Jordan Peterson: From the Barricades of the Culture Wars

so I guess you're all here to talk about Carl Jung's early work and this man's carnivorous diet and the Soviet art he collects. um no, in all seriousness. I am very excited to be here with you. What I learned before your official title is that you are a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto. He's written two books, one called Knops Meaning and the best-selling Twelve Rules for Life, which is currently being translated into 40 languages, but this description doesn't capture what you become, which is kind of a phenomenon when I was reading 12 rules for life in a cafe in the locker room of my gym, I was sitting on a bench and people came up to me and said this book saved my life. and yet there are other people in the country, including some of my fellow journalists, who insist that you are actually a gateway drug to the far right, so I'm excited to be here with you, not just you, but with the man and me.

I hope we can use this hour or so to talk about your views on the meaning of gender and feminism. God Higher Education and I'm sure we can figure all that out in less than an hour, so I want to start with the book Twelve Rules for Life. Which I hope some of you have read here are some of the messages from that book. Gender is not a social construction. People should strive for meaning in their lives, not happiness. Life is suffering, but there are ways to transcend it. your bed now, this all makes pretty good sense to me, and yet I don't think there's a Canadian in the world I've read more opinion pieces about.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that you're kind. of the most loved and hated public intellectual at the time in the Western world, so I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about what that's like and your understanding of that. You just spent two days in Vancouver, where you attended an event with Sam Harris. We spoke for more than two hours on the question of truth and 5,000 people attended those events. Not exactly a sexy Beyoncé concert. What's going on? How do you understand it and what is your place in it? I think you don't want to underestimate the role that technological transformation is playing in this.

You know, I've been thinking intensely about YouTube and podcasts for about two years, so I started putting my university lectures on YouTube in 2013 and I did it for a variety of reasons, mainly out of curiosity and the drive to learn and I discovered that if I want learn a technology, the best way to do it is to use it and I'm always learning new technologies because well, that doesn't make me particularly unique, but I had some success with my public speaking. television in Canada, so I did some speaking engagements with a series called Big Ideas on Canadian public television and there are about 200 of those speaking engagements and I did five of them with 210 by 200 different people, but I did five of them and they were regularly among the top ten. the most viewed lectures, so I knew there was a larger market for, let's say, ideas and I thought I might as well post my lectures on YouTube and see what happens and then in April 2016 I had a million views and I thought, Hey?

The only reason people watch them is because they want to see them because they are actually very difficult and a million something is a lot if you sell a million copies of your book. Well, first of all, that never happens, right? It's very, very rare, you're very happy, you've never cited your scientific papers a million times, you rarely have a million dollars, it's a very big number and I thought it's fair, quite fair and of course it's not so weird as before. It was, but it's still a significant number and I didn't really have any way to calibrate it.

I thought well, what am I supposed to do now that I hit a million views? How am I supposed to conceptualize that? What is this YouTube thing anyway? It was once a repository of cute videos, so what does it mean to have a million views? I thought and really started thinking about it because you know there were a lot of people commenting as well and they were interested in the conferences. And I followed them avidly and thought, "Okay, so what exactly is YouTube?" I thought well, for the first time in the history of humanity, the spoken word has the same reach as the written word and not only that, there is no possibility of publication and no barrier to entry. a big technological revolution which is a Gutenberg revolution which is a big deal this is a game changer and shortly after that I discovered the world of podcasts which is about ten times bigger than the world of YouTube and the world of podcasts.

It's also a Gutenberg revolution, except it's even more extensive because the problem with books and videos is that you can't do anything else while you're making them, when you're reading, you're reading, when you're watching a video, you know? you can be distracted but you have to pay attention to the video, but if you're listening to a podcast you can be driving a forklift or a long-distance truck or you can be exercising or doing the dishes and what that means is that podcasts free up, let's say, two hours a day so people can engage in educational activities that they otherwise wouldn't be able to do and that's about an eighth of people's lives, so podcasts give people back an eighth of their lives. to participate in high-level activities. -High-level education, then I thought: well, people really want to do this, there is a massive market for high-level intellectual engagement that is much deeper and more desperate, let's say, than anyone suspected.

We really saw it in Vancouver, you know, I mean the discussion. I had with Sam Harris the two discussions in which we talked about the relationship between facts and values ​​that was really there and science and religion more peripherally, but the dialogue took place at the level, I would say roughly, at the level of a pretty rigorous PhD defense and we were We were only supposed to talk for an hour and then go to QA, but the crowd didn't want us to stop, so we talked the first night for two and a half hours and the second night for two hours and a half and the crowd was 100 people. % on board the whole time and it wasn't because Sam was winning or I wasn't winning either of us, in fact we were trying to win, we were trying to learn something and we were actually trying to learn something that we weren't just pretending to do. that and you know, the place blew up at the end and I think one of the things I've realized in the last few days as I've been thinking about this is that the narrow bandwidth of television has made us think we're more stupid. of who we are and that is why people have a real hunger for a deep intellectual dialogue and that can be addressed with these new technologies and that has a revolutionary meaning and that is beginning to develop.

I wonder if this Nietzsche would love to quote this line. line that Oh, anyone who has a reason to live can endure almost anything, yeah, what's your why, what drives you, you're the busiest man, I want to bring you here, you know, I think you're important wherever you were last night. in Portland tomorrow like I don't know, you're alive, frankly now, what drives you, what is this relentless drive, what are you pushing towards. I'm trying to do it right when I spent 15 years writing the first book I ever wrote. It's called Meaning Maps and it's similar to Twelve Rules for Life, although it's a much more difficult book, the audio version of that book is now available, by the way, it's been out since June 12, and if you want, Twelve Rules or you were interested and you could try it.

I think the audio version is much more accessible because it is a difficult book. Getting the cadences of sentences right is an aid to understanding. I spent 15 years reading that book about three hours a day. writing and much more time reading and I was interested in solving a problem that was, I was interested in the great atrocities of the 20th century, those that were committed on the right and those that were committed on the left, but I was interested in it psychologically and I What that meant is that if I had been there, what could I have done to not participate and that's what I've been trying to find out because for me what happened in Nazi Germany and what happened in the Gulag Archipelago and in Maoist China in many places it was a sufficient and convincing definition of hell as well and I wanted to understand what was the opposite of that and not sociologically or politically or economically because I think ultimately those levels of explanation are insufficient, but psychologically what is that like? you have to behave in the world so that if the opportunity arises to participate in such things, you don't do it and you know when the Holocaust museums were built there was a motto that went with them which was never forget and I thought so.

Fair enough, but you can't remember what you don't understand, so I wanted to understand it but I wanted to understand it. When people read history, they either read it as an impartial observer or they tend to read it as well, perhaps. the heroic the heroic protagonists people like to imagine that they would be Schindler in Schindler's List, but that's wrong, because the probability that you are the perpetrator is much higher, especially just the perpetrator who hides in the silence when the silence It is not appropriate. so I wanted to have discovered what constituted hell and the path to what would be, I suppose, the cowardice that cowardice produces and the resentment that produces either being complicit in those events or not opposing them when they arise.

I wanted to understand what the opposite is. That was because I think that's what you have to learn from what happened in the 20th century and that's why I wrote meaning maps to understand that and expose what the opposite was and then it turned out to be extremely useful to me and then to people. I started teaching about it because it's helpful to know what the opposite of hell is and I've been teaching that stuff to people since 1993, for 25 years and the students' response has always been the same. The response I am receiving now is missing some of the negative characterizations, let's say they have arisen for particular reasons, but the students have always said one of two things and this is the vast majority of them, they are not selected answers.

