurt us on purpose. You know, so it's not just the tragedy of life. It's malevolence as well. It's everyone's a victim. You can tell that story. The problem is if you tell that story and you start to act it out, you make all of that worse. That's the problem. And so this is why partly I got attracted to Christian imagery, at least in part, because there's an idea in Christianity that you should pick up your goddamn cross and like walk up the hill. And that's Dramatically, that's correct. That's the right answer. It's like, you've got a heavy load of suffering to bear, and a fair bit of it's going to be unjust. It's what are you going to do about it, except it voluntarily, and try to transform as a consequence. That's the right answer. It's the right answer. Because the rest of it is tribalism. And we're too technologically powerful to get all tribal again.

Yeah, well, and bad is that is. And right with conflict as that is, the alternative is to separate, as you pointed out, into two camps that don't talk. Yes. And the thing is, the consequence of not talking is that you fight. That's the end game. Because the only way you can stop from fighting with other people is by negotiating with them. And one of the things that's also interesting, and this is partly why Silicon Valley leads to the left, is that a fair bit of your political preference is determined by your biological temperament. It's a strongly influence. So if you're a creative type who's kind of disorderly, Then you're likely to be on the liberal left end of the distribution. And if you're a non-creative type who's orderly and especially if you're orderly, then you tend to be on the right wing end of things. Well, why is that? Why do those variations exist? Well, they exist because some of the time your best strategy is to do what other people have done and shut the hell up and just do it. Run the algorithm, right? The pathways already laid clear. It works. Stay in the dam rut and move forward. okay so that's the conservative approach and when things are going right it's the right approach the problem is is that sometimes it's not the right approach because something is shifted and so something new has to emerge and so then there's a bunch of people who are adapted to the new and those are the entrepreneurial and creative types and of course they dominate Silicon Valley because it's a very entrepreneurial it's a very entrepreneurial what would you call it geography And so they're going to lean to the left, but they have to understand. People have to understand that the left and the right need each other, the liberals and the conservatives need each other. Liberals start companies. Conservatives run them. And the problem with the conservatives is, well, they can only run a company in one direction. Because they're conservative. They don't think outside the box. But so if the company is working in the product line is good and everything is stable, like hire some conservatives because they'll maximize efficiency and they'll move down that track. But if the track is no longer going in a good direction because something's changed, the environment's changed, well, then you've got to bring in the creative people. And so we need each other. And the only way that we can survive the fact that we're different and the fact that we need each other is by continually talking. We have talked constantly. It's like, well, how much of what we're doing should we preserve versus how much of what we're doing should we transform. And the answer is, we don't know because the environment keeps changing. So what do we do about that?

Oh, I was on a CBC Canadian broadcasting corporation interview a couple of days ago and they took me to task. I tweeted out this this invitation to the catboys to fill out this program that I developed called Future authoring and it helps people make a plan to get a lot of boys. Yeah, well, they're they're an online group. They're they're they're they run kick a stand. Yeah, it's this fictional polity. It's a it's a satire of identity politics essentially. We're going to be our ethnicity. Highly demonized.

Yeah. It's like graffiti. It's like online graffiti or something like that. The kickboys of the ones who are often using the peppy memes, for example, and you know, the left regards peppy as a hate symbol.

That's a kind of reprehensible frog. And so I tweeted out to them. I said, um, kickboys, um, seek your forechand. rescue yourself from the underworld, use code peppy for future authoring. So it's free for one week. So they had to figure out what it meant. Then I showed this picture of Michigan J. Frog, which is the frog from Warner Brothers cartoon, Dancing Frog that wouldn't perform when it was watching it. So, CBC Hold that out and said, well, look, aren't you like appealing to the radical right? And I said, well, no, what I'm doing, I said, look, these people are attracted by the radical right, although there are satirists and juvenile satirists and graffiti types. And, you know, they're playing a weird, so terrifying being naughty. That's exactly what they're doing. They're provoking. And my sense was, well, why don't you develop yourself as an individual and get the hell out of the ideological trap? So here's my program, which helps you write about your future, and that'll help you decide who you are as an individual, because that's the way out of the ideological trap. It's like, and that's the way, obviously, what's the way out of tribalism? First, the way out of tribalism is not to never join a tribe. you actually have to join a tribe as you mature right because what happens is first of all you're an infant and then you have your parents to to make a relationship with but then when you move from your parents you have your tribe you have your group maybe it's the music you listen to it's the gang you hang around with whatever you have to be socialized into the tribe you have to because otherwise you stay a dependent infant okay but now you're socialized into the tribe Well, is that where it ends? It's like, no, the next thing to do is differentiate yourself from the tribe, well, still knowing how to behave within the tribe. Well, that's the quality of individualism. And that's, I think, what the West got right. We figured that out. It's like, you're more than you, you have to be a member of a group, because otherwise, you're not socialized. You're not good for anyone. You know, I have to be able to play on a team, man. You have to have team loyalty. Okay. But that isn't where you should stop. You should take the next step and become a fully developed individual. See the problem with being just a group member is that the group, it's the problem with conservatism. The group is a fixed entity. It has its rules and its regulations, and if you remember that's all you are, but the group can go badly wrong so the group needs individuals to keep the group alive and rivivified. So you have to become an individual so you can rivivify the group. That's the call in the West, to heroism, essentially, to noble way of living is to develop yourself past your group identity so that you can reconfigure the game when that becomes necessary. And I think there's a very influential line of developmental psychology pioneered by Jean-Pierge that laid that out as a developmental progression. First, you're A child, then you're a member of a group, then you're an individual. It's like, get to the individual level. That's the solution. It's a solution to tribalism. But you have to accept responsibility to do that.

Yeah. Well, that's, you know, what's really cool and it's been really quite remarkable, I would say, is that what I've noticed when I've been speaking publicly, say, over the last year and a half because there's a whole in our culture where there should be a discussion about maturity, truth and responsibility. No one's talking about that. Okay. So now I'll come up and I'll start talking about that. I'll say, look, like, what should you do with your life? Well, take care of yourself. But take care of yourself in a way that also means that simultaneously you're taking care of your family. And that and also means that simultaneously you're taking care of the broader community. So that's kind of your goal. So orient yourself towards that. Personal success. But in a way that your success breeds success. Because if you're going to establish an aim, why not establish like a really good aim? That's a good one. It's good for you. It's good for everyone else. Yes. Okay. That'll give you life some meaning. Now, adopt, make a plan, generate a vision. That's what the future authoring program helps people with. Make a develop a vision of what your life could be like if it was worth living, despite all its suffering. It's like what would you need so that you would be happy to be alive? You'd find your life meaningful, so you don't get all bitter and resentful and cruel and hostile and ideologically-addled and murderous and genocidal. It's like none of that. You think real hard, how would you have to configure your life so that despite its suffering and the malevolence that's part of it that you would regard it as worthwhile? So that's up to you to develop a vision, then put a plan into practice. And so when I talk to people about this, and most of my audiences are young men, it's probably about 65, 35, more and more women are showing up, but that's about what it is right now. The halls are dead silent. You could hear a pin drop because nobody's said so clearly for like 50 years that almost all the meaning that you will need to get you through the hard times of your life is going to be a consequence of adopting responsibility, not of rights and impulsive action, impulsive freedom. Fine. Right. Yeah. Got it. Freedom. No problem. Even freedom to do impulsive things. Fine. But that isn't where you're going to find the meaning that keeps you sustained through the storms of life. That's going to be. You take care of yourself. You take care of your intimate partner. You take care of your damn family. You don't run off. You take care of your community. You rescue the wisdom from the past. You stand up straight and you be courageous despite the fact that life is tragic and tainted by malevolence. It's like that's the ancient wisdom.

