#1139 - Jordan Peterson

Five, four, three, two, one. Hello, Jordan Peterson. Hello, Mr. Rogan. How are you doing? Very spiffy today. Thank you, sir. If this is a new look for you, you've been rocking these, a lot of these big gigantic, what do you call those things, these concerts that you guys are doing? What do you, speeches? Well, lectures, discussions is really what I think of them as. Yeah, because I'm discussing, I mean, you might think it's kind of perverse to be discussing with a 3,000 person audience, but

It's not because if you pay attention to the audience, they're constantly in the individuals in the audience. They're constantly providing feedback. So it's a discussion as far as I'm concerned. Feedback in applause, laughter. Sometimes they shout things out too. Shuffling. Shuffling.

Yeah, well, really what you want, if you're on track, if you're where you should be, then it's dead silent. And everyone's focused and listening. And so if that's not happening, I mean, there can be laughter and that kind of thing. But generally speaking, you don't want to hear noise from the audience. So if you're pursuing a complicated topic and you're paying attention, and I'm always looking at individual people in the audience in the first few rows, because that's all I can see because of the lights,

I'm trying to make sure that everyone's on track with the talk and you know there's people gesture with their face and they gesture with their eyes and they shake their head and they nod and there's lots of things to pick up and if you're not speaking with notes you can really pay attention to the audience and then you know if you're in the dialogue and that's where everyone wants to be.

Yeah, it's an interesting thing you're doing because you have experience in doing that with lectures and colleges and universities, but now it's the general public and people just pay to see it and you fill up these huge

gigantic theaters. I mean, I've seen some of the places that you guys are doing it. You and Sam just got done doing one and Vancouver and huge places to two. Yeah, back to back. And he has about five hours of intense discussion over two days. And, you know, we were supposed to talk for an hour each night and then go to Q&A. But we asked the audience

Brett Wernstein who was moderating asked the audience if they wanted to go to Q&A or continue the discussion and you know the the response from the crowd was definitely continue the discussion and so we ended up talking for about two and a half hours each night and again it was the audience is along for the ride you know and they were good discussions as far as I'm concerned

You know, it was kind of marketed as a takedown in some sense, Harris versus Peterson. Right. But the discussion itself was an attempt on Sam's part and my part to further our thinking about the topic and to bring everyone along for the ride, you know, for the journey, so to speak.

Yeah, well, you guys had two podcasts that you did over the phone. So these were the first meetings that you guys had in person. Yeah, it was the first time I'd met Sam. The first one that you two had was marred by this discussion about what is truth. Yeah. And it was a strange sort of

You got stuck. You guys got kind of stuck in that first conversation. But I felt like the second one was much better. Yes. I mean, in both of you kind of recognized that there were some errors made in the first podcast. Yeah, we augured in on a definition and let it go. And so that wasn't so good. Yeah. And I wasn't in tip-top shape for that first discussion. Well, for the second one, for that matter. But

They've been getting each discussion I've had with Sam has been getting better. So as far as I'm concerned, and I think he feels the same way. And I mean, we're trying to sort something out that's really, really difficult. And it's the relationship between facts and values, which is parallel to the relationship between, say, objective truth and narrative or parallel to the distinction between

scientific fact and religious truth, all of those things sort of are layered on top of each other, and it's an extraordinarily difficult topic. And so it's not surprising that it's taking all of this discussion to even vaguely get it straight. It's been a central bone of contention among philosophers for, well, probably forever, but certainly since the time of David Hume several hundred years.

Well, one of the more fascinating things that's coming out of the realm of podcasting is these kind of discussions, these long-form live discussions in front of enormous groups of people where you go over very complex issues. It's a new thing. I mean, and it's something that's greatly received by the public, which is really interesting. I mean, you guys are selling out all over the place. Yeah, well, I've really been trying to make sense of this, because

I'm thinking, well, what the hell's going on? Why am I selling out 3,000 person auditoriums? But not just me, obviously. Sam is doing it, and you're doing something on a larger scale, but very similar with your long-form podcasts. And then there's this whole rise of what Barry Weiss described as the intellectual dark web. That's actually Eric Weinstein's coinage.

And so there's a group of us that have been sort of clumped together for reasons that aren't obvious. But I've been trying to figure that out as I do these lectures. Another thing I'm doing with the lectures or the discussions is trying to continually further the development of my ideas. I use the stage, let's say, as an opportunity in real time to think.

I've been thinking, well, if you're surfing, you don't confuse yourself with the wave. That's a real mistake. You might be on top of the wave, but you're not the wave. I think this long-form discussion and the public hunger for that is best conceptualized like that. There's a technological revolution. It's a deep one.

The technological revolution is online video and audio. Immediately accessible to everyone all over the world. And so what that's done is it's turned the spoken word into a tool that has the same reach as the printed word. So it's a Gutenberg revolution in the domain of video and audio. And it might be even deeper than the original Gutenberg revolution because it isn't obvious how many people can read, but lots of people can listen.

And now it turns out, so I mean, you got a little bit of that with TV, right? And you got a little bit of it with radio. But there was bandwidth limitations that were really stringent, especially in TV, where you could get 30 seconds if you were lucky in six minutes if you were stellar to elucidate a complicated argument. So you can't do that. Everything gets compressed to a kind of oversimplified

entertainment. But now, all of a sudden, we have this forum for long-form discussion, real long-form discussion, and it turns out that everyone is way smarter than we thought. We can have these discussions publicly, and there's a great hunger for it. And I see this parallel, and this would be, what would you call it, supporting evidence for this hypothesis. The same things happened in the entertainment world, because TV made us think, well, we can handle a 20-minute sitcom.

Or maybe we can handle an hour and a half made for TV movie. But then Netflix came along and HBO as well with the bandwidth restrictions gone. And all of a sudden it turned out that no, no, we can handle 40-hour complex multi-layered narratives where the characters shift, where the complexity starts to reach the same complexity as great literature. And there's a massive market for it. And so it turns out that we're smarter than our technology revealed to us. And I think those of us who've been placed in this intellectual dark web group

You know, there's some things we have in common. We more or less have independent voices because we're not beholden to any corporate masters except peripherally. And we've been operating in this long-form space and the technology has facilitated that. And so all of a sudden it turns out that there's more to people than we thought. And thank God for that. I'm struggling with

I don't want to use the word hate. There seems to be a non-acceptance or a resistance to the idea that anything of quality could come out of this group of people. It's really interesting to me. And I'm wondering why when I listen to YouSpeak or Sam or Eric or any of these people, Ben or Dave, and I hear very interesting points. And I'm like, why are people resisting that these are interesting points? Why are they resisting this?

And I think there's a lot of people that are beholden to mainstream organizations, whether it's newspapers or magazines or television shows that feel trapped. I think they feel trapped by this format that they're stuck in. It's a very limiting format. And it's a format that in my opinion is like

I mean, it might as well be smoke signals or ham radio or something. It's fucking, it's dumb. You know, this idea that you're going to go to commercials every 15 minutes and, you know, and in between you have 15 people arguing. I mean, I watched a panel on CNN once and I think we counted 10 people.

that we're trying to talk during this five minute segment like who what genius thought that it would be a good idea to get ten people struggling for airtime barking over each other no one saying anything that makes any sense because everybody's talking over and trying to stand out and trying to say the most outrageous things and

I'm seeing like some of the resistance to this. When we span, I mean, pretty far, you know, from Sam and I lean more left and Ben leans more right and you're what you would call a classic liberal and Eric's very difficult to define and Brett is fiercely progressive. I mean, these are, Brett in particular is a very left wing guy, but this

desire to label and to have this diminishing label is like alt-right or, you know, right wing or fascist. It's very strange to me. Well, there's a couple of things going on. I think one of them is that the technological transformation that I laid out and then the other is that

I do believe that, especially for the radical leftist types, the whole notion of free speech among individuals is not only anathema, but also something that isn't possible within their framework of reference. I've been trying to think this through very carefully because, you know, free speech in some sense has become identified as a right-wing issue. And I thought, well, how the hell did that happen? And then I thought, oh, yes, well,

If you're radically left and you're playing the Identity Politics game, there's actually no such thing as free speech because you're only the mouthpiece of your group, whether you know it or not. So you don't get to talk as Joe Rogan. You get to talk as like Joe Rogan, patriarchal white guy. That's it. And your utterances aren't a reflection of your own opinions as an individual, but they're an attempt on your part, whether you know it or not, to justify your position in the power hierarchy.

And so everything right now, and this is where the technology and the death of the mainstream media and this political polarization all unite, everything is turned into a political conversation in the mainstream media. And it has to be cast as left versus right. And if you're criticizing the left, then all of a sudden you're right and right wing, and it has to be about politics. It's like, well, it doesn't have to be politics. It could be about philosophy.

It doesn't have to be cast in political terms and then it's also subject to a form of, well, it's made more stupid than it has to be by these terrible bandwidth limitations. I mean, I've been on mainstream TV talk shows and it's very strange experience because you're definitely content.

You know, Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message, right? The medium shapes the dialogue, and it does in great, in great, in a tremendous way, powerful way. You go on a TV talk show, and maybe it's an hour long, something like that, and there's five guests, and you've got your eight minutes, something like that, and you have to be bright and chipper and entertaining and intelligent and sort of glitzy, and it puts that facade of momentary charisma on you, and if you don't play that out, you actually fail.

Because you can't start a long-form discussion when you've got six minutes. And if you're trying to talk about something that's deep and difficult, well, you want to talk about it because you've got the access then and the opportunity. But you've got your six minutes. You can't help but turn into sort of a glitzy entertainer. And so it cheapens everything. And then the other thing that I think is happening is that as the mainstream media, television in particular, dies.

the quality people are starting to desert, like rats leaving a sinking ship. I guess they're good rats if they're quality people. And then there's ever more enticement to use clickbait journalism to attract a diminishing portion of the remaining audience. It's like one of the things that's happened. So if you look at the five major indices of violent crime in the United States,

They've declined by 50% in 25 years. It's absolutely beyond comprehension. It's so good. This includes violent gun crime, by the way. And yet, the reports of violence in media have gone up and up and up and up. You think, well, what's going on? It's like, well, it's clickbait. It's the equivalent of clickbait. And then to turn everything into a polarized political discussion takes no real intellectual energy. But it's also driven by the death spiral of the classic media, I think.

And I think that's actually why the polarization seems to be so acute now. Some of it is genuine, but some of it is the consequence of this underlying technological transformation and the death throes of the smoke signalers, fundamentally.

What you're talking about when you're saying people, especially radical leftists, have to concede certain points whenever they discuss things. This is so true and so important because you see that play out over and over again. There's very little variation from the official narrative when they talk about important subjects or controversial subjects.

and whatever they are, whether it's transgender rights or whatever's in the news that's big and it's very popular right now, there's these certain things that you're not allowed to deviate from. And that's an insanely restrictive perspective.

Who's establishing these norms? Like, who's a step question, man? Yeah, who is? Well, I blame the universities in large part for this, the activist disciplines, but that's only a partial answer because the universities are also responding to legislation like Title IX.

And so they've been driven into... Explain Title IX for people... Title IX originally was just a piece of legislation that ensured that women would have equal access to sports events and so forth at the universities. That's what it was designed for, but it's become this umbrella legislation that pushes equality of outcome essentially across every possible dimension in the universities. And it's been used as a weapon by the radical left, but some of that's driven by legislative necessity.