It has been the same in all of them. parts where they tell me and this is the same response that I get from my audience now too: they say that you have given me words to explain things, to explain and understand things that are always new to be true or that I was in a very dark place for a of the seven reasons why people may be in a dark place alcohol or drugs or relationship failure or lack of vision or nihilism or hopelessness or depression or anxiety if you know the dangers that people can encounter and I have been developing a vision for my life and trying to take responsibility and trying to be careful with what I say and things are much better and that's what motivates me, so you know it's very interesting to see what's happening because you know you said I'm the most Hated and the most loved man is like he is hated by a very small percentage of very loud people and so there are people who don't or haven't or won't or taking a look at who I am.

I'm doing it partly because it doesn't fit within their conceptual scheme, you know, every time I'm interviewed by journalists with the smell of blood in their noses, let's say they are very willing and able to characterize the situation that I find myself in as a politician, but that is because they cannot see the world in any other way than political and the political is a small fraction of the world and what I am doing is not political, it is psychological, philosophical or theological, the political element. It's peripheral and if people come to live conferences, let's say it's absolutely obvious, that's not what it's about, that's not why people are there, that's not what they talked to me about afterwards, it's fundamentally irrelevant, the only reason this ever became political is because in Canada our provincial and federal governments had the unspeakable arrogance to propose mandatory speech legislation in a British common law system where that had never been done even a time and despite the fact that its Supreme Court in 1942 made some decisions. such things are unconstitutional, no, that was explained to the people here, what really happened, that is, that you oppose this law that was going to force you, you say that using transgender preferred pronouns is that accurate , it is accurate but partial, so there were already provincial laws to force this type of thing, but a federal law had been generated and I went and read the political guidelines within which the federal law should be interpreted and those that They were put together by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which is a fundamentally radical left-wing Inquisition, and they had documented a lot of policies that would make any sensible person's hair stand on end if they read them, which they didn't, but I did. and not only did I read them, but I understood them. and after reading and understanding them, I made videos only one night.

I got up around 3:00 in the morning because I reallyIt bothered me for a variety of complicated reasons, including the fact that several of my clinical clients had been bullied. states of poor mental health by radical social justice warriors in their various workplaces and this was long before I became embroiled in this controversy, by the way, so it was not a sampling bias and at the same time My university had the nerve to demand unconscious bias retraining for its HR staff despite the fact that unconscious bias measurements are neither reliable nor valid even according to the testimony of formulators and despite evidence that There is no data to give unconscious bias retraining programs even the vaguest hint of a credible result. so I made these videos and since I was upset about this and I thought wow what will happen if I make a video so this is one of the things I feel or maybe you can answer us how I feel about this. incident, you are often characterized, at least in the mainstream press, as transphobic if a student comes up to you and says: I was born a woman.

Now I identify as a man. I wanna go. I want you to call me as a man. pronouns would you say yes to that? Well, it would depend on the student and the context and why I thought they were asking me and what I think really characterized their demand in all of that because that can be done in a way that is genuine and acceptable in a way that is manipulative. and unacceptable and if it was genuine and acceptable then I wouldn't have any problem with it and if it was manipulative and unacceptable then there is no chance then and you might think well who am I to judge well first of all?

I'm a clinical psychologist and I've talked to people for about 25,000 hours, so I'm responsible for judging how I'm going to use my words. I judge it the same way I judge all the interactions I have with people. It's the best I can and it's characterized by all the mistakes I'm prone to, so you know, I'm not saying my judgment is infallible, but I have to live with the consequences, so I'm willing to accept responsibility. So, but also to be clear that this never happened, I have never refused to call anyone for anything they have asked me to call them and although that has been reported several times, it is a complete falsehood and had nothing to do with the The transgender issue as far as I'm concerned, and furthermore, if it were, if it had to do with just the transgender issue in Canada, the likelihood that this would have had the impact that it had is zero, so it wasn't about that it was not at all about something much deeper and much more insidious and everyone knew it, that is why it did not disappear.

What should have happened is that there should have been a bit of controversy about it, maybe even an outcry and everyone's attention. It should have disappeared like a week later and that didn't happen even a little bit, so there's more stuff going on here, so since I knew there's a lot more stuff going on here, then this little bill would have revealed one of its rules in 12 rules . for life is: I hope I am understanding correctly, choose your words carefully and be ironic if I was wrong, be precise in your speech, okay, be precise in your speech, that is, you know you did well, okay, more or less, yes, well, you have.

In essence, that is what is crucial. One of the things that has happened to you in the last two years is that every expression of yours and Caitlyn alluding to this in her introduction is analyzed, perhaps manipulated, how do you live with that reality? I even have the confidence to continue, from my perspective, running towards the gap on all kinds of what have become third rail issues, knowing that a lot of what you say is going to be mischaracterized and then I have a follow up on that hmmm . Well, I mean, about 25 years ago, thirty years ago, maybe 1985.

I guess that's how long ago, yeah, I decided I was going to be very careful about what I said, as I realized when I was thinking about Some of these ideas that I already described trying to understand what inclined people towards revenge and cruelty, I was contemplating that you personally know what I would be inclined towards that or what told me towards that and at the same time I developed what you would call a keen awareness. part of my speech was part of it because he had asked me a question and when you ask yourself a question, if you really ask a question, you start thinking about the answer, whether you want to think about it or not, and and the answer you might generate might have very little resemblance to the answer you'd like to generate and he would ask me a question which was, let's say, what is the way out of this hell and how could I be entangled in that and one of the things I started to realize was that I wasn't very careful. with what he was saying and that that seemed somehow related to that, it's not surprising because you know, it's not really obvious that the Nazis, for example, were all that careful about what they said in terms of its relationship to the truth, Quite the opposite, the same with the ideologues in the Soviet Union and that's why the idea that there was some relationship between carelessness and speech, lies and deception and that kind of thing or oneself. aggrandizement or any of the things you can indulge in if you are careless with your speech and the weakening of your character to the point of getting entangled in great and terrible sociological movements that seem like a problem to me that seemed To me, to be reasonable, if a lot of people would have commented on that, like Solzhenitsyn, for example, can, so I started to feel uncomfortable with what he was saying and what seemed to happen was that I started to realize and I could feel like I was reading Carl Rogers in the At the same time, He suggested that psychotherapists pay attention to exactly these kinds of things.

I began to understand that many of the things he said were not true. I didn't really believe them, they weren't really my thoughts. make me, they made me feel weak when I said them, can you give me an example? okay, that's a good question, can I give you an example? Oh, maybe I would get into an argument with someone in a bar about an intellectual topic in order to show my intellectual superiority or at least show it hypothetically, you know, so you know, sometimes people like to argue and they like to argue because hypothetically they would like to win, so you don't want to say that you were saying platitudes, oh, I sure was, okay?

Yes, all the time and sometimes they weren't even commonplace. You know, they might have been things I learned in books that weren't clichés, but they weren't mine. I had no right to them just because you read them. something doesn't mean you have the right to it, you have to understand it and understanding something so steep means a profound transformation means you have to live it and so on, just because you know it's such a fickle concept and you can say it doesn't give you the right to pronounce it as if out of yours you have to earn it and I was a smart kid and my head was full of ideas that I hadn't earned and I could put them out there, but that doesn't mean they were mine or mine and so there was a falsehood in expressing them and then I couldn't say it for a time because I was saying things and a part of me was all critical about what I was saying, don't think that's not accurate, it's kind of a lie I said that to almost everything I said and I took a risk I thought okay, I'm going to assume that the part of me that is critical of what I am saying is right although that was terrible because I really often admitted that I could barely speak and then I learned to only say things that didn't make me feel weak and then I decided that was what I was saying. was going to do, so I've been careful about what I've been saying for a while. a long time but and I'm having a hard time with what you're saying now because the test shouldn't be I'm just saying things that are true I'm not just saying things that don't make me feel weak What am I misunderstanding in that formulation?

