Conversations with John Anderson: Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin

ladies and gentlemen please welcome John Anderson well Jordan and Dave thank you so much for giving us your time John Anderson net is basically dedicated to something that is very very dear to me as someone who is very worried about our country and where we're going and it's that you can it cannot get good public policy without a good public debate and it seems now we don't have debates anymore we just have abusive emotional mudslinging so that's the sort of the background theme but then we come to this incredible opportunity today to engage with these two gentlemen and I wanted to get the ball rolling by talking about a number of issues firstly personal responsibility then I'd like to move on to freedom what is it because it's not licensed it's not what so many people think it is today and how do we make it work I then want to talk about courage because we're going to need a lot of it going forward and you're going to hear a lot I would see demonstrated some real courage I think here and what we're going to talk about in what you're going to hear what you're going to witness then a bit about social media and how we make it all work and then it's over to you we live in an age when it seems that there's a crisis of trust in our culture it seems that we are very uncertain of our institutions and the people who make them up and what their motivations might be and indeed the research backs that up the Australian National University has been tracking Australia's confidence in their politicians and the political process now for many decades we are in uncharted waters record numbers of Australians no longer have con in the system record numbers of Australians now distrust the political process and the players in it just more recently we've had the latest of a series of royal commissions of inquiry into various institutions this times banking and the financial services and we learnt that we couldn't trust bankers now there are many trustworthy bankers in cases are any here but plainly people were deeply concerned by what emerged and you stop and think about this when people are in relationships of trust harmony and progress can be made when it breaks down harmony and progress are impaired and people flee for safety if you don't feel safe with someone else you look for the rule book and you look for policing and you'll look for protection so it's a good thing we've had the Royal Commission of Inquiry so we know what's been going on it's a good thing we've got the rest 78 recommendations new laws everywhere new surveillance new policing but it's a tragedy it was necessary in the first place that people have not been doing what they've should have been doing without coercion so now we've got a great big battle as to how to resolve these things you see the law based approach but Jordan you've said something quite different in the midst of all of us what you have said is that the redemption of the world is not political it happens at the level of the individual that's not what we hear in the mirror every night there's a new scandal it's we need more rules we need more policing we need more surveillance we need a different party in power you're not saying that you're saying it comes back to the individual the first question is do you want that I mean do you want a more a state with more regulatory power do you want a state with more surveillance I mean first of all why would you think that that would be trustworthy when all the evidence suggests in the past that as a state expands its surveillance power it actually becomes less trustworthy rather than more and why would you want you might think well ice certainly want someone looking into your affairs but I don't want anybody looking into mine well good luck with that because you know to the degree that I have someone elect someone to look into your affairs their bloody well going to be looking into mine as well and that just doesn't strike me as a particularly positive development and practically because I don't believe it'll work I don't think surveillance states do make people more honest I think all the evidence is the opposite and then I would say from the individual perspective it's like I believe that the the fundamental what we got fundamentally right in the West because there is a number of things we got fundamentally right even though we don't like to admit that anymore is that the ultimate moral responsibility for the state relies on you it relies on your moral integrity and you know you can it's not that hard to think that through it's like well first of all you have the right and the responsibility to vote and we could say well that's not exactly given to you by the state it's it's something that exists in some in some sense outside and before the state it's part and parcel of your intrinsic value okay so that's a decision that we've made in the West that each person regardless of their flaws is characterized by a value an intrinsic value that's so deep and so profound that the very regulation of the state itself rests on their shoulders and that's really something that's that's why you have the right to vote and that's worth thinking about the first question is well do you think that's a good idea or not I do you believe that we are in fact sovereign individuals and then well let's assume that you believe that we are because the alternative is some sort of autocracy right it's some sort of tyranny it's it's the it's the parsing off of that sovereignty to a bureaucracy or to some arbitrary form of leadership and maybe you can believe in that and you'd like a strong leader and fine but you you want to think that through because if if it's not that then you well then it's if it's you and you have to make sure that the ship of state is sailing properly then the first thing you might want to ask yourself is what makes you think you're any more trustworthy than the people that you're that you're despising or criticizing I mean if you are well more power to you but it isn't self-evident that you are and my suspicions are that it's not even self-evident to you that you are because it's a very rare person that you come across if you talk to them with any degree of seriousness you know they're able to lay out a whole litany of ways they fall short of their own value their own values not values that other people are putting on them certainly that as well and they can name innumerable ways that not only are they not doing what they shouldn't be doing so they're falling short of the mark in that way but they're doing all sorts of things that they definitely shouldn't be doing and they know it it's like well we're gonna put that right or not and my sense is you know I wrote a rule in my book put your house in perfect order before you complain about the world before you criticize the world what's the idea it's like well you're the sovereign man if the states if the ship of state is listing and sinking that's you that's your problem it's your fault you're not doing it right you're not educated enough you're not awake enough you're not articulated and a target articulate enough you don't know enough about history you're not taking on enough responsibility you're looking for other people to blame because it's convenient and and and that's kind of understandable because it's the dispersal of responsibilities who wants all that responsibility but there's a huge price to be paid for it the the first price that you pay for it is well there goes the adventure of your life it's like you could get yourself together and be the bedrock of the state right that'd be hard that call on everything that you have that would be your adventure you're gonna pass that off to someone else and then then what do you do you've got nothing left in your life a triviality and you can't live I don't believe that people can live ethically trivially that's why I think the pursuit of the idea that life is for happiness is wrong because life is too difficult for that to be the case our lives are too profound to characterized by suffering and malevolence the world is too characterized by trouble at every level for happiness to be the proper solution the solution is something like a heavy burden of ethical responsibility the kind that sets the state straight and then in that you find the purpose of your life and so not only if you want the external monitoring and the surveillance state not only do you sacrifice your privacy and invite all that invasive attention and lose your impulsive freedom you lose everything that's profound about your life and someone takes it from you they take your destiny from you and that's no way to live that's just that's the tyranny that we've struggled against in the West successfully for I would say in one way or another for for for a number of thousands of years and with a substantial amount of success to draw dive into this we met in LA a couple of years ago over breakfast Dave you're a great defender of culture too now when we met it was very interesting you set out the reasons in a way for me to think he's a card-carrying progressive you know you tell me where you came from and what do you believe in what you didn't and then you said and I'm gay married man and then he went on to say and I thank God every day I live in Christian America and I thought that's a surprise turn in the conversation and we had a fantastic breakfast talking about it you're a defender of culture now or of our cultural roots at a time when the West seems to be its own worst enemy and doesn't believe in its cultural roots can you elaborate yeah of course well you know first off as you guys I'm sure know Jordan I just left the Sydney Opera House a few minutes ago and we've done about a hundred and twenty some odd shows opened for Jordan and it just struck me in the last two minutes that having to follow you is much less fun but having to go before you that's easy I'm usually just setting them up and you're knocking them out of the park but ok I'll try well just quickly on what Jordan said about the individual because it links exactly to that you know people ask me all the time in the QAS and in our meet and greets what what is going on why is it that people are following this psychologist talking about lobsters all over the country and and actually that question is what I believe is the answer there is there has been a complete obliteration for young people to understand what being an individual it is what being a person that owns your own mind that decides to get out there and live the life they're supposed to live that doesn't want to take from somebody and give to somebody else or just take for themselves and that has really been lost and what's been amazing to me as we've done now 20-some odd countries is that the same things that you guys are thinking about in Sydney are the exact same things that people are thinking about in Toronto and Los Angeles and Stockholm and and all over the country and that's absolutely fascinating so to your question because I am an individual that is what led me here that that's I think what led you to want to have breakfast with me in Los Angeles that the difference is the immutable characteristics that we either have in common or separate us whether it's sexuality or gender or skin color are completely irrelevant if we really want to be a society that is truly free