Joe Rogan Experience #1070 - Jordan Peterson Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:02 four three two one boom and we're live 12 rules for life so without reading this so what you're saying is there's only 12 things you need to know in life right that's it yeah well yeah this um this interview that you just did with this woman uh kathy newman was that in the uk it was channel 4 uk um i just went i i felt bad but i was also laughing i went to her twitter page to read like and in with each one of her tweets no matter what she says someone writes underneath it so what you're saying is and then some ridicul

00:39 but by the way the your fans were mocking her but politely non-aggressively there were i didn't read any rude things like there was no there was there was no insults or there were well maybe a few insults but there's no swears it was just playful mocking of the interview that she did with you because the interview was ridiculous it was a ridiculous interview and i listened to it or watched it several times i was like this is so strange like her determination to turn it into a conflict to it's one of the issues that i

01:12 have with television shows yeah because they have a very limited amount of time and they're trying to make things as salacious as possible they want to have these sound bites these click bait sound bites and she just went into it incredibly confrontational not trying to find your actual perspective but trying to force you to defend a non non-realistic perspective yes well i was the i was the hypothetical villain of her imagination essentially well what happened what was interesting too the way it it played itself out

01:43 because 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 what's going on yeah yeah well so so that kind of alerted me to well the fact that there

02:08 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 broadcast technologies they re 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 it it hasn't ceased to amaze me yet i think that they thought that the interview went

02:44 fine that's the scuttlebutt i've got from sort of behind the scenes because i've you know i know some people who know what's going on at channel four and they're shell-shocked by the response you know and and then of course there is the counter response the guardian the next day published a paper or published an 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

03:15 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 i and then there was a backlash against that in the press and so it's been a well well someone took an audit of the the actual interchanges that yep between fans and her and there was way more negative ones coming your way yes that were seriously negative yeah that's right seriously negative violent harassing just

03:46 rude there were way more yeah and no one picked up on that at all it was all the narrative was she's a victim even though she was highly aggressive on in this but she's a funny victim it's not like she's not successful yeah you know it's like 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 you go yeah because you don't get to be oppressor and oppressed at the same time that's just too much well one of the things that

04:17 you pointed out was when you were talking about competition for very lucrative jobs and you were saying look what you've done like you you must have had to work here and she proudly was saying how how hard she had to work yeah to get there i'm like well yes of course no one's going to hand this to you no this is why and this is why you were saying you are opposed to equality of outcome 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

04:45 the historical the historical evidence for the pathology of that root 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 agree with you but i think that even if you came into this with no knowledge of history but a complete understanding of human beings you would say well that doesn't make any sense and one of the best quotes that i've ever read about it is that if you have real true

05:17 freedom you're never going to have equality of outcome because with real true freedom you have the freedom to not engage well look if you look at a guy like jeff bezos for instance that amazon guy is worth more money than anybody ever right that guy works all day yeah i mean he's a maniac oh he's acquiring all these different companies and and everything he's doing is designed to succeed i mean he's just well that's what gates just said too in a recent interview and i know some guys that are you know they're in

05:47 approximately the same universe as those two and they just work all the time that's all the time 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 and you know doing that doesn't mean that you will succeed but not doing it certainly means that you will fail well you s well not doing it certainly means you will never achieve that level of success and that's what we're talking about we're talking about

06:15 a quality of outcome i don't want that i don't want to be that guy i don't want to work like that i don't want to do what he's doing and i should have the freedom to not do that yeah as he should have the freedom to do that if we're going to play this game called capitalism which we're all agreeing is probably at least in as far as the models that we have right now is the best one that we have if we're all going to play this game if someone decides to be the michael jordan of capitalism you can't stop them you can't

06:41 say no no no you're playing this game too well you're playing this team too hard you're too obsessed with this game you're going to have that yeah you can stop them you can try to stop people from winning crookedly which is what you should do and yes 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

07:05 there's a there seems to be something like a law of nature that's described by this statistical model called the pareto distribution and it basically suggests that in any creative domain there's going to be a small number of people will will do almost all of the output but it doesn't just apply to human beings it implies 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

07:37 something you can imagine how that would work with a star as it gets bigger and bigger and its gravitational mass increases it's going to attract more and more matter and then as the 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 uh 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

08:04 occur in capitalist societies it occurs everywhere it's like a natural law so you see the same thing with number of points scored by a you know a spectacular sports figure there's always a tiny proportion of people who are way way the head 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 it's the one percent gets 80 percent and so well first we can't blame that on capitalism and second we should note that it

08:34 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 end 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

08:58 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 that 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 so yeah so it goes back to this equality of outcome yeah yeah and this this thing has perplexed me since i've met

09:31 you and since uh you were involved in this original debate over gender pronouns and there was an article that was written recently i forget the exact title of it i think it was something along the lines of why can't people hear what jordan peterson is saying yeah you are misrepresented more than anyone i know in a weird way you are villainized in a weird way where um i can't believe that these people are honestly looking at your opinions and coming up with these conclusions i i can't help but feel like what is

10:08 happening is people are consciously deciding to ignore reality and paint you as this archetypal figure of oppressive white male patriarchy ignorance fill in the blank with all the the rest of the descriptives that you'd like to use but they've decided to paint you in this way like as as a target because they need a target to sort of reinforce this idea that transgender people are being victimized and women are being victimized and well even deeper that the right narrative is the way that we should view the world is

10:48 victim versus oppressor because that's the basic post-modern neo-marxist template it's the right way to view the world is that it's a power it's a power ground it's a what it's a it's a battleground of power interests competing constantly the ones that win are oppressors the ones that lose are 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 now it ends in nothing but

11:17 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 for that isn't 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

11:46 women and i think the evidence in 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 and felt and acted and and and valued everyone knew that the fact that this has become somehow debatable again is just especially because it's being done by legislative fiat they're forcing

12:18 it to me as a scientist it's just it's just well and in the states too with tight with title ix for example because title ix is sort of predicated on that viewpoint what is title now oh title ix was originally just a piece of legislation that um 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

12:48 and like 200 i mean last i looked about 200 of them were up and and they can have their funding revoked if they violate the title ix provisions so it's become like a vicious weapon for social justice warrior equality of outcome types so it's not just about sports no it's got way way beyond that yeah it's it's it's become an equality of outcome issue fundamentally there was an article that i sent you um one of them was uh from i think uh like i thought i got it off of digg.com but it was um jordan peterson is having his

13:22 moment and we should ignore him and i send this to you and there was one probably the last part of that might be true [Laughter] but one of the things in the article was citing this study that showed very little difference oh god it's a pathetic study yeah well i said it to you because i was like this this is not right 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

13:59 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 percent of the time but you'd be wrong 40 of the time and that that's not a walloping difference right 60 40.

