Dr. Jordan B Peterson on Femsplainers

welcome to the Femmes planers I'm Danielle Crittenden and i'm christina hoff sommers and we are thrilled to have the father of all manse planers in our studio today yes a man whisperer and the mad genius behind the intellectual dark web whatever welcome to the femme Slater's Jordan Peterson thank you very much so delighted to have you and it's an honor to have your honor it's um and a note to our listeners we're recording this in front of a live audience at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC where christina is a resident scholar and there'll be video of the podcast as well and we will let you know where to find that when it's ready and we're also grateful to AEI every week for the use of its recording studio for the podcast and now for an introduction though he needs no introduction to the people here but Jordan Peterson is a professor at the University of Toronto and author of many books and and poster of many fantastic lecturers and his most recent book has I can't keep track of how many languages it's been translated into and the sales just a phenomenally successful book tour in fact my first question is really about your tour you look pretty good there's somebody who's visited what a hundred cities in the past she's January 23rd I don't know how you do it and mostly flying well what do you do for fun what do you ever get to relax in brief moments and what do you do go on Twitter and oh god yes although I would qualify that as relaxing and I try to you know forestall that temptation as much as possible well I have the automotive time that I could spend with my wife she does travel with me and so you know we've had we we try to take some time to walk around the cities that we're in and see what we can it's we're usually not at any given place for more than a day or two and they're usually pretty packed up with well whatever is associated with the lecture and then with press that the publishers usually arrange I heard you interviewed in Sweden you were in Stockholm and you were had a half an hour to visit the city with your wife yeah and you know you loved it but that you know it's yeah well you tell you take your breaks where you get them well the thing is is that the the lecture tour is unbelievably positive yes and a lot of this is is ridiculously positive you know like so if I'm going out on the streets now or in cafes or you know airports I meet people all the time and they're always polite and they're always happy to see me and they always have some very touching story to relate and and then the audience's themselves are very positively predisposed to whatever it is that we're doing together and so that makes it a lot easier to stay motivated and and and to continue right you know I mean it's demanding because everything's scheduled so tightly and and I do a different lecture every night every I find that amazing because I give a lot of lectures and I anguish over every word and then I have another one and it I you go up without notes yeah well I have a large collection of you know things that I know what how to talk about and usually what I try to do is to formulate a problem before the lecture so I'm addressing a specific problem right and then I can track how I would set up the argument and then I walk through it but part of it's also an attempt to formulate the argument on the fly you know to make the question what would you say to formulate it more precisely and to make a more precise and engaging answer and then I can use the audience to judge whether or not that's that's happening and so it's also a real challenge to do that so I enjoy that and it's a excellent intellectual workout and I've been recording the lectures and I've been using fair some of them to write the first draft of the chapters for my next book and four books after that and so you know I'm I'm able to maximize the what would you say the utility of doing this at each event and and my wife seems to be particularly well suited to traveling like that she actually enjoys it quite a bit and and is a very stable person and so that's also helpful so and you know it's nice to have an extra brain along because things are scheduled so tightly that we don't ever have any room for error yes well we're going to I can't I don't know how intellectually rigorous we plan to be with you today because we know that when you ever you're on one of these platforms you're talking about your ideas but on the fence planners we want to hear more a little bit more about Jordan Peterson the man that's desperately in definitely want to hear about your wife Tammy yeah and also you're so well known for your views on men or how your ideas have been taken up so enthusiastically by young men but we want to talk to you about women yep that's good so but one of the things you and I share is that we both grew up in Canada I promised Christine I would not do my Canadian accent while you were here but you grew up in rural Alberta I grew up in Toronto and you are what the country's most famous guru now since Marshall McLuhan um and but is the fact that you came from Canada have any effect on your views do you think has it formed you in any way I mean what did what would it wouldn't would it be the same if you think you'd grown up in rural Texas how was Canada contributed to your worldview she's always looking for the Canadian angle well I think the particular part of Canada I grew up in probably was formative to some degree I mean the town I grew up in was only fifty years old you know and the particular part of the world that I grew up in was really the last settled part of the North American Prairie this was outside of Edmonton correct yeah both 400 miles north of Edmonton 