that truly respects each other it makes no difference I mean I I do when I go to colleges I'll usually just single out somebody in the crowd and it's like how sad would it be if I just looked at you and I was like oh well you're a white guy you look like you're in your early 20s as if that would give me any inclination that I would have any insight into what you think or how you should think actually is the better point because you should think whatever you think and and hopefully be willing to have that exchange of ideas so I'm very appreciative that I live in a Christian country because the simple fact is while the media will imply that you know every day there's another story on how well Christian white people are or something like that and by the way I see that spreading all over the world as well I mean there's a there's a weird thing going on with the media where I thought it was really an American crumbling of the media but now I see it all over the place I live in the freest country in the history of the world period the United States in 2019 is the freest place in the history of the world you can you know with with the most tiny exceptions on speech around you know yelling fire in a crowded theater or a direct threat of violence you can say whatever you want and even being here in Australia where you guys have it pretty good on speech I can tell people are jealous of what America has and certainly when we were in in the UK where they have all sorts of things where you know this this YouTube creator count dank EULA had his dog you know do the do the Nazi salute and and got in all sorts of trouble I mean we won't have this forever and that that's very clear to me and I would just add this that Douglas Mari who I'm sure you're familiar with in the UK he's also gay and I and he's a brilliant thinker and I didn't even want to ask him anything about that because it's it's completely irrelevant in a certain way but the last question when I had him on last time I said to him do you think your sexuality has a little something to do with your sensitivity about freedom because you know it might be you first and he said that he thought his skin was a little thinner because of that and so I do think that people that are on the outside for whatever whatever that is it doesn't have to be sexuality it could be obviously a myriad of different issues I do think you become a little more sensitive sensitive to it and for that reason I'm incredibly I'll go a step further I am blessed that I live in the United States of America and I can do I can lit I'm a free man in the freest country ever and I'm very appreciative that you can see while we get on yeah I seriously can anyone push back against that and yet half a time when you listen to the elites who have their hands on the levers of influence today you would think we lived in cruel and oppressive cultures think of the four great revolutions the American War of Independence and what out of that think of the French Revolution think of the Russian Revolution think of the Maoist revolution which one has produced a real understanding of the individual and secured their freedoms in a greater way and we're in Australia of course are unbelievably blessed to use your word again because we've inherited what's called a wash minster the best of the British our house of Congress sorry House of Representatives based on the House of Commons senators closely modelled on yours and it works unbelievably well but you wouldn't think it listening to the public commentary today now let's come to freedom when you and I talked in Sydney back just before Easter last year we had a great conversation than to my enormous delight I found that we had a friend in common Alexander Solzhenitsyn there you go there's a photograph of him no it doesn't look very happy well there's a good reason for that he would have been probably busted up physically and on all sorts of other ways as well when that photograph was taken he was a hero in Russia in the Second World War but after the war he dared to disagree with the regime in Moscow which was an unbelievably evil regime and for the price the price for disagreeing was that he ended up in the gulag in a prison this is a remarkable book he wrote about his experiences they were said there this wasn't the only one it was smuggled out to the west there's no doubt that he's writing shortened the life of that evil regime but the bit that stayed with me in which you referred to and have many times you wrote a great essay on it over Christmas I recommend it to you it was published in the times and then in the Australian or you can google it was that this bloke recorded that one day was lying in his cell I'd imagine freezing cold probably ill incredibly unhappy in these circumstances he hears the thumping of a guard down the rows belting another prisoner up the screams of the prisoner and then he writes of that it dawned on me as I listened to it that the dividing line between good and evil actually doesn't lie between captor and captive can you imagine a prisoner in those circumstances saying the bloke doing the beating is captive - he's not free rather he said the dividing line between good and evil lies somewhere across every human heart it's not between man and woman it's a laughter some of our people in today's movements it's not between Catholic and Baptist or man and woman the dividing line between good and evil lies somewhere across every human heart that was very profound for me in public life and I was telling these friends on the way out that for example you know a point that came to me to be quite real as a young federal member of the Parliament I was in the outback town of Walgett and a very very angry young Aboriginal man came up to me he swore his head off at me he said you sir answers you stole this from us you ruined this you do you know you've an absolute litany of my crimes and now you're going to pass back and I remember thinking stop stop remember that this guy has the stamp of nobility on him - it's just I can't see it at the moment you know and I've got no right to do him over he's like me he's a mixture of good and bad but let's tease this out this incredible writer who eventually was freed found his way to America the Americans and the West refused to listen to his warnings he was there like a kind of prophet saying look out you're losing your freedoms what did he mean how do you find freedom when it's not physical you can't move you're in fear of your life but in some other way he found freedom what's it mean can we unpack that because I think it's important well one of the things that Solzhenitsyn did and this is something I think we're thinking about I mean I've thought about it for decades because it's such a remarkable story I think he tells it in the second volume of The Gulag Archipelago because it's a three volume book the full book and it's all worth reading especially the second volume and especially the second half and in that he details his transformation I would say his psychological or spiritual transformation know he was on the Russian front which was not a pleasant place to be because Stalin had signed a pact with Hitler and Hitler broke it and the Russians were completely unprepared and so to be on the Russian front at the beginning of World War two was a very bad place to be and he wrote letters to a competitor to his complaining about the lack of preparation and that's what got him thrown in the camps now it's interesting to note that Stalin threw all of the Soviet prisoners of war into camps so if you were a Soviet soldier and you would go on to the West and fought and you were captured and put in a say a German prisoner of war camp and treated terribly because Stalin didn't sign the agreement it was from Switzerland Geneva Geneva Accords on the treatment of prisoners of war and the Russians were treated so badly that the Allies used to feed them you know and it's not like they were not hungry and so you would end up in a powa amp there and then when you were done with that when you went home to Russia for your hero's welcome you were thrown into the goo leg because Stalin believed that the mere fact that you'd been exposed to the West now made you a class enemy so that was the sort of place the Soviet Union was now Seoul jannat to spend a lot of time in the gulag and he observed that there were people there who he admired now the camps were mostly run by the prisoners so because most prisoners many prisoners became trustees and then would move up the administrative ladder and that's pretty interesting and it really dark way right because it's like a hell that's run by the Devils and they could escape at any moment if they just realized that they were the ones running it but they didn't and so and and so that that made the situation even more brutal than it might have been because he noticed too that prisoners who became guards were often more brutal than the civilian guards maybe to justify to themselves what they had done who knows anyways Solzhenitsyn at one point noticed that there were people in the camps whose comportment he truly admired who seemed incorruptible who wouldn't deceive or lie or take the easy way out regardless of what it was that they were being threatened with and they wouldn't sign the confessions that everybody had to sign guilty or not guilty they refused to play along and some of them certainly died for that but many people died in the gulags so that was hardly an anomaly but he said that many of them many of the people who ran the camps were terrified by these people and that also that many of them were religious believers which was quite interesting and so what he learned was that even under terrible circumstances there were ways of being more or less noble and I suppose it would be under terrible circumstances where that sort of thing would be put to the test and and it really made him think about his own role in his own demise you know like he had Hitler to blame right because well there was the Second World War and he had Stalin to blame and I mean if you need people to blame for your misery those are credible people to blame you know especially both of them at the same time and yet he started to consider you know what did I do in my own life that increase the probability that I ended up here you know as a citizen for example who was responsible for the way that the country operated because you know like in East Germany one third of the people in East Germany were informers and everybody in the Soviet system lied about everything to everyone all the time which is of course what you would do one in three people were informers because that would be like two people in your family and so the whole system was set up and maintained because everyone lied you think well if I stop lying I'm done for it's like yeah fair enough man but if you keep lying and so does everyone else you're also done for and so is everyone else so that doesn't seem to be much of an option and Solzhenitsyn noted that there were people even under these extreme circumstances that would tell the truth and he decided that he would go over his life with a fine-tooth comb he had nothing but time to think about every time he had acted in some manner in his life that transgressed against his own conscience right that where he did something he knew to be wrong and then to see if he could figure out how to set it right