14:26 it's not 90 10 like 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 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 most well yeah it's 90 90 90 to 95 right so and often if the women are in prison it's because they

15:01 got tangled up with a really bad guy you know so so one of the problems is 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 that's a

15:32 huge difference in interest 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 a very big difference in the scandinavian countries well 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

15:57 hyper um what would you call hyper focused on things they're almost all men 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 85 percent of nurses in scandinavia are female and about 85 to 90 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

16:28 the differences in interest are big now 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 the remaining differences significant in how they play out in the world the answer to that is overwhelmingly significant because you you select for extremes so here's another example ashkenazi

16:57 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 to the extreme 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 over represented so relatively small differences in the average can produce walloping differences

17:30 at the extremes 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 the hell you'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

17:54 a literature they don't understand biology like the the social constructionist types the women's studies types the neo-marxist 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 was showed a very poor grasp of the relationship between group differences and economic and practical outcomes it's not just that it's deceptive and there's there's a need in some way on that side this side of the debate the anti-jordan peterson side to

18:33 label men and women as being virtually identical when there's so much evidence that that's not the case and what you're saying what you've you've never said one is superior one is inferior what you are is a guy who's pointing out the reality of the difference between the various types of human beings and you've been very open about the extremes about you look i'm i'm well aware of the extremes i deal with mma fighters i know a lot of female mma fighters are as aggressive and as tough as any man you're ever going to

19:05 meet in your life and i know a lot of men from comedy that are meek little guys who they're not nearly as aggressive as some of these female fighters like there's i think one of the beautiful things about freedom is that people get an opportunity to express themselves in a way that's genuinely them yep and whether that is like uh our friend alex honold who's a a free climber who is like climbing up these fantastic mountains with no ropes or whether it's a female mma fighter like raquel pennington who's just a tank and

19:38 beating the [ __ ] out of people and that's what she loves to do all of these extremes are available to people because of freedom this is not a suppressive thing no one's anyone's stopping people from choosing these paths i don't know if you saw the most recent slip up by the ceo of youtube i retweeted it today um they were talking about why there's not as many women in tech and she basically said they both her and the ceo of google said exactly what james damore was saying in his memo they completely [ __ ] up they

20:12 tried to look did you find this look at this this is goddamn hilarious and james damore had this on his page they respond women a lack of tackles could you now go to joe go to james damore's tweet just go to the the what i retweeted and what he said so there was a study published a while ago about j no jamie scroll back right it's right there it's right there just just make his tweet larger there you go look see it said he's saying did i read this right i don't know how to say her name is susan what i'm sorry i don't

20:45 know how to say her name w-o-j-i-c-i-c-k-i said that women find geeky male industries as opposed to social industries not very interesting and sundar cites research on gender well that's that's exactly the difference in interest that i just pointed out yeah this is right he this is what james damore wrote in his memo that got him fired and this in my mind if i was the lawyer for james damore i'd be like oh well look who we have here this is this is checkmate yeah you dummies you just said the divorce story is really

21:18 interesting you know because i think it's such a classic story of of an engineer getting tangled up in politics so damore 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 damore is an engineer so when you tell an engineer that you want feedback the engineer thinks oh you want feedback and you and you want like facts and stuff right because that's what feedback would be like so damore went and wrote this

21:47 like thorough memo and gave it to them he 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

22:12 was leaked up into the outside world it wasn't like damore was trying to expose google for for what it is he was just doing what an engineer type would do when 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 it turns out to be pretty damn tough well he's very smart and a very kind guy when you sit down and talk to him he's not a

22:42 sexist he's a he's a guy that's talking about facts in fact he wrote more than a page and a half i believe on strategies for getting more women interested in tech he's not a sexist this is just a guy that was talking about the differences and the choices that people make that's based on just the the variations that you were just discussing 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 they're pretty equally

23:10 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

23:36 full personality readout whether a person is male or female so you'd be wrong 25 percent of the time something like that but if you add interest to that you can get up to about 90 percent and so you know 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 token they're they're very large and the interesting actually turns out to matter a lot like it's

24:05 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 over represented 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

24:32 representation in the stem fields it's like no it doesn't seem to be it doesn't look like it's an intellectual issue which is also what de moore 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 more people-oriented now the thing is this is also being discovered in chimpanzees and other primates like if you offer baby or or child chimpanzees juvenile chimpanzees the toys choice between thing like toys like cars or people

25:05 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 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 is an unbelievably demanding social relationship and it's a primary relationship for about two years you know and so women are tilted towards the kind of

25:35 temperament that makes that possible it's like well is that such a shock really that's such a surprise so no it's not a surprise and what what's confusing to me is the narrative that anybody that points out these differences is somehow a sexist or discriminatory or yeah worse yeah yeah well whatever epithet they can well i think the other reason that the way the left the radical lefties have been going after me constantly is well there's one reason is is if you stand up against the radical radical left you're in a

26:09 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 you're not a nazi it's like well statistically statistically i'm probably not you know so there's that but but you could say at least the question is open but but but then the next part of it comes is that it's motivated epithet slinging because if i'm reasonable and i'm standing up against the radical

26:42 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 they're unreasonable beyond belief as we saw in this situation with lindsay shepard in canada so at wilford laurier university let's talk about that real quick because that was a fascinating thing too and that also had to do with you so she

27:10 was discussing you in class and you could fill up everybody yeah she's in the communications in the communications department at wilford laurier and they were talking about uh the the role of language in communication which 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-leaning liberal television station news program and a good one a good one and i had been on there with a number

27:41 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 anyway she showed a clip from this and well she got hauled in front of two professors and an administrator adria joel who was basically hired for that purpose and raked over the coals for daring to show this video and she had that wherewithal to tape it and then she made the tape

28:15 public and in that tape they compared me it was it was really blackly comical you know they compared me to hitler yeah and but then said well it's hitler or milo yiannopoulos 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 yiannopoulos it's like first of all hitler and milo yiannopoulos they're actually not in the same category right except that they're both human that's about the narrowness of the category and and

28:46 then milo's uh like a comic provocateur and you can hate him or love him or or be indifferent but to put him 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 you know hitler was one of the great super villains of the 20th century right i mean he was he's up there with stalin and mao in the in a in the panoply of satanically possessed leaders you don't just toss that around especially not when

29:18 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 it was the biggest sk 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

29:48 video from television ontario at a club meeting and invite people to come and discuss it it's like they they picked on the wrong girl there too so they certainly did she was obviously very smart you could hear that in her discussion with them and how flabbergasted she was by their take on things but this was essentially proof to a lot of people that were on the outside of how preposterous some of the dialogue was inside these universities yeah well they couldn't have done me a bigger favor than having that scandal

30:16 because when i made the 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 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 bill 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 bigot you're a

30:44 trans full you know they threw everything but the kitchen sink at 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

31:11 professors and an administrator hired for that purpose merely because she showed a video about two people talking about the law it's like that that paranoid as i am let's say that that exceeded the grasp of 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

31:47 rambukana's colleagues rose to their defense the whole department the university when they apologized did it in a very mealy-mouthed 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

32:17 appalling the universities have so much to be ashamed of they're they're well there was an article in the boston globe this week saying the same thing that all of this crazy post-modern 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 was exactly what you see for example at google well the tech industry in particular seems to be like more left-leaning

32:50 than pretty much any industry there is and i guess it's because there's so many intelligent people there so many people that have spent a tremendous amount of time in universities and they get indoctrinated into this mindset and you're you're seeing that in this the the ceo of youtube's response to james damore memo completely misrepresented it they're talking about harmful gender stereotypes that's not what he talked about at all um what what's fascinating to me about all of this is it it just reeks of tribalism that

33:22 these people on the left have decided i mean and i'm mostly on the left which is really crazy i mean when it comes to most policies and most thoughts of equality and and the idea of just letting people be who they are i mean that's what the left used to stand for it used to stand for being open-minded it used to stand for being a reasonable person it now it seems to be all about this very toxic tribal ideology and this is one of the reasons why so many of these attacks and you are so baffling to me is because there's a

33:59 willful ignorance or a deceptive narrative there there's a deceptive description of who you are and what you're saying and what you represent and it's this conveniently categorized not even convenient willfully willfully deceptively categorized into these category categories of homophobia transphobia sexism these are reprehensible categories that if they can just shove something that you're saying figure out a way to push you into this little narrow confined then everyone has to disagree with you everyone has to insult

34:32 you and everyone has to like take that girl into their office and chastise you for even using not even speaking up for you right just she said she wasn't yes that's what was more fascinating about it than anything yeah then 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 yiannopoulos it's it's so strange but what they don't understand and this is what's really crazy is that the world is watching and that most

35:05 people but maybe it's a 60 40 like we were talking about before when it comes to aggressive men women versus aggressive men i don't know what the number is 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 it's like i think that like i think that what the radical leftists are doing is overwhelmingly um unrepresentative of the general population overwhelmingly but they're they're a very well organized and and verbal and prepared minority and they've