What's happening, the reason that I think this is coming from the universities is because I don't think that this could, well there's all these activist disciplines that are essentially subsidized by two high tuition fees and also by state funding and they've produced an entire substructure of activists and those activists are doing everything they can to lay out the theoretical structure for the radical left and that's a

That's a structure that involves, there's buzz words, right? Diversity is one, but that means diversity by race and ethnicity and sexual preference, for example, as if those have anything to do with genuine diversity of ideation and they don't. And there's no evidence that they do inclusivity. I'm never even sure what that means. Equity.

which is a marker for what would you call it? It's a code word in some sense for equality of outcome, which is an absolutely deadly doctrine. I think of all the mistakes that the radical left are making and the moderate left for not calling them out on it. The equity doctrine is at the top of the list. And then there's other associated things like white privilege, that's a good one, and systemic bias, which is a

It's an absolute embarrassment from the perspective of a reasonable academic psychologist, because psychological tests have been used to prove that there's this implicit bias that lurks everywhere, and the tests aren't reliable and valid enough to make that claim. That's even the people who've made the test, the implicit association test, have admitted, except for Mazarin Banaji, who's the chairman of the Department of Psychology at Harvard, they've admitted that the tests aren't reliable and valid enough to be used

for the purposes they've been using for, and there's also no evidence at all that these unconscious bias retraining seminars have any effect whatsoever that's positive. It's all nonsense pushed by this ideological, what, fulminations of the radical left. Is there any benefit in having these conversations, talking about implicit biases, and recognizing that

there's an extreme pushback against racism or sexism and all these different things and that even though these things these these these ideas that they're pushing might not be tested and proven the idea of putting it out there in the mainstream that there's a shift in consciousness in terms of like how people will or won't accept racism or sexism or homophobia or whatever else is being discussed that

Maybe it's far left, but maybe it's moving the needle towards where it needs to be. Well, I think that, well, I think that happens. I mean, I certainly believe that there's space and necessity for a constant dialogue between the left and the right. This is also something that I've been developing more particularly during these lectures. So I'm going to lay out a couple of propositions. So imagine that you have to move forward in the world. You have to do things.

And the reason you have to do things is because, well, if you just sit there and don't do anything, then you suffer and die. So that isn't an option. You have to move forward. You have to move forward towards valued things. So you have to have a value hierarchy. It has to be hierarchy because one thing has to be more important than another or you can't do anything, right? You're too split with your choices. So you have to do things. You have to value. You have to value some things more than others. Then you have to act out what you value in the social environment.

because you're a social creature and you're not going to do things alone. Then as soon as you start to act out things of value in the social environment, you inevitably produce a hierarchy. And the reason you do that is because no matter what you're acting out, some people are way better at it than others. And it doesn't matter if it's basketball or hockey or plumbing or law, it doesn't matter. As soon as there's something valuable and you're doing it collectively, there's a hierarchy.

Okay, so then what happens? Well, the hierarchy can get corrupt and rigid and then it stops rewarding competence and it starts rewarding criminality and power. And so there's always the danger the hierarchy will become corrupt. The right wingers say, we really need the hierarchies and we should abide by them. That's sort of the motif of patriotism and positive group identity. And the left wingers say, yeah, but wait a second.

There's a problem here. A, your hierarchy can get corrupt and might. And B, because some people are way better at it than others, you're going to produce a bunch of dispossessed people at the bottom. And that's not only not good for the dispossessed people, it actually threatens the whole hierarchy. So you have to be careful. You have to attend to the widows and the children, let's say, the widows and the orphans. OK, so now you can think about that as an eternal problem.

You can't do without hierarchies. But, and that's the right wing claim in some sense, you can't do without hierarchies and they're valuable. But they're also prone to corruption and they dispossess people. Okay, so now that's an internal problem. The question is what do you do about it? And the answer to that is there's no final answer to the problem. So what you have to do is you have to have a left wing and you have to have a right wing and they have to talk all the time about whether the hierarchy is healthy and whether or not it's dispossessing too many people.

And then the problem with that is, is that discussion can go too far. Because the right wingers can say hierarchy, uber-all is, right? That the state is correct and everything's right. And so that's the right wing totalitarian types. And the left can say, we'll flatten everything so there's no inequality.

And so both left and the right can go too far. Now, the problem is we don't, we know how to define, I think one of the problems is we know how to define when the right goes too far. I think we learned that after World War II. I think if you're making claims of ethnic or racial superiority, you get to be put in a box and put off the shelf, right? You're not in the dialogue anymore.

It's obvious that the left can go too far, even though there are necessary participants in the discussion, but we don't know how to define when they've gone too far. But we have an obvious example. No, and you might think, well, that's the moderate leftist's problem. It's their moral responsibility to dissociate themselves from the radicals, just as it's the moral responsibility of reasonable conservatives to dissociate themselves from John Birch and Ku Klux Klan types. That's a very important point.

But it isn't just the moderate-lefts problem because even the people on the right don't know what to point to when they say, no, you've gone too far as a leftist. It's complicated because I think it might be more than one policy. I think the really deadly leftist presumption is equality of outcome. I think as soon as you start talking about equality of outcome, you should be put in a box and put off the shelf.

But it isn't obvious why. That doesn't sound like white people overall. It doesn't have the same guttural punch that the excess of the right has. Well, you're for equality of outcome. Why is that bad? Well, it's bad because when you play it out in society, and there's endless evidence for this, it's an instantaneously murderous doctrine.

And I think it's because it shifts so quickly into a victim, victimizer narrative. I've had a great opportunity, eh, in the last month and a half. I got asked to write the preface to the 50th anniversary edition of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. And so I've been writing that. And one of the things Solzhenitsyn did, which was one of the things he, one of the things that made that book arguably the greatest work of nonfiction of the 20th century, I mean, it's in the top 10 anyways,

was to point out very clearly that the excesses of the Russian Revolution started right away. It wasn't that Lenin was a pretty good guy and then Stalin came in and corrupted everything. It was like Lenin was not a pretty good guy. The revolution got bloody really fast. And what seemed to happen, so imagine you started to divide the world up into oppressor and oppressed.

And you're going to do something about the oppressors. The problem is that you can define people multiple ways. This is the intersectionality problem. And almost everybody can be defined in terms of their group identity in some way that makes them an oppressor. So like if you're a black man, well, you could argue that you're oppressed because you're black, but what about the fact that you're a man?

And so does that make you an oppressor or someone who's oppressed? And the answer is, as the revolution progresses, if there's any dimension along which you can be categorized as oppressor, you end up dead. And so that's part of the pathology of the equality of our country. What would it mean by that? Like, you end up dead. You end up rounded up. You ended up being put into the oppressor camp.

Right. But there's only so far you can go with that, right? I mean, you can't put all men in the oppressor camp. There'll be no men left. Like what do you... Well, that... Yeah, but that... So you really think that's how it plays out? Well, it is how it plays out. When you look for equality of outcome. Well, it is how it played out in the Soviet Union in China. I mean, in the Soviet Union, we don't know how many people died. The reasonable estimates look like about 25 million. That's dead. That's not just... That's not imprisoned. That isn't families destroyed. That's just dead.

And in Maoist China, it might have approximated 100 million. That's just internal repression. And so what seems to happen is, soon as you decide that the hierarchy is unfair because there are oppressors and oppressed, then you can go after the oppressors with moral virtue. But the problem is, is that there's almost no limit to the number of ways that you can categorize someone as an oppressor. The category just starts to expand. Like the communists killed all the socialists.

They killed all the religious people. They killed most of the students. They killed all the productive farmers. And they killed the productive farmers because they owned land, you know, and maybe a little house and a few cows, you know, I mean, to be a successful farmer in Russia at the turn of the 20th century didn't mean you were rich, right? It just meant you weren't starving. It's like they killed all those people because they were oppressors, because they had more than someone else. That's how they defined it in order to get the people to rally against it.

yes yes it said yes and it and that and the definition kept slipping because well look look even now it's like let's say we rally against the one percent you know and and those would be the money owners let's say it's like okay who's in that group well everybody north america's in that group

worldwide, yeah. Well, but who sets the parameters? It's $34,000 a year sets you in the 1% worldwide. Right, right. So does that make all of us oppressors? Basically, everybody who lives above poverty in America is in the 1% of the world. Right, right. And also by historical standards. And so the problem with the oppressor, oppressed narrative, is that you can multiply the oppressors endlessly.

And there's no end to going after that. Right. And as soon as you make a definition, you can move the boundaries, and then the next person is the oppressor. And then you keep going. Well, and you also see the interesting thing, too, is that this is complicated. So I've been thinking about this proclivity of the left to destroy members of the moderate left. It's like part of the game is that's being played. As far as I can tell, the ideologically pathological game is, I'm more virtuous than you.

Now, look, if you're on the radical left and you say, well, you're more virtuous than a right winger, it's like, well, who cares? That's obvious because the right wingers are, you know, pathological. So being more virtuous than them, that's not much of an attainment. But if I have my moderate leftist compatriot standing right beside me, and he's pretty damn virtuous, but I'm even more virtuous than him.

then that's a real attainment on my part. It's a moral attainment with no effort on my part. If I can figure out some way of classifying that previously virtuous person as an oppressor along some dimension, then all of a sudden I get an increment in my moral virtue. And that happened all the time in these leftist revolutions run amok. That was just a constant feature. So it's not good. It's not good.

Why is it, and this is something that's always puzzled me, why is it that the left is defined by, there's certain values, and one of them is, when you look at the right, you automatically think of racism, potential racism at least, dislike for gay people, homophobia, there's certain qualities that are always attributed to conservatives, and then there's certain qualities, and these are social things,

and that I'm not quite sure I understand. Like, why is it that the left is always associated in support of gay rights? The left is always associated in support of all races and all genders. Well, I think it's the dispossessed issue again. So imagine that

We make these hierarchies. And they're hierarchies that are devoted towards a goal. And that the sum total of all those hierarchies is something like the patriarchy. Even though I hate that word and I don't think anybody should use it. I don't like that word at all. But we're speaking within the confines of that theory. It's defined in how you're using it. What do you mean by the patriarchy? Well, the patriarchy is the sum total of all Western hierarchies, let's say. It's the radical leftist vision of the sum total of all Western hierarchies. But it's always male.

Well, that's the theory, is that it's male-dominated. Well, it is patriarchy as a male-dominated word. Well, and it's a funny thing, because of course there's lots of elements, there's lots of sub-elements of the patriarchy that aren't male-dominated. So healthcare, for example, universities, the education system in general, there's lots of places where these sub-elements are female-dominated. So I don't know if they're defined as the patriarchy, do they define healthcare?

Well, it's a good question, Joe. I don't know what happens. If you have a sub-element of the patriarchy that's dominated by women, is that still the patriarchy? It's like the structure's still intact. It's still performing the same function. Well, now the women are running it. Well, is that the patriarchy? And the answer to that is, well, we're all vague about what the definition is, so we don't need to address that issue. That's the answer. Well, here's some clear ones. Here's some clear ones, right? Like major corporations, the vast majority of CEOs are male. We think of that as part of the patriarchy. Government.

never been a male, never been a female president. A vast majority of senators, congressmen, et cetera, male.

Yeah, so I guess we could say, well, the patriarchy is all those elements of hierarchical structure that are still dominated by men. Law enforcement, military, male, mostly male. Right, but it's a peculiar definition. Right. Because it means you have to fractionate the patriarchy into pieces. You can no longer talk about it as a uniform structure if you're going to take out all those pieces that are dominated by women and say, well, that's not the patriarchy.

But the thing is, is that the whole concept is so ill-defined that it's... that it begars description. But so is you power though, right? I mean, isn't it? Well, that's the other thing, that's the claim. The other claim is that all hierarchies are predicated on power, which is a claim that's absolutely appalling. It's like plumbers.

Are they part of the hierarchy? Hierarchy? You've got roaming bands of armed, aggressive, tyrannical plumbers coming to your door saying, use our service or else. That's not how it works. When you're going looking for a plumber, you go look for a massage therapist, you look, or a surgeon, for that matter, or a lawyer, you go look for the person who's most competent. And one of the things the left can't tolerate is the idea that hierarchies are predicated, in part even, on competence, which they clearly are.