then now obviously he couldn't necessarily apologize to the people against who he had transgressed right sometimes you have to pay for something you did in a currency other than that which you took and his determination was to chronicle his experiences in his truthful manner as possible which was basically impossible it wasn't like he had paper and pencil and and time to write and privacy had his notebooks ever being discovered well he would have been in serious trouble and they would have been destroyed in fact when he got out he had two copies of the full manuscript each out to a different typist secretly the KGB got a hold of one destroyed it and the typist committed suicide you know so he basically memorized the book and it's 2,400 pages long of 8-point type like it's it's a it's one remarkable work it's one long scream of truthful outrage you know and that came out of his decision to set himself right and then it was as John said it was smuggled into the West where it had a walloping impact it completely demolished at least for a long while the moral credibility of communism completely from like 1972 on if you knew about the existence of the Gulag Archipelago you didn't get to say anything good about communism and that lasted for a long time it even convinced French intellectuals that there was something wrong with communism and there's no doubt that it was one of the historical events that caused the Soviet Union to collapse and that was a good thing and you know when it collapsed relatively peacefully all things considered no thermonuclear war Yugoslavia was no picnic and you know but for the demise of one of the most evil empires that ever existed it was pretty damn smooth and certainly the world's being in way better shape especially Africa since the Soviet Union has disappeared because the African economies are booming like mad now and it's partly because they aren't doing things that are insanely foolish under the guide guidance of you know communist direction and so Solzhenitsyn decided under these conditions of absolute powerless and privation right to put himself together and to say what he had to say and that was enough to knock over the Soviet Union it wasn't it wasn't all that knocked it over but it wasn't nothing it sold 35 million copies you know it's arguably the most influential non-fiction book of the 20th century and it's unbelievably powerful you think well what power do you have if you're willing to tell the truth it's not easy to tell the truth it's it's complicated you have to take yourself into account right over the long run you have to take your family into account you have to take your society into account you have to think it through you have to think strategically and then you have to find your words and that's hard to find your words because you tend to use other people's words or ideological words or words that mask or hide it's not easy to find your own words but if you find your own words and there are truthful words there isn't anything that can stop them you think well do you believe that oh let's go back to the sovereign idea are you sovereign citizens or not well if you are well why is that well it's because you have a certain faculty a certain power well what do you have you have the power of your convictions in your truth and your ability to communicate and that's what's supposed to set the state straight okay so you have that it's like well then maybe it's truth that you're pursuing and seeking if you have any sense and what truth well truth is the best reflection you can manage of reality imperfect because you're imperfect but it's the best you've got it's like what what's gonna be better for you than to have reality on your side and what's gonna stand in your way if you have reality on your side lies I don't think so that isn't how it works and I don't think anyone believes that because the other thing I've noted and discussed with people frequently is if you have someone that you love a child let's say and you're trying to raise a child in a decent manner you don't tell them look kid this is how the world runs everything is corrupt beyond belief including you and your parents and and society and nature for that matter it's just complete bloody hell everywhere and the only possible way that you can make it through life effectively is to learn to lie as brilliantly and undisguised ibly as possible no one does that well why not if you believed in falsehood if you believed that that was the way forward then that would be the right thing to teach but you don't you teach your children to tell the truth even if it's painful and the reason for that is that you actually believe in the power of the truth I'll finish that with one thing there's it's a very interesting scene in Revelations there's a very strange document appended to the end of the primary book in the Western Canon right and it's a hallucinogenic nightmare revelation and in it Christ comes back to earth and he's not the merciful Savior of the Gospels he's the judge and there's a reason for that a psychological reason and the reason is is that if you have an ideal and whatever Christ is metaphysically or psychologically he's an ideal if you have an ideal and ideal is a judge because the ideal judges you right okay so he comes back as a judge he has a sword in his mouth and he judges that saved in the and the Damned and it's not pretty but here's something interesting it's so fascinating he saves his worse contempt and and uses contemptuous language says I will spit you out of my mouth it really means I will vomit you out of my mouth not if you were a bad person not if you were a good person not if you were a bad person but if you sat on the bloody fence right if you were neither warm nor cold you wanted to play it both ways well I'll lie when it's in my favor and I'll tell the truth when it's expedient for me it's like you're you're in the category of the damned and I think that's absolutely right because that's real cowardice if you believed in falsehood it's like good get on with it man you could be a criminal and lay your life out and see how that works and if you believe in truth well then perhaps you put yourself on the line for the truth but you don't play the the two sides against the middle because there's there's nothing in that that isn't self-serving at the cost of your own well-being and at the cost of everyone else's so you have to think about you have to think about your relationship with the truth you know there isn't anything more important than you can do than that and because you're your um your I've seen people in major corporations that were corrupt and failing spend three years doing nothing but telling the truth often at their own peril fix the companies and it's such a relief to the people that they were talking to because they'd go talk to them that company is run by people who are not doing what they should be doing and their questioning is like okay well what's really going on here well no one wants to talk because they're afraid but the person who's doing the questioning actually wants to know and people start opening up and he gathers information it's like oh I see here's the real problems here it's like we've got all sorts of problems here this is why the company is in trouble but it's okay if we know the problems well then we can fix them and we'll go ahead and fix them and then the company will work and everybody who's terrified and won't say anything it isn't really working hard anymore because they're so dispirited and believing that the projects are corrupt and that the leadership isn't doing what it's supposed to they start having a bit of hope it's like really you mean you're actually willing to admit that that is the problem and you're gonna give me a problem that is a real problem that I could actually work on and actually solve and benefit from that and the whole company switches around and and if that works it's not naive to believe that and I'll say one more thing about trust that's very much worth knowing so this is what you learn if you're a clinician most people who trust are naive and naive is not a virtue it's a fault it's partly a fault because if you're naive and you run into someone who's malevolent including you they might do you incalculable damage so that you will never recover so that's not a good thing you don't want to be naive if you're not naive that means you've been burned once or twice or three or four times and you know once you've been burned in that manner well then it's hard to trust because you think well why would I trust you or me for that matter knowing full well that I can be betrayed and so then you're cynical and you think that's an improvement over being naive you know it's you're more mature cynical than you are naive even if it's premature and it's often premature in young people it's like okay so how do you get out of that conundrum well this is a crucial thing to know you trust people because you're courageous that's why it's the same reason that you're grateful it's a mark of courage it's a mark of commitment it's like you and I we're gonna make an agreement and you're full of snakes and so am i and there's lots of ways this can go sideways but we're going to put together an agreement we're gonna articulate it out we're gonna try to find something that is of mutual benefit to both of us we're gonna put our hands out and shake and we're gonna try to stick to that and we're gonna risk trusting each other right it's a risk and that's the risk upon which the state is based really like I believe and I think the evidence for this is very strong by the way I don't think that there is any other natural resource than trust and for trust you need courage not naivety and you go to overcome your cynicism so that you trust and then you ask yourself to if you don't trust your institutions it's like hey there your institutions why don't you go out and do something about them you think well I can't it's like that's not true that is that is absolutely not true that that's there's there's nothing vaguely accurate about that in a society like this almost all of our democratic institutions are crying out for people to participate they can't find enough people to do it and if you participate and you and and you do it diligently and you have your say and you're careful and trustworthy and you and you and you and you and you speak your mind you can have way more effect than you think so if you're cynical about the institutions it's like look in the mirror because those institutions the corruption of those institutions is a direct reflection of your inability to get your act together and that's what it means to be a sovereign part of the Western community so it's not someone else so this issue of trust now I would have thought that after what he'd been through and you've outlined it not a lone body means but some of these people who have warned us of the need to be responsible and a heed history salt solution is a classic example what has happened you made the point that for a very long time we understood how dangerous that sort of drift towards totalitarianism is it seems to have washed out of the system now it seems as though we don't teach history we don't respect it we don't understand that it can teach us valuable lessons and what worries me about that is the old saying if you don't understand history you may very well repeat it why do we