Well, what you're partly misunderstanding is how you know that the things you're saying aren't true and I would say one of the ways you know that is that they weaken you and you can learn that you can learn to feel Carl Rogers talked a lot about This in his work in psychotherapy, he said that one of the main functions of a psychotherapist was to be consistent with what and what he meant by that was that there was no disjunction between what you felt in a situation, let's say, and what you said, that it was all one piece and that it was an embodied unity, not simply a conceptual unity, so I really think there's something psychologically weak, not weak about that. terms of power, I mean, psychologically, we're fine, yeah, yeah, I mean, I mean, morally weak, I mean, weak and character, that kind of thing, yeah, that's what I mean, okay, yeah , and so, you know, I was very careful with what I said and At the same time, I spent an enormous amount of time writing, so I was very careful with what I wrote, so in meaning maps I think I rewrote every sentence of that book at least 50 times and that's great, and every sentence, yes.

You're sure? Oh yeah, that's for sure, now you know. I come up with the sentence and then I write a bunch of variants and then I choose the variant that's best and then I try to find as many arguments as I can. about why the sentence was stupid so tell me you still do this yeah I still do this right did you do that? 15 15 versions of each sentence and 12 rules for life I also said 50 Oh 50 excuse me, it was more like I should be precise in my speech, okay, listen, it was more like 15 with 12 rules for life, so it was less, but I'm a better writer than I was then, so I didn't have to do it as often, so I kept writing it until I couldn't improve the sentences, that doesn't mean they were good, it just meant I got to the point where if I rewrote them it wasn't obvious.

The rewrite was better than the original sentence, so I had to do it. stop, so my question from a few minutes ago was how do you know that you're going to be intentionally your words are going to be intentionally twisted and how has that changed you, well, it's made me even more careful, okay, you know, it's a stretch. careful, but you know, I had been pretty careful and the evidence of that is pretty clear, so you know, when all this political controversy surrounded me and that was swirling around me, well, it still is, maybe it's even overblown. to a certain extent, but it was very intense in Canada for a good six months and people were going through what I had put on YouTube with a fine-tooth comb and there were 200 hours of videos in there and you think well with a little bit of creative editing and with motivation in mind, you think. if you spent more than 200 hours of someone's lectures you could find a smoking gun, even if you had to cut a sentence, no one found anything and the reason for that was that there was nothing there, that's why they didn't find it, and so on.

I had been very careful and discussed all kinds of incredibly controversial topics, you know, because my classes were very intense, we were going with the meaning maps class in particular, it's like they got it, it's a basic presupposition, partly what I What I was trying to do with my students was convince them that if they had been in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, they would not have been on the side of the good right. It's a tremendous thing to drag people down, but statistically it's overwhelmingly likely. It was a very serious class and certainly a place where you could take a misstep at any given moment, you know, and I talked about gender differences and the biological substructure of consciousness and all these things that could easily become politically controversial, but as I said, there were It's not smoking guns, but now for the last two years I've been even more careful and I have people watching me, you know, I mean, my family watches me and what I'm doing, they follow it very carefully and if I stray. a little bit of what they think I should have about how I should behave so they tell me and I have friends who are doing the same thing and I listen to them, do you feel like you deviated from how you should behave when you said oh? uh, I think it was Mishra in the New York Review of Books.

Well, let me share what you said. I'm trying to be precise in my speech, but I think you said you're a sink. What did you say? you were if you really abstracted the ammonia spray and if you were in the room upstairs, yeah, so don't regret it one bit, okay, and I'll tell you why, okay, look, it's very complicated, you know, I've got this, I've got this . friend who is a native Carver and he comes from a very difficult background, much more difficult than you think and maybe some of you come from difficult backgrounds or know people who come from them, but he comes from a pretty difficult background. background and I started working with him buying his art 15 years ago and he was a survivor of residential schools in Canada and we became very close and he helped me design the third floor of my house and anyway, the long and short of it was that I was inducted into their family about two and a half years ago at this big ceremony on a native reserve in North Vancouver and you know we've been through a lot together and a lot of it has been pretty difficult and you know this what the hell was Mishra's name for sure What the hell was his name, he had the temerity to say that he was having an affair with the noble savage, it's like watchingto your stepmother, you don't know what the hell you're talking about even a little bit and So if I had been a left-wing character and he had made a comment like that, he would have had to pay hell, which doesn't mean he's a right-wing character, by the way, so I have no regrets. a little I think what he said was absolutely reprehensible and that he should have been reported for that, so I don't regret it at all now people said, you know, maybe it would have been better for me not to have made that comment they may be right but actually I thought about it and I thought there's no excuse for that you don't know what you're talking about you're getting into things you don't understand and you're casually slandering not only me but also my noble and savage friend, it's like you know. , so speaking of things that people have said to defame you, you are currently suing Wilfrid Laurier University because you will correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the administrators there, in their meeting with Lindsey Shepherd, who was a TA who showed a clip of you, in a way they interrogated her accusing her of creating a hostile teaching environment for showing a clip of you in her classroom and during that interaction she recorded they compared you to hitler no, they compared me to hitler or milo you nopales excuse me right now it's important and the reason it's important is because look at these people one of the 13 fair and just to finish that question maybe you can braid this because you're one of the most outspoken advocates.

I would say freedom of speech right now. I would like you, if you can, to struggle a little with the fact that you believe so strongly in freedom of speech and yet I also sued this university for defamation, yes, well, first of all they compared me and said to play a clip by Jordan Peterson was like playing a Hitler or Milo Innopolis clip and I thought, well, let's go a little easy on the Hitler comparisons, guys. you might want to save that for when it's really necessary because you don't use it, it's sacrilege to use an insult like that except in situations where it's justified, it's not appropriate to use a catastrophe like that casually, especially when you're doing it under the disguise of moral virtue there is no excuse for it and then the second thing is that you are a professor, you both understand your damn words well, what is my Hitler and my humble innopolis?

Seriously, those aren't the same people in case you didn't realize that one of them was the worst barbarian of the 20th century, with the possible exception of Stalin and Mao, and the other is a provocative trickster who is pretty quick standing and is what you would say is stirring things up. posed in a relatively unproblematic way, they are not the same creature, and therefore combining them into a single careless insult during what you would call an administrative investigation that, by the way, was completely unjustified and based on an outright lie. It was a student complaint since the university admitted there was no excuse for it and if they weren't professors then well it wouldn't have been that bad but they were and the reason I sued them there are a lot of reasons I mean that the comparison to Hitler, the comparison to Milo and Nautilus were just two of the forty things they accused me of and they are all listed in the statement and the only reason I filed the lawsuit, but seven months later, something like that was because of what happened to Lindsay Shepard, so what happened to her at Lynne's at Wilfred Laurie is absolutely unforgivable, everything they did to her was based on a lie, then the University apologized and so did the professor, and then he lied during his apology, which was a forced apology. anyway and therefore of very little use, they were not subject to any disciplinary action even though the university bylaws required it and they made Lindsay Sheppard's life a living hell even after they apologized to her and They told him that he had done nothing wrong and that they had done nothing wrong. "They didn't follow their own procedures, so I read your statement and I actually read it on YouTube, where by the way it has about 500,000 views and I thought you guys hadn't learned anything, you hadn't learned anything at all, so if a lawsuit doesn't does." I don't convince you, maybe two will and then regarding freedom of speech, it's like freedom of speech is still limited within a structure of law and P these people broke the law or at least that's my claim , so I don't see the contradiction there in You can't just slander someone, defame them, lie about them, you can't incite people to commit crimes.