Yep. Well, the other thing I've been telling young men is that, and this is something I think that you could relate to tremendously is I read this New Testament line while a decade ago and I could never understand it. It's the line is the meek shell in here at the earth. And I thought there's some wrong with that line. It just doesn't make sense to me. Meek just doesn't seem to me to be a moral virtue. And so I did a series of biblical lectures this year, like 15 of them, and that was also a weird little experience that we can talk about. But I was looking through these, these sayings, these maxims, and that was one of them to make children here at the earth. But I've been using this site called Bible Hub, and it's very interesting. It's organized very interesting. So you have a biblical line and then they have like three pages of commentary on each line. And so because people have commented on every verse in the Bible to the two degree that's almost unimaginable. So you can look and see all the interpretations and all the translations and get some sense of what the genuine meaning might be. And the line, the meat shell and hair at the earth, Meek is not a good translation, or the word has moved in the 300 years or so, 300 years or so since it was translated. What it means is this. Those who have swords and know how to use them, but keep them sheathed, will inherit the world. And that's another thing I've been telling you.

That's a big difference. It's so great. And so like one of the things I tell young men, well, a young women as well. But the young men really need to hear this more, I think, is that you should be a monster. You know, because everyone says, well, you should be harmless. Virtuous. You shouldn't do anyone any harm. You should cheat your competitive instinct. You shouldn't try to win. You know, you don't want to be too aggressive. You don't want to be too assertive. You want to take a back seat and all of that. It's like, no. wrong. You should be a monster, an absolute monster, and then you should learn how to control it.

Right, exactly. That's exactly it. Yeah. And that's exactly right. And so when I tell young men that, they think, well, lots of them are competitive. They're low in egregious, you know, because that's part of being competitive temperamentally. So because there's something wrong with being competitive, There's nothing wrong with it. There's something wrong with cheating. There's something wrong with being a tyrant. There's something wrong with winning unfairly. All of those things are bad. But you don't want people to win. What's the difference between trying to win and striving?

But also teaches you how to lose.

One definition of a winner is someone who never let losing stop them. Yes. You know, and the idea that a single loss in a competition is somehow a defeat is completely insane. First of all, well, let's say you're a hockey player and you're good player and you lose the tournament. It's like, well, so what? You played the game. You're increasing your skills. It's like there's always next time. And one of the things that I've also been telling people, informing people about his idea that life isn't a game. It's a series of games. And the right ethic is to be the winner of the series of games. And part of that means you all have to learn how to be a good loser because you're not going to win every single game.

same feeling you get when you lose a martial arts tournament or anything else losing is important well you might also say like let's say that you can pick your level of competition in life to some degree okay so let's say you pick a level of competition where you're always winning It's like, well, all that means is you've picked the wrong level of competition. Because, you know, like, let's say you're a grandmaster chess player and you're all you do's play amateurs. And every night you go home and congratulate yourself on what a genius you are because you just stomped these people left right in center. It's like, you're not a genius. You're dim with what you should be doing is playing people who are beating you like, well, as much as you can tolerate. Right. So maybe that's 40% of the time. Maybe it's 60% of the time. But that way, because to be a winner, You want to be disciplined. You want to know what you're doing. And then you want to be on the edge where your skills are being developed. And if you're going to be on the edge where your skills are going to be developed, you're out of place where loss, where losing is always a possibility. Because otherwise you're not pushing yourself beyond your current capacity. And so one of the things that I've outlined in 12 rules for life is a theory of meaning. Because meaning, as far as I'm concerned, that sense of meaningful engagement is the antidote to malevolence and suffering, essentially. Because you want to have a life that's so engaging that you think, despite the fact that I'm limited and that we're mortal and that life is tragedy and there's evil in the world. Despite all that, this is worth doing. And I think that there's a technical meaning that genuinely exists and that's the meaning that you get when you're in a domain where you have some discipline and some skill. So you're laying out your competence and your ability. But you're simultaneously pushing yourself to develop past where you are. That's really engrossing. And what that is doing is expanding your competence. And so life is suffering and betrayal in many senses of the world. But you can adopt a way of traversing through life that is more powerful than the tragedy in the malevolent.

Yeah, well, so, so part of that is, so imagine it, so imagine that you're this loose collection of all these things that need to be gratified, that need to be fed. It's perfectly reasonable way of looking at it biologically. Okay, so now you have to conjure up a mode of being that satisfies all those necessities simultaneously. But then, and this is a technical explanation of why the postmodernist insistence that there's an infinite number of explanations turns out to be wrong. An infinite number of interpretations. There's a very finite number of viable interpretations. So the first constraint is what exactly what you just said. You have these inner demons, let's say, all of which need to be satisfied. But they need to be satisfied in a very particular way. Not only do they need to be satisfied today. But they need to be satisfied today in a way that doesn't interfere with satisfying them next week, next month, next year, and in a decade. So because there's no point in you betraying your future self to gratify your present self. It's a stupid game. OK, so you're constrained by the necessity of satisfying yourself. But of maintaining that satisfaction across time. But then it gets even worse. That's hard enough. But it's like there's an infinite number of use extending indefinitely into the future and all of them have to be satisfied simultaneously. But then it's worse because it isn't just you. You have to figure out how to gratify all those internal demons in a sustainable way in a way that other people not only don't object to, but probably help you with and that benefits them at the same time. Well, then you think, well, they just aren't that many ways of solving that problem. And we know some of them. One of them is reciprocity. If you go out of your way for me, it's incumbent on me to notice that and to attempt in some manner to repay you. And if we're good friends, that's what we'll do. If we're good brothers, that's what we'll do. That's what you do with your wife. It's a reciprocal arrangement. And that keeps things flowing properly across time. So there is an ethic. This is the answer to the post-modern conundrum. It's like, well, it's life meaningless. You say everything just nihilist is nihilism, the right answer, or maybe what would you call identification with an ideology as a counter-position to nihilism? So nihilism is wrong. Life is meaningful. And that's what 12 rules for life is about. The first meaning of life is suffering and malevolence. is indisputable realities. Okay? Well, what's after that? Well, there's a noble way of being that allows you to exist properly, despite that, and also not to make it worse. So can your life be meaningful enough so that you, what is it? Confront chaos voluntarily. Establish and revivify order. Constraint malevolence. That's a good three-part doctrine for life. There's things to do, and so that's what I've been talking to, the audiences that I've been seeing over the last year. It's like, get your act together. Stand up fourth rightly. That's rule one. Stand up straight with your shoulders back. There's a vulnerable position, right? Because you're open. But it's a powerful position, because it means that you're brave enough to take what's coming. And it isn't like what's coming isn't dangerous. It's dangerous. So, but your best bet is to be dancing on your feet and ready for it. Pay attention and be awake. And to treat yourself properly, that's rule two. It's figured out how to treat yourself as if you're someone worth coming to the aid of. To detach yourself in a bit and say, okay, I'm going to set up my life so that it's good for me and good for other people as well. That's a corollary to that. So, the book is all about all about the meanings of life, the negative meanings, suffering, malevolence, those are indisputable realities. And then a mode of being that integrates the sorts of things that you were talking about, these underlying needs with everyone else's and like doing that voluntarily. It's a call to responsibility and meaning. And I actually think it's not. The thing that's been so exciting for me for the last three decades, looking into these things is that I believe that There is a genuine human ethic. It's not arbitrary. It has to do with reciprocity, for example. It has to do with honesty. That's another thing, is that you should speak the truth. Because your life turns out better if you speak the truth. And so does everyone else. So in this biblical lecture series I did. I looked at the first chapter in Genesis and there's a theory in there. It's really interesting theory. And the theory is that there's three parts to being. There's chaos and potential. And that would be like the potential you should live up to, because everyone says, well, you should live up to your potential. It's like what the hell's that? You can't measure it or touch it or taste it, feel it. It's this hypothetical thing that everyone regards is real. It's like the future. What's the future? What's not here yet? You can't measure it. What makes you think it's real? Well, We act as if it's real and that seems to work. So there's potential, that's one, that's chaos, chaotic potential. Then there's order. And that's the structure that you need in order to confront the chaos. And you'd be born with that, biologically. And then there's your ability to call forth from the potential new order. That's what you do with your speech. And that's what happens in the first chapter of Genesis is that God uses God order, let's say, uses the power of truthful speech. That's the logos to transform potential into order. And that's what people are made in the image of. So there's this theory. It's a lovely theory that's laid out right at the beginning of the Bible that says that if you tell the truth, you transform the potential of being into a habitable actuality. That's how it works. So say, well, how do you make the world better? Tell the truth. Because the world you bring into being as a consequence of telling the truth will be a good world. And I believe that's true. I think it's true metaphorically. I think it's true, theologically. And I think it's true like at the practical and scientific level as well. I think it's true in all those levels simultaneously. So that's been ridiculously exciting too to sort through.