The best predictors for success in Western hierarchies are intelligence and conscientiousness. Those are the best psychological predictors of success. They only account for about a third of the variation in success. Maybe a third is probably about right. So there's still lots of room for randomness and even for systemic discrimination. But the notion that our

our systems aren't predicated in part on competence is clearly wrong. Now, you asked a question about the left. It's like, why are the left always on the side of the people who don't fit in, let's say, or don't fit so easily? And I think that is a matter of the consequence of hierarchical structures. So imagine in every hierarchy, there are some people who don't do very well in any given hierarchy. Then imagine

Then imagine across all the hierarchies that there's a subset of people who are very likely to not do well in any of them. So you might say, well, they're systemically discriminated against. The left would be on their side because they're on the side, even temperamentally, of the people who are dispossessed. And the thing about that is that it's valid. Look, we need a spokesperson politically for the dispossessed. That's what the Democratic Party used to do when they worked for the working class.

Is the working class needed a political voice? It's like, okay, that's the Democrats. Well, why do they need a political voice? Well, to keep the hierarchy from degenerating into rigid tyranny. It's part of the political discussion. But now the problem is, and this is the problem with the left, is that, well, what's the hierarchy? It's a tyrannical patriarchy. It's like, no, it's not.

It's partly corrupt, like every system. But it's less corrupt than most systems, and there's a lot of elements of it that are devoted towards self-improvement and self-monitoring. You have to be a little nuanced and subtle about these sorts of things. And you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater, and the leftist rhetoric has got so intense that the idea is, and people believe this, while the world is going to hell in a hand basket, everything is getting worse in all possible ways, and there's systemic racism everywhere, and it's utterly unfair, and it should be torn down and rebuilt.

It's like, no, it's actually functioning unbelievably well, even though it still has its problems.

And there's a big difference between saying there's systemic racism everywhere. And the reason that there isn't perfectly equal outcomes is because of prejudice. And saying, no, no, look, the system is functioning, let's say at 75%. It's doing all right. It's got some problems, including systemic prejudice, which hopefully will work themselves out across time and which show every bit of evidence of doing so. And so we don't need a radical solution.

And one of the things I've started to do with my Twitter account is to tweet out

good, non-naive news. Because one of the things that's happening in the world, and there's been half a dozen books on this or more written in the last five years by credible people, is that the distribution of the idea of individual sovereignty and property rights and free market economies, et cetera, out into the rest of the world is making the non-Western world, is making the non-Western world rich really, really, really fast.

So between 2000 and 2012, the rate of absolute poverty in the world fell by half. Half. It was the fastest period of economic development in human history. We beat the optimistic UN target by three years. Staggering.

You know, the rates of child mortality in Africa are now lower than they were in Europe in 1950. The fastest growing economies in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa. Millions of people, millions of people a month, are getting access to this incredible technology that's embodied in cell phones.

Right? People have access to fresh water like they've never had access before. The kids are getting immunized at a rate that's unprecedented. And yet we have this idea that's become rampant in the West that there's something ultimately corrupt about the patriarchal tyranny and that it has to be dismantled right down to its core.

And a lot of that's being taught by the activist disciplines and universities. And I just don't get it. It's not acceptable. So they see these hierarchies and their proposal to level everything off and to take away the insane power at the very top is a quality of outcome. It's unproven in terms of it's never been done successfully to a utopian

Right, and I also don't even think you can do it in principle, because if you accept the propositions I laid out, which is you have to pursue things of value, and if you pursue things in a social space, so you do it cooperatively and competitively, you do it with other people, then you're gonna produce differential outcome because people will be differently good at it. It's like, okay, you don't believe that? It's like, okay, do you listen to random selections of music online?

Or do you do what everyone else does? You go for the one-tenth of one percent of songwriters, and you only listen to them. You only read the productions of one-tenth of one percent of writers. You only listen to the podcasts of one-tenth of one percent of broadcasters. When you watch sports on TV, you only watch the athletic contributions of one-tenth of one percent of athletes.

So like, where's the equality exactly? Where's that in your life? You people who are pushing for equality of outcome. You manifest that in anything you do. You don't. You're unbelievably selective, just like everyone else. And the reason you're selective is because there are things that are happening that need to happen or that are entertaining and interesting. And you want the best in all of those realms. That's how it works. And there is a best. That's the other thing that's so painful. And that actually is painful.

Here's a problem of dispossession, a real problem. One way to not do very well in any hierarchy is to have a low IQ. And so IQ is normally distributed. And if you have an IQ of less than 85, it's hard for you to read well enough to follow instructions. That's about 10% of the population. It might even be higher than that. So given that lack, how are you going to compete?

And the answer is, you're not because low IQ is a good predictor of poverty. Now, they spiral because if you're less cognitively gifted, then

And you have children, they're going to be in a less enriched environment. These things spiral, but you still have the essential problem. That's the essential problem of the dispossessed. It's like hierarchies are complex tools to attain necessary goals, but they dispossess people. What do we do with the people that they dispossess? The answer is we don't know.

So we have to talk about it constantly to figure out how to solve it, because it's an ongoing problem that transforms, and that's the reason that political dialogue is necessary. And then the danger is that the political dialogue will polarize into the radical left, no hierarchies whatsoever, or the radical right, our hierarchy is 100% right at all costs.

And so those are the, we have the eternal problem and those are the two poles that we have to negotiate between. It's interesting because the accusation has always been that what the left is trying to do with this equality of outcome thing is sort of an infantilization of the populace, right? And the best example of that is sports.

When you look at sports, clearly, the best people win. The fastest runners win the race, the people that have the best strategy win the game. That's a weird word, infantilization, I never get it. But of that is what we do with children, where you get participation trophies and no one wins. When my daughter was three years old, she was in soccer.

and they didn't keep score. But everyone knew. Everyone knew these kids scored, and they didn't. At the end of the game, they didn't announce a winner. There was no... Well, you can't. You can't have a soccer game without keeping score. It's not a soccer game anymore. It's something else. But the score was kept. Of course. It just wasn't discussed. Well, of course. It was the strangest thing. But this is to treat these little kids, because they couldn't handle it. Yeah. You know, she cried when the other team scored. I'm like, that's... It feels bad when they score, so it feels good when you score. It's very difficult to say that

a three-year-old. So is she going to run hills? Is she going to practice drills so that she feels that good feeling more? And then there's a point where that becomes too far. There's a point where you become an obsessive overwinner, right? And this is the people that want to crush their enemies. Then you become Conan the Barbarian. This is the far end of it. And this is what the left is terrified of, right?

The idea of the left is the demure, the soft, the people that are kinder and gentler. The idea of the right is the conqueror. The people that work hard, play hard, go kick ass, go America, that kind of shit. And so these are the type of people that are going to be crueler. They're going to do what it takes to win. And the people that you would consider that would like equality of outcome are the people that are trying to slow that down. Does this make sense?

Yes, absolutely. And I think that's how it lays itself out temperamentally. Psychologically. This is the motivation for all this. Yes, yes. And the radical left is compassion gone mad, although it's also envy. Let's not forget about that. Well, absolutely.

One reason to stand up for the dispossessed is because you're empathetic. And empathy is not an automatic good. This is something we make a big mistake about. We think, well, I'm feeling sorry for you. Therefore, I'm good. It's like, no, I might be feeling too sorry for you. I might not be demanding enough of you.

So, and that's the terrible devouring mother, you know, from a psychoanalytic perspective. Everything you do, dear, is okay. It's like, no, it's not. Right. So, one of the things that Jean Piaget, the developmental psychologist, he was very interested in figuring out a way out of this, and it's very much relevant to your concept, your talk about athletics.

Okay, so imagine this, because this is also something that points the way to a proper morality, which was actually something that John Piaget was very concerned about. He wanted to reconcile the distinction between religion and science. That's actually what drove him. Even though people don't know that, he was arguably the world's greatest developmental psychologist.

So, here's the idea. You know how you tell your kid to be a good sport? You say, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, it matters how you play the game. Okay, so I've been unpacking that in my lectures because it's really, really complicated. It's like, you tell your kid that and they look at you and they think,

Well, what do you mean by that? Aren't I supposed to try to win? It's a soccer game. I'm supposed to win. And you say, well, yeah, you're supposed to win, but it doesn't matter whether you win or lose. It matters how you play the game. You know that that's right, but you don't know how to explain it to your kid. You say, well, you want to be a good sport. OK, so imagine this. This is how it works. And this is crucially important. So first of all, life is not a game.

Even a game is not a game. Because a game is, most of the time, a game is the beginning of a series of games. So let's say that you're on a soccer team.

Well, there's winning the game. But the game isn't the issue. The game is the whole series of games. So maybe the game is winning the championship. And winning the championship and winning ad game are not the same thing. And the reason for that is, well, maybe if you want to win a game, the best thing to do is to let your star player make all the moves. But if you want to win a championship, maybe the best thing is for your star player to do everything he or she possibly can to develop all the other team members.

That's a different strategy. And the reason it's different is because it iterates across time. OK, so I'll tell you a quick story. So when my kid was playing hockey when he was about 12 or so, he was in the championship game, just at a local arena. And it was really fun to watch. The teams were pretty equal, which is something that you want, so that everybody can

expand their skills while they're playing and it was like five seconds to to the end of the game and the other team made a breakaway and came down the guy came down nice and scored it was a beautiful goal and it was four three and that was the end of it right and all my kids team there is the kid who is the star and he was a pretty good hockey player

He came off the ice and he was very annoyed about what had happened. He smashed his stick on the cement and was complaining about the refereeing and acting as if he'd been robbed. And his father came up and instead of saying, get your act together kid, that's no way to display yourself after a loss. He said, oh yeah, man, you were robbed that the referees didn't ref right and you played the best and you should have won. And I thought, you absolute son of a bitch.

You're ruining your son. And then the question is, why? Because his son was the star and was trying to win. Why was he ruining his son? Well, you're trying to train your son not to win the game. You're trying to train your son to win the championship. And so that's a series of games. But then life isn't the championship. Life is a whole bunch of championships. It's a whole sequence of them. And so what you're actually trying to train your son to do is to be a contender in the entire series.

And the way you do that is by helping him develop his character.

And the character is actually the strategy that would enable him to win the largest number of games across the largest possible span of time. And one way you do that if you're a kid is like, well, what do you want to do with your kid? You don't want to teach him to win. You want to teach him to play well with others. And that's to be reciprocal. So that means to try to win, but also to pay attention to developing the other people around him and not to put winning the game above everything at all times. So then he's fun to play with.

And this is absolutely crucial. You can help your kid become fun to play with between the ages of two and the age of four. If your kid is fun to play with, then what happens? Kids line up to play with him. And adults line up to teach him. And if kids line up to play with him, then he'll have friends his whole life, and he'll be socialized, and he'll be invited to many games, some of which he'll win, all of which he'll be able to participate in. And if he's fun to play with, then adults will teach him things, and then he wins that life.

And so when you say to your kid, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose. It matters how you play the game. What you're saying is, don't forget, kid, that what you're trying to do here is to do well at life. And you need to practice the strategies that enable you to do well at life while you're in any specific game. And you never want to compromise your ability to do well at life for the sake of winning a single game. And there's a deep ethic in that. And it's the ethic of reciprocity in games. Part of the reason that we're so obsessed with sports

is because we like to see that dramatized, you know, like the person we really admire as an athlete isn't only the person who wins. We don't like the narcissistic winners. They're winners and that's a plus, but if they're narcissistic, they're not good team players. They're only out for themselves. Then we think, well, you're a winner in the narrow sense, but your character is suspect. You're no role model, even though you're a winner. And it's because we're looking for something deeper.