There are all sorts of reasonable restrictions on freedom of speech that are already essentially codified in the British common law system, but Wilfred Laurier learned nothing more than this. It's not over yet, but isn't it creating a chilling effect that is something those of us who care so much about free speech want to stay away from? You could say that these types of defamation lawsuits are a really very dangerous slippery slope and I'm a little surprised that you don't see it that way, well, you know, I do see it that way, which is why I spent seven months thinking about it before deciding to do it, but I thought that there is always a risk in every decision that is made. the risk of doing something and the risk of not doing something and both risks are usually catastrophic in every decision you make in life is like ice.

I weighed the risks and thought no, the risk here of not doing something is greater than the risk of doing something if they had shown any signs look at one of the things wilfred laurier did after this scandal which, by the way, was the biggest scandal biggest thing ever to hit a Canadian university by a wide margin and it was an international scandal I rarely go places where people haven't heard of this so it was a big deal and they had a lot to learn and they learned nothing. They hypothetically created a panel to clarify their position on freedom of expression and its relationship to inclusion, etc. only two people on the panel who were defending the free speech position resigned in frustration and I know this because I know who they are and very well, that is just one of the proofs that they learned nothing and then I continue with Street Shepherd continually like her, her statement is like a novel of stupidity, you know, it's like and my feeling was that if there had been any sign of, let's call it, true apology and procedural rectification, she would have left them alone and so on.

I would have, but in fact there was nothing, if anything what they did was double down and go underground here is our apology here are our procedures that is what they showed the world here is how nothing has changed it is like no not good enough since we're on the topic of universities, you recently said that what universities have done is beyond forgiveness. I'm wondering if you can explain what you mean by that and a second question related to the file is: Should we? I will put it clearly: should we abolish universities or all? do it themselves, okay, let's hear a little about what they've done that you think makes them beyond forgiveness.

Well, they are overwhelmingly administrative and don't spend any more money on the faculty than they did thirty years ago. and the cost of that higher administrative burden that is well documented not by me by other people and that has been that way has been accelerating over the last twenty years has been a radical increase in tuition rates, especially compared to the radical decrease in the price of most things. in the last twenty years, so they have become administratively very heavy and this is especially true in the United States. The way it's being handled is that unsuspecting students are being given free access to student loans that will get them through their 30s and 40s. in a and universities are inciting them to extend their carefree adolescence for a period of four years at the cost of mortgaging their future earnings in an agreement that does not allow escape through the bank, making it essentially a form of indentured servitude, there is no excuse.

In any case, that means that administrators have learned to pick the future pockets of their students and because they also see them in some sense as sacred and fragile cash cows, let's say because one might wonder why the students are being treated like they're They're so fragile it's like well, we don't want them to retreat now, right? And we can't, if they fold, then we won't get our hands on their future profits in a way they can't escape. and that paralyzes the economy because students come out loaded with debt that they will never pay just at the time when they should be at the peak of their ability to take entrepreneurial risks, so they can't do it because they are too paralyzed by debt and that is Absolutely atrocious.

They are manipulating the accreditation processes so that the degree no longer has its credible value. They are enabling activist disciplines that have zero academic credibility in my opinion and I am perfectly willing to defend that. They claim that they are there and by enabling the activist disciplines there they are enabling the distribution of this absolutely absurd view that Western society is fundamentally a patriarchal tyranny, which is absurd on at least five dimensions of analysis, but which is increasingly becoming more in what one has. believe if they allow you to speak in public well, that's the most, it's a good start, that's there, they are not teaching students to read critically, they are not introducing good literature, they are not teaching them to write, it's like The list goes on and on and on.

Do you think you are somehow a symbol of failure in higher education? Which means that the reason maybe that people are turning up 5,000 people to hear you, it will be 20,000 in London and in July is because there are not many people who are neurotically talking about what it is to live a good life and asking questions about how to live a meaningful life. If you said that at most universities I feel like you would be laughed out of the room, well it would depend. about how you said it and to whom, but if you tell it to the students, they will be so happy to hear you that they will hardly stand it because even the most cynical students come to university hoping that there is something worth learning and the reason . who are exposed to great literature, for example, because there is such a thing, not all claims to power are because great literature contains the key to wisdom and it takes wisdom to live without excessive suffering, so yes, I say it seriously, but I do what I say that what happened to me is a reflection of the failure of universities, it is partly although I taught this to the entire intellectual dark web hmm, the fact that people listen to Sam Harris talk for hours and I mean all these people, well, I think I think about it well, I think you know that you want to look for simple solutions before you look for complex ones and you first want to look for solutions associated with ignorance rather than malevolence, and I would say that we don't want to end nor estimate the degree to which what is happening on YouTube and with podcasts is a consequence of a technological revolution, as I have known for years that universities do not serve the community because for some reason we think that university education is for young people of 18 to 22 years old, which is such an absurd proposition that it's absolutely mind-blowing that everyone has conceptualized it, it's like you know why you wouldn't take college courses your entire life.

I mean what you stop looking for. To gain wisdom when you're 22, I don't think, you usually don't even start until you're around 20, so I knew that universities weren't serving the broader community a long time ago, but there wasn't a mechanism through which that could be rectified apart from, say, books, and of course that was part of the rectification, so I think you don't want to underestimate the technological transformation, but at the time I would also say I was teaching this at the university. You know, it's not like there isn't anyone at the university who still teaches this kind of stuff.

There are many qualified teachers who are still doing a good job, but they are being pushed out very quickly and also terrified by it. by the activist disciplines, so you talk and write a lot about how masculinity is in crisis, what are some of the main signs of that and we'll open it up to questions soon and whether Trump is a symbol of that crisis or a corrective for it. I really don't think masculinity is in crisis. I think that to the extent that masculinity per se is considered toxic that will produce a crisis, which is not the same thing.

I think there's a crisis of meaning, let's say in our

culture

, but that's not new, it's been that way for quite some time, but I don't think it's specific to masculinity, it's been an aggregate story around me and the way it happened It was with people who don't like it. what I'm saying look at my audience and they say, "well, he's talking primarily to men, therefore, he must be talking to men." see me on YouTube yeswere men is an artifact to some extent of the fact that most people who watch YouTube are men now, it may also be that the kinds of things I'm saying are more relevant to men, although I'm not convinced that the Most of my students throughout my undergraduate career have been women because psychology is fun, you know, it's largely female-dominated and since I published my book, the proportion of people who attend my lectures are female. increasing reliably, it's probably up to around 35 35% I would say now probably from around 20, so I don't think it's a message that's particularly relevant to men, although it is relevant to men and I don't think it's I think there's a separate crisis of masculinity, there could be a crisis of concepts of masculinity and I think that's difficult for young men in some ways and the reason is you know, you're, you're, you're you.

We, as a virtuous person, are supposed to have a duty to buy into the doctrine of tyrannical patriarchy. It is as if, in the first place, every hierarchical system tends towards tyranny, that is a universal truism and our structures have the same problem, obviously, and we have to be there eternally. vigilant so that they do not fall into tyranny, but that does not mean that they are tyrannies and they always have been and, of course, also compared to what is compared to their hypothetical ideological utopia, yes, compared to all the other societies that have existed on the planet, including most of those that exist now definitely not, but anyway, if you buy into that stupid one-dimensional idea that is a pathological error and see your

culture

as a tyrannical patriarchy, then you will see that any attempt to ascend in that hierarchy has a manifestation. of patriarchal tyranny now the problem is that many of the ways you move up in a modern functional hierarchy is through competition and if we take young men, it doesn't happen as much with young women for reasons that we can analyze, but yes If you take young men and say that every manifestation of your desire to move up the hierarchy is nothing more than proof of your participation in the tyrannical patriarchy of the pipeline, then you tend to demoralize them, which is exactly what you are trying to do, by the way, yes To begin with, you adopt that position because I really believe that at the bottom of most of the most pathological manifestations of the collectivist saying there is an assault on the idea of ​​competition itself and that is another unforgivable sin that the university commits like everything else.