400 miles yeah yeah it's right at Short so it's short yeah so the Prairie number the Prairie stretches up that far north it stretches up farther north in Alberta than it does anywhere else in the North American continent and so we were at the tip of viable farming essentially and so it was it was a new place and it was a rather raw place and it was a it was a rather harsh place in many ways be especially because of the winter and it was fundamentally a working-class place although a prosperous working-class place right because most of the industry there was related to the oil and gas industry on although it was cyclical when things were good working-class people could make a very good living this was during the seventies to be a kid in 400 miles outside a small town yeah I liked it when I was a kid I wouldn't say it was as fun when I was a teenager I but I'm not convinced that you know the majority of people who are teenagers necessarily have the most wonderful time of it I think adults often look backwards at the past through rose-colored glasses I can't that's what the cartoonist Trudeau accused Reagan of doing continually um Gary Trudeau the American I think the words Institute oh no no I used for it in your book was teenage wasteland yeah yeah but it's Canadian as' just do you see how does that form do you or affected you if at all maybe it didn't it's hard to say I mean I've lived in lots of different parts of Canada now and and Canada is quite different I lived in well Alberta for a while and it had this particular flavor of existence I mean mostly in Fairview I was striving to leave mm-hmm and to move ahead let's say or to move I hesitate say up but somewhere different somewhere more urban but that's the case with many people I mean the small towns all across the West in the US and in Canada are dying mm-hm they're they're down to nothing because everyone's moved to the cities I lived in Montreal for a good while and that was interesting because it was a very very different culture it was a culture that was to some degree stratified by language and by class and none of that was true in Alberta because it so knew that there's no class structure so that was quite interesting right and you worked what I loved pulled a passage because I think as you say people are born in small places everywhere and someone to leave and some don't you said I wanted to be elsewhere I wasn't the only one everyone who eventually left the Fairview I grew up knew they were leaving by the age of twelve I knew and my wife who grew up with me on the same street knew well what's that thing what would you call that what's the thing that makes you want to leave and and set you off because as you point out there was no class system education was cheap in Canada oh yeah I wasn't it wasn't cost it was talking people you were from a what middle class my father was a teacher and my mother was a librarian no no she had trained as a nurse so you know we had a comfortable I would say suburban lifestyle essentially you know I'm moderate middle-class suburban lifestyle that's what Fairview looked like it looked like a suburb that was built mostly in the 90s a between the 1950s in the 1970s so young Jordan and the then young Tami and you have to tell us that story how you met but wanted wanted more well you know I think that's one thing that is different to some degree about class my father and my mother had both left two towns they were from and they were forward future looking people and you know most of my friends who quit school and who didn't attend University they didn't have they didn't have that sense I would say that more developed sense of a world outside of what they knew and the other thing is that my my father took us on long trips when I was a kid he was a teacher and so he had summer holidays and we drove all over Western Canada and down into the US long driving trips thousands of miles and you know that also gave us the sense that the world was a bigger place but I knew way before I was 12 I believed that I was off at least to university and I think generally in your family if you're liable to go to university people don't even really talk about it it's just a given that that's what's going to happen it's it's something that you take in with every breath all it's it's an uncertain and unspoken expectation and maybe people make casual reference like well when you go to college but it's not like there's a question about it whereas if you're from a working-class background especially if your family hasn't pursued post-secondary education that isn't in the realm of unspoken or spoken expectation and it wasn't like like lots of my friends including many of them who dropped out before they hit high school they weren't by they were by no means the dimmest people in the class like they were plenty smart but they weren't oriented towards the idea of pursuing a career that that involved intellectual what intellectual engagement wasn't in their worldview and you know when you hear people on them let's say more socialist end of the distribution talk about barriers to education they are often talk about cost and sometimes cost is a barrier and it's more of a barrier thing yeah and it's more of a beer although there's still plenty about community colleges and state colleges where you can right get educated for a perfectly reasonable amount of money but for my friends no it was never a reason that money was never a reason they didn't pursue post-secondary education it was more like a truncated view of time I would say you know there was more of an emphasis on the here and now only and there were jobs aplenty I guess well there was also doubt yeah you know and and well-paying jobs like it wasn't obvious that