We're looking for that, the manifestation of character that allows you to win across the set of possible games. And that's a real thing, that's a real ethic. It's a fundamental ethic. I think what you're pointing out that's very important is we're searching for the person who's got it all nailed. Someone who tries their hardest but is also

honest enough about the circumstances to not cry foul when it's gone the other person's way. Yeah, well, that's part of resilience. It's right. Like, look, you're not going to win it. You're not going to score on every shot. Right. Doesn't mean you shouldn't take the shots. It doesn't mean you shouldn't try to hit the goal. But part of being able to continue to take shots

is to have the strength of character to tolerate the fact that in that instance you weren't on top. It's more trivial in games than it is in fights. And it's also the response is much more negative from the fans if you lose a fight and complain about it.

it is it's ruthless there because they understand that you've made a huge character error yes so why do you think it's more important in in fights than it is in games why do you think it's because the consequences are so grave because you recognize that the highest much higher in the lows are much lower to lose a basketball game sucks but it's nothing like losing a fight there's no comparison so what do you think it is the damages the fighter

If he complains about losing, why is that a mistake? Why do the fans respond so negatively to that? Because they know, they know that you lost. They know that you're complaining for no reason and you're not a hero. They want you to be better than them. They want you to be the person that has the courage to step into a cage or a ring or wherever you, whatever the format is you're competing and to do something that's extremely difficult. And when you do that, they hold you to a higher standard.

to lose with grace. Yes, and when you fall, especially if you were a champion, that is one of the most disappointing things ever when a champion complains. Right. And it is, okay, so it's response is horrific from the audience. Okay, so that's a great example. So let's imagine, what does the person who loses something important with grace do? And the answer is fairly straightforward.

He accepts the defeat and thinks, okay, what is it that I have left to improve that will decrease the possibility of a similar defeat in the future, right? So what he's doing is, because the great athlete and the great person is not only someone who's exceptionally skilled at what they do, but who's trying to expand their skills at all times. And the attempt to expand their skills at all times is even more important than the fact that they're great to begin with, because the trajectory is so important.

more important in particular to the audience. It's extremely important to the audience because the person who's competing, you are expecting them to live out this life in a perfect way or in a much more powerful way than you're capable of. Yes, and so part of that is the skill because they put in the practice, but part of that also is the willingness to push the skill farther into new domains of development with each action.

And that's really what people like to watch, right? They don't like to watch a perfect athletic performance. They like to watch a perfect athletic performance that's pushed into the domain of new risk. They want to see both at the same time. You're really good at what you do and you're getting better. Okay, so you lose a match, which is not any indication that you're not good at what you do. You might not be as good as the person who beat you. But if you lose the match and then whine, what you've done is sacrifice the higher order principle of constant improvement of your own skills.

Because you should be analyzing the loss and saying, the reason I lost insofar as it's relevant to this particular time and place is the insufficiencies I manifested that defeated me. And I need to track those insufficiencies so that I can rectify them in the future. And if I'm blaming it on you or the referees or the situation, then I'm not taking responsibility and I'm not pushing myself forward. And so then you also take the meaning out of it. One of the things I've been doing on my tour

People are criticizing me to some degree for saying things to people that are obvious. Well, first of all, it's not like I didn't bloody well know they were obvious. When I wrote those rules. Well, the rules in my book, for example, stand up straight with your shoulders back. Treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping. It's like, I know perfectly well that those can be read as cliches. The question is, cliche, let's say, is something that's so true that it's become widely accepted by everyone.

Well, but we don't know why it's true anymore. And so this, this issue, the issue that we're talking about here, the issue of being a good sport, we need to figure out why that's true. And the reason that it's true is that you're trying to push your development farther than you've already developed at every point in time. And now that's the proper, that's the proper moral attitude. So

When you see an athletic performance where someone is pushing themselves beyond what they are, you see someone dramatizing the process of proper adaptation. It isn't the skill itself. It's the extension of the skill. And when you see someone acting like a bad sport, then they're sacrificing that. And so they're sacrificing the higher for the lower, and no one likes that. In the fights, it's got to be

See the question is that's the thing i can't quite figure out is why that would be even exaggerated in the fight situation and you said it's because the stakes are so high yeah the consequences of victory or defeat they're just so much greater. Your health is on the line it's one of the rare things that you do, where your health is on the line your physical health.

right so they're more extreme victories in more extreme defeat so the morality that's associated with defeat is more extreme exactly because there's more on the line that makes sense and the the way people treat the champions it's it's a it's a very different thing it's the the respect and adulation that a champion receives is it's the pinnacle of sports in terms of uh... the the love from the audience when someone wins uh... a great fight

it's there's nothing like it and this is one of the reasons why these people are willing to put their health on the line because that high the high of victory and it's not just a victory it's uh... you know what what is it who was it who who said the victory is really the victory over the lesser you it's a victory over is the victory yes yes the victory is over you you've got to realize what a guy like steppe meochik who uh... defends his heavyweight title this weekend

in the UFC. He's the heavyweight champion of the world, but he's not undefeated. He's lost in his career. He's lost a couple of times. And I'm sure he's lost wrestling matches and sparring sessions in the gym. And he's a product of improvement. He's a product of discipline and hard work and thinking and strategy and constantly improving upon his skills. And because of that, he's the baddest man on the planet. So in my book, Rule 4 is, this is 12.

Excuse me. This is from 12 Rules for Life. Rule 4 is, compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. Yes. Because you need to have a hierarchy of improvement. You need to be aiming for something. And that means you're going to be lesser than people who've already attained along that dimension. Yes. And that can give rise to envy.

So the question is, who should you defeat in the final analysis? And the answer is you should defeat your former self. You should be constantly trying to do that. And you're the right control for yourself, too, because you're the one who's had all your advantages and disadvantages. And so if you want to compete fairly with someone, then you should be competing with you. And it is the case, and this is what we were talking about, too, with regards to the self-improvement of the fighter, is well, if you're improving yourself, then what you are doing is competing with your lesser self.

And then you might also ask, well, what is that lesser self? And that lesser self would be resentful and bitter and aggressive and vengeance seeking and all of those things that go along with having a negative moral character. And those are things that interfere with your ability to progress as you move forward through life.

So it's very necessary to understand that this is why, you know, I've been stressing this idea of personal responsibility. It's like, well, personal responsibility is to compete with yourself is to be slightly better than yourself the next day. And it better in some way that you can actually manage. And that's humility. It's right. Like, well, I'm a flawed person and I've got all my problems. Could I be as good as person X? It's like not the right question. The right question is, could you be slightly better tomorrow than your currently flawed self? And the answer to that is,

If you have enough humility to set the bar properly low, then you could be better tomorrow than you are today. Because what you also have to do is you have to say, well, here's all my flaws in my insufficient season. The best that someone that flawed and insufficient could do to improve and actually do it is this. And that's not worth going out in the street and celebrating with placards. It's like, well, this is why I tell people to clean the room. It's not going to braid to someone that you did that.

But someone as insufficient as you might be able to manage it. And that means you actually are on the pathway to self-improvement, and you're transcending your former self. And you might say, well, what's the right way of being in the world if there is such a thing? And it's not acting according to a set of rules. It's attempting continually to transcend the flawed thing that you currently are.

And what's so interesting about that is that the meaning in life is to be found in that pursuit. So I've been laying that out in these discussions too because I say, well, the fundamental issue is that life is tragic and difficult, very tragic and difficult for everyone. And it's also tainted by malevolence because no matter how

Things are tragic and difficult, but there's always some stupid thing that you could do or someone else could do that could make it even worse than it has to be. And so that's life. And you need an antidote to that because that can embiter you. Constant contact with that. Just the tragedy, but the tragedy combined with betrayal and malevolence, that makes it even worse.

especially if it's self-induced. Okay, so you need something to set against that so you don't get bitter and resentful. Well, what do you set against that? Doing something worthwhile by your own definition, say. You need some reason to get the hell out of bed on a terrible day because you've got something good to do. Well, what's the best thing you can do? Transcend your current wretched and miserable self. There's meaning to be found in that. And that's a meaning that's associated with responsibility. One of the things that I've been trying to lay out clearly is that

Life is hard. It's tainted by malevolence and betrayal. That can make you bitter. You need a meaning to offset that. Where's the meaning to be found?

Not in rights, not in impulsive pleasure, but in responsibility. You take responsibility for yourself. So you take care of yourself. If you're good at it, you have some excess left over to take care of your damn family. If you're good at both of those, then you have some excess left over to take care of your community. Those are heavy burdens. You pick up the burdens. You find that's meaningful. The best way to pick up the burden is to continually improve yourself. And that's where the meaning is to be found. And so that meaning is in the continual self-transcendence.

That's letting your old self die and the new self be reborn. Did you watch when we were kings? Elie and Frazier? God, that's an amazing, amazing, amazing movie. Right at the end of it. So, Elie defeats Frazier basically by letting him defeat himself, right? Because Frazier is angry and he's got a chip on his shoulder and he doesn't conduct the fight properly. So, he exhausts himself chasing Elie.

And Ellie is basically just trained himself to take the damn blows, right? And to wear Frasier out, that's his plan. Then right at the end of the movie, he knocks Frasier down. And it's pretty much the end of the fight, but Frasier sort of struggles to his feet. You know, he's just getting up off the mat, and Ellie's got his hand pulled back to just nail him, because he's completely laid open, and he puts his glove down and turns away.

That's the end of the fight. And Frazier said, and this is true as far as I know, that that fight tamed him. Like Frazier had a big chip on his shoulder and he was a kind of a dreadful guy up till that fight. And afterwards he was affable and he was civilized. Elie civilized him. And so, but that gesture that Elie made was that great gesture because he could have

flattened him right and he had every reason to man he got he got he got taken apart a lead took punches like mad in that fight and then in the final analysis when he had Frazier down and he was struggling to his feet he just let him go man nobility of character right there something impressive to behold so

When, why are you defining people, like when you're saying this, why are you saying your miserable wretched life? Because there's a lot of people that don't have miserable wretched lives that also just want to improve. Like, why does it have to be the worst case scenario in order to- Because it has to work in the worst case scenario. Okay.

That's why you're using the worst case scenario as an example. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But do you think that that perhaps may alienate someone who doesn't have the worst case scenario? No, I don't think so. Well, it depends on how much time you have to outline the ideas. Because even if things are going really well for you now, there's going to be a time in the future where things are rough. You're going to be ill.

family member is going to be ill, a dream is going to fall apart, you're going to be, you're going to be uncertain about your employment status. Like the flood is coming, right? The apocalypse is coming. It's always the case in life. And you have to be prepared for it. And the question is how to prepare for it. And the answer to that is to find a way of being that works even under the diarist of circumstances.

that's the issue and so you outline and i mean i am pessimistic about this in my approach in some sense because when i'm talking to my audiences in the same thing happens and happen in my book maps of meaning and in twelve rules for life i'm laying out the worst case scenario

That's sort of like hell. It's things are going really badly for you. And there's just chance associated with that sometimes. And you and the people around you are doing stupid things to make it worse. It's like, OK, what have you got under those circumstances? You've got the possibility to slowly raise yourself out of the mire. You've got the possibility to do just what the fighter does when he's defeated, which is to say, well,

Regardless of the circumstances that might have led to my defeat, like even if there were errors on the part of the referee, this is no time to whine about it. This is a time to take stock of what I did wrong so that I could improve it into the future. And that's the right attitude. You know, in the Old Testament, one of the things that's really interesting about the Old Testament stories is in the Old Testament, the Jews keep getting walloped by God. It's like they struggle up and make an empire and then they just get walloped.

And then it's all crushed and they're out of it for generations. And then they struggle back up and make an empire. And then they get demolished again. And it happens over and over and over. And the attitude of the Old Testament Hebrews is we must have made a mistake. It's never to shake their fist at the sky and curse fate. It's never that. The presupposition is if things aren't working out, it's my fault.

And that's a hell of a presupposition. And you might say, well, of course, that underestimates the degree to which there's systemic oppression, et cetera, et cetera, and the vagaries of fate. It's like it doesn't overestimate it. It's not the point. The point is your best strategic position is how am I insufficient and how can I rectify that? That's what you've got. And the thing is you are insufficient.