Especially the social psychologist is push this idea of self-esteem. You should feel good about yourself. And I think, why would you tell someone 20 that? It's like, you should feel good about who you are. It's like, no, you shouldn't. Why should you feel good about who you are? It's like you should feel good about who you could be. That's way better because you got 60 years to turn into who you could be.

Well, I think I think confidence is a big part of it. It is. It is. And I'm not saying that people shouldn't have confidence, but like often you take young people, say they're 16 to 22, and they're not really feeling that good about who they are, because their life is chaotic and in disorder and they don't know where they're going and they don't know which way is up.

Right. But the thing is it has to be stated with precision. It's like, yes. It's like, you should treat yourself as if you're valuable. especially in potential but you should concentrate on who you should become especially if you're young and so let's say you're miserable and nihilistic and chaotic and depressed and all of that now and you have your reasons you know terrible parenting abuse all of those things it's like well you should feel good about yourself it's like no no it's not it's not the right message is that It's more like you should understand how much potential there is within you to set that straight. And then you should do everything you can to manifest that in the world. And it will set it straight. And that's better than self esteem. It's like you're in a crooked horrible position. Okay, fine. There's a lot of suffering and pain associated with that. Yeah, you can't just feel good about that because it's not good. But you can do something about it. You can genuinely do something about it. And I think all the evidence suggests that that's the case. So I'm telling young people, look, there's no matter how bad your situation is. I'm not going to pretend it's okay. It's not okay. It's tragic. Tainted with malevolence. And some people really get hurt by malevolent people. Like, you know, terribly hurt. Sometimes they never recover. It's really awful. But there's more to you than you think. And if you stand up and face it with the positive with a noble vision, with discipline and intent, You can go far farther to overcoming it than you can imagine. And that's the principle upon which you should predicate your behavior. And I think that one of the things that's really nice about being the clinical psychologist is that this isn't just guess work. Like one of the things, we know two things in clinical psychology. One is truthful conversations redeem people. Because if you come to a clinical psychologist, whose worth is solved. You'll have a truthful conversation. The conversation is, well here's what's wrong with my life. And here's what caused it. You know, maybe it takes a year to have that conversation. And both of the participants are doing everything they can to lay it out properly. Here's how it might be fixed. Here's what a beneficial future might look like. And so it's a completely honest conversation if it's working well. And all that's happening in the conversation is that the two people involved are trying to make things better. That's the goal. Let's see if we can have a conversation that will make things better. okay so we know that works it does make things better and then another thing we know is that well let's say there's a bunch of things that you're afraid of that are in your way so you have some vision about who you want to be maybe you have to you know you want to be successful in your career so you have to learn to talk in front of a group It's like, okay, well, you're afraid of that. No wonder you don't want to be humiliated. So, okay, so what do we do about that? Well, maybe we first get you to speak in front of one person and then three people. You know, for five minutes and then for ten minutes, like, graduated exposure to what you're afraid of. Voluntary graduated exposure to what you're afraid of is curative and that's true. It works. The documentation is in. It's how people learn. So, So to tell people that if you confront the world forthrightly, if you speak the truth, and you expose yourself courageously to those things that you're afraid of, that your life will improve, and so will the life of people around you, like as far as I'm concerned, that's as close to undeniable fact as we've got. And it also dovetails nicely with the underlying archetypal stories, a heroic story. It's like, go out there, find the dragon, confront it. It's a dragon, it might eat you, it's dangerous. But it's worse to cower at home and wait for it to come and devour you. Go out there, confront it, get the gold, share it with the community. It's like, yeah, it's the oldest story of mankind.

Yeah, well, it's no, there's a couple of reasons for that. One is, well, what makes you think that you're someone we should listen to. It's like, hey, fair enough, you know, so you've got to be poked a bunch to see if that's true. And then the next thing is, well, it's painful to understand how much of what you're doing isn't productive. So I'll give you an example. So I've done this a couple of times with classrooms full of students, usually when I'm lecturing about career development, say, okay. How much time do you waste so then I get the class to vote? How many of you waste 10 hours a day? It's like 10% of the kids will put up their hands. And it's interesting because I don't define what constitutes waste. I just asked the question, so they're diagnosing themselves, right? I'm not saying you're wasting 10 hours a day. I'm just asking. It's like, given your own attitude, how much time are you wasting? 10 hours a day. It's like 10% of the people put up their hands. Well, when you get to like six hours a day, 80% of the people put up their hands. So then we do the arithmetic. It's like, because I like doing arithmetic with people. People hate arithmetic, but I like doing it. It's like, okay, six hours a day. 42 hours a week so let's call that a work week 40 hours a week so so that's that's a work week let's say what's your time worth your university student well certainly worth minimum wage because obviously but it's worth way more than that because if you spend a productive hour when you're 20 then you gain the benefits of that hour for the rest of your life. So there's the compounding effect of time spent when we were young. So I say, well, let's assume your times worth 50 bucks an hour, which I think is an underestimate, but whatever, let's call it 50. We call it 25, but we'll call it 50. That's $2,000 a week, you're wasting. It's $100,000 a year. So like, how much better would your life be if you weren't wasting $100,000 a year? It's like, what is that over 40 years? 4 million dollars it's like your rich you don't even know it quit wasting time by your own definition it's like people shake their heads like I never thought about it that way it's like yeah Think about it that way. Don't waste your damn life. And then you think, well, why would people be resistant to that message? It's like, well, you really want to wake up and figure out that you're wasting half your life. And you know, when people do that kind of wasting, they actually hate it. You know, and I've had lots of people come to my clinical practice who were chronic procrastinators. You know, and so there watching YouTube videos say, but not ones that are good for them, although sometimes they will do that. But just browsing in that kind of mindless way that you do when you're not paying attention and you're trying to kill time. And people doing that, they feel bad. They get depressed. They feel anxious. They can't get away from it. They feel kind of quasi-addicted. That's what they do.