walk away from people we can trust warning us of the consequences well it was an interesting reason for that that sort of brings the search in its in story into 2019 which is that he was truly oppressed this was a life of actual oppression right now we have people that are around everyone in this room has this in their pocket and if you have this in your pocket and off I hope yeah hopefully it turned off but if you have this thing in your pocket and you think you're oppressed you're very confused we we live in a time with such absurd freedoms in the West that are so beyond imagination of what people could only dream of two generations ago even one generation ago especially with this that people now have a perceived oppression instead of a real oppression so one of the things that I find when I go to when I go to college campuses is that you know these kids will protest and they'll scream and that you know that everyone's alright and everyone's neo-nazi and the rest of this and I I always find alright well how do you how do you break through to somebody like that how do you actually when they have you know you've talked about this when they have that look in their eye truly a possessed look and and they're you know it's this this postmodern monster has become sort of a secular religion and I think that's also one of the reasons why what Jordan is doing is resonating because they've they've removed religion from the equation and now they have no meaning and they put it all into this really competing set of ideas where we call the the oppression Olympics where they're constantly competing for oppression because they believe that victimhood is virtue and victimhood of course is not virtue what's virtuous is getting your life in order and going out and doing something so I'm always looking for a little trick to get through to these kids and it's really hard because when they have that sort of glossed over zombie look it's it's tough and I found one trick that actually kind of works if you can get it to them in the most simple personal way and this particularly works in the United States and I have no doubt that it would work here in Australia as well I'll say to them anyone in this room does anyone in this room have it worse than their grandparents now I've done this I don't know 100 times probably nobody has ever raised their hand nobody ever if you live in the United States you basically short I mean the only outsider case would be if your grandparents were oil barons or something like that and then they lost all the money in which case in which case the leftist would actually love that too because it would show that well it would show that that accumulated wealth doesn't stay beyond generation so they're all about that right so but if you can do something like that I mean if you say I mean everyone in this room can do it like can everyone picture their grandparents do you a bit better or worse I mean does anyone in here have it worse than their grandparents and that shows you that it's a perceived depression not a real oppression that that the thing that they're fighting this patriarchal postmodern capitalistic thing that they're fighting I mean they can't define it so it's hard to define it for them that it actually has bent toward justice always always and one when you get with you can plant that seed in them I think it's a little bit of something but it's very hard to break them out of that but I think the key here is understanding that it's a perceived oppression if you live in a free society in the West in 2019 you're not oppressed you you may be you may be don't happen as well as your neighbor does and maybe you came for more and they came from less or maybe you're sick and they're not or a series of other things but you've got a chance and that's all you're supposed to have in life and I think getting that through to them as opposed to oh the system is horrible and I have to now destroy the system as if they could magically reconstitute a system that really would just be in effect throwing away thousands of years of human history that they're so wise there's so wise at 24 years old is they're shouting down speakers that they could they could build up what nobody before them could and that that's the danger there so I think getting them to to think about their own lives where they come from I think is a pretty effective way of getting through to people well we could also say like look there's a claim that the West is an oppressive patriarchy and so that's actually true the the problem with the claim is that it's not just an oppressive patriarchy and there's a big difference between something being completely something and something being partly something because one of the things you might point out is that you can look at human history anywhere and what you see is a complete bloody nightmare right it's it's it's death and struggle and privation and war and horror everywhere with some progress you know some ability of us to pull ourselves out of the mire you know and the West is the same is there's plenty of catastrophe in our past and of all sorts and and I think it's it's necessary to know that but then it's necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff you know one of the things I see with readers who are unsophisticated and intellectually arrogant is they'll read someone great maybe they'll read Nietzsche for example and they'll find the odd thing that Nietzsche said that grates against their current moral sensibilities whether they do that in context or out and then they'll throw away the whole book it's like you don't throw away the whole book it was Nietzsche you don't throw away the book he's like one in a billion you read it carefully and you think well okay no to that but yes to this and you do the same thing with darts Kiev ski and you do the same thing with Tolstoy and you do the same thing with the great writers of the past that have been passed down to us you you read intelligently you separate the wheat from the chaff right and you gain wisdom that way well you do the same when you look at your own history it's like well of course it's a bloody nightmare what do you expect it's like what's your point what are good we're gonna burn it down and then we're gonna have something better as a consequence well not so easily not so quickly maybe we read our history carefully and we think okay well what did we get right well what did we get right well the sovereignty of the individual that's pretty good the fact that you have right to property that's pretty good you could argue about the limits on that but you know you don't want someone just taking your purse you know it's it's it's helpful that there are things that you can earn and own you know the dignity of the individual that's another one the innocence before the law god that's that's a miracle that we ever came up with that idea I can't believe that that idea exists because in most cultures it's like well you might be guilty okay you're dead because well that's easier you might be guilty you know why go through all the trouble there's plenty of people where you came from it's like the trouble of presuming your innocence it's easy innocent it's even hard for you to do that for yourself and and and the idea that that each person has an intrinsic worth regardless of their while externalities let's say that's another idea that's a complete miracle it's like what we're doing what I'm gonna do we're gonna throw all that away with the statement that we live in an oppressive patriarchy and then we're gonna be left with nothing and and and what what good is that well how about we look at our history and we take responsibility for it we think okay well here's some things that need to be fixed there's plenty of them right there's plenty of them for each of us to fix and we'll go fix them and maybe then we can atone for the bloodiness of our history and for our so-called unearned privilege you know some of which all of us have and that would be good that would be part of the adventure of your life too and that's that's a far more sensible and wise approach to the diagnosis of what's wrong with the West then well it's an oppressive patriarchy and it should be overthrown or whatever that you know current low resolution and resentful ideology happens to be and and there's something to be said for a bit of humility as well it's like really you really think that you're capable of making large-scale social transformations and getting it right do you you really think that you're 25 you're 30 you're 40 I don't care you know what makes you think you're smart enough to pull off something like that it's very very difficult very very very difficult to take a system that works not too badly and to do anything to it that doesn't make it worse much less to radically reconstitute it and make it better that's really hard so you know if you're upset about your culture well maybe you could think of some small ways that are local that you could go out and improve it well I think you should start with yourself because well then you're only harming yourself and you're not a bad person to practice on and then you could extend that to your fat well at least you suffer for the consequences of your own experiment that way rather than having someone else do it and then maybe you can work on bringing a little more harmony into your family and maybe you can get a job and see if you're any good at that and then if you manage those three things half ways respectably well then you could dare to put a toehold out into the broader community and think maybe I have an idea here that we could tentatively attempt that might make some small things slightly better that we could measure carefully and assess and that would be your contribution and and maybe you get real good at that you know so by the time you're 50 or 60 and you have a solid life behind you you're actually capable of generating large-scale improvements carefully you know as you were saying that I was thinking I mean this is exactly what Alexandria Acacio Cortez is I mean this is a failed this is a bartender with a 430 credit score which is pretty terrible but you all she's ever done in her life has been a bartender now that's fine I've been a bartender at times but the her only accomplishment is becoming a congresswoman with I think around 15,000 votes by saying the exact thing that the gummy dia wants you to say all the time right the idea that she could write this green New Deal and that somehow she is the one that can now of course she didn't really write it you're you know we're not we don't know who really wrote it but the idea that she could present this as if she has the ideas that could rejigger the entire United States economy and how we deal with energy and transportation and everything and we're not going to have planes and we're gonna pay people unwilling to work although then she deleted that part and put that you know it's like it's it's the lack of humility there that's actually staggering that she thinks no one before her might have tried to move some of these things on the margins a little bit but she but the crazy or the or that moving things on the margins isn't enough well they don't believe it's enough but the really crazy part of this is that pretty much I think the five or six Democratic candidates that we have now have all basically signed on board this thing yeah this thing