And you could rectify it. Both of those are within your grasp. If you aim low enough. One of the things you do- That's another thing you keep saying aim low enough. Have a low enough bar. Why do you mean that? Well, let's say you've got a kid and you want the kid to improve. You don't set them a bar that's so high that it's impossible for them to attain it.

You take a look at the kid and you think, OK, this kid's got this range of skill. Here's a challenge we can throw at him or her that exceeds their current level of skill, but gives them a reasonable probability of success. And so like I'm saying, it tongue in cheek to some degree. But I'm doing it as an aid to humility. It's like, well, I don't know how to start improving my life. Someone might say that. And I would say, well, you're not aiming low enough. There's something you could do that you are regarding as trivial.

that you could do, that you would do, that would result in an actual improvement. But it's not a big enough improvement for you. So you won't lower yourself enough to take the opportunity. Incremental steps. Yes. And so this is also what is achieved through exercise. It's one of the most important. Yeah.

Well, what do you do when you go and lift weights? If you haven't bench pressed before, you don't put 400 pounds on the damn bar and drop the bar through your skull. You think, look, when I started working out when I was a kid, I was weighed about 130 pounds and I was six foot one. It was a thin kid and I smoked a lot. I wasn't in good shape.

I wasn't in good physical shape. And I went to the gym and it was bloody embarrassing, you know, and people would come over and help me with the goddamn weights. Here's how you're supposed to use this. You know, it was humiliating. And maybe I was pressing 65 pounds or something at that point. You know, but what am I going to do? I'm going to lift up 150 pounds and injure myself right off the bat.

No, I had to go in there and strip down and put my skinny goddamn self in front of the mirror and think, son of a bitch, there's all these monsters in the gym who've been lifting weights for 10 years, and I'm struggling to get 50 pounds off the bar. Tough luck for me, but I could lift 50 pounds. And it wasn't very long until I could lift 75. And well, you know how it goes?

But, and I never injured myself when I was weightlifting. And the reason for that was I never pushed myself past where I knew I could go. And I pushed myself a lot. You know, I gained 35 pounds of muscle in about three years in university. I kind of had to quit because I was eating so goddamn much I couldn't stand it. It was eating like six meals a day. It was just taken up too much time.

But there's a humility in determining what it is that the wretched creature that you are can actually manage. Aim low. And I don't mean don't aim, and I don't mean don't aim up. But you have to accept the fact that

You can set yourself a goal that you can attain, and there's not going to be much glory in it to begin with. Because if you're not in very good shape, the goal that you could attain tomorrow isn't very glorious. But it's a hell of a lot better than nothing, and it beats the hell out of bitterness, and it's way better than blaming someone else. It's way less dangerous, and you could do it. And what's cool about it

There's a statement in the New Testament. It's called the Matthew Principle, and economists use it to describe how the economy and the world works. To those who have everything more will be given. From those who have nothing, everything will be taken. It's like what's very pessimistic in some sense, because it means that as you start to fail, you fail more and more rapidly.

But it also means that as you start to succeed, you succeed more and more rapidly. And so you take an incremental step and, well, now you can lift 55 pounds instead of 52.5 pounds. You think, well, what the hell is that? It's like it's one step on a very long journey.

And so it starts to compound on you. So a small step today puts you in a position to take a slightly bigger step the next day. And then that puts you in a position to take a slightly bigger step the next day. And you do that for two or three years, man. You're starting to stride. You know, when I have so many people coming up to me now, this is one of the things that's so insanely fun about this tour, which is so positive. It brings me to tears regularly. It's mind boggling. Because people come up to me and this is happening wherever I go now. And they say,

They're very polite when they come and talk to me and they're always apologetic for interrupting and so it's never narcissistic and it's never annoying. I'm really happy to see people and they come up to me and they say, well, I know you've heard this lots of times before, but I've really been putting my life together since I've been watching your lectures.

Then they tell me a story about where they were in some dark place, too much alcohol, too much drugs, not getting along with their father, not getting along with their mother, not having a vision for their life, being nihilistic, playing too many video games. You know, like being suicidal, that happens a lot, having post-traumatic stress disorder, sometimes as a consequence of combat, whatever little slice of hell they were occupying.

They say, look, I've been listening to your lectures and I've been developing a vision for my life and I've been trying to take responsibility and I've been trying to tell the truth and things are way better.

And so that's absolutely perfect. It's the right way forward as far as I'm concerned. And those are people who they took stock of themselves. They said, I'm in a dark place, and I'm a dark person. And here's some things that this dark person in this dark place could do. Little things that they could actually do. I'll clean up my damn room. I'll make my bed. I don't know how many people have come and told me. It's so strange. They said, well, I started making my bed, and that made all the difference.

It's like, well, yeah, you decided to aim up, man. And the first concrete instantiation of that was that you made your bed. And you think, well, that's nothing heroic. It's like, no, but aim and up is heroic. That's something. And then lowering yourself to the point where you're not above the mess in your room. You're not super ordinate to that. You lower yourself so that you straighten up. You're grateful for what you have right in front of you. And you take care of it, and you put it in order. It's like all of a sudden, things start to get better. And it's so wonderful to be doing this.

tour because I see so that's what this tour has been about for me. It's not political. I never talked to people after the talks, for example. I talked to about 150 people a night. We never talk about anything political. It's always this. I wasn't doing very well. I'm putting my life together. I'm getting along better with my father. I'm getting along better with my wife. I'm getting along better with my kids. I've got some meaning in my life. Thanks a lot. It's way better. It's like, yes, that's

That's the right thing. It's very beneficial for people and they need to hear that and there's there's something that comes along with that. That's critical and what that is is an honest assessment of yourself and honesty.

That type of honesty, honesty with yourself, it's very difficult for some people and they don't have the tools for it and they haven't been explained how to do this. Or why you should. Or why you should. Yeah, one of the things that happens when you go through school, you're told what to do, you're never told how to think. You're also told that you're okay the way you are. That's self-esteem. You're okay the way you are. It's like, no you're not.

And this is another thing. Well, you are and you're not. You're OK as a human. Look, if you want to be a black belt in jujitsu and you just started your first class, you're OK as you are. You're a human. But in the goal, you're not OK. In the greater goal. That's right.

The incremental improvement is important. You have to honestly assess your position and move forward. Well, that's it. You're a position and a trajectory. And when you say to someone, you're okay because of your position, that's not good enough because you have to say, well, wait a second, you need a trajectory. And maybe you're okay if you're okay in your position and your trajectory.

But the self-esteem movements and all of that will accept yourself the way you are. It's like, no, because you need a trajectory. And one of the things that I think, one of the reasons that audiences are responding to what I've been saying in my lectures and what I've been writing about is that I don't tell people that they're okay the way they are.

No, I say, no, no, you could be way more than you are. And they're relieved about that, you see, because if you're in a dark and terrible place and someone says, you're okay the way you are, then you don't know what to do about that. It's like, no, I'm not. I'm having a terrible time and I'm hopeless. You're okay the way you are.

Well, then what? That's it? That's it? That's where I am? And what do you want to tell a young person? You're 17. You're okay the way you are. It's like, no, you're not. You got 60 years to be better. And you could be way better. You could be incomparably better across multiple dimensions. And in pursuing that better, that's where you'll find the meaning in your life. And that will give you the antidote to the suffering.

The way I always describe it to people is there are disciplines that you can pursue, and those disciplines are a vehicle for developing a human potential. And if you get better at these things, you can get better at anything. And if you figure out what it takes to become better at whatever sport it is, or whatever art it is, or whatever you're pursuing, the same principles you can apply to the way you treat people, you can apply to the way you educate yourself, you can apply to the way you keep your body in shape, all those things are connected.

That's why you have to impose order. People have asked me in my book why I wrote it as an antidote to chaos, because, well, there isn't anything technically wrong with chaos. Chaos is a place of great potential. Well, the question is, what's the proper balance between chaos and order? Chaos potential and order?

Well, the answer is, look, when you're a kid, you're all potential. It's chaotic potential. It can manifest itself in any number of ways. And maybe you don't want to give that up. So you're like Peter Pan. You want to be a kid forever because you don't want to give up the potential. And you look out in the world and all you see are Captain Hooks, you know, who've lost a hand, who were chased by death because that's the clock in the crocodile. It's already got a taste of him. It's terrified by death and he's a tyrant. Well, I don't want to grow up to be that. So I won't be disciplined at all.

Well, that's no good because the way the potential transforms itself into actuality is through discipline. And so then as you said, this is the trick though. You have to pick a path of discipline. Whether what path of discipline you have to pick is a different issue. There could be a rule. The rule could be

The rule might not be follow this rule. The rule might be you have to follow some rules. So it's a meta rule. And the meta rule is you have to discipline yourself. And the issue is, well, how? That's not really the relevant question. You can pick a disciplinary path. That's why I often tell my clients, especially young people, they say, well, I don't know what to do. It's like, that's OK.

Nobody does. Go do something. Do the best thing that you can think of. Put the best plan you have into practice. It's not going to be perfect and it will change along the way. But it will change partly because you become disciplined pursuing the path. And as you become disciplined, you become wiser. And as you become wiser, you become able to formulate better and better plans.

So you can start vaguely and confused and develop a plan that's not so great, and you start to implement it, and then you accrue incremental wisdom as you implement your flawed plan, and that enables you to fix the plan. And so that's part of that process of incremental self-improvement as well.

One of the more difficult aspects of that is personal honesty, like being honest with yourself, being honest with yourself about what you're doing, self-assessment. It's very difficult for people. They don't, they're never, they're never taught it. It's not something that's encouraged. No, and it's dismal. I mean, imagine you only got a hundred, you only have a hundred thousand dollars to go buy a house. And so you go by, you go look at this house and it's like, Jesus, this house, man, it's like it needs a lot of work. It's like, well, that's all you've got.

While you're going to pretend that the house is okay the way it is, or you're going to look for where it's rotten and where the plumbing doesn't work and where the stove doesn't work, you have to go and look and see where everything needs to be fixed. And that's like, that is harsh, man. But, and then in order to do that properly, someone has to have taught you, it's look, you aren't your problems. Well, you are. You're most fundamentally that which, if it confronts its problems, can solve them.

And that's the hero myth in a nutshell, by the way. The hero is the person who confronts horrible, chaotic potential and tames it and makes something of it, right? That's the fundamental human story. But the problem is is that you have to face what you don't want to face in order to fix it.

And so you look at all the things about yourself that need to be burned off, that need to be dispensed with. And that man, especially at the beginning, especially if you're screwed up, that may be like 95% of you just has to go up in flames. And it's painful. Even some of that stuff that you have to burn off doesn't want to die. And it'll scream in agony while you're burning it off. It's not pleasant.

But if you know that you're the thing that can transcend your problems most fundamentally, if you know you're the thing that if it faces the problems can transcend them, then you have the faith that would enable you to take stock of who you are. And you have to do that in small steps because most people don't have experience in transcending their problems. So they really don't know what it even feels like. It seems like an alien concept. It seems like something other people can do.

But if you do it incrementally, you can show yourself that you can do it. I mean, it's one of the reasons why they have belt systems in martial arts. You start off slow. Oh my God, I got a stripe on my white belt. Oh my God, I'm a blue belt. You feel improvement. Yeah. And for some people, it's the first real improvement marked absolute improvement in their life. Yeah.

Right? Well, then that's an interesting thing too because right there you've got a bit of a measurement system. We have this system set up online called the Future Authoring Program and last time we implemented it because we've tested it three times. We implemented that Mohawk College in Canada and we had people write about their ideal future and also to put in measurement strategies. It's like, okay, here's your ideal future. Here's how you're going to break it into goals. Here's how you're going to mark progress towards those goals.

Because you've got to be playing a fair game with yourself, right? Because when you make progress, you want to reward yourself. So you have to identify what the progress is and you have to reward it. The consequence, we had people write a future plan for only an hour when they came for their school orientation in the summer before going to, it's a community college. And it dropped the dropout rate among young men by 50%.