35:43 occupied powerful positions in many many institutions hr 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 like to let these postmodern neo-marxists into your company through the guise of human resources is an absolute catastrophe you're going to pay for that this the ideology that drives post-modern neo-marxism this identity politics uh what the identity politics movement and its insistence on equality of outcome is a

36:14 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 is beyond me it's a big mistake i agree with you but i don't think people are aware of it i think part of the problem is this battleground is largely ignored by the general population i don't think most people are aware of what's going on you are because you're obviously you're deeply embedded in the university system in canada and you're you're obviously now uh branching

36:43 out into youtube and podcasts and all these different ways to get this information out but the average person that is a ceo of a company or they're they're concerned with their own company they're concerned with their own individual needs they're concerned with organizing things and keeping their bottom line and yeah well they're also concerned with looking fair and making sure that they're not prejudiced and all of that which is laudable and but i just don't think they see the wave coming no they don't they don't see

37:09 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 end 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 now this is really what i can't stand about identity politics and i've

37:34 been warning about the consequences of on the right wing too because what i see happening is that as the left like let's say the left gets to define the linguistic territory which is what i was objecting to in bill c-16 when it came out i said look i'm not going to use these neologisms z and zur etc because as far as i'm concerned they have nothing people who don't know what you're talking about yeah a bunch of different made up gender pronouns yeah to describe people in the non-male or female that's right so there's

38:04 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 that's that's that's up to them and whoever else they can convince or ask or entreat 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

38:36 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 reprehensibly 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 so but most people think that that's a gigantic step to go from saying you don't want to say z or zero or any of these made up gender pronouns to these are murderous people the ideology is murderous the ideology being

39:07 marxism yeah absolutely well jesus how much proof of that do you need most people don't understand marxism like when you when you're saying this like when you were so adamant about it i had to start reading about it myself and i had to start doing a lot of research about it myself and i think most people hear marxism and they think socialism yep they think uh pooling all your money together you know making you know making things more even for people yeah like they are in venezuela everybody has an equal chance to

39:36 starve to death so you know how they you know how the venezuelan government start 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 all have the same number of bones to gnaw on yeah that's a horrible thing but yeah it's it's a horrible thing undeniably but there's no like the connection between gender pronouns and murder this it's a big leap yeah

40:13 that's that's for sure that's for sure well that's why you have to look at the underlying ideology you know and you think well what's what level at what is the level at which these things should be addressed well is it economic is it political is it personal meanings of these this ideology and you understand where the road map leads you understand the x at the end of the road yeah right absolutely well and i think that's why i recommend it to people continually to read soldier knits in school like archipelago so

40:38 actually there's a set of books that let lay this out perfectly you read dostoevsky's wrote a book called the possessed or the devils and it's a it's a description of the initial breakdown of the of orthodox christian society in in russia in the late 1800s and the rise of radical socialist ideas so it's sort of like the pro drama to the russian revolution it's a brilliant brilliant book brilliant book and it concentrates on the personalities that are involved and then if you read after that solzhenitsyn's gulag

41:07 archipelago where he details what he does in that book is quite remarkable so 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 justice i mean it's absolutely dreadful what happened in the soviet union i mean just for starters 6 million ukrainians died in the 1930s because of enforced starvation in fact in in in the 1930s here's here's how here's how terrible it was so all the food that

41:38 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 starved to death now here's here's how draconian it got so let's say you were 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 starved to death i'm going to go out in the field and i'm going to on my hands and knees and i'm going to pick up the grains that are left over

42:03 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 solzhenitsyn 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 lays that out and and it's well

42:36 i think he got it right and what is that won the nobel prize but what is the connection how much tyranny you have to impose in order to produce something like equality of outcome the the and thomas sowells 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 cede 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 pro another problem with

43:07 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 art and literature like you know you can multiply the number of dimensions of evaluation between people innumerably right because

43:37 there's 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 why stop with economic why stop with pay there's no place to stop so and that's 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

44:08 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 have you ever debated a marxist supporter have you ever debated someone who is pro-equality of outcome no they don't debate me well the only 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

44:36 equivalent of a debate it's supposed to be friendlier i suppose um but no i haven't because people don't do it they don't ask me to do it but what is it about that idea or that ideology about marxism that's so attractive to young students and to university people well that's a good question i think it goes back to the issue of inequality and and this is something that has to be dead seriously addressed like you might say well why is the left wing necessary let's let's put it that way so and then a subset of that would

45:08 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 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

45:35 a really bad scene because first of all that's a lot of suffering and that's not so good second of all well at least in principle a lot of those people might be what 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 so 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

46:04 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 foments 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 gotta parameterize the the tendency towards inequality so that it doesn't destabilize the entire society so that it's

46:32 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.

46:55 are going to choose most people is going to take poor at 18. well yeah especially if you've been rich at 80 and you understand you can get back there yeah 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 inequality is just simply age but it's not obvious

47:22 that the old rich people have an advantage over the young starting out people so so anyways but any anyhow maybe you're resentful and irritated because you're young and you're still at the bottom of the heap and you know 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

47:51 nobody likes the fact that homeless people exist and have to go to the emergency ward you know 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've 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 that that desire to help is contaminated by resentment and ideological certainty and then also

48:20 by something that george orwell pointed out so nicely in his book road to wigan 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 have anything 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

48:51 they hate is the successful it's it's like cain and abel it's the retelling of cain and abel 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 the let's look at both extremes so back to the idea of the of the ideological and verbal territory i said with bill c-16 that i wouldn't speak

49:23 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 the 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 okay now the left is say okay well here's the oppressed people the oppressors the patriarchy type patriarchal types they should be ashamed of themselves and give up some power the

49:51 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 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 if 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

50:24 and forth which side of the identity politics spectrum am i going to fall in do i want to go with uh do i want to go do i want to be driven primarily by compassion and 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

50:51 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 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

51:22 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 the in this book so i have a book rule in there says set your house in perfect order before you criticized the world and it's a very dark chapter about the motivations

51:53 of the columbine high school killers and this other guy named carl panzram who was a serial rapist and arsonist and murderer and these he wrote an autobiography and the columbine 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 resentment resentfulness and bitterness even though life is hard and and there's malevolence in the world it's like yeah you can you can tell a story where everyone's a victim

52:23 because we all die we all get sick you know and and 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 it's so this is why partly i got attracted to christian imagery at least in part um because there's an idea in christianity that

52:54 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 so what are you going to do about it accept 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 we're too technologically powerful to get all tribal again what's exciting to me is that i think this is the

53:26 first time in my life that i've ever seen so much communication on these subjects and i think so much recognition about the consequences of tribal toxic tribalism this tribal thinking that everyone seems to be engaged in on the right and on the left i mean in america you need to go no further than going back and forth from cnn to fox news to say something's wrong here these are these are supposed to be news outlets you have two completely different narratives and that has nothing to do with what we're talking about

53:56 with gender politics and and radical left socialism and marxism what what you're seeing in universities though um is a radical departure from what i always considered universities great for what i always considered universities great for is separating from your parents challenging belief systems and being engaged in the the works of brilliant people who you can compare all of their findings and their discoveries and and sit down and debate them in class and when i was a kid when i was in high school i went to a very

54:32 good high school newton south high school in newton massachusetts and uh one of the things that they did is they put on a debate between a guy from the moral majority which was this uh right-wing uh christian group that i don't even know if they're around anymore but there this was 19 i was 14 so 81 and uh barney frank who was that congressman is now one of the first openly gay guys uh in congress and and uh you got to watch these two people in this auditorium debate their points and this moral majority guy had this