which you say I think you could probably argue that it's unconstitutional on on the grounds of its just taking more for the government but it defies everything we know from history about how economics works well she's admitting you can't no olives yeah she says well tax the billionaires and then she also tell you tells you that the billionaires are the blight on society so it's like well which one is it because you need the billionaires to pay for it even though it won't pay for it and if you don't want billionaires well now we can't pay for it so what are we doing give me give me one right as a strategist longest-serving Prime Minister is a man called Bob Menzies and he was a man of incredibly powerful intellect and very very deep learning and he wrote fascinating me that democracy is not a machine it's a spirit in which the peculiar Christian conception that no matter what your station in life is each of us has a spark of the divine and every soul is of equal value before heaven why do I mention that partly because I think it's a very relevant point personally but it's because in the mocking and the ridiculing of that respect for our faith out of the door we've knocked out one of the pillars of democracy we've knocked out the idea that whether I agree with you or not doesn't matter I have to respect you because they're a higher authority places as much value on you as he does on me now it seems that the problem is that if you dare disagree with me I don't have a reference frame for good and bad anymore or for respecting you therefore I have to insist I'm right so I've got over my life and you dare to challenge me because you want to be got over yours well that's to say you're an evil person or you're a racer story or something terrible we lack a framework for respecting one another and it seems a massive problem for us well it's the problem with the collectivist viewpoint because if if your defining characteristic is that you're a member of a collective then you live or die by the propriety of the collective the the antidote to that is that strange metaphysical claim which is that well which is fundamentally that we each have a spark of the Divine in us you think well it's easy to be cynical about that but you shouldn't be because you act like it's true and that's worth noticing it's like if you have friends or family members and you don't treat them like they have profound intrinsic value then they're not happy with you right you can't you can't have a loving relationship without that you can't have a relationship of reciprocity without that you can't have a relationship of respect without that none of it and they also want you to treat them like they're in some sense masters of their own destiny which is also interesting right because if you ever say a 21 year old child and they're upset with you they say well I'm 21 years old I'm I'm able to make my own decisions and you say and they want you to agree with that and you want to agree with it because you hope that there are ready to make their own decisions and you think well maybe they haven't matured to that point so what are you saying well you're saying that they are gifted with the ability to take the responsibility to shape the reality around them and they insist upon that they insist upon you recognizing that in them as a hallmark of respect and love and you know you might be irritated because they're not acting responsibly enough to deserve that but it's still what you hope for and want it's so like well so what is it we're the sovereign cornerstone of the state each of us we're gonna dispute that well we know the cost of that okay well do we have that spark of divinity well what do we struggle with day to day we struggle with the potential that's in front of us and transforming that into the reality that could be that's as close to a divine faculty as anything I can think of it's completely mysterious that we can wrestle with the fabric of becoming and turn it into the actuality of being and that we seem to do that as a consequence of our ethical choices right you make bad choices you think they're bad bad things happen right and you think they're bad and so it's you took the potential that was there in front of you and you made something bad of it you can do that and you can also do what's good and we know that of each other and that's part the reason that were granted let's say the rate and the responsibility of being the cornerstone of the state and so that the idea that there is that divinity in us I think that's associated with our consciousness whatever that is because consciousness is a mystery it seems to give reality to being right what's being without consciousness there's no one there to perceive anything there's no one there to shape anything so is there anything there well our consciousness itself seems to be what participates in in the reality of being and and the the transformation of potential into into actuality for better or for worse so there's an ethical domain to it too it's like there's no reason for us to be questioning these fundis fundamental assumption unless we think we have a better theory what is that well it's your race it's it's your power structure it's like that's what you want you want to be judged on by collective standards it doesn't matter what you did it's in in this forward I wrote for this ocean it's invoke you know the read the people who ran the magazine read terror that's a hell of a magazine read terror they said well look if you're getting rid of the birds you Ozzy you know don't just be start stopping with the people who own businesses you want to get rid of their children too because they're infected with the same damn evil spirit and just to be on the safe side how about you take out the grandchildren to six year old 10 year old doesn't matter everyone goes you know and what happened in the Soviet Union everyone judged on their collective identity right that's how you're going to be judged I'll find something about your collective identity that's not so positive right some manner in which regardless of how oppressed you are you're also an oppressor you know for you it might be your male well that would do it you know for you it might be that you're middle class I can find some dimension of your multiple collective identities on which you're an oppressor and that's good enough to do you in if you take the collectivist route the alternative to that is no no no we have that spark of divinity it's associated with a deep deep responsibility and it's the ability that goes along with that and we play that out all the time we play it out every time we play fair games with one another we have we have decent honest relationships with one another we have business arrangements that are honest and work and we can cooperate for long periods of time we take care of our children properly we take care of our old people properly it's all predicated on the same thing you have intrinsic value and even if you do something terrible let's say and I still have the the conviction that you have value then it's incumbent on me to say well you did something terrible but you aren't necessarily something terrible and it might be possible for you to shed that and to atone and to rejoin those who good and that's something to and it's built deeply into our political and economic and justice systems and it's it's no time to be abandoning this you know especially when you look around the world you see as it's spreading and it's spreading quite rapidly everywhere it's spreading things are getting way better so enough crisis of confidence in the West like we've got our house to put in order there's no doubt about that but I see no reason why we can't do it unless we lose faith in ourselves and and there's reason for that like life is brutal there's reason to lose faith but not in the final analysis it's it's a mark of it's a mark of malevolence and cowardice to lose faith so the problem with that though just very briefly is that the people that are that are promoting these ideas they actually believe that the experiment of freedom which is all that it is they believe it is bad they believe that America is bad that the freedoms that you've won here are bad and what's interesting is I've seen such a massive look I was a lefty my entire life you're well and yeah and I should be judged accordingly but I mean look what I've see what I see now is look I could sit up here and give you my my lefty cred right so I'm gay married I'm gradually pro-choice although I'm really struggling with that one lately because the left is now especially in America gun soap and as on the Emporio issue really has gone on completely crazy I mean they're literally quite literally talking about post birth abortions I mean it's it's really nuts I'm I'm against the death penalty I'm for reforming the prison systems I'm for strong public education I mean I give you a litany of lefty ideas right but I can't get invited anywhere by the left or a democratic group or anywhere by any of these people but you know who invites me the Conservatives and I go up there and I tell them all the reasons I disagree with them and the libertarians I mean I like the libertarians they're mostly stoned but like you know you know I'm also pro pot but but why is it that almost everyone right now I would say if you're conservative if you're libertarian if you're so if you're a classical liberal or sort of a disaffected lefty if you're an independent and a couple other things if you're if you're any of those there's a great group of people right now that are willing to agree to disagree and get to exactly what your question was which is how do you sit down with people without impugning them the only people were talking about at the moment that have any institutional power because you know everyone every time you talk about this someone says well but there it's for white nationalists here and that and it's like they have no power no one cares about them the media promotes them to make it seem like they're massive and they're not no one but even the right does a pretty decent job of saying that these people are no good so all we're really fighting is this hysteric what was that study in the Atlantic where it's only something like 8% yeah and the only 13% of them think it's gone too far so something like 8 percent of the of people believe really in this postmodern progressive view of the world and a lot of them are shaky within that belief so it seems like a big monster because the media is always pushing it on us because they're loud but I I'm extremely enthused that we've gone all over the world and met good people who were I think need to be a little braver perhaps but but are here and are willing to wonder that bravery in a moment of it that what you've just said reminds me of two remarkable men in history GK Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw they disagreed on just about everything you could think of but they loved each other's company now isn't that incredible they couldn't wait to be together to have another good argument and a good feed together that's what we need the genius of Western harmony surely is lying in our ability to respect one another even over our deepest differences and one day yeah Chesterton was huge he was six foot four and very very heavy George Bernard Shaw was in great shape like you two fellas and and GK Chesterton looked at George