And it's, yeah, no kidding. 50%. Yeah. And what that meant was, to me, what that meant was just think about that. What that means is that these kids have been educated for 12 years and no one had ever sat them down and said, OK, what the hell are you doing and why?

And how are you going to get, like, where do you want to go? Why do you want to get there? How are you going to get there? How are you going to mark your progress? I've never walked them through that exercise. You walk people through that exercise just to get them to do that increases the probability that they'll stay on track by 50%. That's incredible. Well, it's one of the things I've always complained about is that no one, people teach you facts. They don't teach you how to approach life. They don't teach you how to think. They don't teach you how to confront. Why do they think? Insecurities and

different traps that your mind will set up for you. Yeah, well, that's partly what's so fun about doing this lecture tour because that's exactly what I'm talking to people about. One of the things I talk about is, well, why do you think? Why bother thinking? It's like, you think, well, that's obvious. It's like, no, actually, it's not so obvious. It's like the issue that I discuss with my students at university law is, well, why write a good essay? Why bother? Well, to get the grade, it's like, no, that's not why.

And if you think that, well, that's better than not thinking that there's any reason for writing, but it's a bad reason. Why write? Well, writing is a form of thinking. It's actually the most demanding form of thinking, I would say. There's other forms that are demanding. So how do you write a good essay?

Pick a topic that matters to you. Because if you're not writing about something that matters to you, it's like you're not living something that's meaningful. It's wrong. You're not going to write a good essay because you're wrong right to begin with. It has to matter to you. Well, why does it matter? What does it mean that it matters? Well, it means that it's going to affect how you make decisions in your life. Something that matters affects how you make decisions in your life. Well, why does it matter how you make decisions in your life? Because if you make so stupid decisions,

you're going to increase the sum total of suffering, a lot. You're going to do stupid things to yourself, you're going to do stupid things to other people, and you're not going to be as good a person as you could be. So not only will you do stupid and terrible things, but you won't have manifested the good in the world that you could have manifested. So that's the lack.

So you write an essay so that you can think and you think so that you can live properly. And so you write damn carefully. You make sure that every single bloody word is a word that you want to use. And you make sure the phrases that you put the words in are as solid as they can be. And you make sure the sentences are well constructed. And that they're organized into proper paragraphs. And the paragraphs are sequenced. And the content of the thing matters. And you put your soul into it. And you know when you've done that because it's gripping when you write. It's meaningfully engaging.

And this is another thing that I've been sharing with my audiences. Meaning is actually an instinct. Like, you think, okay, so we already decided that incremental self-improvement is the proper root.

Okay, so how do you know when you're incrementally self-improving properly? And the answer is it's deeply engaging. It's deeply meaningful. And the reason for that is you're actually adapted neurologically to identify the pathway of maximal incremental improvement. That was a discovery conceptually by a guy named Vygotsky, who was a Russian neuropsychologist who coined the term zone of proximal development. You hear now and then people say they're in the zone. That's the zone of proximal development.

And that's that place that you occupy when you're improving at the rate that's optimal to you. And your sense of intrinsic meaning signifies that. That's how your bloody brain is wired. And so then you might say, well, what's the antidote to the tragedy and malevolence of life? And the answer is to put yourself in the zone of proximal development, because that's where the maximal meaning is. And that actually does prepare you for life.

And so the question why think is, well, you think before you act, and you act to put yourself in the zone of proximal development, and you do that too, as an antidote to the catastrophe of life. Well, that's the answer. And the thing that's cool about that, and then this is, I think, part of what I've been telling people that's sort of novel is, well, where's the meaning? The meaning is in responsibility.

You know, because people avoid response, that's Peter Pan again, avoid responsibilities, just a burden. It's like, no, it's not. It is a burden, but voluntarily hoisted. It's the place of maximal meaning, and the more responsibility you take, the more meaning you have, and that's the antidote to the catastrophe of life. And everybody also knows this, because just look, it's so simple. When are you sick of yourself?

Well, that's when you're being useless and irresponsible for yourself and for your family and for your community. You're not even taking care of yourself. Well, you can't sleep with a clean conscience unless you're psychopathic, if you're not taking care of yourself. And then when are you not awake in the morning at three in the morning tearing yourself apart with a guilty conscience? It's when you've done something useful, at least for you,

You know, and you can say, oh, well, check one on my side. You say, OK, so fine. You adopt a little responsibility for yourself, and you can sleep with a clean conscience. What happens if you adopted full responsibility for yourself? And then for your family, lots of the people who are coming to talk to me say now, I've been really trying to put my family together.

I've made that a goal. I'm trying to heal my family and bring it together. And it's working. So here's a story. I love this story, man. It just killed me. I was in LA at the Orpheum. And you know, it's rough downtown in LA and places around the Orpheum, too. And Tammy and I, my wife, because she's traveling with me and is a big help, by the way.

We were wandering around downtown LA the morning after the talk, and we were walking down the street, and we were on streets we probably shouldn't have been on. But in any case, because what the hell do we know? Being stupid Canadians. And so we were walking down the street, and this car pulled up beside us, and this kid hopped out, and it's a good-looking Latino kid, 20, 21, something like that. He jumped over, and he said, he's all excited. He said, are you Dr. Peterson? I said, yeah, yeah, he said,

I'm really, really happy to meet you. I've been watching your lectures for like a year and a half and I've been trying to put my life together and it's really working. I'm really doing way better. I really wanted to thank you. And so it's lovely when you're walking down a kind of rough area and somebody pulls up beside you and they jump out of the car to tell you how much better their life is. That's a pretty good morning. But then that isn't all that happened. He ran back to his car. He said, wait a minute, wait a minute. He went back to his car and he got out his dad.

They came over together and his dad was just smiling away, like a real smile, you know? And so was the kid and they had their arms around each other and they said, look like we've really been working on our relationship for the last year and a half and it's going just great. We want to thank you and the father said something like, I'm really happy that you got my son back to me. It's like, yes, that's what this bloody tour has been like. It's great.

and everybody that's coming to these talks, that's what they're trying to do. You know, I got 3,000 people in each audience and what they're trying to do is figure out how can I take maximal responsibility for my own life? How can I imbue it with the meaning that helps me withstand tragedy and suffering? How can I be a better person? And wouldn't it be great if that was of optimal benefit to my family and the community? You're getting very emotional about that. Well, it's something, Joe. Jesus, I've seen like 150,000 people in the last two months.

You know, and this is what it's... Well, you'll have a chance to talk to Ruben about this too. This is what it's been like. It's so positive. I can't believe it. And it's just one person after another saying like, look, I was having a rough time. I'm really happy that I've been encountering what you've been talking about. I've really been trying to put things together and it's really helping.

Yeah, Ruben was pretty blown away by it. We had a long conversation about it. He just feels like there's some crazy movement going on. Something's changing in the world because of this, this new avenue of learning and development is opening up for these people. Well, and I've been thinking about that too, because you know, like I said at the beginning, if you're surfing, you don't want to take responsibility for the wave.

You know, I mean, first of all, a lot of what I've been telling people are things that I've gleaned from the clinical literature. It's not like I'm coming up with this of my own accord, right? I'm transmitting information that I've learned from very, very wise people. And so there's that. But also, we don't want to underestimate the utility of the technology, right? Because we have this long-form technology now. And it's enabling us to have this discussion. And so we can get deeper into things publicly and socially than we were able to before. And I see this

I see this as a manifestation of that. And I'm hoping too that maybe what's happening because we're going to have a lot of adaptation to do in the next 20 years as things change so rapidly we can hardly comprehend it. And hopefully the way we're going to be able to manage that is to think.

And hopefully these long-form discussions will provide the political or provide the public forum for us to actually think, to actually engage at a deep enough level so we'll be able to master the transformations. And I think that's possible. I mean, part of the reason that I wrote this book, and well, part of the reason that I've been doing what I've been doing for the last 30 years is because I really have believed

since 1985, something like that, that the way out of political polarization, the way out of the excesses of the right and the left is through the individual. I think the West got that right. The fundamental unit of measurement is the individual. And the fundamental task of the individual is to engage in this process of humble self-improvement.

I believe that's the case, and that's where the meaning is, and that's where the responsibility is. And I think, and I'm hoping that if enough people in the West, and then in the rest of the world, for that matter, but we're very polarized in the West right now, if enough people take responsibility for getting their individual lives together, then we'll get wise enough so we won't let this process of political polarization put us back to the same places that we went so many times in the 20th century. I don't see another antidote for it. It's not political. It's ethical.

This is the message that I always hear from you. And this is you as a friend. This is the you that I understand. But this is not how you're commonly represented. You are the most misrepresented person I've ever met in my life. I have never seen someone who has

so much positive that gets ignored and where people are looking for any little thing that they could possibly misrepresent and switch up and change. And I'm kind of stunned by it. I mean, I'm really not sure what it is about you that's so polarizing with all these different people that are

deciding that you are some sexist, transphobic, evil person that's this right wing, alt-right figure, even to the point where it's kind of humorous to me, sometimes when I read some of these takes on you.

What do you think that's from? This is a new thing for you. It's only been the last few years that you've gone from this relatively unknown professor in the University of Toronto to being this worldwide figure where obviously your message is resonating with people in a very huge way. But the people that are opposing you,

They're vehemently opposed. What do you think that is? Collectivists don't like me. Collectivists. What do you mean by that? People who think the proper unit of analysis in the world is A, political and B, group-oriented. The identity politics types don't like me at all, and they have every reason not to.

Because I'm not a fan of identity politics. I think that's why you're misrepresented fundamentally. There's other reasons. I mean, I came out against this bill in Canada, Bill C-16, that hypothetically purported to do nothing else but to increase the domain of rights that were applied to transsexual people.

But there was plenty more to that bill, man. Let me tell you, and I read the policies that went along with it, and it was a compelled speech bill. And so I opposed it on the grounds that the politicians are not supposed to leap out of their proper domain and start to compel speech. It's not the same as forbidding hate speech. I think hate speech should be left to hell alone, personally, for all sorts of reasons.

to compel the contents of speech is a whole new thing. It's never been done before in the history of British common law, English common law. And it's actually the Supreme Court in the 1940s in the US said that that was not to be allowed. And so it was a major transgression. And they said, while we're doing it for all the right reasons, it's like, no, no, you don't get it. You don't get to compel speech. I don't care what your reasons are. And why should I trust your damn reasons anyways? What makes you so saint-like?

so that you can violate this fundamental principle. And I should assume that you're doing it for nothing but compassion and that you're wise enough to manage that properly. It's like, sorry, no, I read your policies. I see what you're up to. I don't like the collectivists. I think they're unbelievably dangerous. And I have reason to believe that.

So I think that when push comes to shove, if your unit of analysis is the group and your worldview is one group and its power claims against all other groups, that that's not acceptable. It's tribalism of the worst form and it'll lead to nothing but mayhem and disaster. And part of the reason you're doing it isn't because you're compassionate, because you're envious and you don't want to take responsibility for your own life, and I'm calling you on it.

And so you don't like me, so I must be an alt-right figure. I must be a Nazi. Saying, your house needs a lot of work, man. There's a lot of rot in the floorboards. The plumbing is leaking. The water's coming in. You're not the sage and saint you think you are. There's so much work you have to do on yourself that it would damn near kill you to take a look at it.

do everything honestly think that that's why people are responding to in a negative way that they only have their own personal problems that they're avoiding they can't possibly be that you represent to them something that is either

cruel or something that is not compassionate about people and their differences and their flaws and their humanity? Well, I think it's certainly the case that the vision that's been generated of me is that? Yes.