It seems, there is no doubt that human hierarchies are prone to error and lean towards tyranny obviously, but that does not mean that they are unitary dimensional patriarchal tyrannies, they are neither patriarchal nor tyrannies, but that is received wisdom now and questioning it means that you're such a misogynistic fascist so I tell the young man it's like no, no, no, no, it's like there's something that competes with a man speaking like a woman who's read your book and I'm with you for much of it. of and then you start to lose me when you talk about archetypes the same way you talk about archetypes in the book and again, forgive me if I'm being a little vague, but I'm trying to shine a light on it for an audience that may not have read it. is that in this type of Jungian archetype a world chaos is feminine order is masculine and the subtitle of your book is an antidote to chaos so, as a woman who reads that, you know I would like you to explain to me maybe what am. was missing there because that's when you started to lose me a little bit as a reader, why does there have to be an antidote to the feminine in that way?

Well, there has to be an antidote to whatever is manifesting in excess and it is chaos that is manifesting. excessive right now in our culture and that's what I decided to address in this book and mainly because I guess it was aimed, at least in part, at younger people and what younger people have to deal with generally speaking is an excess of chaos because they are not very disciplined and then you need to know that we have this idea that while you are free when you are a child and then you let me see if I can express this correctly that you have some wonderful, wonderful positive freedom when you were a child and then you abandon it as you approach adulthood, but the truth of the matter is that you have a lot of potential as a child, but none of it is able to manifest as freedom before you become disciplined and discipline is a matter of imposing order and the Order is necessary especially for people who are hopeless and nihilistic and a lot of people are hopeless and nihilistic, a lot more people than you think and part of that is because no one has really encouraged them. and so the book is partly a matter of encouragement, it's like imposing a disciplinary structure on yourself, controlling the chaos and then moving towards a state that is freer because it's disciplined first, as if you were going to do it.

To become a concert pianist, you will need several thousand hours of extraordinarily disciplined practice - that's the imposition of order on your potential, let's say - but what comes from that is a much greater freedom, and therefore in virtually every freedom what you have in life, that is true freedom. It is bought at the price of discipline and, therefore, because I believe that it is nihilism and hopelessness that constitute the main existential threat, especially for young people, at that time I was concentrating on the need for discipline and order, and on The question regarding the metaphysical or symbolic representation of chaos and, as feminine, is a very complex problem and the first thing to understand is that there is no a priori assumption that order is preferable to chaos in any fundamental sense.

Both are constituent elements of reality. It cannot be said that some are bad and others are good. It can be said that they can become unbalanced and that is definitely not good. Too much chaos is not good. Obviously too much order is not good. Obviously, those are the two extremes between which you have to negotiate. I am not making a causal claim regarding the idea that reality is an amalgamation of chaos and order. I don't think there is a more accurate way to describe the nature of reality, that is the most fundamental truth, maybe not the most fundamental. but there are certainly two there are two fundamental truths reality is composed of chaos and order and your role is to mediate between them successfully that is a metaphysical and symbolic truth but it is more than that because that is how your mind and your brain are organized not only conceptually but emotionally, motivationally and physiologically, and I don't really understand how that can be because it's not obvious to me how the most fundamental elements of reality can be chaos and order, but the evidence that that is the case is overwhelming.

You have a quick example that is quite interesting. So you have two hemispheres. There is a reason for that. Its rationale is that one of them is adapted for things you don't understand, that is, roughly speaking, the right hemisphere, and the other is adapted for things. that you understand, that is the left hemisphere and that is a dichotomy of chaotic order and the fact that you are adapted to that, that the very structure of your brain reflects that bifurcation indicates, as far as I can tell, beyond a shadow of a doubt, because it is also characteristic of non-human animals, many of them, that this differentiation is fundamentally true in some sense.

Now you might wonder why it is conceptualized as masculine versus feminine because it is not masculine versus feminine, by the way, they are not the same. Because one's conceptual is extraordinarily complicated, I think the reason is that we are social cognitive primates and that our fundamental cognitive categories, a priori cognitive categories, are masculine, masculine, feminine and infantile, it's something like that, that is the fundamental structure of reality because we. We are social creatures and we see reality as something that is essentially social in its nature and then when we start to conceptualize reality outside of the social world, which was not that long ago, by the way, and which is something that animals practically do not do in absolute.

We use those a priori social categories as filters through which we interpret the external world and we are stuck in that in some deep sense and you could say well, why do we have to get stuck in that? It's like because some things are very difficult to change, like if you go to watch a story and the characters in this story fall into those archetypal categories, then you will understand the story and if they don't, you won't because your understanding is based In an application of the archetypal Priory to history, you wouldn't understand it any other way, so you can't understand that there is nothing wrong and not still be human, so I can give you a quick example.

I like to use Disney movies for a There are a variety of reasons, mainly because everyone knows them, but it is no accident that the Evil Queen, the Evil Queen from Sleeping Beauty, is not an accidental character, she is the way she is. because we understand it and the reason we understand it is because we see the world through the categories that I just explained and you can say well, what do you think a queen has to be and not a king? No, if she were an evil king, it would be different, it would be like a scar on the Lion King, he is the same. evil man but not the same character, true, yes.

I guess I'm surprised that it seems like so much of your intellectual project is reaffirming difference in a time when we're told everything is the same, yes, but it's almost different to say "okay, well." Look, look, I'm sorry to be so blunt, but look, it's a problem, the problem with some of this, the problem with some of this, some of it is willful blindness, but some of it is just ignorance, so let me lay out a couple of things for you. things, so, for example, I've been criticized by, say, James d'amour, who had actually been very influenced by my videos before him and my classes before doing what he did.

Google, you know, I've studied personality differences between men and women for 25 years and written articles on the topic. It's actually an area of ​​expertise of mine and substantial experience as well and not expertise in pseudoscience. Thank you so much. I'm not a pseudoscientist so my publication record puts me in the top 5.% of psychologists so I'm not a pseudoscientist by any means and I have 10,000 citations and that's not a million but that's a lot and a hundred articles published, so let me expose one of the personality differences between men. and women because it's worth understanding and you could say well, there can't be personality differences between men and women because that's anti-feminist, it's like no, it's not, we might have to really understand that there are differences between men and women. women so that we can Let men and women make the decisions they are going to make without subjecting them to undue manipulation.

Well, one of the reliable cross-cultural differences between men and women is that men are more aggressive than women. What is the evidence for that? Here is a piece. According to the evidence, there are 10 times more people than men in prison and what is this about a sociocultural construction? No, it is not a sociocultural construction. Well, here is another fact: women attempt suicide more than men and that is because Women are more prone to depression and anxiety than men and there is a reason for that and that is true in all cultures. They are also more likely to attempt suicide, but men are much more likely to commit suicide.