55:10 you know right wing ronald reagan sort of puke point of view and barney franco's kind of crazy he's got busted in some male prostitute scandal and but the gay community that's not that big of a deal and uh just barney frank took him apart it was brilliant to watch but it was a real debate it was fascinating and he got to see a a mediocre mind versus a great mind and he got to see this little thing and i was like wow this is one of the things that's always attracted me about the the idea that two people with differing

55:48 viewpoints can get together in front of a neutral audience and these people can sort of decipher which which way these people are thinking and why they're thinking yeah well and bad as that is and rife 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 the consequence of not talking is that you fight that that's the end game because the only way you can stop from fighting with other people is by negotiating with them and you know one of the

56:17 things that's also interesting and this is partly why silicon valley leans to the left is that a fair bit of your political preference is determined by your biological temperament it's strongly influenced 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 and so and well why is that why do those variations exist well

56:53 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 pathway is already laid clear it works stay in the damn 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 has shifted and so something new has to emerge and so then there's a bunch of people who are adapted to the new and

57:20 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 um 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

57:47 because they're conservative they don't think outside the box but so if the company is working and 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 environments change 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

58:12 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 we talk 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 uh this invitation to the keck boys to fill out this program that i developed called future authoring

58:40 and it helps people make a position yeah well they're they're an online group they're they're they i know what it is it's this fictional polity it's a it's a satire of identity politics essentially we're going to we're going to be our ethnicity highly demonized satire highly demonized right and with good reason for with some individual examples of racism and nazism and you know yeah there's lots of misbehavior yeah yeah yeah it's like graffiti it's like online graffiti something like that so um and and the keck boys

59:17 are the ones who are often using the peppy memes for example and you know the left regards pepe as a hate symbol pepe the frog pepe the frog feels good frog that's right that's right kind of reprehensible frog and so i tweeted out to them i said keck boys seek your 4chan rescue yourself from the underworld use code pepe for future authoring so it's free for one week so i they had to figure out what it meant and then i showed this picture of michigan j frog which is the frog from old warner brothers cartoon dancing frog

59:50 that wouldn't perform when anyone was watching it so cbc hauled that out and said well look aren't you aren't you like um appealing to the radical right and i said well no what i'm doing i said look the these people are attracted by the radical right although they're satirists and juvenile satirists and graffiti types and you know they're they're playing a weird sense that's exactly what they're doing they're they're provoking and i my sense was well why don't you develop yourself as an individual and get the hell out

01:00:16 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

01:00:45 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 while still knowing how to behave within the tribe well that's the call to individualism and that's i think what the west got right is we figured

01:01:13 that out it's like you're more than you're you have to be a member of a group because otherwise you're not socialized you're not good for anyone you don't 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 and 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're a

01:01:42 member that's all you are but the group can go badly wrong so the group needs individuals to keep the group alive and revivified so you have to become an individual so you can revivify the group that's the cult 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 that there's a very influential line of developmental psychology uh pioneered by jean piaget that laid that out as

01:02:13 a developmental what would 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 and this is what your future authoring program is basically all about i mean it's it's a wonderful program it's and along with this book rules and guidelines for life i think that's one of the things that a lot of young people are lacking is a structure to how to go

01:02:42 about establishing who they are in the world 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 hole 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 um well take care of yourself but take

01:03:17 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 a name 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 your life some meaning now adopt make a plan

01:03:42 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 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 adult and like 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

01:04:08 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

01:04:37 going to be a consequence of adopting responsibility not of rights and impulsive action impulsive freedom like fine rights 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

01:05:09 straight and you be courageous despite the fact that life is tragic and tainted by malevolence it's like that's the that's ancient wisdom that's what that is and understanding that there's structure and discipline and that you know i am in a lot of ways both of those things you described earlier i'm in a lot of ways my mind is i'm creative and i'm always sort of half paying attention to things but i'm also disciplined yeah right and it's one of the reasons why i think i'm i so relate to both sides of this issue yeah

01:05:42 because i could it's also one of the reasons you're successful yeah i could have easily been some hardcore right-wing [ __ ] i'm a competition-oriented person i've been since i was a child yeah i grew up competing in martial arts tournaments i mean that's and you have to be a hard person to do that you have to understand what discipline is but before that i was an artist i wanted to be a cartoonist i wanted to do comic books that's what i wanted to do i wanted to be an illustrator if it wasn't for one bad teacher in

01:06:09 high school that totally shied me away from art i probably would have went into that as a living when i look at both sides i see myself in both sides yep yep well the other thing i've been telling young men is that and and this is something i think that you could relate to tremendously is i read this new testament line well decades ago and i could never understand it it's the line is the meek shall inherit the earth and i thought there's something wrong with that that line it just doesn't make sense to me meat just

01:06:38 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 the these these sayings these maxims and that was one of them the meek shall inherit the earth but i've been using this site called bible hub and it's very interesting it's very it's organized very interesting so you have a biblical line and then they they have like three pages of commentary on each line and so because

01:07:06 people have commented on every verse in the bible like to the to 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 meek shall inherit 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

01:07:38 thing i've been telling you yeah no kidding that's a lot different that's a big difference it's so great and so like one of the things i tell young men well on 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 sheath your competitive instinct you shouldn't try to win you know you you don't want to be too aggressive you don't want to be too assertive

01:08:02 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 do you know the expression it's better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war right right exactly that's exactly it yeah 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 agreeableness you know because that's part of being competitive temperamentally it's like is there something

01:08:27 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 you want to eradicate striving what's the uncomfortable feeling that people associate with losing when they've personally experienced it they look at losing as their they've been oppressed or they've been hurt but what

01:08:53 they don't understand is that is the motivation for growth and one of the most beautiful things that i think a young person can get involved in is martial arts because martial arts teach you that in a way that very few things do they teach you it in especially jiu jitsu because jiu jitsu is so complex and there's so many possibilities to it that it attracts a lot of really smart people if you think of jujitsu you would think of like brutish individuals engaging in this hard martial art you go to a real good jujitsu

01:09:22 school you see nerds you see a bunch of like really smart kids that really get obsessed with the possibilities of this physical language this physical language also teaches you the consequences of not working hard of not being prepared of not understanding positions of not doing due diligence and doing the work and it's it's an amazing amazing scaffolding for developing your life but it also teaches you how to lose yes you know and that's very important one definition of a winner is someone who never let losing stop

01:09:54 them yes you know and and the idea that a single loss in the competition is somehow a defeat is completely insane first of all well let's say you're a hockey player and you're a good player and you 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 is the 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

01:10:25 games and part of that means you all you have to learn how to be a good loser because you're not going to win every single game but you also have to embrace those losses as learning experiences and the people that have never lost or afraid of losing they're afraid of learning you're afraid of that feeling that terrible feeling that you get from losing is so beneficial it's aided me in so many ways like it's one of the reasons and also one of the reasons why i talk so openly about bombing on stage and i do it with other

01:10:49 comedians i i always want to tell people yeah i'm an established comedian i've been a comedian for a long time let me tell you about like when i was two years in or five years in or or four years ago like can we tell you about some horrible moments on stage where it went wrong just so you understand like those things took me to another place because i realized i don't want to ever feel that feeling again and so i ramped everything up and then i went back to work and i went over my notebooks and i went over my my

01:11:16 recordings and i figured out what i was doing wrong and and i tried to improve upon it but if it wasn't for that horrible sick feeling that's the same feeling you get when you get tapped out in jiu jitsu class 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 could pick your le 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

01:11:42 well all that means is you've picked the wrong level of competition yes because you know like let's say you're a grandmaster chess player and you're all you do is play amateurs and every night you go home and congratulate yourself on what a genius you are because you just stomp these people left right and center it's like you're not a genius you're dimwit right 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 percent

01:12:04 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 you're at a place where where loss we're 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 is a theory of meaning because

01:12:31 meaning as far as i'm concerned the 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 that there's there's a there's a technical meaning that that that genuinely exists and that's the meaning that you get when you're in a domain where you have some