That's what I'm getting at. Oh yeah, there's that too. But there's layers. Well, part of it's the political polarization. At the moment, we're viewing almost everything that happens in the world through a political lens, at least the journalists. First of all, first of all, I've got to make this clear. First of all, I've been treated well by lots of journalists really well.

like the best journalists in Canada have been on my side since about two weeks after the Bill C-16 thing erupted. And those would be the journalists that have an independent voice and that have created their own following. And they're in a number of different media places, mostly in print. And there's a coalition of newspapers in Canada, the post-media group, 200 newspapers. They came out fully in support of my stance on Bill C-16. And so there's lots of times that I've been treated properly by journalists.

There's a small number of journalists, very noisy, and a small number of activists, very well organized, who have been on my case right from the beginning. And those are people who are generally driven by a very radical leftist progressive agenda. And I am not on their side. I'm on their side as individuals. I'm on their side as people who could struggle forward. But the collectivist vision, it's deadly. But you seem to be the poster boy for this very simple

characterization, like almost a character of what the alt-right figurehead is. To me, as a person who knows you, it's very strange to watch this take place. And then when they can find anything that you say that could, without further explanation or definition, be misconstrued as appealing to this definition of you. Like for instance,

when all this uh... when this what what i guess they call themselves in cells involuntary celibates when all this stuff went down this car drove his car into a group of people it's horrible tragedy

One of the things that you talked about with incels is that, and this was a part of the role, what was it? It was a New York Times hit piece. You said one of the cures for this is enforced monogamy. People decided, and I had never heard that term before, quite honestly, and I was like, what the fuck does that mean?

It's a psychological term, and what it means is enforced by culture, that it is a good value. Yeah, because polygamous societies tend to become ultraviolet. And that's been known in the anthropological literature for 100 years, and certainly leftist anthropologists were among those who discovered it.

She knew, the journalist knew perfectly well what I meant by enforcement origami. She's not stupid. It's, you use it as if everybody would understand it because you're an intellectual and because you're a professor in this what you do. It was also two minutes out of a two-day conversation, you know, it's like, so it was something which is glanced. Well, it's so, that was funny in some sense because my sense is if you want to pillory someone, you should attribute to them views that someone somewhere has had.

And the implication of that part of the New York Times article was that I wanted to, you know, take new, vile young women at the point of a gun under state enforcement and deliver them to useless men. It's like no one has ever believed that. So it sounds like that. It's a real, the optics of that, that statement are very bad. But the question is, why didn't, why wasn't there follow up questions? And if there was follow up questions to get you to define what you mean by enforcement. Well, there were. They just didn't make it into the piece. Well, that's a real problem.

Yeah, it's a real problem. That's a real problem because it's so ridiculous. It's an inaccurate definition of who you are. One of the things I've said continually, and this is on record in multiple places, it's like, okay, so you're a young man, and all the women are rejecting you. Who's got the problem? It's not all the women. That's a bad road to go down. If all the women are rejecting you,

It's you. We both agree on this, but why is in forced monogamy the solution for people that are involuntary celibates? Well, it's the solution to the, it's the solution to the relationship between men and women. Fundamentally is monogamous social norms. Yeah, but these men are unattractive. If these men are unattractive to them, but these men are unattractive to women. I don't mean just physically unattractive. I mean, women aren't seeking them as mates.

They need to become men. Yes, they certainly do. That's the solution. That's the solution. Absolutely, man. And we both agree on this. But they need to do that in a society where monogamy is the social norm. But isn't it the social norm anyway?

Well, that was partly my point, although to the degree that we deviate from that, we tilt towards a more violent society. I was making a very minor point. I don't think they're related, quite honestly. I don't think that involuntary celibates, I don't think that having enforced monogamy as a part of our cultural norm is gonna help those people. I really don't. How's it gonna help them? Well, because what happens is if a polygamous society develops, which is the alternative, then a small minority of men get all the women,

That's what happens. That's the only point that makes this theoretical world where polygamous societies exist and mass. And then you do have this problem where there's a small group of men that are fucking all the women.

But that's not what we're talking about. And also making the women unhappy, right? Because the women don't have any access to a genuine intimate one-to-one relationship over any long period of time. Which is what the women want. It's the whole idea that the women want that, right? Sure, if you have children. Right.

But I still don't think that that is why these men are involuntary celibates. And I don't think it's the solution to that. I think the solution is that they need to become attractive to women. Yes, that is the solution. There's no doubt. I don't think the two are related. Well, the only deal I was making a minor point, the minor point was that one of the ways that societies around the world have figured out

that you keep young male aggression under control is by enforcing monogamous standards because it gives everyone a chance in some sense. That's the only point that I would make. It clears more women will be available for one-on-one relationships rather than one guy who is some

Whatever, for whatever reason, it's a large figure in society. Yeah, well you see this happening in universities where women outnumber men. So the men hypothetically have more sexual opportunity. But that isn't what happens. What happens is that a small minority of men have all the sexual opportunity. A fairly large minority of men don't. The women are unhappy because they can't find a committed relationship. It's bad for most of the men. And the men who have all the sexual opportunity get cynical.

But isn't this in some ways against your whole idea of equality of outcome? Because you're talking about equality of sexual outcome now. If these men, if you have a guy like a LeBron James, that's a dominant basketball player that just kicks everyone's ass, this is a guy who succeeded at the highest level, right? Well, there's going to be people like that sexually.

There's going to be people that are better at finding mates, and this is what they enjoy. They enjoy having many mates. They enjoy being, yes, but if this is what they enjoy, if it's a man who doesn't want a family and enjoys dating multiple women, why is that bad? Well, I think the fundamental reason it's bad is because it's bad in the long run for children.

It's bad for children if he chooses to have children. Yeah, but that's it. But that's it. That's the fundamental issue as far as I'm concerned. Right. And then I think it's the answer. Look, to give the journalist credit, that is the point she was making. You know, apart from pillering me and and and and caricaturing my perspective, that was the point she was making. Well, first of all, I'm not in favor of unbridled hierarchies.

I've already said that the proclivity of a hierarchy is that all the spoils go to the person at the top, and that can destabilize the whole structure. So we have to have a dialogue about how to rectify that. But how would you possibly rectify that if one man is, but say if we've got one...

six-foot-five beautiful man who's got a perfect body and he's brilliant and he just wants a date a bunch of women and all the rest of the people are five-foot one and they're fat and they're lazy and like this guy's gonna if this is the competition he's going to win. There's no way around this and even if you decide to have

Enforced monogamy and where it becomes a popular thing the women are going to be more drawn to him if he chooses to date them They might decide I would rather have him sometimes than never at all But what is wrong with that?

Well, what's wrong with it is that it destabilized the society and it's bad for children. Right. You said that, but they don't want to have children, but there's a lot of people that don't want to have children. There's a lot of people that choose to go their entire life without having children as men in their thirties. Some of my friends have vasectomies. They don't want children. So why, why would that help in any way these involuntary celibates?

Well, I think you tilt the society so that it serves the interests of, well, that's a good question. Do you see my point where you almost have it? Look, I see your point. There's no doubt about it. You're almost forcing an inequality of outcome. I know. That was her point, too. To the degree that she had a point, that was her point.

Now, but it's not, it doesn't run contrary to my opinions that the issue of outcome has to be addressed. I already said there needs to be a reason for the left and the right. And then the problem with hierarchies is that they can get too steep and destabilize everything. That does happen. That particularly happens in the sexual domain. And there's plenty of anthropological evidence for that. But you still might say, well, who cares? Because the men who are winning should be allowed to win and the women should be allowed to choose. It's like, yes, except

that there's the problem of children, and so society steps in on behalf of the children, and you can say, well, lots of people don't want to have children, yes, and that's truer now than it used to be, although many of those people end up having children anyways, you know, the guys who are sleeping around all the time, so that doesn't circumvent the problem. But the issue here for me isn't the men or the women, it's the children.

We're trying to set up societies where the probability that children will be raised in something approximated in optimal environment is optimized. And that's going to mean sacrifice of opportunity and choice on the part of the adults. It's necessary. I agree with you, but I think that what we're talking about mirrors what we're talking about in sports. It mirrors what we're talking about in business. It's everything else. There's going to be people that are better at all different aspects of life. There's going to be people that are talented in terms of like getting women to like them. Yes.

That's true. Well, that's why also look, you see this. Right. Women are hypergamous, which means they meet up and they meet across and up dominant hierarchies.

And so if you're a male who's successful in a given hierarchy, the probability that you're going to have additional mating opportunities is exceptionally high. It's an unbelievably good predictor of that. That hypergamy is a very uncomfortable discussion. Yes, it certainly is. It doesn't matter. Well, there's plenty of uncomfortable discussions to be had. That's a big one, though. It is. The idea that it defines women's sexual choices by the fact that they want bigger, bigger, better. They want someone who's more successful, someone who's so higher on the social ladder.

than what they're accustomed to or what they have. Yeah, well, what women do is, like, mate choice is a very difficult problem. So how do you solve it? Well, here's how women solve it. Throw them in a ring, let them compete at whatever they're competing at. Assume that the man who wins is the best man, marry him. Yes. It's a brilliant solution. It's a market-oriented solution. It's actually the solution that appears to have driven our evolutionary departure from chimpanzees. It's a biological solution. It's a biological solution, but it has a cost. But it has a cost. What is the cost?

Well, the cost is, the cost is polygamy. And so we rein that in with enforced monogamy. And we do that in order to provide stable, stable circumstances for children is polyamorous is a polyamorous society just as unattainable as this utopian Marxist idea.

I think so, because it looks like, and this is another point I was making that didn't get covered in the article, although wrote about it somewhat extensively on my blog, is that societies tilt towards monogamy across the world. It's human universal. Now, that doesn't mean that people don't have polygamous or polyamorous tendencies, because they certainly do. And it's certainly also the case that one of the ways that women gerrymander this system is that, like, the number of children who are

In a, say you're married and you have children with your husband, but you also have an affair. So you have a child by another man. That's more common than anyone suspected. So part of the way that women solve the problem that you're just describing, and I'm not saying anything for this or against this, this is a purely factual biological claim, is they pick a monogamous marriage and they cheat with high status guys.

now you know obviously in the confines of the marriage that's a terrible thing but that's a very uncomfortable subject of that for women in particular uncomfortable subject for everyone right but it's a terrible and comfortable subject they don't like the idea that this is a common thing that women choose a safe man that is willing to be monogamous with them and perhaps maybe they're above him in a social class or in uh... sexually

And then they'll cheat with someone who is above them. Well, it's common, but it's not the norm. Right? It's still the norm not to do that. The norm is fidelity. Right. But there's plenty of exception. And this is enforcement agamy, culturally, the norm. Yes. Well, enforcement agamy is this. It's like, OK, so my son's getting married in September. And so let's say he comes to me in a year and he says, hey, dad, guess what? I've had three affairs in the last year and they've all been successful. I haven't got caught. Aren't I a good guy?

What am I going to say to that? No! What the hell are you doing? That's not what you're supposed to be doing. That's enforcement origami. Enforcement origami being the people around you try to guide them in a way that you think is going to lead to a harmonious family. Yes, it's built deep into the cultural norms, and if that starts to destabilize, then there's trouble.

And that doesn't mean that it's not prone to all the problems that you laid out. Look, there isn't a bigger problem than successful reproduction. It is the big problem. And all of the solutions that we've generated for it are full of flaws. Like here's an example. The gender pay gap. Okay, there's no gender pay gap. There's a mother gap. There's other reasons too. But women really take a hit when they become mothers.

Okay, that's unfair. Fair enough, man. What the hell are you going to do about it? It's not just that though, right? And this is also, I'm sorry to interrupt you here, but this is what's one of the things that I wanted to bring up, but I kind of lost track of it. The misrepresentation of you mirrors the misrepresentation of the gender pay gap.

because it's a convenient misrepresentation that upon further inspection and understanding, you realize there is no gender pay gap. The gender pay gap, when people discuss it, they don't understand it. And I've had these conversations with really intelligent people that just listen to what's in the news or read some very quick article talking about this problem that we have. And they assume that a man and a woman are working the same job, but the woman is unfairly paid 79 cents to the man's dollar. That's not the case.