you were in better shape economically to go to university oh yeah especially if you were doing something like working on the oil rig right right but Tom but you know that was rough cold harsh work and it wasn't it wasn't once you had an inn you could stay employed but it wasn't that easy to land an entry-level job either and so yeah well it was wise for lots of working-class people to to work in those jobs because they were unbelievably lucrative mm-hmm so and they should have been because they were very difficult and dangerous and frigid cold and and and rough so you know it's not like the people didn't earn their money well just tell us quickly like how you met your wife you were you met her when you were and seven or eight hurt yeah great three thank grade three yeah and you did you fall in love with her in grade 3 grade three yeah it wasn't mutual [Music] what there were lots of the boys in grade 3 we're in love with her she had a whole little crew of guys that were perfectly willing to follow her around and she was perfectly willing to exploit that she's very good at it yeah she was very popular it's just so wonderfully you met his children there were friends for a long time you know we used to play chess together and croquet and she's a vicious croquet player she would I don't know if you've ever played croquet but if it's with your balls touch then you can stand on ears and whack it and then the other person's ball will oh she did vanish off into this stratosphere and she liked to knock it all the way down the street then she laughs so she she always had a good sense of a good vicious sense of humor it's one of the things actually admire about my wife when when we've had our verbal disputes which you know have certainly happened she can string together a sequence of insults that's so hair-raising then you have to laugh what did she have brothers um she did she has a brother much older eight years old because quite a peaceful person and I rose with brothers you know seemed to can get along with guys cuz the they would they show love and affection by insults yeah and jabs and jeers and yeah and if you and I had brother and I started learned okay I could but if you don't have brothers girls like oh that's so rude that's so yeah so she was yeah well she she she has a naturally there's maybe cuz she's naturally twist she did well and her father is quite sharp witted and and and but he was a real town character he's still alive huh he was a real character in the town a real hyper extrovert everybody knew him and he had a pretty good wit on him and she had some of that well it still had does have some of that so she was her you know aside from her acerbic humor and her ability to whack balls and I just don't want to go further on that description that's it of many many things that tells us about you what else brought what else attract I mean you've known her pretty much your whole life so some of the other qualities that not just attracted you but enable you to sustain I mean I think every young person in this room will want to know and maybe there isn't one but what's the secret what's it like to be with someone that long how do you sustain that well I think if you're fortunate some of its some of its good fortune you know and I would say this is true I've watched people in their relationships you know personally for a long time but also as a professional because I've done a lot of clinical counseling and I mean there's some things that that need to be a given about the relationship I would say it doesn't hurt to find the other person very attractive you know and that's a mysterious thing we're not exactly sure what it is that produces let's say chemistry between people although chemistry is definitely part of what produces it there's subtle things that attract people to one another that are way below the level of consciousness so for example women don't like the older of men who have our each blood factors who if they had children with would be likely to produce a stillborn infant well that's definitely a category on match.com right well it's so strange though because well that's a good question and you know you know by older apparently and so there's or wearing Cologne well that then it would depend on what type of right smell is a very strange sense and it's very deeply tied to very profound emotions including memory and so you find people attractive for reasons that you can't always determine and so so that that was part of it I mean I've always found her very attractive and that continues and I I liked her combativeness you know like I think that there's you want someone I think in a relationship that you can spar with and it's partly because you have hard problems to solve if the person that you're with isn't willing to put forward their opinion then you only have half the cognitive power that you would otherwise have you know and hopefully you find someone who's interestingly different from you like not so different that you can't communicate and you have to be careful of that but interestingly different and then hopefully they have the ability and the will to express their opinion and and then well then it's you know then then your interest stays heightened and there has to be that tension in a relationship you know people think well I I want to get along perfectly with my partner it's like no you you probably don't you just get bored and then you'd go looking for trouble and so you want a little bit of trouble in the relationship and a little bit of mystery and a little bit of combativeness and and the ability to exchange opinions forthrightly and and I trust her which is a huge element I mean when we finally did decide to get together permanently we were both in