Bernard Shaw slim as a rake and he said by gee George you look as though there must be a famine in England and George Furniture shot back as quickly as you could imagine there's a great big gargantia in man and you look like you're the cause of it but you just mentioned courage and I want to get to some of the terrific questions that people have put up before I do that courage is something you've both displayed in spadefuls and it's incredibly important we live in a culture now where I think there's a lot of fear when I was lost with you we're a Chatswood and there's a thousand people in that auditorium a lot of me young men and I looked around I thought these are terrific young Australians they're pretty concerned about whether or their masculinity might be toxic and they're pretty fearful about speaking out because you know we had once upon a time we used to burn people to stake anyway and then we went for the guillotine then we went for the hangman's noose now we kill people in social media and we do people get kneecapped every day and worse I think we owe you a great debt both of you actually because you've dared to break the ceiling and Dave you actually asked Jordan about this in Norway this is the beauty of modern even I've caught up a bit you know I heard your conversation you said did you ask Jordan did you expect when you started on this journey to end up like this and you asked him what it's like to break through that you know how do you feel about it when you're attacked and you are very open and very honest and and you said it's very tough when a journalist does you're over but you might like to repeat that question two Jordan yeah well quickly on the bravery thing my partner hates when I say this but I don't consider myself brave I'm doing what I think is right that is it that really is it I wake up every morning and I feel that I have a I have something to do that's relevant and important and being on this tour with Jordan has been life-altering not only for all the people that show there but I don't I don't view it as bravery I couldn't not do it I guess is the best way to say it I couldn't ask God I just gotta make the point there I think you're probably being very tough on yourself I think the reality is that courage is not so much not knowing fear it's overcoming it isn't it and there must have been times when you wanted to sort of say gee I don't want to be under this attack well I guess I saw enough when I when I started waking up to some of what was going on on the left and I had seen the tactics over and over and how they destroyed good people I suppose that as that went on and as I woke up and and got out of it I just became numb to that and I just wouldn't I just wouldn't live like that I would think but the question that I asked you in Norway in effect was you didn't set out for this when when c16 came around you know you were doing all sorts of other things you had a practice you were teaching all of these other things and you yet you've survived these it's not even the attacks you've survived a road that you didn't plan on being on and the bravery that you've shown along the way is why people keep coming back they keep there rooting for us more as you often say it's like these hit pieces come out and then in a weird way and now I see it with me they've moved on from you by the way they're working on me now but good yeah yeah I'm happy I'm happy to help but in a weird way it wasn't that you reveled in it but you made a point of saying look every time they do it I'm still here and I think I really took my while to understand that because I always want you know I wanted to defend my friends but I also wanted to defend myself and now it's like all right keep coming I'm still here we must be doing something right because I don't spend all my day attacking other people I'll gladly attack ideas but I don't attack people I mean I don't think we've done anything up here where we attacked a singular person right and that's that's a huge difference so the question really was you inadvertently you know I'm not a big fan of quarters okay fine fair enough yeah exactly so every now and again though but I think I talked about her ideas in the public eye talked about her and her credit score but you know not her as a as a person but right and she is in the public sphere and it's also impossible to never talk about people so it's you can't be that lofty all the time but you can try to be a little bit but that basically you inadvertently ended up in this position where now by virtue of showing bravery well you sold out the Sydney Opera House in five minutes quit easily it's a matter I think it's a matter of being afraid of the right thing that's the issue it's like I decided a long time ago partly from reading Solzhenitsyn that I was going to try to be very careful with my words and I was only going to say things that I thought well to begin with were lies let's say I was going to try to formulate my thoughts truthfully and the reason I decided that was because I thought that the opposite was hellishly dangerous and I really I really I really believe that I truly believe that and so I'm if I say things and I think they're true and they get me in trouble then I think well that's not as much trouble as I would have got into if I would have said something that wasn't true like it might be more trouble right now who knows right because you and you don't know how these things are gonna turn out and I had this interview most of you know about it with Kathy Newman from channel 4 right and that was a pretty strange experience so what you're saying is it was a great interview yeah exactly exactly exactly and you know she was pretty professional when we went to the studio like someone like that is professional kind of hard surface and glossy and and media presentable you know the TV turns you into that and she was perfectly polite in a professional way until the camera went on and then you know and then she went after me and and then the whole interview went went the way it went and I thought I I had like 20 interviews that and and so I walked away from that and I thought oh god they're gonna take seven minutes of that and you know broadcast it and make me look like a complete monster and that'll be the end of that and that is exactly what they did except they also posted the entire thing on YouTube not knowing at all that it was a train wreck they have no idea wasn't like they thought oh well this is a train wreck we better put it on YouTube it wasn't that at all they thought it was a perfectly fine interview so then it went on YouTube and so well so like my mood changed a lot it was first of all well this interview went catastrophically and then it was well they're only gonna use seven minutes of it that's gonna be a drag but I'll probably get over it and then they put it online and then there was just an incredible reaction and then five ten newspapers came out to play the victim card for poor Kathy which was now all the online trolls were after her and I thought that really really struck me I thought she's one of the most powerful people in the UK you know one of the thousand most powerful let's say or the 500 most powerful she's no bloody victim and she's play paid plenty well for what she does Jordan by the way don't forget that that night that this all happened she was she did a video in her car reading the troll the comments by the trolls because at that moment she didn't realize she should play the victim card yet yeah she was not reveling it right and it was until she realized that yeah yeah yeah and so then her her employee said well we had to call in the police to investigate was that unbelievably crooked thing to say it's like anybody can call in the damn police to investigate anything it's like well what constitutes a credible threat well there are ways of assessing credible threats you know they have to be direct and detailed that's that's how you assess suicidality for example if you tell me that you have a plan you know when you're gonna do it you know where you have a gun you've thought it through it's like that's a credible threat sometimes I wish I wasn't here that's not a credible threat and you see the same sort of thing online well then 10 newspapers played the dim card that poor Cathy was being trolled by well at that point by like a million trolls who knew there were that many trolls but apparently they were and then I thought well god the whole thing's gonna go sideways again because I'm gonna come out of this as the villain who called forth you know the alright Armada to take down poor innocent Kathy Newman and so it looked like it was going to shift that way for about four days and then well that didn't work there was a couple of other interviews that started to push back that narrative and and then it switched back to my side but look I'm making a point with this is when I do an interview like this interview um I don't I follow this rule in my book rule which is it let's say I think it's eight it's seven do do what is meaningful not what is expedient okay so I come to an event like this and I have an opportunity to say things and I don't come in here and think okay here's a bunch of things I want to convince you up you know it's I I don't care if you're convinced it's not like I don't care about you you know in in the sense that you care for people and hope the best for them but I don't care if you're convinced either so what I'm here for what I'm here for is to hear the questions and try to figure out what I think about them and then to say that and then to see what happens like who the hell knows what's gonna happen but there's here's an in if if the world is properly constituted through truth then faith is the willingness to have faith in truth and so then you say what you believe to be true and then some things happen and sometimes they're not so good which is why people often lie you know you tell the truth you get in trouble for it every kid knows that it's like well why'd you lie because I thought I'd get in trouble well obviously it's like well that's not a good long-term strategy it's like so you say what you believe to be the truth and then you have the faith that no matter what happens if you've said what you believe to be whatever happens is the best thing that could have happened and I believe that I think that's how the world's constituted and so it's not bravery exactly and I would say it's more like faith it's like I'm going to say what I think I'm gonna try to do that as carefully as I possibly can and I'm going to detach myself from the outcome because sometimes though it comes terrible I'm at McMaster University or Queens and there's like a bloody mob of zombies pounding on the window you know it's a little slice of hell you think this doesn't seem to be a very good idea but you know the tide turns two or three times in the next three weeks and something comes out of it and so if you're going to have faith in truth it can't just be well did I get what I want in the next second that's not that's not faith it's like no I'm gonna it's an it this is the other thing too that you got to understand I think is that without truth you don't have the adventure of your life you see because if you tell the truth that means you're revealing your being that's what you're doing when you're telling the truth and when you when you reveal your being then you're you're