Because? Because they are more aggressive. so they use lethal means, okay now the question is how much more aggressive are men than women and the answer is not much, so the statement that men and women are more alike than different is actually true, but here is where you should know. something about statistics to really understand the way the world works instead of just applying your a priori ideological presupposition to things that are too complex to fit under that rubric, so if you took two people out of two people in a crowd, a man and a woman and you had to make a bet on who was more aggressive and you bet on the woman you would beat 40% of the time, okay, that's quite a bit, it's not 50% of the time, which isn't there would be some difference, but it is quite a bit, so there are many women who are more aggressive than many men, so the curves overlap a lot, so there are many more similarities than differences along the dimension where there is the greatest difference, by the way, but here's the problem you can solve. small differences in the average of a distribution, the distributions move to one side and then all the stocks go out the tail, so here is the situation you don't care, however, how aggressive the average person is, it is not so relevant, what matters to you is who. is the most aggressive person among a hundred, take a hundred people and take the most aggressive person because that is the person you should be most careful with and what is the gender of men, because if you move three standard deviations away from the mean in two curves that overlap but are slightly disjointed, thenderives an overwhelming preponderance from the overrepresented group and that's why men are about ten times more likely to be in prison, it has nothing to do with socialization, then, and then, there are other differences too, so it turns out that the Differences in aggression and agreeableness also predict differences in interests and therefore it turns out that men are more interested on average than women than women and women are more interested in people on average and that is actually the The biggest difference that has been measured between men and women has nothing to do with ability, it has to do with interest, and therefore the way it manifests itself is that women are more likely to pursue disciplines that are They are characterized by caring for others and this is evident in the way their occupations are.

To segregate, all you have to do is look at the data for about 15 minutes. Women overwhelmingly dominate healthcare and that's accelerating, by the way, and men dominate engineering. Let's say and then you say well that's sociocultural, it's like no, it's not and here's the proof, so now what you do because you want to test this hypothesis, it's like and it bleeds and the other thing you want to understand is that leftist psychologists generated this data and you think well, how do you know that's easy? There are no right wing psychologists except you, well that's what people say they know and that has been well documented and people have published this data despite their ideological leanings and despite the fact that this is not what they expected to find or what they wanted to find, so what is done now is to stack the countries according to how egalitarian their social policies are, from the least egalitarian to the most, and you say well. the Scandinavian countries are the most egalitarian and, by the way, if we don't agree on that then there is no point in having this debate because we don't agree on what egalitarian means if you don't think that what the Scandinavians have done there has been a movement in the direction of egalitarianism so I have no idea what you mean by egalitarianism no you could say well they haven't done it perfectly it's like yeah that's true but it's not relevant to this argument so what You do is stack countries based on how egalitarian their social policies are and then you look at occupational and personality differences between men and women as a function of the country and what you find is that as the country becomes more egalitarian, the differences between men and women increase. t decreases and what that means is that the radical social constructionists are wrong and these are not a few studies with a couple of people done by some dumb psychologists and some small university, they are population level studies that have been published in major journals that have been cited by thousands of people it is not pseudoscience it is not it is not questioned it is not questioned by leading psychometricians and personality theorists we discovered it in 1995 everyone thought it was solved and so what's the big problem?

Well, who knows what the big problem is? If the result is not exactly the same between genders, it's good who says it has to be that way and, more importantly, it's something to constantly ask yourself who the hell is going to enforce that and exactly how they are going to do it . and believe me, it will not be the way you like because there are differences between men and women and if you leave them alone, those differences manifest themselves in different occupational choices, that is the other finding, this is a newer one as societies they become more equal the occupational options between men and women are maximized and what that means is that fewer and fewer women are entering STEM fields now no one wanted it no one predicted it no one expected it it actually went against I would say the majority from established psychological theories because my assumption was certainly 20 years ago that what would have happened as we made societies more egalitarian would be that men and women would converge, that is not what happened, biological difference is maximized as we eliminate differences sociocultural and therefore maybe you don't like that is like it's okay for me.

I didn't say I liked it, but whether or not I like a piece of information has very little bearing on whether or not I'm labeled to accept it. Trying to look at the damn scientific literature and draw the conclusions that the data requires and then you can say that everything is suspect because it is the construction of the patriarchal tyrants who generated the Eurocentric scientific point of view, that's how you want. To have that conversation, then go to an activist discipline and have it because it's not the kind of conversation that anyone sensible would participate in, so I would love to open the room to questions, please, sensible questions and keep them brief but genuine. with a microphone I will find you if you raise your hand yes yes hello good evening my name is Prater I wanted to understand your point of view a little more about the fact that it is not a fact, but at least the observation that over generations and generations is fine at least What I have heard and seen from my family I can accept that women are told about that position at home and men are told that position to work and be a little more aggressive, you know the conditioning social, so how does that influence?

I have not heard that being a being is a dimension to reach these conclusions. I have never claimed that the differences between men and women are 100 percent biologically determined. They are biologically influenced. Radical constructionists claim the opposite. There are no biological differences between them. men and women have a good psyche, first of all, that is so absurd that it hardly requires an answer, but you could specify it a little and say that no, there are no biological differences that manifest themselves psychologically and that is not so absurd, but it is also incorrect. Obviously, all kinds of things about sex, sexual roles and gender roles, let's say, are conditioned by sociocultural mechanisms because human beings are very, very plastic and therefore the way in which those biological differences manifest themselves in a culture is radically influenced by the nature of the culture, but that doesn't mean biological influences don't exist, but are you saying we should counteract those kinds of traditional cultural customs?

Yes, at one point you're saying that it's not necessarily biological or inherent yes. I had to paraphrase well, some of that is yes, but it's not very clear in the sense that at least maybe an hour is too short and maybe it needs a broader discussion. It seems that it is easy to deduce that these are inherent differences that exist and social conditioning. It was not taken as a parameter for its control, since by comparing societies that have different levels of egalitarianism incorporated into their social structure, everything is taken into account in the analysis if biological differences manifest themselves to the maximum where sociocultural influences must be equalized. . gender is maximum, then obviously the biological differences are powerful and profound, it is conclusive, so it is taken into account in the data analysis, that is why countries are stacked according to the egalitarian nature of their social policies to control for socio-economic characteristics. - cultural influence and then you know you have to admit it, because if you think about it for a minute, it's not even what you would have expected theoretically is that the least egalitarian societies would have the greatest differences between men and women and that As societies become If they became more and more equal, those differences would get smaller and maybe even disappear, but that's not what happened, it's exactly the opposite, that's what happened.

They were maximized in the most egalitarian societies, therefore, the social constructionist position, the radical social constructionist position. it's wrong it's wrong has been disproven, which is partly why radical social constructionists have taken that legislative route to impose their point of view they lost the science war but then well then we can just attack science it's like well it's the science itself that is suspected is like well then Well, stop using your iPhone if you are going to have your convictions, put them out there in your life, if you believe that the scientific process is suspicious, tyrannical and oppressive, and all that, then stop using the products it produces.

Have your cake and eat it too, let's go with this young lady here yeah, and then we'll go with you Hi, my name is Julia and I recently read an article in the New York Times about your comments about forced monogamy, what are they? your comments on how it was perceived by the public and specifically the big question from the left, well I think it was enforced, is that how it was in forced monogamy, yes, application, first of all, it's a technical term that, by the way, It has been used in anthropological literature for hundreds. years and the journalist who wasn't stupid knew it perfectly well and reported the story the way he reported it despite that, but what's even more surreal about that story is that if you're going to try to undermine someone's credibility, I can do it. effectively, you should attribute to them an extreme vision that some person somewhere really has well, so the vision attributed to me was something like I want to rotate itself, I want to find useless men and distribute women to them at that time. of a weapon so that they don't become violent it's like no one has believed that anywhere and certainly in the environment well, true, true, she wrote a book about it, but, just so you know, it is absolutely absurd and it is absurd in a lot of ways because she interviewed me for two days and we talked about it for about two minutes, it was a peripheral conversation and it's an anthropological platitude generated mainly by left-wing academics so that everyone is clear that societies that use monogamy as a norm which by the way is practically every human society that has ever existed does that in an attempt to control the aggression that accompanies polygamy it's like oh my gosh how controversial can they be it's like well how many of you are in monogamous relationships ? majority, how is that applied?