our later 20s and you know one of the things that I had learned by that point and insisted to her about was that we had to tell each other the truth and she took to that wholeheartedly you know and for better and for worse because truths can be harsh does that include like does this have yeah well the truthful answer to that is I don't answer questions that are likely to get me in trouble yeah so my I have a son who will answer honestly and it's infuriating but then we realized if you want the truth talk to Tam well well that's the thing you know it's it's useful to know truth is empowering truth tellers are charismatic and you know actually both my sons are like brutally honest which is disconcerting you but it's minh see that it has made them very formidable and because of it people trust them and the friendships and just it gives them mood and you've written a lot about this well you know if I tell my wife that she looks good in an outfit knows that I mean it yeah and so there's some utility in that and then if you're silent and say I don't answer questions that she goes and she knows well well sometimes sometimes you know she'll say you know do you like this and I'll tell her that I don't and and you know and doesn't necessarily make her happy in the moment but but if I do say I like it she knows that I mean it and you know I'd actually like her sense of style a lot so it turns out that 90% of the time it's pretty easy for me to say look I think you look great and mean it and you know she's a fairly harsh standard bearer to like she's she's insisted that I stay in whatever reasonable physical shape I happen to be in you know that was that was something that she's very demanding of and I would say that it's the same from my side and and we've been good at negotiating which is you know what do you want from a partner fundamentally what what do you want need I mean the first thing is is that well hopefully you like I said you're blessed with the fact that you find each other attractive and I think it's very difficult for the relationship to begin or proceed or sustain itself without that but having that then what do you want well you want someone that you can trust you want someone that you can build a view of the future with and you want someone that you can negotiate with and that's very hard to negotiate with people because they have to tell you what they think they have to know what they want or figure it out they have to tell you what they want they have to be satisfied when they get what they want which is also a very difficult thing to manage and you have to continually update that because your life goes through different stages and well in your attraction wanes as we all know it our stage of life not fatally necessarily for yourself but but no but you will go I mean you will not be twenty five forever so so that that has to be renegotiate yeah well and you have to work at that too right you know and and that's something that people also don't understand because they tend to think that well that that all romantic interaction should be spontaneous it's like well if that's your theory then you might as well just give up right now if you're gonna get married because that like the only reason you can think that is because you don't have enough responsibility to make romantic entanglement virtually impossible and what happens when you're married especially when you have little kids is that and and you both have a job let's say is you're so busy that the probability that you're going to find time for spontaneous mutual interaction is decreases to zero and so if that's what you're hoping for then you're never going to have it and so what you have to do is you have to make time for each other and you know if you're dating when you're establishing a relationship well you put some effort into it you know you you decide that you're going to go out for dinner and you dress up to some degree and you know you try to present yourself to each other in some halfways mutually acceptable manner and you hope that there's going to be a positive consequence of that that you're going to find each other attractive but Ben's people somehow think that once they're married that the same amount of effort isn't necessary and that's wrong I would say more effort is necessary on the same front and you have to think it through it's like you know if you don't want to be bitter about the intimate element of your relationship how much time do you have to spend together each week and my my rule of thumb sort of derived from clinical observations is that you need to spend 90 minutes a week with your partner talking and that means you're telling each other about your life and staying in touch you know so that you each know what the other is up to and you're discussing what needs to be done to keep the household running smoothly and you're laying out some mutually acceptable vision of how the next week or the next months are going to go together right so that that keeps your narratives locked together like a like the strands in a rope you need that for 90 minutes or you drift apart and you need to spend intimate time together at least once a week and probably more like twice and that has to be negotiated and if you don't negotiate it and if you don't make it a priority then it won't happen in all likelihood and then well well then you don't have it and that's a catastrophe because there's not that many things in life that are you know intrinsically what would you say engaging and meaningful and pleasurable and also bonding all of that and if you let that go then well part of you dies and part of the relationship dies and well then there's always the possibility of becoming attracted by alternative