It's not close to the case. The case is women choose different professions that don't pay as much. They work less hours and they oftentimes get married and have children and because they have children, they take paternity leave and they make less money. They would and they make less money because that. So there's about 10 reasons or 20 reasons for the for the gender pay gap. Right. One of them being motherhood, but there's a whole slew of them, but it's never a dangerous jobs men work outside men are more likely to move.

But it's never discussed. It's because people don't like multivariate problems. It's not just that. It's a willful misrepresentation of a reality. And I think it mirrors this willful misrepresentation of where you stand. And I think these are all tied in together with people want bad and good. They want a one and a zero. They want things to be very binary. Yeah, they want them to be binary in the way they already understand. They want everything to fit their ideological lens and things are more complicated than that.

This is a complex discussion that you're not going to get in a five minute segment on a talk show. You're not going to get this on a radio show. You're not going to get this in an article that gets edited by someone with a biased opinion. And this is the problem with mainstream media. And this is the problem with ideas, period.

Warren Farrell's book on, he wrote a book called, Warren Farrell is the guy who's most, what would you call, been most pilloried for pointing out the real reasons for the gender pay gap. He wrote a book called Why Men Make More. Who'd he write it for? His daughters, why? Because he wanted to help provide, now obviously he was doing it for public consumption as well. But one of the motivations was, well men do make more. Well why?

And if women want to make more, well, could they learn from the men who make more, how to make more? And the answer is yes. The question is whether or not they'll do it. And the probable answer is most women won't. Because how much you make isn't the only hallmark of success in your life. It's one measure. And it might be a measure that really competitive men compete for, and they do. And that's partly to provide access to increased mating opportunities, because that's built into the structure, something we never talk about either, although we could.

So Warren wrote this to lay out all the reasons that men make more, but it was so that his daughters, at least in part, so that his daughters could figure out how to be socioeconomically successful. It's like, yeah, but that's not the only hallmark. How much socio-economic success are you willing to sacrifice to spend time with your kids before they're three years old? Well, the answer to that shouldn't be none, right? Because what makes, look, we already know this. For example, once you make enough money to keep the bill collectors at bay,

So that's kind of lower upper working class, say something, like even centrist working class. Keep the bill collectors at bay. Additional money doesn't improve your quality of life. Other things do. So maybe it's a rational response when you're like 30. See the irrational man, here's the irrational man. Maybe they drive the world, but they're the irrational man. More success is always better along this unit dimensional axis of achievement.

Well, Gordon Gecko, greed is good. Well, there's a tiny percentage of men who are hyper-competitive along those single axis of competition. And maybe they drive most things. They probably do. But that doesn't make them right. It also doesn't make them most people. And it doesn't make them happy.

Well, happy is the whole different issue, right? That isn't what they're out of it because everyone is. Well, you are though in pursuit of success, it's implied that happiness goes with that success. Otherwise, why the fuck are you doing it? Yeah, well, domination, domination, power, but that charisma prestige was implied. It is success and happiness are there. They're inexorably connected in our perception. Yeah, well, often a flawed equation, you know, like,

What happens, look, I worked in law firms with law firms for a very long period of time. And I worked for lots of high-end women, lots of them. And they were, like, they were usually extremely attractive. They were extremely intelligent. They were extremely driven. They were very, very conscientious. They varied in how agreeable they were. Some were disagreeable, litigator types, and some were more agreeable. They often had a harder time in the law firms. But the law firms lose all their women in the 30s. They all bail out.

at partner level. A lot of them. Well, Jesus, it's, yeah. It's good percentage. It's a huge percentage. And it isn't because the law firms don't want them. The law firms want them because you can't find people like that. They're really rare, especially if they're also rainmakers, if they can bring in money. So the law firms bend themselves over backwards, trying to keep the women. They can't keep them. Why? Well, the women decide that, oh, I'm working 18 hours a day flat out all the time, seven days a week.

My husband makes a fair bit of money. If I made half as much money as I made, we'd still have plenty of money. Why am I working 18 hours a day? Well, that's not the question.

The question is, why would anyone work 18 hours a day? That's the mystery. And the answer is, a small minority of men are driven to do that. And so they'll do that. No matter where you put these guys, that's what they do. Yes. OK. But does that mean it's correct? I think there's something wrong with these women. They hit 30. They've hit partner. They've hit the pinnacle. I mean, they could keep going if they wanted to. But they've accomplished their goal. They've definitely shown them their bloody well in the game. And they wake up at 30 and they think,

Oh, wait a minute. I want to have a relationship. And also, I want to have some time to put into that. I'd like to have kids. And I'd actually like to see my kids. It's like, is that irrational? This is another thing that you and I are in agreement on. But when I see people talk about the way you discuss women, they misrepresent what you're saying and paint you in what I think willfully paint you. They do it on purpose. They paint you as a misogynist.

I don't understand why. I don't understand if it is because they disagree with you on things. So this is a convenient way to demonize your position by demonizing you as a human being. But... Well, it's partly too because I've made the case that there are differences between men and women. Yes. But like, why that isn't a feminist case is beyond me. It's like, no, they're exactly the same. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. And it's confusing. It's confusing. Purposefully confusing. Yeah. And then the thing is the data are in. So look.

and people have accused me of pseudoscience you know which i really think is quite comical because this is the studies that i'm reporting aren't who's accused of pseudoscience oh god journalists journalists of all stripes especially when i talk about differences between men and women it's like all that pseudoscience is like actually no it's not it's bloody mainstream science both biology and psychology but why do they like to do that well because it seems to be there's a reason that goes along with the radical leftist agenda that if there are

That a world of equality of outcome could not be achieved, and that's the desirable world, if there are actually differences between people, actual differences, like that aren't just socio-culturally constructed, so that you can gerrymout it. There's also something as well. If you're really power-mad,

You want to believe that human beings are infinitely malleable because then you can mold them in whatever image you want. And if you say, no, they actually have a character, right? There's something built in. Then that interferes with the totalitarian regime. But here's what's happened is like, look, we've got a good personality model. We've had it for about 40 years, something like that, the big five model, five dimensions of personality. And they were established statistically, atheoretically, by left-leaning psychologists. And I'm not saying that they're ideologically contaminated.

but what i am saying is there's no evidence whatsoever that right wing leaning psychologist produced the big five because there are no right leaning psychologists so enough of that that isn't why the big five came up okay so once you have a good personality model you can say okay well do men and women differ

And the answer is, yeah, it turns out they do. There's quite a few differences, but the biggest ones are women are more agreeable, because that's one of the traits, agreeableness, and it's the compassion, politeness dimension, and they're more prone to negative emotion, anxiety and emotional pain. And that mirrors a psychiatric literature that shows worldwide that women are more likely to be diagnosed with depression and anxiety, just like men are more likely to be imprisoned for antisocial behavior, which is the reflection of low agreeableness.

This is true worldwide. Okay, so there's no evidence of any bias, unless you say everything's biased everywhere in the world. Fine could be, but we've also controlled for that. So now, there are personality differences between men and women. Now, the first thing we might point out is they're not that big.

So if you draw a random woman and a random man out of the population, and you had to bet on who is most aggressive, least agreeable, and you bet on the woman, you'd be right 40% of the time, which is actually quite a lot. You'd be right quite a lot. But if you take the 1 in 100 person who's most aggressive,

least agreeable. There's an overwhelming probability that they'll be mailed because the differences get more extreme at the ends of the distribution. People don't understand the statistics. You can have two populations that are quite similar and still have radically dissimilar outcomes if only the extremes matter. So like, who are the most powerful physical fighters in the world? Man.

All of them. Well does that mean that there are no women who can beat a man in a fight? No. It also doesn't mean that there are, there's plenty of women who are more aggressive than men. But if you take the most aggressive, physically powerful people, they're all men. All of them. Because they're like one in a thousand people, or one in ten thousand people.

So you can have walloping differences at the extremes, despite most similarity at the middle. People don't understand that. But then the next thing is, okay, well, there are differences between men and women, personality-wise, apart from the biological ones. Are those caused by cultural differences? Hey, turns out we can answer that. How? Rank order countries by how egalitarian their social policies are.

Does everyone agree? Yeah, yeah. The Scandinavians are at the top. Everyone agrees. Left, right doesn't matter. Everyone agrees. It's like, okay, so you stack up the cultures by how egalitarian their social policies are. And then you look to see how big the differences are between men and women, up that hierarchy of egalitarianism. And if as the societies become more egalitarian, the differences between men and women disappear, then it's socio-cultural. That isn't what happened.

What happened was, is that as the societies got more egalitarian, the differences between men and women got bigger, not smaller. It means the socio-cultural construct people, and I'm talking to you socio-cultural construct people, you're wrong. You're wrong.

You make the society's more egalitarian, men and women get more different. Who makes the argument in opposition to this? All the social constructionists, all the radical left-wingers. And what do they use as facts? They don't have facts, but then they criticize the whole idea of facts. Then they go after the whole idea of science as a Western patriarchal construct. What's their motivation?

The motivation is that if people are different, then equality of outcome isn't neither desirable nor achievable. And why do they want equality of outcome? Why is this so attractive to them? That's a good question. Well, part of it is, part of it is actual compassion. Look, Rand, it's not good that some people lose, and it's certainly not good that some losers lose all the time. Who wants that? You're happy when you walk down the street and see homeless people? It's like, hey, look, the hierarchy's working. Look at these homeless people. No one's happy about that.

Right. Okay, so the fact of failure within a hierarchy of value is painful. And so to give the devil his due, you give the left its due, just like you do the right, is like, yeah, it's painful that hierarchies produce dispossession. Bloody right. Okay, what's the cure? Get rid of the hierarchy. Hey, well, wait a minute, man. You get rid of the hierarchy. You get rid of the value structure. You get rid of the tools that allow us to generate absolute wealth and stop people from starving its catastrophe.

okay so so there's there's the problem you have to have the hierarchy but then also it isn't just compassion on the left it's envy it's like okay

If I'm standing for the dispossessed, what makes me so sure that I'm not just standing against the successful? And maybe that's because I'm bitter and jealous and envious and resentful. And certainly it's highly probable. If you look at what happened in the leftist societies that tried to pursue utopia, and you don't read envy and resentment into that, you don't know the history. Because that's clearly the case. Why else did they become murderous?

This is the question. It's clearly the case that the Soviet Union, for example, was motivated by the desire for equality of outcome. As a primary motivation, what happened? 25 million people were killed. Why?

Why? Well, was it all compassion and love for the dispossessed? Or was it absolutely bitter resentment and hatred for anyone who had any shred of success whatsoever on any possible dimension of evaluation? So this compassion for people that aren't doing well when utilized the wrong way or when approached the wrong way leads to attacking people that do well.

That's the danger of compassion. That's exactly well look what happens if you get you think oh look at how isn't it lovely that the mother grizzly bear takes care of her cubs Yeah, it's lovely man till you get between her and her cubs Then it's not so damn lovely and that's the flip side of that affiliate of agreeableness

It's like if you're on my side, if you're the infant who's sheltering under my wings, it's like I'm the absolute epitome of maternal love and care. But if I've identified you as a predator, you better look the hell out. And that's playing out in our political landscape at a very, very rapid rate. That's the female side of totalitarianism as far as I can tell, the feminine side of totalitarianism.

It's not just that. It's not just that agreeableness motivates aggression, because it certainly does. It's also that it's that the envious and the resentful can use compassion as a camouflage for their true intent, which is to tear down anyone who has more than them. That's why you notice, like, when there's discussions about the 1%, we already talked about this. Well, who's the 1%?

Well, I'm in the park in New York demonstrating against Wall Street, down with the 1%. It's like, wait a second. You're in the 1% there, Mr. protester. No, no, you don't understand. The rich are those who have more money than me. Yes. Right. That's the definition. Who's rich? Someone who has more than me. Not me. It's like, well, why isn't the 1% North America?