Absolutely, but there's this feeling of kind of internal rot and corruption that goes along with it. It's like, yeah, well, you're wasting your life. It's like, so it's painful. It's painful to recognize that. Then it's painful to think, oh my God, look how undisciplined I am. I don't know anything. I can't use a schedule. I can't stick to a calendar. I don't have any aims. I don't know anything about the world. Right? And maybe there's a part of me that's bitter because I haven't got everything already. And I'd like just like to say to hell with it. That's the recognition of the union shadow. It's like that's what makes you vicious and and and and untrustworthy all of that. No one wants to look at that and no bloody wonder. Hey, the alternative is worse.

Yeah, well, so you're right just telling people not to waste their lives is not enough. And this is another reason why I so much enjoy being in clinical psychologists because clinical psychologists don't stick with high level abstractions, especially the behaviors that are really practical. It's like, okay, you want to get your act together. It's like, well, how about if let's say you're not studying? Well, and so we do a real analysis of how much you're studying. You say, well, I go to the library for hours a day. It's like, yeah, yeah, okay. How much time do you actually study in the library? Well, you know, I waste time. I have to travel there. I look at my phone. It's like, okay, well, how much 15 minutes, half an hour? How much is real studying? Well, maybe we figure out it's 15 minutes. Say, OK, so what you're going to do for one week is you're going to study for half an hour. That's all. You don't get to go to the library for four hours. You have to sit down. We'll figure out a time, 10 o'clock in the morning, whatever. We'll put it in your schedule. Try to study for half an hour. No more. And then just come back and let's have a conversation about how well that worked. And people will come back and they say, well, you know, I managed it four days. And one day I went over and one day I couldn't do it at all. It's like, okay, that's better. Instead of 75 minutes of studying, you know, 15 minutes a day for seven days. What is that? 15, 70, 105 minutes. You've managed about 210 minutes. So you've already produced an improvement of 50%. And you're bumbling horrible way. You've got a 50% improvement in one week. It's like that's deadly. It's like, so in the future authoring program, What we ask people to do is, well, think about your life along six dimensions. What do you want for your, so that the goal is this, you're going to take care of yourself. You're going to have a life in three years that justifies it's suffering. That's the goal. So you can invent the damn life, but you have to think what you would be satisfied with, so you wouldn't be all bitter and resentful. It's like, okay, what do you want from your family? What do you want from your friends? How are you going to educate yourself? What do you want for your career? How are you going to use your time outside of work? How are you going to handle drugs and alcohol and other temptations like that? How are you going to keep yourself mentally and physically healthy? These are open questions like you get to answer them. The idea is you can have whatever you want, but you have to figure out what it is. It has to be realistic and you have to figure out what it is. It's okay. So now develop a vision. What's your life going to be like in three to five years? So you write it down. Then we do something else, which is okay. Your bad habits and your resentment and your bitterness and all of that, your procrastination gets completely out of hand and you auger down and you're in your own personal version of hell in three to five years. What does that look like? Everyone knows that. It's like everyone can look into the future and think, well, if I keep going on this dark path, this is where I'll end up. Well, then you've got little hell outline for yourself to run away from and you've got a little heaven outline for yourself to run towards and then you're motivated. Because sometimes, you know, you're just hopeful. I would like a good thing to happen. It's like, yeah, but I'd like to drink half a bottle of whiskey tonight too. It's like, so which is it going to be? Well, just being hopeful about the future might not be enough, but then you think, oh, I see. There's that little hell thing that I outlined that's waiting for me. And maybe I'm afraid of taking the next step forward because it's demanding and challenging. It's like, yeah, I'm afraid of that, but I'm way more afraid of where I might end up if I don't get my act together. And people should be, that's why there are conceptions of hell in so many religions. It's like hell's a real place. Whether it's eternal, that's a whole different question. Whether it's waiting for you in the afterlife, that's a whole different question. But if you've never met anyone in hell, you haven't lived very long. You haven't had your eyes open.

Yeah, especially when it's compounded by the fact that you know you did it to yourself. That's the real fun. That's the real fun part. It's like I'm having a bitch of a time and I richly deserve it. Jesus, that's rough, man.

better to have the conflict in yourself. That's another thing I really learned, not only from the New Testament, but a fair bit from that, the idea is that, well, there's evil in the world of all sorts, and some of it's evil in other people. And some of it's the evil in your brother's heart. But the part of it that you can really do something about, that's the malevolence in your own heart. You can actually do something about that. And that's actually way more useful than you think. So because if you can face it in you, then you start to understand it. And that also makes you strong enough to identify it and to fight it when you see it in the external world. Plus you don't do any harm. It's like there's lots of people all over the world going out and doing reprehensible things and you might say, well, you should go out and protest against them. It's like then sometimes you should. But most of the time you should think, where am I falling short of the ideal? My own ideal doesn't have to be one that someone puts on you. Where am I less than I should be? Where am I better? Where am I making the world a worse place than it has to be? that you ask yourself those questions, you'll be in for a big shock. Say, well, what would happen if you stop doing that? That's what 12 rules for life is about. It's like, stop saying things that make you weak. Stop telling lies that you know to be lies. Stop doing things you know to be useless and counterproductive. Aim high, adopt some responsibility, and then see what they hell happens. It's like it'll work. And that's what I'm hoping people will do.

That's exactly it. That I have a chapter in there on raising kids. It says, don't like your kids. Don't let your kids do anything. It makes you dislike them. It's like, well, that's first predicated on the observation that you're quite a monster and it would be better for your kids if they didn't get on your bad side. And again, because I'm a clinical psychologist.

Because I've watched families. Like, I've seen families where it's as if every single person in the family has their hands around the neck of the family member that's close to them. And they're squeezing. But only tight enough to strangle them in 20 years.

Yeah, but that's, that's, you shouldn't be it. It shouldn't be accidental.

Oh, that's easy. A positive monster is somebody who says no and means it. Because when you say no, what you mean is there isn't anything you can do to me that will make me agree to do this. Why is that a monster? Because you have to be because no one will take you seriously otherwise. No one will take you seriously. Like, no means if you keep pushing this something that you do not like will happen to you. That's what no means. You don't have any strength of character unless you can put up a fight. You know, and to be able to say no to something is to be able to put up a fight. So when you can't do that, if you're, if you can be pushed around, you'll just get argued into submission, or you'll feel guilty because you're causing conflict or something like that.

Well, there is, there is the potential, there is the potential for confusion. You say, well, is that something that can be, does I think that monster is a horrible thing?

Well, when you fight someone who's formidable say, what do you think of the person that you're fighting? Like, how would you characterize them? They have a monstrous side because they can, they can, they can bring physical substantial physical force to bear on the situation, and Andy, be willing to do it. So they're not naive and harmless by any stretch of the imagination, right? They have a well-developed capacity for me, him. You think, well, is that monstrous? It's like, well, I would say, yes, I would say fierce. Fear is fine.

Okay, well, so fair enough. Well, so back to the situation with your kids. Well, you definitely don't want to have your kids act in a way that awakens your inner monster. Right. Let's put it that way. And so you need to organize your family with a certain amount of discipline and a certain amount of structure so that you get to do what you want, which is back to the point that you made earlier, so that you're happy to have your kids around so that you won't take revenge on them. And so you want to lay your life out so that Well, so that it's providing you what you need to not be bitter and to work for your best interests and for the interests of everyone else. That would be lovely and I think it's attainable. You know, because the book is very dark, and I'm a very dark guy in some ways, because I've looked at the terrible things that people do to one another.

Yeah, well, the tribalism issue that you were discussing earlier doesn't seem to be all that what would you say debatable that if we degenerate into tribalism, the probability of bloodshed becomes vastly enhanced. It's like, well, that always happens when people evolve into tribalism. So, and I'm pointing to a particular kind of tribalism. I guess the darkness is that, you know, I'm very aware of the terrible things that people not only are likely to do to each other, but do do to each other all the time. I mean, what? It's about 40% for divorce rate, right? Yes, we go through a fairly fair bit of ugliness to get to divorce.