I think this is a very polyamorous room, so you know, she was desperate, that's what it seemed to me, but the problem is that she was also desperate and amateurish, it's like she could have done so much. better job with much less extreme characterization is like oh yeah, I want to take women at gunpoint and distribute them among useless men. It's so stupid partly because if she had been reasonable and she knew this too, one of the things I've specifically told men over and over again is that if every woman you approach rejects you, they're not the right ones.

It's women who are right, that's right, and that's because you know these characters who like the guy who mowed the lawn. Taking down those people in Toronto he ends up blaming women and he's blaming more than just women in a sense, he's blaming the structure of being for producing women who reject him, that's how it is and that's part of what makes it violent , it's like, well, what the hell is wrong? with him, you know he has it completely backwards if everyone, if you, if everyone you talk to is boring, not right and therefore if the opposite sex rejects you assuming that you are straight, then you are wrong, they It's not bad and you've got some work to do, man, you've got some tough work to do and there's nothing I've been saying, let's say, young people, that's clearer than that, you know what it's actually something that I.

I've been criticized by people on the left because they think I don't take enough account of structural inequality etc, what I've been telling people is to take responsibility for your failure and that certainly applies to everyone else. especially when you try to formulate a relationship and you get rejected left and right, it's like it's an indication that you have some work to do now. It could also be an indication that you are young and useless and why do that? Why the hell would anyone have anything to do with you because you have nothing to offer? You know it, but that is rectifiable and in part, even maturity rectifies it, but not only like that, what would you call it? surreal and absurd accusation made by a journalist who knows perfectly well what he was suggesting and chose to misrepresent it anyway, it is actually the complete opposite that the conclusion that people drew from it is the exact opposite of what I have been suggesting in particular to young, so it's absolutely absurd, yes, the microphone is yes, Professor Peterson, I teach students, I teach trans students and I am often asked to call out to particular people.

It started probably about four years ago. It seemed very strange to me. I am 52 years old and some. You can tell about them that it comes from a very deep place and that is how they feel and deeply need to be called. Some of them my horse sense says that they are enjoying giving me a certain shock and that there is a certain theatrical aspect it is my horse feeling that there is a certain potala bourgeois aspect in a way I am sorry and I am probably right but I cannot knowthat I'm a linguist, I'm a person and my general feeling has been whatever they ask, just go ahead and let's change our use of pronouns because we have a lot to do now.

What you said was interesting. You said that the way you make a difference in deciding these cases is based on the fact that you have psychological training. and you can say that what I want to know is for my own elucidation and also because I think many of us wondered about it, but then it happened, how do you know now? I want to specify that I would prefer you not to tell everything. episode of how ridiculously they treated you in the middle of all that controversy, I'm sure three-quarters of the room knows it. I sympathize with you.

I thought it was ridiculous. I want to know specifically because I am a linguist. You have psychological training. How would you know well if you listen? a I'm almost done oh yeah, if you hear a little bit of skepticism in my voice, you're right hmm, however, I'm open to being convinced based on your background, which is immense, how would you know which students to discount and which? who to agree with, well, first of all, I wouldn't really know, which is partly why your skepticism is justified, but I have to be responsible for what I say based on my willingness to take responsibility for my judgment. , so I would be willing. do that despite the fact that I could be wrong, but having said that, in any reasonable situation, I would be wrong to address the person in the way they requested to be addressed, but that's not the problem for me . it's like now I'm forced by law to do it it's like no, no, I'm doing it now not because I'm forced by law, so that's the end game as far as I'm concerned, because there's no excuse for forcing it by law, That's my position and I think there are all kinds of reasons for it.

I don't think it was an isolated legislative measure. I believe that it is an integral part of a whole sequence of legislative measures that have been adopted and continue to be adopted. in Canada I think it's an attempt by a certain radical ideology, what would you say, a certain radical ideology to gain linguistic advantage, which I think is a terrible thing to allow, so I had every reason to reject the legislation, but I had nothing what to do with you that is very interesting we are talking about experience here and my ears perked up when you talked about how there is a way of thinking that would allow us to decide I know that there is a way of thinking that would allow me to decide For me, I know that we must decide for ourselves , surely you have a mission bigger than what's going on in your own head and I mean no, I had a perfectly simple mission, which was that there was no way I was going to say those words when I was forced to. by law, but that was my mission, you weren't trying to model for the rest of us a way of thinking, it was really just about, you know, what was about me in the law, that the law, the legislators had gone too far , stepped outside its proper territory into the domain of linguistic freedom and, as far as I was concerned, I was going to put up with that, so if people were happy with it and wanted to follow suit, that was fine with them, but for me was something and that was the statement: I'm not going to do this and then people can draw their own conclusions from that maybe they want to do it.

I mean, and I've talked to a lot of trans people and you know, my propensity has been without exception so far to approach them in whatever way seems most socially appropriate given the circumstances now that you asked you know you asked a specific question which was do I have special experience? that I could share with other people that you are doing Martin Luther and I I think these problems are a little more subtle than that and so what makes you think that you are doing the grandiloquent children a favor by agreeing with Herman because they don't Can I decide what they are?

Well, my goodness, it seemed fair. enough, but you have a type 1 and type 2 error problem, so one error is that you do not call the students what they deserve to be called, that is an error and the other error is that you call the students what they want to be called even though they don't deserve it and therefore what you are trying to do optimally is minimize both errors and to do that you need to take a middle route. Now what you have decided to do and I am not criticizing it is you. I've decided to allow 100% of the possibility of one of those errors occurring because you believe it's a less significant error and you know you may be right, but it's not like you're acting in an error-free way, you just decided to do it. minimize one form of error at the expense of the other because I would say that you are allowing what you would call attention-seeking and somewhat narcissistic college students to get the advantage over you in your class now, that is, believe me, it is not a criticism, it is It's not a criticism, I understand why you're erring on the side of generosity and passion.

One more thing to say, but I'm sure I won't take up any more space, are you saying that psychological theory has nothing to teach us about this because you are talking about my question, you are wonderfully articulate, you are smarter than me, does psychology Do you have something to teach us? or no, yes or no. I like this question. I don't think I have anything to teach. I don't think I have. anything to offer that can teach you without thinking, so it's too complicated no, no, no, no, no, no, it's not so good, partly because it's not easy to articulate the principles, the infallible principles by which you would make a such a categorical statement. correct judgment because those are very situation-specific problems, you know, and it's part of the problem of how to make a generic moral truth applied to a very individualistic situation and the problem in the kinds of situations you're describing is generally the Devil in the details , if you have all these students, the ones you just introduced, they vary in their attitude towards their self-proclaimed gender, from those who are bombastic to a certain extent, let's say, to those who are very serious and you have to make a judgment in the moment that depends on the variables that present themselves in a very complex way in that situation and I understand why you took the path you did and it's perfectly reasonable to do so.

My point is that you don't minimize all the mistakes by doing this, that's okay, it's still a good way to approach it. It's not my point that, because of my psychological insight, I would say that the experience that I have gained is that I would be comfortable. By making the judgment and taking the consequent risk I am not saying that I would be right that is not the same at all I am willing to suffer the consequences of my error that is not the same as being right and that is why I do feel If a student is manipulating, so I'm not going to accept it.

I could be wrong about this and actually hurt someone who is actually asking for something they need, but I am also, how would you say, sensitive to the error of allowing? manipulation to not be controlled, so hello, you're not back, there's no time and then there could be a two hour podcast about this on your wonderful podcast that everyone should listen to to invite you in good hands here with the orange and pink scarf. Thanks Barry and thank you. To both of you for this really interesting conversation, which is unlike most of the conversations we've had here at the festival of ideas.