living in the world you're there you're present right your your your your that's being there let's say that's you that's your destiny that's your journey that's your adventure that's what's gonna justify your life the adventure it's not gonna be easy but man if you hide from your truth well then you hide from yourself and then you're not even there and then who the hell are you what are you the puppet you're the puppet of some coward you're the puppet of some dictator or some second-rate philosopher some idiotic idea or a bully you were afraid of in grade six god only knows but it's not you living your life and then you lose your life and you lose your soul too so that's what I'm afraid of and so you know journalists well they try to take me down it's like yeah well that's annoying and it usually takes me three days to recover but compared to not having my life and and and and not saying what I have to say that's that's nothing it's it's nothing it's this minor inconvenience and and then generally if you can if you can just withstand it you know two weeks you get mobbed you guys might all need to know this you're gonna get mobbed on social media okay so what do you do unless you did something wrong don't apologize that's the first thing cuz then no one can come to your defense so don't apologize maybe you even double down carefully carefully not vengefully right carefully you say no that's what I meant and if you don't like it too bad and you get mobbed then you apologize a different mob comes after you that's not helpful and no one can defend you if you can hold out for two weeks you'll win now it's a pretty brutal two weeks cuz you know if you're a reasonable person and a hundred angry neighbors show up at your door with pitchforks you might be thinking there's something wrong with you you know like you think that unless you're psychopathic and you think well maybe I made a mistake and it's easy to waver and to and to back down and maybe you're also afraid but you know if you scoured your conscience and you're careful and you've said what you had to say then leave it lie and if and they'll throw the people who are playing this game will throw everything they can at you for two weeks and if it doesn't stick you're done and then the next time they try it it doesn't work as well as it did the first time and by the 50th time they try it like as far as I can tell carefully the people who have enmity for me are out of ammunition they're done I read hit pieces now and I think oh you just copied the hit piece from two months ago it's like I'm perfectly habituated to that they're out of ammunition and maybe you know like someone creative could still come up with some more ammunition maybe that will happen at the QA but it's not bravery man it's faith in the in the redeeming power of truth and that's different I think that's incredibly interesting and encouraging let's come through a couple of questions yep I'll just preface them by saying there's been a we actually did a bit of research on this and one of the things that people say is they love hearing your stories and they love hearing you being open and they love it when you connect personally with them and somebody wanted to connect with you and Tammy Tammy is here with you and they're I think very conscious of the incredible timetable that you're setting so as Alastair there you wanted to ask about how this works for you it's so great having opportunity for both you in person in a moment of uncharacteristic courage close to two years ago I got married again a woman who on any objective measure completely outranks me congratulations thank you now she's very high on assertiveness and I'm very high on conscientiousness which you will fully understand and so we contend we can tend a lot and it's good and we're going somewhere good and I'm very proud for what it's worth I'm aware and I imagine what your life is like and I'm talking to you Jordan but I don't to exclude you either and I imagine your life being one of constant exhaustion exhilaration and probably a fair bit of Terror as well and the word contending is one that you actually used a few days ago on a different platform in a different City you're talking to young people and you challenged them to marry a mate with whom they would contend and I think of Tammy and I think of you and we don't hear a great deal of Tammy but you guys are I'm sure working really hard you're contending you're confronting all this stuff and you're processing it and I'm sure your marriage is strengthening I trust it is and I'd love some insight on that if you if you can speak to what you're learning about marriage in this season of your life well the first thing we're doing is that Tammy is traveling with me so that's very helpful and she's paying attention you know so and we talk a lot about what is going on but also a lot about our family because there's complicated things going on in our we like there are in most families and we do our best to communicate you know when she says what she thinks and I say what I think and we don't always think the same thing you know but we do our best to listen we do our best to assume that just because the other person has a different opinion doesn't mean that they're wrong even though it would be lovely if they were and then we try to come up with a negotiated solution that's mutually acceptable you know and and we discuss strategy as well I mean for example when we started this tour which was more than a year ago we thought you know there's a lot of competing things that you could think about a tour especially when we had no idea how long it would be like what was this was this a vacation we were going to you know spectacular cities all over the world was it time for us to spend together like what was it what were we doing and and we spent two hours thinking it's like no this is work we have a remarkable opportunity here and and and we're going to do the work we're going to hit as many cities as we can and so what does that mean it means we get the hell up in the morning we make sure we're packed our suitcases aren't too full we don't carry anything that goes underneath the plane we make sure that I don't get hungry because then I can't perform properly we make sure that I'm at the theater at the right point in time and we make sure that our eye is focused on the fact that it's a great privilege and it's very unlikely that we can do this and so we thought okay that's the deal and then we thought well and then we can take an hour or two here and there if we're fortunate to see some of the city and to take a break and to do that when we can and you know we've negotiated other details about exactly how intense the scheduling was going to be but it's a constant negotiation and it is a contentious negotiation which is good because these things are complicated you know and to think something complicated through you need a good argument on this side and you need a good argument on this side and then you go to have a derp and see if you can come out with an even better argument as a consequence and so seemed to work now there's other advantages it turns out that Tammy is very suited I'm sorry I'm speaking from for her but she doesn't have a microphone and actually prefers to stay in the background to some degree for various reasons she's very suited to a life like this she's quite stable emotionally so she she doesn't suffer from a lot of anxiety she likes to travel she likes meeting new people she likes the adventure and she's supporting what I'm doing and so that's working and thank God for that and then she also keeps an eye on what I'm doing and lets me know when it's going well and when she thinks it needs improvement and and and she helps me figure out where I'm going next because for the last two years my schedule has been so busy that I don't know what I'm doing next usually maybe the next day and so her job because we've also parceled out jobs is to make sure that I get wherever I'm going next on time and ready and so far that's brought I would say incalculable benefits fundamentally and and because we agreed on it we had our little Constitution in place we were able to handle the stress because I think we've been in a hundred and it's damn-near 150 cities in 350 days and so it's very heavy traveling schedule but Andy the other thing too is I trust her she tells me the truth it isn't necessarily what I want to hear well you can tell that's the truth man what you don't necessarily want to hear but so she's a very good counselor and that's turned out to be exceptionally helpful so yeah and I'm like their son who refuses to leave yeah I like it mom yeah you know I think we ought to give Tammy a round of applause Dave I think one for you comes from Monica Wilkie it's about dealing with difference thank you John Dave I wanted to ask is it possible to come to a resolution with someone who has different values to you so for example if I have free speech is my highest value and I'm talking to someone who believes that diversity and equality is a higher value and therefore free speech should be quelled in order to achieve this is it possible to reconcile these differences I think it is the best example that I can give you and I'm sure some of you have seen this I've had a couple interviews and debates with ben shapiro now ben is an Orthodox Jew he does not believe that gay people should be married well he believes that being gay is a sin is the loose word for it right now Ben my studio is in my home I lived with my partner in my home obviously Ben and I were friends to it to a certain point you know you mean like you've got like your best friend in life who knows you the way your husband or wife or partner knows you and then and then you have sort of other tiers of friends Ben will never as long as we have this disconnect there's you know he last time I had him on when we discussed this he said that you know it caught fire on the internet he said he wouldn't bake me a a gay wedding cake right or even come to an anniversary party because it would be celebrating something that he doesn't believe in and I remember when we were having the discussion I thought all right well here's a really interesting moment I can now berate him and I can demand that he acquiesce and and put aside whatever his beliefs are so that he will believe what I want him to believe even if I think it is the right thing I mean I I think I'm a good person I'm doing what I'm just doing my life as I see fit right Ben sees the world differently so can we ever truly through that I would say yes because what we agreed to for what we were agreeing to disagree on what we agreed to agree on was that it's not the role of the government to decide who can get married now he's less thrilled with that than I am because I think that's a perfectly fine position to take heed he you know this you see this a lot with conservatives now where they when you ask them about gay marriage they'll take the libertarian position they weren't taking at five years ago but they suddenly now that they realize it's the law of the land in the United States and it's just the easy way out it's like well you know I don't really care about gay marriage it's anyone can get into any contract that they want to it's the easy way out I don't mind letting them slide on that because we're equal we made it so it's okay now so I don't know that you can ever well