Maybe.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, that'd be the hope. You know, one of the things I'd be suggesting to people is that they pick something difficult to do. I read this, this funny little paragraph by Kierkegaard, it was written about 1840, and he was thinking about his role as a student and writer, and he was a student and writer forever. He never really had a career apart from that. And he said that he wasn't one of these people who was capable of inventing something wonderful to make life easier for everyone, like so many people were doing during the Industrial Revolution. He said, well, maybe I'm one of these people who's benefit to society will be that I will make things more difficult for everyone because there will come a time when what people want not they don't want ease they want difficulty instead and I think well that is what people want that is what they want you think while I want an easy happy life it's like no actually that isn't what you want a few people want is things that are difficult that they can overcome Yeah, right. That's right. They want an optimal challenge.

Yeah, one of the mysteries is why that feeling exists. You know, it's a genuine. It's not a trivial thing that it's to say I did something difficult and that was worthwhile. Basically what you're saying to yourself is, well, there was a lot of suffering attendant on that along with the just general suffering of life. But it turned out that was worth it. That's what you want. It's like you want that sense that you're engaged in something that's worth it. And I say, well, like I try to not Like a casual optimist about these sorts of things. I mean, one of the things I do in 12 rules for life is lay out the rationale that drives people like the Columbine High School killers because I understand that rationale. I've studied it for a long time. I know why they did what they did and they have a powerful argument, but it's wrong. But you don't, there's no sense in showing how it's wrong before showing that it's a powerful argument. Like, life is suffering. There is lots of malevolence. It's no wonder that people want to bring being itself to a halt. They want to take revenge on it. It's not surprising. It's the wrong way of going about it. The right way is akin to the sorts of things that you were just observing is you take on a difficult task that pushes you past where you are already and you succeed in it and you get this sense that yes, that was worthwhile. It's like that's what you want. You want to live in that place where things are worthwhile. That's paradise on earth. That's what that is. And it isn't some happy little place where someone's feeding you peeled grapes. That isn't what it is. It's more like It's more like victory on the honorable battlefield or something like that.

Yeah, I talked to one of the people that I was working with who had a vision for retirement. I said, well, what's your vision for retirement? Well, I see myself in the beach, you know, some tropical country drinking margaritas, and I thought, first, that's not a plan. Like the travel posters. Like, okay, let's walk through this. All right, so you go down to this tropical country and you go sit on the beach and you have a margarita. It's like, okay, well, how many margaritas? Like 10? Okay, so you're going to do that. What you're going to do that for six months? You'll be dead. Yeah, well, you'll be this like pathetic sunburned like fat. Yeah, unhappy, hungover, surrounding. Yeah, yeah, it's like that's you've graduated. So how long can you have a margarita on a beach? Like maybe you can do that once every six months for like 10 minutes, something like that. It's not a vision.

But maybe. Right, exactly. But it's like this 16 year old fantasy of paradise. It's like, well, And it just doesn't work out. And the thing is, the thing that sustains people through life really is the lifting of a worthwhile burden. It's something like that. And it's partly because we're social animals, right? It's like we're evolved to be useful to the people around us because they're much more likely to let us live if we're like that. and and it's been very fun talking to especially talking to young men about this is like well and that's the other thing too is I think the world the world is full of darkness let's say and we could say each of us have a little bit of light and if we released that light if we let it shine properly Christ it's too cliched to go on with in some sense but the world is a lesser place if you do not reveal from within yourself what you have to reveal. And the fact that the world is a lesser place actually turns out not to be trivial. Like if you aren't everything you could be, more people will die, more people will suffer, more evil will be unconstrained, more tyranny will reign, more chaos will remain chaotic and dangerous, all of that.

It's something similar to that, but it can even be more local. It's like, your family is more messed up than it could be if you were less messed up than you are. Right. So if you just got your act together, like 10% more, your family would be 1% better. Right. So like, well,

And it ripples fast. Yes. That's the other thing that's so cool, is that people think, well, there's seven billion of us. And each of us is just this separate dust mode floating in the cosmos. And what the hell difference does it make? What you do anyways. It's like that is not how we're connected. It's like, you're the center of a network. And you know, well, you know way more people than this. But let's say typically, You know what's out. You're going to know a thousand people in your life. Well enough to have an impact on them. Okay. And each of those thousand people is going to know a thousand people. So you're one step from a million and two steps from a billion. And we are networked. Technically, that's how human interactions work. And so when you do something that you shouldn't do, it's worse than you think. And when you do something that you should do, it's better than you think. And so you think, well, this is why I've been telling people, clean up your room. It's like, well, your room is actually network too. It's not that easy to clean up your room to set it. So you want your room to be set up so that when you walk in there, it tells you to be better than you generally are. It's organized, it's got direction, everything's in its place. You try to do that in a chaotic household. You know, I've watched people do this because I had students do these sorts of things as assignments. I'd say, look, pick a small moral goal, clean up your room, and just write down what happens as a consequence. So maybe these are students in a chaotic household. The whole place is a bloody mess. No one's taking any responsibility for anything. And so they decide they're going to start to clean up their room. And then the people in the household notice, well, the first thing they do is get pissed off. It's like, who do you think you are? Like you think you're better than us? Like why do you think this is worthwhile? Who made who died and made you God? All of that. So just by trying to organize this little part of their life, they immediately run into the people whose actions they're casting in a dim light by trying to improve themselves to some degree. They might have to have like a thorough war in their household to be allowed to do something as simple as keep the room orderly. They find out very rapidly that a that's way more difficult than it sounds and b that the consequences of it are far more far reaching than people think. So that's quite fun. You know, because maybe part of it is is that Like everything around you is full of potential. Everything. Maybe more potential than you could ever possibly utilize. And so maybe all you have is this little rat hole of a room in some rundown place in the world. It's like, fix it up. There's more there than you think. See what happens if you fix it up. And you'll fix yourself up simultaneously because you have to get disciplined in order to fix up the room. Then you have a fixed up room and you'll be a more fixed up person. It's like, you think that nothing will happen as a consequence of that? It's like all hell break loose as a consequence of that.

Well, people don't take what they have right in front of them seriously enough. It's like the wasting time thing. They don't do the arithmetic. You know, when they they'd also don't understand, they devalue what they have right in front of them. I can another client I worked with was having a hard time putting his kid to bed at night. And so we did the arithmetic. It's like, well, I'm fighting with my kid for 45 minutes a night trying to get him to go to bed. Okay, so let's analyze that. All right, so what does that mean? Well, it means that both of you end the day upset. That's not so good, because why would you want that? It means that you're spending 45 minutes fighting. When you could spend 20 minutes doing something positive, like reading to them, say, means that you don't get to spend that time with your wife, so she's not very happy with you, plus you're annoyed, because you don't see her, plus you blame it on the kid, because he's the proximal cause. It's like that's pretty damn ugly. And then let's do the arithmetic. It's like seven days a week, 45 minutes a day. Let's call that five hours, 20 hours a week. 240 hours in a year, it's six. You're spending a month and a half of work weeks fighting with your four-year-old son. You think you're going to like him? You don't like anyone you spend a month and a half a year fighting with. It's a bad idea. Fix it. It's important. Get him to bed. Make it peaceful. You do it like these things that repeat every single day. That's a motif in this book too. Your life isn't margaritas on a beach in Jamaica. That happens now and then. Those are exceptions. Your life is how your wife greets you at the door when you come home every day. Because that's like 10 minutes a day. Your life is how you treat each other over the breakfast table. Because that's an hour and a half or an hour every single day. You get those mundane things right. Those things you do every day. You concentrate on them and you make them pristine. It's like you've got 80% of your life put together.