It's my first one so I have no idea so dr. Pearson, there are a million questions I'd like to ask you, I'll just ask you one, obviously, I'm a psychologist, I'm a social psychologist with clinical experience and what I think I'd most like to hear right now right now is the very loud small percentage of people. who oppose you, have you thought about anything they might be right about? They might actually be right about something you hadn't thought about, but you've started to think that they might actually be right, a point I don't know if I've started. to think about the point that they have that I hadn't thought about before, I mean, people have been characterizing me as right-wing, it's like I'm not right-wing, so The characterization is not very useful and one of the things What I do all the time in my public lectures is defend the usefulness of the left, and the case can be made quite quickly if things of value are to be pursued in In a social environment you are going to produce a hierarchy, it is inevitable because some people They are better at whatever it is that you value and when that is manifested socially it will produce a hierarchy, hierarchy has its flaw, that hierarchy has a need if we are to pursue things of value, but it has a risk: the risk is that we ossify and If we become corrupt, that is risk number one and risk number two is that when hierarchy occurs, a number of people are going to be dispossessed because there will be many people in the hierarchy who are not good at it and they will be dispossessed, for example. what you need a political voice for them, that's the left, so I bring it up again and again now, what the right does is Say yes, but we still need the hierarchy.

It's like, you still need the hierarchy. The reason we need political dialogue is because we need the hierarchy and we can't let it get out of control, so we and how to balance those two. competing needs is not just having the hierarchy or dissolving the hierarchy, you have to live with the tension and the way, because because the situation keeps changing, the way you live with the tension is by talking, say, well, here it is the current state the hierarchy is in. It needs to be modified a lot because it's becoming too tyrannical and it's dispossessing a lot of people, so we need to modify it so that it's not so corrupt and so that it's a little more open and we need to talk about it all the time and that's what the right wing does. and the left is not the only thing they do because they also talk about the need for borders, that is the other fundamental thing they do, the dialogue has to continue so that we can have hierarchies and use them as tools without allowing them to descend into tyranny, ok, so I made a case, I made a case on the web, I gave a talk at the University of British Columbia, the left's case for free speech, like it's so hard to make, I mean, that's it. the kind of case that was made up until 2014 or something, so the left-wing types have all kinds of things that are correct to say now, the problem is one of the problems of the left, but this is another thing of the that I talk all the time.

By the way, in my public lectures is that we have a problem, we know how to lock up right-wing extremists, we basically say, oh, you're making claims of ethnic or racial superiority, you're no longer part of the conversation, what do you do? We don't do anything on the left that is not good because there is a problem, can the left go too far, yes, win, oh we don't know, oh that's not a very good answer, now you could say, well, then it's up to the moderate leftists to solve that so that They can disassociate themselves from the radicals and it depends on them, but in reality it is not a very good answer either because it is our problem, it is not the centrists, now they do not know how to reliably identify the radical, the two radicals on the left and the right.

I don't know how and it's partly because I think it's actually more conceptually complex, like with the radical right, you can attribute it to one dimension. Oh, racial superiority, no, sorry, you're out of the conversation, but that's my lowest point, but we knew that. You mentioned before, well I didn't say I was a fan of Milo, no, but you called him a joker, well he's a joker mostly, yes, but he's also a racist, well, possibly, yes, I haven't followed that character, you know it and it might be, I mean it's hard to say what exactly Milo is.

He is a very complicated and contradictory person destined to implode, which is exactly what happened. Well, there's just no way you can be such a contradictory person and handle it. It is simply not possible. There was just too much going on at once for anyone to pull it off, but on the left, you know, I don't know what it is, I think the left becomes toxic. One of the things that makes the left unacceptable is lawsuits. for equality of outcomes it's like no, you've crossed the line, man, that's not an acceptable demand and now it's also increasingly a moderate left demand, but I don't know, it could be more complex, it could be that there are four things you have to do. demand from the left that suddenly makes what they're doing unacceptable and we don't know what those four things are, so I really think it's a conceptual problem as well as an ethical problem that we don't know how to unite the mint the necessary left so that we don't so that the radicals do not dominate in a counterproductive way and if you don't believe that the radical leftists can dominate in a counterproductive way then well, God help you know that I agree with that, the idea that it's so clear on the right, it's not clear to me, I mean, look, look, the Trump administration, oh, I don't think it necessarily applies very clearly, but at least conceptually it's worked well, we can point it out better mm-hmm so and because of the Second World War, yes, yes, that helped a lot, actually, yes, yes, but the point is that the communist catastrophes did notThey seem to have made it clearer in the last yes and that, and now that is another thing that the universities What I have done is unacceptable because of the way in which the intellectual class, I would say, is that it has never reached an adequate agreement with the fact that the intellectual class as a whole supported the communist experiment and it was an absolutely catastrophic failure in every sense. analysis people say well that wasn't real communism it's like he should never really say that because what it means is this is what it means it's the most arrogant statement a person can make it means that if he had been in Stalin's position , with my proper Asian conceptualization of Marxist utopia, I would have claimed in Utopia that that's what it means and it's like no, first of all, if you really had that good spirit and you weren't by the way, if you were, you would have been eliminated so quickly after the Revolution happened that it might as well have killed you because that's what happened, that's what happened like all the well-intentioned people after the Russian Revolution, the small minority of people who were genuinely well-intentioned, were dead like two or three years from now, so it wasn't really zero like in zeroquestion zero for zero something one more question really okay, yeah, I know, but several people there, we can take a few and he'll answer them shortly, like maybe two more, okay, let's go here and the front row right here, yeah, but keep it very, very short. great mentor, great help for me and for many people with whom I have been sharing your work.

I have two books here and I would like you to sign them for me. It's okay, you can do it. Yes, people do it after they are sure they do. Professor Peterson, this is a little bit like the question the young lady over there asked, but if he could reflect on himself throughout his life and his career to date, what could he honestly tell us about where he felt? ? You've been very wrong and what caused me to be wrong in your thinking when you said I was wrong about the Big Five personality theory for about five years, so I know that's not very interesting, but no.

I liked. It was not at all statistically derived brute force. It was not theoretically interesting. I didn't like it at all, but I was wrong about that because the science was well done. What else have I been wrong about? Well, you asked for deep examples. of being wrong and in my field that is actually a profound example because that is one of the main theories in the field. You're thinking of more interesting examples. What have I radically changed? Well, you know, when he was a kid he was an avid. socialist I was wrong about that but more but more specifically I was wrong about that because I thought that in that darkness there were questions that I want answers that that doctrine could answer and it was not that it was socialism that did not make the answers arise it was that it was the level of incorrect analysis, so it was a major source of error, it was a kind of source of error that the journalists who follow me make them think that everything is political, it's like no, it's not, there are many levels of analysis and the Political is one and I eventually learned that political was not the right level of analysis for the questions I was interested in addressing and that was a big mistake I made.

I was wrong about the meaning of religious ideas because as a child I knew about thirteen years old and at that time I was intelligent enough to see the contradiction between an evolutionary account of the origin of human beings in an account, say, of the Scriptures. , so I just dispensed with that in this kind of new atheist movement and, you know, threw the baby out with the bathwater and I was really wrong about that, deeply wrong about that and I'm sure I'm wrong about a lot of other things , but I'll find out what some of them are as we go, so that's three things, those are important things, so you know, I'm sure if I thought more.

I could think of other examples, but those are pretty big things I got wrong. Thank you very much to all. Clearly, an hour and a half is not enough for you, but thank you very much for your time.