01:13:03 discipline and some skill so you're laying out your competence and and your your ability but you're simultaneously pushing yourself to develop past where you are that's really engrossing and what's that do it what that is doing is expanding your competence and so life is suffering and betrayal in in 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 malevolence i agree and i say to many people that what what is going on in your life is you have a

01:13:37 series of human reward systems that are in your body encoded in your body in your genetics and it's the reason why human beings survive to 2018. in in order to be happy you have to feed those things you have to feed all of them you have to feed the one that wants to uh overcome difficult tasks you have to feed the one that wants to solve problems you have to feed the one that wants to be with a loving tribe of people that you care about you have to feed the one that wants to procreate you have to feed all these things

01:14:06 you have to feed the love you have to feed the competition you have to feed the discipline and that to me is the only way to stay balanced or with me with my body and my mind that's the only way i've i've been able to stay balanced and when either one any of those things get out of whack i get out of whack yeah well so so part of that is so imagine this so imagine that you're this loose collection of all these things that need to be gratified that need to be fed it's a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it

01:14:32 biologically okay so now you have to conjure up a mode of being that satisfies all those necessities simultaneously but then and this is this is a technical explanation of why the post-modernist 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

01:15:04 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 your future self to gratify your present self right it's a stupid game okay 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

01:15:35 infinite number of views 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 you think well there just aren't that many ways of solving that problem and we know some of them one of them is reciprocity you know like

01:16:03 if you go out of your way for me it's incumbent on me to notice that and to attempt in some manner to to repay you and like if 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 there is an ethic this and this is the answer to the post-modern conundrum it's like well is life meaningless is everything just nihilist is is nihilism the right answer or maybe

01:16:36 you know the what would you call identification with an ideology as a counter position to nihilism so nihilism is wrong life is meaningful that and that's what 12 rules for life is about the first meaning of life is suffering and malevolence there's indisputable realities okay well what's 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

01:17:11 revivify order constrain 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 forthrightly 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

01:17:44 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 is figure 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 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

01:18:16 motive 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 speak the truth because your life

01:18:45 turns out better if you speak the truth and so does everyone else's 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

01:19:13 thing that everyone regards as real it's like it's like the future what's the future well it'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 there's the 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 to confront the chaos and and you'd be born with that biologically and then there's your ability to to call forth from the potential new order that's what you do with

01:19:45 your speech and that's what that's what happens in the first chapter of genesis is that god uses god's 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 wanna how do you make the world

01:20:18 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 to to sort through i think this notion and one of the things that you said that i think really resonates is that there's not a voice out there that is

01:20:52 advocating for responsibility and that is talking about how important this is and i think this is an inherent principle that most people are kind of aware of and it feels good to them to hear like it resonates you feel it you when you when you're saying this clean your room you know put your house in order people like yeah yeah how come i'm not hearing this right right i'm not hearing this well it's so funny because one of the things psychologists have done for the last 20 years especially the social psychologists is

01:21:18 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've got 60 years to turn into who you go wait a minute are you what your accomplishments are or are you this individual going through this journey i mean i don't think there's anything wrong with feeling good

01:21:43 about who you are if as long as it's tempered by an understanding of potential and what you have accomplished versus what you can accomplish well i think but having 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 right 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 also there

01:22:08 could be bad parenting bullying that could be a lot of abuse going on and i think that's one of the reasons why that resonates with people this idea of be happy for you about who you are right feel good about who you're right but but the thing is it has to be stated with precision it's like yes it's like you should 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

01:22:36 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 you're in a crooked horrible position okay

01:23:04 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 yes so i'm telling 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

01:23:29 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 with a positive with a 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 a clinical psychologist is that this isn't just guesswork like one of the things we know two things in clinical psychology one is truthful

01:24:01 conversations redeem people because if you come to a clinical psychologist whose worth is solved you 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

01:24:30 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

01:24:55 well you're afraid of that it's like 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 10 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 to to tell people that if you confront the world forthrightly if you speak the

01:25:26 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 as we've got and it also dovetails nicely with the underlying archetypal stories the heroic stories 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

01:25:52 gold share it with the community it's like yeah it's the oldest story of mankind i think one of the factors and the resistance to these ideas of discipline and of taking responsibility for yourself and of a lot of the things that you've been saying in regards to you know all the things that we discussed earlier is people recognizing that they're not doing that in their own lives and they get upset and instead of looking internally they try to attack the thing that's upsetting them they attack your message they attack

01:26:23 the philosophy behind it rather than look internally and objectively and having some sort of introspective point of view where you go okay am i reacting to this because this resonates like i'm missing this aspect of my life is this guy does does does this diminish me or is this guy pointing something out that i can benefit from very few people are willing to do that very few people are willing to take that critical moment to look at their own behavior and look at their own thought process and wonder if the actual

01:26:54 adverse reaction they have to this person's message is because they know that they're wrong yeah well it's no well it's 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 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 um well it's 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

01:27:26 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 uh 10 hours a day it's like 10 percent of the kids will put up their hands and it's interesting because i don't define what constitutes waste i just ask 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

01:27:55 put up their hands well when you get to like six hours a day eighty percent 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 it's 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 it's certainly worth minimum wage because obviously but it's worth way more than that because if

01:28:24 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 you're young so i say well let's assume your time's 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 two thousand dollars a week you're wasting it's a hundred thousand dollars a year it's like how much better would your life be if you weren't wasting a hundred thousand dollars a

01:28:49 year it's like what is that over forty years four million dollars it's like you're 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 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

01:29:20 know and i've had lots of people come to my clinical practice who were chronic procrastinators you know and so they're watching youtube videos say but 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 what are they doing about social media now

01:29:47 it's a huge issue with young kids 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 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

01:30:15 already and i'd like just like to say to hell with it that's the recognition of the union's 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 but hey the alternative is worse so the problem is you say like just saying you stop wasting your life like i think that that's not enough i think this is one of the reasons why a book like this is so important like the idea of discipline in most people's eyes it's like if you're not a

01:30:47 disciplined person it's uncomfortable it's it's going to be painful it's it's frustrating you you have to force yourself into these things it's a muscle it's a and it's a muscle that has to be developed these patterns have to be developed in in your own mind incrementally yes yeah well with uh so you're right just telling people not to waste their lives is not enough and this is another reason why i've so much enjoyed being a clinical psychologist because clinical psychologists don't stick with high-level abstractions

01:31:18 especially the behaviors they're 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 four 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

01:31:43 15 minutes so okay 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 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

01:32:08 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 percent in your bumbling horrible way you got a 50 improvement in one week it's like that's deadly it's like so in 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 the goal is this you're going to take care of yourself

01:32:42 you're going to have a life in three years that justifies its 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

01:33:03 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 um your bad habits and your resentment and your bitterness and all of that your procrastination gets completely out of hand and you

01:33:29 auger down and you're in your own personal version of hell in three to five years what does that look like well 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 a 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 you

01:33:56 know i'd like to drink half a bottle of whiskey tonight too it's like so which is it gonna be well just being hopeful about the future might not be enough but then you think oh i see like there's that little hell thing that i outlined that's waiting for me and maybe i'm afraid of taking the next 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

01:34:21 hell in so many religions it's like hell is 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 it's undeniable that that feeling of total complete misery is undeniable 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

01:34:48 [ __ ] of a time and i richly deserve it jesus that's rough man this is another concept that is doesn't have a voice right now this is another i mean this is a giant part of being a human being and instead of identity politics and right versus left i think these these right versus left battles oftentimes what they are is simply the the battleground for the conflicts in your own mind better to have the conflict in yourself that's another thing i really learned well not not only from the new testament but a fair bit from

01:35:20 that you know the idea is that well there's evil in the world of all sorts and some of it's the evil in other people and some of it's the evil in your brother's heart but the 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