Oh, I haven't adjusted to it. How old are you?

Yeah, yeah, I had a little bit of exposure. I did some work with a public television station in Canada. And you know, I had my little flashes of public appearances that compared to, yeah, that's just crazy.

Yeah, they're about 2 million views each, and then about- That's nothing compared to YouTube.

Yeah, so the audio is like five times that or something. Yeah, so that's, yeah, it's completely crazy. I know I haven't adjusted to it. It's like, I don't know, I mean, have you adjusted to your status? I'm numb. Yeah, so what's it like when you think about it you wake up at the morning and you think okay I'm gonna get a billion downloads this you don't think that I think I'm gonna talk to Jordan Pearson what I want to talk about that's that's how I handle it it's exactly the same thing for the last 15 months this is what I've done go up in the morning I've looked at the like 25 things I have to do in a mad rush before seven o'clock at night. I think I'm going to go through them and I'm going to concentrate on them. Do the best job I can. Then it's seven o'clock tonight but I have a rest. I'm going to take a look at what I have to do tomorrow and I'm going to do the same thing. That's what I've been doing. And then when I stand back a little bit like when it sort of dawns on me, you know, then it's disconcerting like it's surreal. I can't figure it out. I can't understand it. But then I, but there's no sense dwelling on that because first of all, I don't know how to conceptualize it. I don't know why it's happening exactly. Like I think what's happened is that two things, one is that I said it, there was something I wouldn't do with regards to this legislation. And I meant it. I actually meant it. I wasn't going to use those words under legal compulsion, period, no matter what, and actually meant that. So there was that. But then I think the more relevant thing is that I've been studying these old stories. These archetypal stories for a very long period of time. And they have power. They really have power. And they manifest themselves everywhere. They manifest themselves in movies and in books. I mean Harry Potter's a mythological story. And it made Roland richer than the Queen of England. You know, these stories have power. And I was fortunate enough to study of large number of people, large number of scholars who knew what that power was, Carl Jung in particular. And I could make it more accessible to people. And so that's a big part of it. But what the overall significance of that is, well, I just, it just leaves me speechless. I mean, this Kathy Newman thing's a good example. And I mean, so many things have happened. I've got involved. I've been in a scandal of some sort. a serious scandal of some sort probably every three weeks for a year and a half. You know, and their things that are just, well, the James Demore thing is a good example of that. That's a big deal. You know, that explosion that emerged around him in the court case that's coming out of it. It's a big deal. And this thing with Lindsey Shepherd, that was the worst scandal that ever hit a Canadian university. And then there was all the protests. And then there was what happened with with channel 4 in the UK. And it's like, I don't know what to make of it. I don't what what I'm trying to do is have a good conversation when I come and talk to somebody like you where we can have a good conversation. I'm trying not to say anything stupid. That's really what I'm trying to do is to not say anything stupid.

Yeah. What? And it's been high stakes poker. Yeah. You know, for it's not quite so bad now because especially after what happened with Channel 4 and some journalists like people have been trying to take me out for quite a long time and it's not it isn't working.

Well, you know, that's not a bad start.

Well, and I also decided like a long time ago, and I think this runs through 12 rules for life is Well, I believe that people's decisions tilt the world towards heaven or hell. I think there's no more accurate way of describing the consequences of each of your decisions than that. You face potential. That's what you face. That's what you face in the world. It's potential. It's not material reality. It's potential. And every decision you make, you're deciding whether you want to make the world better or worse. And if you like the ultimate better is heaven and the ultimate worse is hell. We know how to make the world into hell. We've done that multiple times. Much of the 20th century was that. It's like I looked at all that and I thought, okay, I would rather that the world didn't degenerate into hell. And I understand why people wanted to degenerate into hell. They're angry. They're angry because they suffer. They suffer unfairly and they suffer because people hurt them. And so they think this is a bad game. I'm not going to help make it better. I'm angry. I'm going to make it worse, even. That's what the Columbine kids did. You know, that's what all the mass shooters do. They say to hell with this, I hate it.

Yeah, worse than that. They want to obliterate the game. Yes. And they want to do it with as much malice as possible, just to obtain revenge. And I understand that. But I decided a long time ago that I would rather not play that game. I think it, I think that it's possible that we could make the world better. I really believe that too. So I think, well, I'm trying to tell people, look, There's more to you than you think. There's more potential. There's more than enough potential to go around. There's definite suffering and malevolence in the world. We could fix it. You haven't got anything better to do.

Yeah, well, there's, and it's, and think the other thing too is that I've realized that people actually act like what they confront in the world is potential. It's so funny because whatever potential is, it's not materially measurable. But if you tell someone, you're not living up to your potential. They go, yeah, well, I know that. It's like, well, what is that potential that you're not living up to? And then when you say, well, there's potential in front of you, you know that. You can walk out on the street and you go right or left or straight ahead. you're facing this thing that isn't fully formed and you get to decide how it's going to form and you can make it better. And so my question is like the world's a rough place. There's no doubt about it. It's a harsh place. But my question is, what would happen if we stop making it worse? How good could it be if we stop making it worse? And I don't know if there's an upper limit to that. I get might be maybe we could make it really, really, really good. Why not? And we don't have anything better to do than that. It's like, aim at heaven. Start at home. Aim at heaven. Tell the truth. Let's see what they hell happens. You know, like it's, it is the case. Clearly on the facts of the matter. In 20 years, there wouldn't have to be a single person in the world that was hungry. In 20 years, we could get rid of the five biggest diseases that currently plague the planet. We could straighten things up and god only knows what things could be like that. Or we could let the whole thing degenerate into hell. So in each of us is making that decision with each decision. That's the other thing that I've understood. So take a choice. You want hell or you want heaven? If you pick hell, just remember. You knew what you were doing when you picked it. But nobody picked sell. Yeah, I just sort of let it slide. Yeah, but they do it because they blind themselves. You know, you know when you do it, you say, I, well, you know, I let that slide. And then you, and then you don't think about it. It's like you could think about it. You could think about it. You could know, but you don't let yourself know.

How are you feeling like when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how,

Oh, well, I, yes, I mean, the thing that I, I shouldn't say this, but I'm going to because it's just so goddamn funny. I can't help but say it. I figured out how to monetize social justice warriors. It's what it is. I know it's so funny. It just can't believe it. It's just, every time I think that, well, it's just one of the surreal circumstances that characterize my life. It's like, I'm driving the social justice activists in Canada mad because if they let me speak, then I get to speak and then more people support me on Patreon. It's like, that's annoying. It's like, God damn capitalists, these make more money off this ideological warfare. It's like, okay, fine. Let's go protest. So they go protest me. And then that goes up on YouTube. And then my patron, account goes way up. So it's like, they don't know what to do. And so one of the things they keep accusing me of, they keep accusing me of like hauling in the loop. And I think, well, look, here's the situation, guys. I give away everything I do online for free. It's free. And people are giving me money. They're just sending it to me. I'm not twisting. They're not even asking them for it. Well, I guess that's not exactly right because I set up the patron account. But that's more complicated than it looks. That a lot of that was curiosity. And I thought, well, I could increase the production quality of my online videos.

Well, they're, yes, well, that and that was your life tension.