entanglements which which you would do if you had any spirit left right I mean that's the thing is if well if you're not if you're if your relationship at home is entirely unsatisfying sexually what are you supposed to do with that nothing he was supposed to just bear it I mean in one way the answer is yes because it's your marriage but another way is well what that's all the fight you've got in you you're gonna just let the erotic element of your life die and and accept everything that goes along with that because you're not willing to cause a bit of trouble to ensure that it's maintained and you know and we're not very good at thinking these things through consciously and I mean people are bad at negotiating period as far as I can tell but they're particularly bad at negotiating things that are deeply private how much do you want your partner to know about you anyways it takes a lot of trust to have a real conversation about what you need and want now you have in the press people read that you are you have a following of young men and I went to hear your lecture and in Washington DC and there were a lot of women there and your book I had first of all men don't buy books that often compared to women so I'm presuming you have a lot of female readers and I found it Danielle and I found it completely readable and for men no it was no one it was more like a delusional desire on the part of the radical leftists that the only people that could possibly be attracted to me are angry man exam be better if they were angry young white men you know okay then that fits the narrative but yeah there's a it's a you have a diverse audience and diverse following including many women and they're also not particularly angry I mean are you are diffusing the anger that's the point of your book is stopping yes not being resentful right well resentment is that that's absolutely crippling right it's resentment just zenman deceit arrogance that's part of I'm writing the book and one of the rules is don't allow yourself to become resentful resentful deceitful and arrogant things together yeah it could be rad if you just write well that's supposed to be good thing so yeah I mean there's been 250,000 people as I said come to the lectures and there hasn't been a single negative incident this is what I find fascinating is that I I found you early on I said I'd had no idea you I just that it was like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kids like who is that guy who is that guy like you were pretty good and we were covering a lot of the same topics later on and Wow and then you know I found out who you were what is astonishing to me is that there's this amazing it just split between the positivity of your audience the diversity of your audience the the intellectual content of your message and then you get with a snarky journalist with an agenda I'm not mentioning names but this would be this no baby no this this young woman from GQ oh yeah and it is beyond sight it was just like you lady gotcha that was Channel four we don't want to blame the BBC it was Channel 4's and then I and she seemed you know like that's often she seemed intelligent and capable of insight up to a point but it's almost as if something had seized her mind and she oh yes something had something for sure I think people in audiology can you apologize that a whole generation some of our most talented young women are incapable of thought because of this idea where she thought maybe you mean or just it's just an openness to she couldn't and you were saying completely like interesting fascinating original things even to me who've studied these topics and Wow and no it was quite the day so I went to Baltimore you said I did yeah well any but it just made me think a lot that day because I went there and I had to go out of my way to do it not that I'm complaining but there's a reason for saying that you know so I go out there and Baltimore yeah well I was talking in both okay so so and I showed up to the to the hotel room where this was all occurring and you know what you expect generally speaking even from journalists who aren't you know who are more of the attack dog variety or who maybe aren't positively predisposed to you ideologically or personally you expect a certain modicum of professional politeness right you know because well you don't have to be there and you came and you in vyx eped it an invitation and all of that and so even with the channel 4 journalist Kathy Newman she was quite polite and and forthcoming in the in the green room before the interview you know it so she would have at least that professional persona which is it's not nothing right there there's something to be said for for going through the emotions professionally in an appropriate manner but when I walked into the hotel room in Baltimore it was obvious that this interviewer had already made up her mind about me a hundred percent and that she was absolutely you know negatively predisposed to me with a personal animus an animus is exactly the right word and there was about a half an hour photography session because it was GQ and so I was in that atmosphere the photographers were fine I was in that atmosphere for about 45 minutes before we started to talk and part of the reason that I'm so I'm not as calm during that interview as I usually am I'm a little bit harsher and the reason for that is that you know it just started off instantly combat it and and what I what I should have done you see it's very very difficult to be awake enough to do these things properly and and the interview progressed fine although by the end of it I thought that I had maybe done enough interviews for a while because I didn't think I had regulated my temper as well during