01:35:50 external world plus you don't do any harm it's like like there's lots of people all over the world going out and doing reprehensible things you might say well you should go out and protest against them 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 bitter where am i making the world the worst place than it has to be like you ask yourself those questions

01:36:16 you'll be in for a big shock say well what would happen if you stopped 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 the hell happens it's like it'll work and that's what i'm hoping people will do yeah i'm hoping people do that too and i think the if more people live their life in this sort of a manner i think

01:36:45 we're going to have less differences in terms of our ideologies and more of an understanding that people have different ways of looking at things and different ways of living and this this combat between people this this internal strife that manifests itself in this combat between ideologies i think you are much more inclined to let other people live their lives if you're living your life in a satisfactory manner that's exactly it that's that i have a chapter in there on raising kids says uh don't like your kids don't

01:37:14 let your kids do anything that 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 like again because i'm a clinical psychologist i keep saying monster why why do you use that term 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

01:37:41 tight enough to strangle them in 20 years but you're not always using it as a pejorative you you you've also used it you should become a monster you should be a monster yeah but that's that's you shouldn't be it shouldn't be accidental that's the thing what so what do you mean by monster then in a positive sense like you should a monster 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

01:38:09 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 and 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

01:38:37 causing conflict or something like that but isn't there confusion using those terms as a positive as a negative maybe there's another word instead of monsters well there is there is the potential there is the potential for confusion you say well is that something that can be because i think that monster is a horrible thing i don't think of it as being like a wall like someone who is just rock solid in their belief system and rocks out in their understanding well when you when you fight someone who's formidable say what

01:39:05 do you think of the person that you're fighting like how would you characterize them they mean they have a monstrous side because they can they they'll they can they can bring physical substantial physical force to bear on the situation and and be willing to do it so they're not naive and and harmless by any stretch of the imagination right they have a well-developed capacity for mayhem they think well is that monstrous it's like well i would say yes i would say fierce fierce fine let's go with that yeah because

01:39:39 someone who's fierce and formidable it's not necessarily a monster you know just i think of a monster as being just an awful person who's done awful things and just you know okay well so but fair enough well so back to the 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 you need to organize your family with a certain amount of discipline and a certain amount of structure so that you get to

01:40:08 do what you want which is back to 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

01:40:37 to one another that's the fascinating way of looking at it you think you're yourself as dark cause i don't oh that's great of you is dark oh that's good i mean you seem you're a very friendly guy i think you're you're very serious and especially about these very complicated issues and i think that's one of the reasons why you have made this gigantic wave uh in online discourse and people discussing these very tumultuous times we live in is because you're a guy that did extrapolate your guy did look at that c-16 bill

01:41:11 and look at marxism and go do you know where this is heading and you were the guy that had the courage to say murderous and and people like what the [ __ ] is he talking about that doesn't make any sense and you had to spell it out and explain it and when you do you realize why this is so significant to you 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

01:41:43 like well that always happens when people devolve into tribalism so when 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 forty percent for divorce rate right you have to go you have to go through a fairly fair bit of ugliness to get to divorce canadians are nicer than americans maybe you guys have forty percent maybe maybe i think

01:42:09 we're gonna say yeah i mean i think i i think actually it's 50 here somewhere around the line but yeah yeah you have to go through a lot that's yeah that's really ugly too you know and chris rock had a joke about that he's like 50 of people uh get divorced he goes and he goes but that's just the people who had the courage to leave he goes how many cowards just stay and suffer and meanwhile he wound up getting divorced a few years later and a horrible divorce so yeah true story yeah yeah yeah yeah but it's a good point

01:42:43 yeah i think um we need um more people who are actualized human beings more more people who understand themselves more people who have gone through adversity both in real life and personal in terms of their understanding of their own growth of their own potential and their own understanding of how they've managed their their life their mind their their actions and the the more we have people that have personal sovereignty the better we'll be able to have these these conversations well that that be the hope you know one

01:43:21 of the things i've been 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 you know 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 you know during the industrial revolution

01:43:48 he said well maybe i'm one of these people whose 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 well i want an easy happy life it's like no actually that isn't what you want i think what people want is things that are difficult that they can overcome yeah right that's right they want an optimal challenge well

01:44:14 there's a whole different thing when you overcome something when you do something difficult whether it's i mean i've never written a book but i assume when you write a book when you're done writing that book there's a great feeling of accomplishment because it's very difficult to do that feeling of accomplish for me it's like when i put together a comedy special or when i you know just anything that's difficult there's a feeling like i did it yeah yeah well one of the mysteries is why that feeling exists you know it's

01:44:40 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 i try to i'm not a like a casual optimist about these sorts of things i mean one of the things i do in 12 rules for life

01:45:10 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

01:45:37 of going about it the right way is it's 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 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 you know someone's feeding you peeled grapes that isn't what it is it's it's more like it's more

01:46:05 like victory on the honorable battlefield or something like that yeah the the perception that people have of ultimate success and ultimate happiness is uh it seems motivated by what they don't have rather than an understanding of what success and happiness really is their idea is that one day i'm gonna go and i'm gonna be in my golden years and i'm just going to be able to sit around and do nothing and tell everybody to [ __ ] off you won't be happy at all yeah i talked to to one of the people that i was working with

01:46:34 who had a like 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 uh first that's not a plan that's a travel poster it's like okay let's 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.

01:46:55 okay is it going to do that we'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 yeah yeah it's like that's 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 it's true but when you are working and slaving away you think about that beach with your feet up and the waiter comes over would you like another margarita mr peterson

01:47:26 yeah yes i would absolutely like all right right exactly but it's it's like this 16 year old fantasy of paradise it's like well yes and it just doesn't work out so yeah and and the thing that the thing is is that 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 yeah so and and

01:47:58 it's been very fun talking to especially talking to young men about this it's 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 release that light if we let it shine properly christ it's too cliche 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

01:48:30 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 do you mean this by this in the sense of like the old proverb of the wings of a butterfly fluttering become a hurricane it's it's 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

01:48:59 together like ten percent more your family would be one percent better right it's like well do it and that would ripple off into the people that they interact yes yes and it ripples and it ripples fast yes that's the other thing that's so cool is that like people think well there's seven billion of us and each of us is just this separate dust moat like 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

01:49:26 and you know well you know way more people than this but let's say typically you know without you're gonna know a thousand people in your life well enough to have an impact on them okay and each of those thousand people is gonna know a thousand people so you're one step from a million and two steps from a billion and we are networked technically that 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

01:49:54 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 networked 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

01:50:22 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 made you god

01:50:48 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

01:51:18 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 run-down 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'll 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

01:51:46 that nothing will happen as a consequence of that it's like all hell will break loose as a consequence of that it's really worth trying it is worth trying and it's it's a concept that seems alien to people but if you think about it it makes sense 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 and they also don't understand they devalue what they have right in front of them like another another client i worked with was

01:52:11 having a hard time putting his kid to bed at night and so we 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 him say means that you don't get to spend that time with your

01:52:39 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 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 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

01:53:06 with it's a bad idea fix it it's important get them 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 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

01:53:40 mundane things right those things you do every day you concentrate on them and you make them pristine it's like you got 80 of your life put together these little things that are right in front of us they're not little that's the first thing they are not little and they're hard to set right and if you set them right it has a rippling effect and and fast too way faster than people think i want to talk about the rippling effect because i know you got to get out of here at one but i want to talk about the rippling effect

01:54:05 that you have had on people and how how that makes you feel i mean you were relatively unknown just a year and a half two years ago and now you have become i mean for lack of a better term you're an online celebrity and your your reach is fantastic now this thing that you were talking about about how your impact can affect the people around you in a not very a not insignificant way a very significant way what has that been like for you i mean what is that adjustment been like oh i haven't adjusted to it how old are you