Yeah, they have had stopped wanting that in October when the Lindsey Shepherd scandal broke and it looked so bad for the left wing ideologs like 200 University of Toronto. a community member signed a petition to get me fired again. And I was kind of upset about that. And this is what my life is like. So my son came over that day and I said, Jesus, Julian, you know, like 200 people at the faculty at the University of Toronto, petitioned the faculty association. And then they sent in a petition to the administration to get me fired. It was the faculty association. That's my union. They didn't even contact me. And Julian said, do worry about it, Dad. It was only 200 people. And I thought, that's where my life is like, it's like a day where 200 people signed a petition to get me fired as a professor. My son can come in and say, well, that's not so bad. It's like it's only 200 people. It's like two scales. That's right.

Well, in the administration at the University of Toronto, like they didn't take it seriously at all called have me remove. It didn't cause any, didn't even cause a repal.

Oh, well, they're hard to say what their motive is.

It's not very hard to say what their motive. It's not very hard to say what their motive. It's not very hard to say what their Well, that's madness. Oh, yes, but it looked look. I mean, I mean, this formally, like 20 members of Pinlots and Rambo Countess faculty, that was communications at Willford, Laurie, wrote a letter supporting them. So that's why it's not a isolated incident. It's like, no, no, they thought that what they were doing was right. It's mass hysteria. Well, there is an element of that.

They tried to paint her as a radical wringer and doesn't what she certainly isn't.

Yeah, that's for sure. That's for sure. Yeah, and it's been what's been crazily Well, I'm what I say, crazily stressful. The best way to describe it is surreal. It's like I stepped outside myself. I can't put this in a box. I don't know what to make of it. I don't know what to make of the channel for interview. You know, it's like, what the hell? Really, it's, it's, it's crazy.

Yeah well then I think that is part of it too is that like I happen to catch a technological wave well like you did you know yeah I mean they're they're television offers nothing over YouTube nothing Because YouTube offers you to make the TV. Yeah, well, exactly. Yeah. And then there's no space requirements on YouTube. So you don't have to do this twist the complex event into a short sound bite and entertain everyone. Right. And it turns out, too, that there's this huge audience online for actual content. just genuine conversation because like one of the things that's happened between you and I when when I've come down here we've actually had a conversation right we're trying to figure things out you know we've got our viewpoints and everything but we're basically and now I outlined this and there's a chapter in twelve rules for life called assume that the person you're talking to might know something you don't which is like the formula for a good conversation it's like There's a bunch of things I don't understand about the world. I mean, that's a big book. Things I don't understand about the world, right? That's a very thick book. And I can come in here and talk to you about what's going on. And hopefully we both emerge with better understanding. We're not the same people that we were when we walked in. And that's a good thing. And then we have those conversations online and people can participate in that. And I'm trying to do that in my lectures, too. When I did this biblical series. Because that was another thing that was so strange, Joe. Imagine I walked into a venture capitalist organization. I said, look, I want you guys to bank role me. I'm going to do 15 lectures on the Old Testament. And I'm going to try to attract young men. I'm going to rent a theater. They just laughed me out of there. Can you imagine anything less sailable than that? So, but I did that when I had with it. I rented it theater and then I walked through these stories and I was learning a lot because like I knew this first stories in Genesis up to the flood. I knew them pretty well. I knew kind of understood what they meant. But then all the stories from Abraham onward, I had read them, but I hadn't done a detailed in-depth analysis. And so I was learning a tremendous amount walking through those stories. And they had a big they had a big impact man and so I'm going to do Exodus soon because I want to do that but it's just another example of how surreal things have become but also the utility of a good conversation because like when I'm up on on on the podium, say lecturing. I'm not exactly lecturing.

Yeah, it's like, here's what's right, memorize it. Right. It's like, my lectures are more like, well, I don't know what's right. Like, here's some things I know. And they seem to be working. And here's how I use those tools to dig at this story. And here's what it might mean. And this is what I got from it. And then here's some universal truths about human beings. And then I try to explore that. Like, well, should we believe this? Should we like, when Abraham, in the Abraham story, for example, I mean, Abraham's an old guy. And he's basically lived in his mom's basement. That's really the beginning of the story. And he gets a call to adventure. You know, God says, well, get Get away from your family and your kin, get out there in the world. It's a call to adventure. Think, okay, fine, that's a heroic motif. But then Abraham goes out in the first thing he encounters is like tyranny and starvation, and then a bunch of guys who want to steal his wife. So it's, it's been entertaining to take those stories apart and to see why they're foundational, because they are foundational. And they're not mere ignorance Whatever they are, ignorant superstition is not the right category.

Well, I haven't gone back teaching since all of this hit because when did you stop teaching? Oh, no, I guess that's not true. I taught from January to May of 2016. Well, the first way it changed it was that I was like, so shell-shocked when I went to teach last January, and I was really sick. Like, I would really sick this year. I had, like, last January, Jesus. It was just dismal. I wouldn't have wished that on my worst enemy. I had three weeks where I didn't sleep a wink. Try that. That's really entertaining. If one long day of misery, that's three weeks long. What kind of an illness? It looks like an autoimmune disorder. Do you think this is because of stress? No, I don't. You don't think it's connected at all. Well, yeah, I think it probably made it worse. But no, it's something that I've battled with for a long time. And it's something that really, both my wife and I have autoimmune illness. And my daughter got what autoimmune illness. Don't know exactly what it is. I don't know what it is. In my daughter, it manifests. Yes. That's what's fixed, what fixed it. Oh, all I eat is meat and greens. That's it. No juice, no vegetables, no carbohydrates. Meat. greens. That's it. And that fixed it. That seems to have fixed it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I've been following them because my daughter has a blog to called Don't Eat That. And my daughter had a terrible autoimmune disorder. It was awful. I detailed that out in chapter 12. She had 38 affected joints. And she had her hip and her ankle replaced when she was 16. So she walked around on two broken legs for a year. and inscruciating pain, she was on extremely high doses of opiates. And so she was addicted to opiates, which she just once she had her surgery, she just went off the cold turkey and suffered through the withdrawal for two months and compared to what she had been through that was nothing. Like what she went through, man, it was dreadful. And that was just the surface of it. Like that was only the beginning of her illness. She had all sorts of other things that were worse than that. And so, and we figured she was probably going to die by the time she was 30 because my cousin's daughter had a similar autoimmune problem and she died when she was 30. So, it was bloody dreadful. But she figured out at one point that it was associated with diet and then she went on a radically restrictive diet and she, Christ, she was on antidepressants, she's not. She had to take riddle into stay awake. She could only stay awake about six hours a day and she had to take high doses of riddle into stay awake. She, what is this autoimmune disease? Well, she had, her diagnosis was rheumatoid arthritis, but she didn't have the blood markers for it, but she had all the other symptoms. Anyway, she figured out this restrictive diet. She only had chicken and broccoli for about two months, and almost all her symptoms went away. And she's pretty much symptom-free now, in which it's a complete miracle. And she convinced me to try this diet about a year and a half ago. I lost seven pounds a month for seven months. That was the first thing, which was just bloody amazing. Yeah, it was unbelievable. It was unbelievable. I couldn't believe it.