let's put it this way I think there are issues that you will have existential profound differences with people that you will not be able to get over but that doesn't mean you have to cut them out of your life and as I said to Ben last time we talked about this I hope that you know we'll remain friends to whatever degree our friendship is for the next let's say 50 years and I'm a little older than him but when I'm you know 92 and he's 37 or whatever it's re but he's 87 math was not my thing but when I'm 92 and he's 87 that may be the long game would have worked here and he'll look back and go you know Dave you you probably were right I suspect I will get him on this one so I would say just generally try to be try to be as tolerant as the other people say they are they're not really that good at it they just talk about it a lot but if you actually try to do that and realize that the world is not designed to bow to you and that you can show people you're a little bit better I just am a firm believer that that is what will ultimately get there but no you can't get everyone right there and it's for you to judge what relationships you want to be in thank you I think to bring it home and a question I think's very important than probably troubling or goes to the heart of something that's troubling a lot of people now Rochelle on the men in the me to era and the I'm at that point but Rochelle whiz Rochelle hey right here I just want to be clear I've never had a me-too incident with the woman first of all thank you very much for being here and helping us to wake up I really appreciate it so my question is as a redeemed progressive what is the key to empowering men in the me to H while maintaining healthy boundaries and strong behavioral expectations well as their what do you redeem to progress it as I said well no one's born guilty no one's born guilty if you haven't raped anybody and you haven't accosted anybody and you haven't you know done anything untoward then you have nothing to be guilty about I mean this is the consistent theme that we've talked about here about why you should judge people as individual and not as a collective but they've created a situation now where people are now being born with original sin oh you're a white heterosexual usually Christian male you are the worst thing that exists and that not I mean it's the essence of bigotry it's your prejudging right so that's prejudice you're looking at someone and you're prejudging them and you think that you know everything that they're not only about but capable of so I would say the further we can get away from that how do you how do you negotiate those relationships well if you've done something bad it's on you I mean Jordan addressed this already it's on you to figure out how to make penance for that I suppose but if you haven't done anything and most people haven't that's why this thing this idea believe all women that's well that looks like saying believe all men believe all midgets believe all I mean it just doesn't not engines not midgets now you're gonna get us in trouble yeah for sure see you just walked into me yeah you did it to yourself this time but it may I mean really called little people little people believe all little people but but really I mean if you could just take the reverse they say believe all women well now just do the other way or believe all men does that sound right you of course you shouldn't believe all men and you shouldn't believe all women and by the way every time that this happens with one of these people saying believe all women then the accusation gets turned on them like our governor Gavin Newsom in California or when it happened cory booker or a series of these guys and then suddenly they go whoa wait for evidence when it was Kavanaugh no believe all women so it's it's just a ridiculous untenable way of holding a position and if you're not guilty of something I mean that the fact that this is happening to young people in the West especially an especially young white men that they're walking around feeling like they've done something when they've done nothing what a what a recipe for a disaster and the type of totalitarian society that we've been talking about up here it's also reflective of a technical problem I would say we've had relatively reliable birth control since 1960 okay that's not very long and we underestimate the unbelievable technological triumph of birth control it's it's the hydrogen bomb it's the transistor like it's a major-league transformation in human interaction women are now free from involuntary reproduction that's never been the case in the entire history of the planet okay we don't know exactly what to do about that okay so the first idea in the 60s was hell let's party and you know you could see why it's like what the rules for not engaging in promiscuous sexual intercourse seemed to have vanished so we had a couple of decades of experimentation it's like well how'd that go little hard on the family I would say that's not so good for kids AIDS that wasn't a plus could have killed us all and it mutated particularly to take advantage of promiscuous sex because viruses are very tricky things so it turns out that sex is a little bit more complicated we thought well it actually turns out that it's a lot more complicated than we think okay and now it's for 50 60 years later and we're trying to sort this out it's like well when is it okay to have sex exactly and when is it not okay to have sex and what does it mean that it's okay and what is consent mean and the answer to that is well we never used to have to think these things through because the rule was don't have sex until you get married that was the rule now that isn't the rule okay so what's the rule well we're not having a conversation about the rule we're waiting til someone does something that seems like it might be untoward and then mobbing them and trying to extract the rule out that way and it's not a very effective way of doing it you know you want to decrease campus rape that's easy get real alcohol no one has that conversation it's like I did my PhD work on alcohol fifty percent of the people who are murdered are drunk and fifty percent of the people who kill them are drunk and almost all the date rape situations are consequences of excess intoxication but yet there's a party culture on campuses and anything goes and you also have this strange thing especially on the radical left which is which is unbelievably paradoxical where absolutely every form of sexual expression imaginable is 100% permissible because sex is fine but it's so dangerous that while you're dancing with someone at a Princeton mixer you have to ask them two or three times if it's okay for you to continue and and that's that's actually the case by the way I'm not making that up it's like well both of those things can't be true now what's happening I think on the me to end of things and the affirmative consent end of things is the old sexual taboos are reasserting themselves the idea that we can extract sex out from emotional intimacy and especially emotional intimacy I would say psychological intimacy maybe even from long-term relationship is I don't believe it's a tenable idea I don't think we can do it and a lot of what we're seeing is the backlash against that it's like well I feel used you know because one of the things that's happening on the really radical end of the anti sexual abuse movement is the idea that well if you have intercourse with someone and then you regret it the next day that's evidence that it wasn't consensual well it is in the sense evidence that it wasn't consensual because it's evidence that you didn't bloody well think it through right it was good for last night but it's not good for today it's not very wise the question is well what constitutes consent and we need to have a very serious conversation about that like under what circumstances is it acceptable to give consent but we're not mature enough to have that conversation we want both ways we want to be able to do whatever we want whatever with what with whoever we want whenever we want with no consequences and we want there never to be any trouble about consent it's like well no that's not going to happen I don't think that sex works very well outside of committed relationships I don't think there's any evidence that it does there's a strong proclivity across cultures for for the enforcement social enforcement of long term monogamy and there's reasons for that and I think you deviate from that at your peril so now if you if you want to deviate from that there's all sorts of reasons to do it and I can understand why people are interested in adventure and all of that but you know my sense also as a clinician is you know you only really get to try out about five people in your life you have to make a decision pretty damn quick you know like between 20 and 30 there's a lot of things to get straight and long-term mate is usually one of them and most of the time people should be more careful with their sexual behavior when they're young especially when they're drunk than they are and I think it I just think it's so interesting that all of the taboo reconstruction is coming from the radical left it's not what you'd expect at all you'd think it'd be the damn right-wing Christians complaining about you know sexual immorality it's like no it's the radical lefties you know you you have to have sign consent before making any physical move and then that's so what really who thought that up that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard you know how awkward that would be you know you're supposed to be able to do a little bit of nonverbal reading right I mean that's part of romance you don't see it you ever see a movie where the two people who are dating exchanged consent notes like that doesn't happen so it's an unrealistic solution but but I think the real solution is that despite the fact that we have reliable birth control we're going to have to relearn what the acceptable rules of propriety are with regards to sexual relationships one of the things I often tell my young clients is don't do anything physically with anyone that you wouldn't talk to them about because if you're too damn embarrassed to talk about it well maybe it's a little premature in the relationship to actually do it and then there's harm in it you know there's emotional harm in it throw on both parties there's the cheapening of both parties so well so it's gonna take us a long time to sort this out but hopefully we can do it in a serious manner and and it won't be merely a matter of mobbing those who seem to have made an error so well Jordan and Dave you've given us unbelievably generously of your insights of your ideas of your experience of your wisdom and you've done it with immense warmth and humanity I can't thank you enough and I've think all of these good Australians wouldn't would agree with me oh yeah penis that's about daddy yeah

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 685,463

Rating: 4.8856668 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism

Id: TVYDdZWUWlE

Length: 99min 11sec (5951 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 05 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/SurfaceReflection]

Great job by Dave where he leads by example of first cleaning his own room before criticizing what is beyond his level of education and knowledge.