01:54:43 55. so for 53 years you're relatively anonymous outside of universities yeah yeah i had a little bit of you know 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 but compared to oh yeah this is just crazy what you've done on this show mean millions yeah millions millions of people have listened and watched each sing each individual episode yeah they're about two million views each and and then that's nothing compared to

01:55:16 youtube youtube is nothing compared to the audio yeah so the audio is like five times that or something yeah so so that's yeah it's completely crazy no 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 but so what's it like when you think about it you wake up in the morning and you think okay i'm i'm going to get a billion downloads this year i don't think that i i think i'm going to talk to jordan peterson whatever i want to talk about that's that's how i handle

01:55:41 it it's exactly the same thing for the last 15 months this is what i've done got 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 at seven o'clock tonight i'm gonna have a rest i'm gonna take a look at what i have to do tomorrow and i'm gonna 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

01:56:10 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 i don't know why it's happening exactly like i think what's happened is that two things one is that i said 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

01:56:42 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 is 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 a large number of people large number of scholars who knew what that power was

01:57:14 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 there are things that are just well the james demour thing is a good example of that like that's a big

01:57:47 deal you know that that explosion that that emerged around him in the court case that's coming out of it it's a big deal and this thing with lindsey shepard that was the worst scandal that ever hit a canadian university and then there was all the protests and 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 try not to

01:58:18 say anything stupid that's really what i'm trying to do is to not say anything stupid that's hard or too stupid yeah yeah well 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 so far actually you actually believe what you're saying and it actually makes sense well you know that's that's not a bad start it's not a bad start but

01:58:49 it's rare in this world this is a especially in these ideologically charged times this toxic tribalism that we keep bringing up it's well and i also decided like a long time ago and and i 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 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 is potential it's not material

01:59:20 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 want it to degenerate into hell they're angry they're angry because they suffer they

01:59:51 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 they're going to make it behind the game they just want to flip the table over yeah worse than that they 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

02:00:18 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 i believe that too so i think well so i'm 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 that's a very big point that there's more potential to go

02:00:44 around more than people understand yeah we're not going to run out of potential no we're not and this idea of the famine thinking is one of the reasons why people get upset at other people's success they think somehow another this other person's success takes something away from them yeah yeah well there's and it's it's 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 it's not materially measurable but

02:01:12 if you tell someone you're not living up to your potential they go yeah well i know that it's like 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 you go right or left or straight ahead like 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

02:01:40 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 like it 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 the 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

02:02:14 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 when 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 so yeah i just sort of let it slide

02:02:49 yeah but they do it because they blind themselves you know you know when you do it you say ah well you know i let that slide 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 is any of this all all the pressure and the scandal every three weeks is this uh this is it weigh on you is it is it difficult uh how are you feeling like when when i'm feeling stressed it's like yeah it's like it's like simultaneously the worst

02:03:23 possible thing and the best possible thing that could happen well financially it's been a boom right yes it's which is scenarios as oh well i think yes i mean the thing that i've 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 [Laughter] that is what it is i know it's so funny i just can't believe it the other way it just every time i think that well it's just one of the surreal circumstances that characterize my life

02:03:55 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 goddamn capitalistic 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 yeah they keep accusing me of uh like

02:04:23 hauling in the loot 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 there i'm not even asking them for it well i guess that's not exactly right because i set up the patreon 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 was also the potential of you being removed from the

02:04:50 universe well they're yes well that and that was really potential oh yeah oh and yeah people wanted that yeah they haven't stopped wanting that yes in in october when the lindsay shepherd scandal broke and it looked so bad for the left-wing ideologues 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 has been like so my son came over that day and i said jesus julian you know what like 200 people at the faculty mem at in

02:05:22 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 uh don't worry about it dad it was only 200 people and i thought that's what my life is like it's like a day where 200 people sign 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 two hundred people that's how like where the scale is

02:05:50 yeah that's right it's so it it's so surreal because you could say that online and look what's happening and then the support would be overwhelming from who knows how many people well the administration times of that yeah absolutely well in the administration at the university of toronto like that they didn't they didn't take it seriously at all the call to have me removed it didn't cause any didn't even cause a ripple now who are these 200 people what was their motivation oh well they're hard to say what their

02:06:18 motivation is very happy about they read the transcript or listen to those recordings yeah how could they possibly be against you based on that oh because they think that the people who who who conducted the inquisition were right well that's madness oh yes but look look i mean i mean this formerly like 20 members of pimlots and rambuchana's faculty that was communications at wilford laurier wrote a letter supporting them so that's why it's not an isolated incident it's like no no they thought that what they were doing

02:06:51 was right it's mass hysteria yeah well there is an element of that that's for sure and there's certainly again i hate to bring this term up again but this toxic tribalism thing it's like they're they're supporting their own and they understand that their own ideologies have been completely connected to the same type of group think that's going against lindsay shepard in that meeting oh yeah when they tried to paint her as a radical right winger and she certainly isn't of course not neither are you i mean the whole

02:07:18 thing is ridiculous you're not alt-right you're not a neo-nazi you're not i've read a lot of crazy things about you and knowing you personally seeing this stuff i'm like this is this is a fascinating time that's for sure that's for sure yeah and it's been well it's been crazily well i'm what would i say crazily stressful it's it's the best way to describe it is surreal yeah like i'm it's like i stepped outside myself i can't 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

02:07:52 channel 4 interview you know it's like what the hell really it's it's it's crazy well it's it's this these conversations are so limited by what you were saying before that they're trying to get this five-minute sound bite in and that's what television has become yeah it's a dying medium yeah it doesn't make any sense it doesn't make any sense to sandwich these commercials in every 15 minutes or whatever they do none of it makes any sense it's an archaic way of communicating ideas yeah well then i think that is part of

02:08:22 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 yeah well exactly yeah and 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 like just genuine conversation because like one of the things that's happened between you and i when i've come

02:08:59 down here is 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 i outline this and there's a chapter in 12 rules for life called uh assume that the person you're talking to might know something you don't which is like the formula for good conversations 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

02:09:24 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 like when i when i did this biblical series because that was another thing that was so strange joe was like imagine i walked into a like a venture capitalist uh um organization i said look i want you guys to

02:09:51 bankroll me i'm gonna do 15 lectures on the old testament and i'm going to try to attract young men i'm going to rent a theater like they just laughed me out of there see can you imagine anything less saleable than that so but i did that i went ahead with it i rented the 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

02:10:17 that 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 like they've 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 use the utility of a good conversation because like when i'm up on on on the podium say lecturing i'm not exactly lecturing i'm trying to figure something out and sharing that process with the

02:10:49 audience which is so different than what is going on in universities that is freaking everybody out it's what's going on is this indoctrination into this group thing 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 here's some universal truths about human beings that seem to

02:11:18 be and then i try to explore that it's like well should we believe this should we like when abraham in the abrahamic story for example i mean abraham's an old guy and he's basically lived in his mom's basement that's that's really the beginning of the story 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 the call to adventure think okay fine that's a heroic motif but then abraham goes out and the first thing he encounters is like tyranny and

02:11:44 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 that what whatever they are ignorant superstition is not the right category how has this changed your classrooms well i haven't gone back teaching since all of this hit because when did you stop teaching well oh no i guess that's not true that's not true i taught from january to may of of 2016.

02:12:20 well the first way it changed it was that i was like so so shell-shocked when i went to to teach last january that and i was really sick like i've been really sick this year i had like last january jesus it was just dismal i wouldn't worship wish that on my worst enemy i had three weeks where i didn't sleep a wink try that that's really entertaining one long day of misery that's three weeks long what kind of a an illness it looks like an autoimmune disorder do you think this is because of stress no i don't you don't

02:12:51 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 i mean 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 what fixed it oh all i eat is meat and greens that's it no juice no no vegetables no carbohydrates meat greens that's it and that fixed it that seems to have fixed it yeah

02:13:22 that fixes so many people i can tell if you've listened to the podcast i've done yeah yeah yeah yeah well i've been following them because my daughter has a blog too called don't eat that and my daughter had a hair 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.