Rich enough? Yeah. Rich enough, you know? Pastas and bread and things on those bread. Bread in particular, I ate a lot of bread. So the first thing that happened was a quit snoring that happened immediately. Took one week and I was snoring quite badly. So that disappeared in a week. And that was amazing. I thought, oh, that's interesting. And then I had gastric reflex disorder that went away. And then I lost seven pounds the first month. I thought, oh, that's a lot. Seven pounds. I had psoriasis that went away. I had floaters in my right eye, which is also not a immune problem. That went away. I have had gum disease for 30 years. That went away. That went away. That's amazing. I'm 55th. Like my gum disease went away. It's ridiculous. I figured all that out. So my life in the last year was so strange, because I'd get up in the morning and I'd think, God, all these bloody scandalous things are happening around me. And I have to deal with that. And then I'd think, I need a break. But I can't eat anything. I can't eat anything because if I ate the wrong thing it would like knock me out for a month. So I was trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with my diet and I was feeding a wretched and so it was like if I was like wolves at the back door and crocodiles at the front door or something like that. So but but Whatever, like, I'm down to the same weight I was when I was 25. Wow. Yeah, no kidding. And I've got lots of energy. I wake up in the morning and I wake up. That's never happened to me my whole life. I've always had to have a shower. Like, took me an hour to wake up my whole life. That's gone. I'm not hungry. Um, I don't have hyper leukemia. Uh, I've lots of energy. Um, I can't eat anything, but so I can't go out for dinner.

Yeah. Well, for some people, it seems like like, well,

Well, I think for far more people than we know, I think people are carbohydrate poisoning themselves like they can't believe.

Yeah. Well, I know too that two food scientists in the UK resigned about three years ago. They were part and parcel of the organization that had produced the food pyramid they said it was the worst public health disaster the last 40 years pretty much got it backwards yeah and you look around you know you drive through the u.s. it's really obvious in the u.s. people are overweight like mad like mad.

it is but you know and the reason is as far as I can tell The reason is that they're poisoning themselves with carbohydrates.

So, the way I don't get hungry is I eat a lot of oil, like a lot of oil, oil. Yes. And that keeps.

Yeah. And it seems to be, well, and that was complicated. That would have been complicated enough to keep me occupied for the last two years. Especially sorting it out with my daughter because she, well, that was quite the bloody nightmare I can tell you. It was really something. But I can't believe she figured it out. It is amazing and like she's really she's been pretty damn good shape. She just had a baby like five months ago, so that was amazing. Yeah, we're we're stunned man. We're stunned because like it was it was rough.

Yeah, I had nap boat two hours a day. Yeah. And now I don't nap at all.

Same thing. That's not exactly true. When I've been zooming around, I take like two minute naps when I'm in the airport or whatever.

So yeah, it's been it's been remarkable.

Oh, well, I took a sabbatical.

Yeah, well, I told the, I told my department chair said, look, I had a sabbatical coming up next year. I said, look, you know, There's too much going on. It'll be better if I take this abatical this year than I can concentrate on my teaching next year.

Yeah, correct. Yeah. Well, and I always teach from, I put all my courses from January to March. I teach all them in the same semester and that enabled me to concentrate on my research for the rest of the time. And so technically, I'll be going back teaching in January of 2019. Technically. Technically.

I can't think a year ahead at the moment. I don't know what the hell's going on. I'm not going to go back and teach the same way. Because at some point, the technological transformation means you have to approach things differently. And so now, if I do a lecture online, whatever the lecture happens to be, I can get 150,000 people to watch it. That's minimum. So the first question would be, well, why would I teach 300 people when I could teach 150,000? That's just stupid.

That's right. That's exactly it. And the next thing is, well, I taped my maps of meaning class and my personality class for three years running. It's like, it's there. Well, I could do it again, but why? It's taped. I would rather lecture about new things. So that's what I did this year. I did this biblical series, which I hadn't done before. But now, if I'm going to lecture again, I'm going to lecture about different things because because the technology has transformed the landscape. We're not in 1990 anymore, not even a little bit.

Well, one of the things that's really fun about YouTube, And having my lectures on YouTube is that the only reason people watch them is one reason is because they want to learn. That's it. And so it's you might think well, where is the university? Well, the university is where people want to learn. It's like, okay, well, YouTube is the university because there's hundreds of thousands of people on YouTube, maybe millions who just want to learn. It's like, fine. I'm an educator. I'll talk to people who want to learn because if you're an educator, that's what you do. Is that most effectively done in the universities? not self-evidently. And so now I'm trying to figure this out. You know, like, I like my job at the university. The U of T is treated me well apart from this scandal thing, but they were kind of taken aback by, they didn't know what to do about that. You know, it was a new law. And when I made the video criticizing Bill C16, I said, I think that making this video is probably illegal in and of itself.

No. Wow. No, I mean, it surprised me because I would say that the content of my lectures is being atypical. but it's been a typical and a good way. Like the student responds to my lectures, there's always been, well, extremely good, extremely good. I'm always surprised that I was able to teach what I'm teaching because I always thought that it was like insanely revolutionary, but it was revolutionary in a really like in a scholarly way. You know, like I'm a careful scientist, I'm a careful thinker. I think things all the way through to the bottom and I'm really self-critical. Like when I wrote maps of meaning, which was my first book, I suspect I rewrote every sentence at least 15 times. It's probably more than that. And I really literally mean rewrite it. So I'd take the sentence out of the paragraph, put it in another document, write like 10 variants of the sentence, and then pick the one that was best. And I did that. I took me 15 years to write. I did that over and over and over and over. And so what I was write a sentence and then I'd think, okay. Have I got all the words right? Every single word is that the proper phrase is the proper sentence. Do I believe that this sentence is true? Then I'd think like, of ten ways I could attack it and say if I could break it apart and find out what it was wrong. And I only kept the ones that I couldn't destroy and like I was going out full force to destroy them because I wanted to come up with, you know, I wanted to produce a book that I could not break no matter what I did. And so I spent 15 years on that. And then that was the basis, well, it's the basis for 12 rules for life. It's been the basis for all the lectures I've done and so forth. And like I can't see where it's wrong. And mostly what I was trying to do was to see where it was wrong. And I can't get underneath it. I can't break it.

I had a big problem. So when I started to write maps of meaning, I thought, OK, what's the situation? This is the Cold War. We've divided into two armed tribal camps, and we've decided that Settling the difference between us is worth risking being itself. We could drive everything into extinction. We're willing to take that chance. It's like, what the hell is going on? So I wanted to know two things. What was truly driving the tribalism of the Cold War, including the generation of that vast nuclear arsenal? Because that just seemed to me to be insanity taken to the final pinnacle. So I wanted to know that. And I wanted to know, OK, having figured out why that's happening, what could be done about it. So it would stop. And at the same time, I was also studying what had happened in Auschwitz with the Nazis and all of that. And so it was a very serious problem. And I actually wanted to have the answer. I actually wanted the answer. I didn't want to write an interesting book about it. It wasn't even that I wanted to write a book exactly. It was just that writing a book was the best way to figure out the problem because it's really writing a book is so rigorous, you know, because you think, but you can only remember so much. You have to write it down. Because then you can remember way more and you can write and then the next day you can go back and think, okay, I'm going to take that goddamn argument apart. I'm going to see if there's anything about it that's weak. And so, and I think I did figure it out. I think I did figure it out. And then when I, when I Well, and then I started lecturing about it, and the lectures were always unbelievably well regarded like people, the kids in the classes would always write for the evaluations at the end of the year. 80% of them would say, and this happened for 20 years to say, this class changed everything about the way I look at the world. It's like, yeah, that's what happened to me too, and I wrote that book. It's like, I didn't think the same way at all when I was done. I started to understand what these ancient stories meant. It was like shocking, never recovered from it.

I made a discount for your viewers again for the future authoring program.

Self-authoring.com.

Yeah. Yeah. And I'll send you a link for that. Thanks a lot.

And also, thanks for everything, eh? Really, you were the portal into this weird world that I'm in. And people say that all the time they come up and say like I heard about you on Joe Rogan. It's like thousands of people have told me that.