that interview as I might have well for the first two minutes you were getting and then she brought up a question about anger and I just saw you kind of adjust and then after that it was smooth well that's good because it was touch-and-go you know and I thought boy you know maybe you're running out of patience maybe you you know maybe it's time to dial back on the interviews because you know I've had many interviews like that and they're very I find them like and it takes me like three days to recover I know and then you got you start thinking yourself like what I should have said I should have said that and I Drive myself mad no but you did very well but it's so interesting that what it told me was how parochial she was and she lives in her own little world isn't it more a little bit about the ideology of our time and gosh you encountered this everywhere and I used to write about this wisely I put I would encounter it I mean I think part of the issue is that you will acknowledge that there are differences between the sexes that seems to be I know that's a hell of a heresy that's a heresy because when I was reading your book there is nothing about it that is anti female in fact you you do a lot of examination of the Adam and Eve story and you have this wonderful passage about like Adam being the originally aggrieved man who throws a woman under the perfect God you do you made her and the rules such as they are you know they seem very commonsensical they could apply to anyone so is that a fair surmise of why you get so attacked that just the very fact that you're willing to speak about the sexes as being not unequal but different but equal yeah well you know what I would say that that's part of it because there's a threat there so one of the things that happened when I was in Scandinavia I just wrote a call him about this actually it was interesting being in Scandinavia especially in Sweden because they pushed the equality of opportunity doctrine farther than any other country they invented it it almost started there and there like in the UN and the original the Charter the Swedes were there they've never given no no and so and the week that I was there was the same week that two articles were published on gender differences in in temperament and in interest and the biggest sex differences that we know of that aren't morphological are in interest so women are more interested in people by and large and men are more interested in things by and large and the difference is actually large it's one standard deviation and so that means if you're a man you would have to be more interested in people than 85% of men to be as interested as 50% of women and if you're a woman you'd have to be more interested in things than 85% of women to be as interested as the 50th percentile male so the difference is actually quite substantial and it's certainly large enough to drive occupational choice differences and it explains a lot about the configuration of people in the work absolutely well and you know we're approaching parity in terms of workplace overall workplace distribution women but there's massive difference as an occupational choice like it's very interesting for example to go to the website of the US Labor Department and look at male and female dominated industries and you know there's the the top 10 male-dominated industries have basically zero women in them people bricklayers being wonderful like people there are people through zones according to Camille Palio you find just a lot of men in the people free zone yeah yeah yeah and the women are in you ask a group of women and men would you rather spend the next three weeks taking a part of machine and putting it together or helping a group of people work out their problems and the pool of people who want to do the machine it's just far more men than well and there's more men in women dominated industries than there are women and men dominated industries at the extreme so that's like nurse nursing yeah yes it is way more male nurses and more bricklayers I've studied these male nurses and they already you know gender activists are upset because they earn more than women and a professor of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania tried to find out why and she found out they immediately find out what's the best paying field subfield so they go into like nurse anesthesiology it pays a lot more the men are there and just proportionate number and they're willing to work in CREP you know in st. hours they're far more willing to with gender differences is that men are more willing to move longer hours yeah they're more willing to to work outside they're more willing to take on dangerous tasks they're more likely to work in scalable industries so like you can't scale personal care it's really very it's very very difficult they're much less likely to work part-time if they have small businesses they're much more likely to work full-time in the small business rather than this then part-time yeah and I mean women have their reasons to want to work part-time and Farrell also pointed out that if you work 10% longer hours you make 40% more money nonlinear nonlinear return on overtime that's something that's really useful to know you know it's closer to an employer they have some but it also marks you out you know like if you have 10 employees and they're all doing the reasonable job let's say but one of them is working in extra half an hour a day or 45 minutes a day and you can observe that every day then that gives them an edge with regards to potential promotion and so and the return on those edges is nonlinear and so anyways so I went to Scandinavia and it was the same week that two studies were released showing what had already been