02:13:43 jesus so she walked around on two broken legs for a year in excruciating pain she was on extremely high doses of opiates and so she was addicted to opiates which she like she just once she had her surgery she just went off them cold turkey and like suffered through the withdrawal for two months and compared to what she had been through that was nothing like what she went through man you 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

02:14:08 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 she was on antidepressants she's not she had to take ritalin to stay awake she could only stay awake about six hours a day and she had to take high doses of ritalin to

02:14:36 stay awake she what is this autoimmune disease well she had her diagnosis was rheumatoid arthritis right but she didn't have the blood markers for it but she had all the other symptoms anyway she she figured out this restrictive diet she only ate chicken and broccoli for about two months and almost all her symptoms went away and she's pretty much symptom free now and which is it's a complete miracle and she convinced me to try this diet about a year and a half ago and so i lost seven pounds a month for seven months

02:15:09 that was the first thing which was just bloody amazing yeah it was unbelievable it was unbelie i couldn't believe it you know well you was your diet rich in refined carbohydrates before that rich enough yeah rich enough you know um pastas and bread yeah bread bread bread in particular i eat a lot of bread um so the first thing that happened was i quit snoring that happened immediately took took one week and i was snoring quite badly that so that disappeared in a week and that was amazing i thought oh that's interesting

02:15:39 and then i had gastric reflux 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 immune problem that went away um i have had gum disease for 30 years that went away that went away that's amazing i'm 55 like my gum disease went away it's ridiculous so i figured all that out so my life in the last year was so so strange because i'd get up in the morning and i'd think god all these

02:16:14 bloody scandalous things are happening around me and i have to deal with that and then i 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 feeling wretched and so it was like if i it was like wolves at the back door and crocodiles at the front door something like that so but but whatever like i'm down to the same weight i was when i was 25.

02:16:44 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 hypoglycemia i have lots of energy um i can't eat anything but so i can't go out for dinner but you can't eat nonsense you can eat i mean i'm on the same dime i eat meat and greens i don't have a disorder like you did in the same regard but i take a day where i have a

02:17:14 cheat day you know i don't even do it every week well i'll have a cheeseburger or something like that yeah but for the most part that's the diet that i follow as well yep well for some people it seems like like uh well for a massive amount of people well i think for far more people than we know i think people are carbohydrate poisoning themselves like they can't believe yes and along with all the other things that go along with it insulin yeah you know the high blood sugar is not good cholesterol in this this idea that

02:17:40 uh cholesterol and saturated fat are the problems that people are experiencing it's not true no the real problem is sugar and cholesterol has been demonized you know i'm sure you read the article from the new york times about the sugar industry paid off scientists to lie about the results yep yep well i know too that two food scientists in the uk resigned about three years ago they were they were part and parcel of the organization that had produced the food pyramid they said it was the worst public health disaster the

02:18:06 last 40 years they 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 yeah like crazy it's crazy ridiculous go to disneyland yeah exactly it's insane it is but you know and the reason is as far as i can tell the reason is is that they're they're poisoning themselves with carbohydrates that's what it looks like and the thought process is so out of whack i i um retweeted an article today from nina thai schultz uh she

02:18:36 she tweeted it about um this trend of eating only egg whites and how terrible it is for you so it's a health disaster and this idea that cholesterol from the egg yolk is bad for you it's one of the most important things you can eat it's and then weight watchers is adjusted yeah see it goes weight watchers diet program now adjust their uh pro their uh protocol and they say that eat all the eggs you want it is now a zero point food which is [ __ ] incredible yeah yeah yeah so and the way i don't get hungry is i eat a lot

02:19:06 of oil like a lot of olive oil yes so and that that keeps fats so you're basically burning fat you're on like a ketogenic diet yeah yeah so and it seems to be well and that was complex 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's amazing it is amazing and like she's really she's in pretty damn good shape

02:19:33 she just had a baby like five months ago so that was that's amazing too yeah we're we're stunned man we're stunned because like it was it was rough well she sounds like an incredibly she is quite the tough cookie that girl sounds like it yeah many people are experiencing the same revelation that their diet is killing look i was tired all the time i would hit a net i mean i was always very very active so i stayed lean because of my physical activity but by the end of the day i need a nap i would always take a nap before

02:20:04 i'd go to jiu jitsu i was like i have to take a nap or i can't train yeah and it's because of carbohydrates yeah i had i'd nap about two hours a day yeah and now i don't nap at all me too 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 well that's also you're probably not getting enough sleep yeah right exactly big difference exactly so yeah it's been it's been remarkable so so why did you stop teaching oh well i took a sabbatical because

02:20:28 of all this yeah well i told i told my department chair i said look i i had a sabbatical coming up next year i said look you know i there's too much going on it'll be better if i take the sabbatical this year then i can concentrate on my teaching next year so you take the entire year off yeah so you're about eight months in is that yeah correct yeah well then 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 and for the

02:20:56 rest of the time and so technically i'll be going back teaching in january of 2019. technically technically you're not convinced well well i can't think a year ahead at the moment right i don't know what the hell's going like i'm not going to go back and teach the same way right because see 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

02:21:27 question would be well why would i teach 300 people when i could teach 150 000. that's just stupid who would do that those same 300 people also have access to the hundreds well exactly that's right that's exactly it and the next thing is well i taped my maps of meeting class and my personality class for three years running it's like it's there well i could do it again but why right it's taped right 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

02:21:57 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 right so and this is something i brought up to brett weinstein and i'm hoping he falls along the same line same bet weinstein not steen i make that mistake often sorry brett but same thing brilliant guy restricted by his university big scandal leaves and i'm hoping he follows the same path because he has so much to offer and

02:22:33 he has so much to offer for anybody who can get online well and one of the things that's really fun about youtube that 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 right and so it's you might think well where is the university well the university is where people want to learn right 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

02:23:00 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 and u of t has 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 c-16 i said i think that making this video is probably

02:23:32 illegal in and of itself was there controversial moments in your career before that no wow no i mean it surprised me because i've always i would say that the content of my lectures has been atypical but it's been atypical in a good way like the student response to my lectures has 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

02:24:08 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 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 like it took me 15 years to write i did that over

02:24:38 and over and over and so what i was i'd write a sentence and then i'd think okay have i got all the words right every single word is that the proper words the proper phrase is the proper sentence do i believe that this sentence is true then i'd think like of 10 ways i could attack it and see 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 a you know come on i wanted to produce a

02:25:09 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 that's what's so fascinating to me about all this stuff and not to not to overly exaggerate the significance of this but just to be completely honest about it

02:25:41 you're the right guy for the job and it sort of found you it's real weird because there's not a lot of people that are that meticulous about their thoughts and about their work and about their writing and about their criticizing their own ideas to the point where they break them down and try to break them try them apart i had a big problem so when i when i started to write maps of meaning i thought okay what's the situation this is the cold war we've divided into two armed tribal camps and we've decided that settling

02:26:08 the difference between us is worth risking being itself we could 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 its 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 okay having figured out why that's happening what could be done about it so

02:26:45 it would stop and at the same time i was also studying what had happened in auschwitz and 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 it's writing a book is so rigorous you know because you think but you can only remember so much you

02:27:14 have to write it down because then you can remember way more 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 so 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

02:27:40 eighty percent 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 wow listen you're out of time thank you always 12 rules for life an antidote to chaos jordan peterson i made a i made a discount for your viewers again for

02:28:12 the future authoring program okay so what do they have to do rogan just use rogan and how do they get to the website selfauthoring.com okay 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 look i heard about you on joe rogan it's like and like thousands of people have told me that so well it's been it's your fault it's been an honor i appreciate it sir thank you

02:28:40 you bet