established beyond a shadow of a doubt that the personality differences between men and women and the differences in interest as well actually get bigger as your society gets richer and as it gets more egalitarian and and not just a little bit either that's the other thing that's so interesting is you might think well the effect is it's the opposite of what the social constructionist would predict first of all so that's the first thing to point out is it's not only that their hypothesis wasn't supported it was decidedly refuted and and none of them have come to terms with that and and and it's not a small effect the the the difference between personality between men and women in Scandinavia is a lot larger than ideas in 90 Gillett area contract in rural Botswana that's also true in the United States the richer the Democratic your household demographic your household the more likely the woman is to take town time out and be at home with right you can afford it you can afford to do it and she can afford to major in what odd you know low-paying fields like I don't know a feminist dance therapy the other thing you see one of the things that's also interesting I think is that you know there's this idea that mate that marriage is a patriarchal institution you know that's primarily put there for the for the utility of the of the male and think well like I think that's complete bloody rubbish and I don't think there's any evidence to support it at all but I think the best counter evidence is that well if that's the case then rich people shouldn't be getting married because they don't have to oppress themselves but the truth of the matter is is that the higher your demographic position the more likely you are to be married so marriage is falling apart among you know in the more likely the wife is staying home and but not I mean she will has all sorts of pursuits but she's not well there's an old saying anyone any woman who marries for money earns it yes but now okay this is where you might get in a little trouble because in your book you call men order and women chaos and you say order the known appears symbolically associated with masculinity and chaos the eternal feminine is also the crushing force of sexual select yeah what's up with that yeah chaotic okay well it isn't men and women that are ordering chaos it's masculinity and femininity symbolically and so what's happened fundamentally is that where our brains are wired for social cognition so we're not natural scientists or natural sociologists that might be of bidders even though I shudder to think that that might be true especially yes well that's yes okay triggering or maybe yeah or ma'am or maybe were more were more naturally people who observe through the lens of fiction and that what we see is the world as characterized and the world obviously is made out men and women and children and those seem to be our fundamental cognitive categories masculinity femininity and and and and then the category of children and those categories have expanded to take on connotations outside of pure person perception and so you know it's for this reason that if you go to a movie and maybe it's a Disney animated movie and I like to talk about those because they draw on a very deep symbolic well it's perfectly reasonable to see a witch that lives in a swamp because those go together like it makes sense you know the witch doesn't live in a gleaming chrome high-rise you know she lives in a swamp guess that's in maybe a quarter room I think well that's it that's well the hybrids would be better for that right you can take off better but there are categories of symbolic Association that are natural to the way we think and the fundamental elements of those categories seem to be gendered and so this is partly why I make reference to Taoism for example so for the Daoists the world is made out of chaos and order and chaos is the domain that you don't understand and that emerges unpredictably but also the domain from which new forms emerge right because it's from novelty that the new emerges and i think the fundamental association between femininity is chaos is the association between what's unexpected and novel and what's new because new forms emerge from chaos and it's not that chaos is is bad an order is good that that's no book both have their pathology both have their virtue yes yes and and and what you're looking for and this is this is what the book concentrates on above all is that you're looking constantly to find the balance between those two so for example formally speaking the domain of order is that place that you are when what you're doing is producing the results that you want to have produced so imagine imagine think about the preconditions for not being anxious okay so the preconditions are that you're constantly making predictions about what's going to happen next and those predictions are tied tightly to your behavioral output so you act in a certain way and you presume that a certain thing is going to happen and if your actions produce the results that you desire then you assume that you know where you are and you know what you're doing and that your plan is intact and that the environment is secure and that keeps your anxiety under control that's order and then you know maybe you're at a party and you don't know anybody and you tell a joke and everybody looks at you like what you said was not only not funny but also downright offensive and then all of a sudden you've moved from the domain of order into the domain of chaos because you thought you were somewhere and you thought you were someone and you were thought you were with people that were of a certain type and you got all that wrong and so if you also suggesting it is gonna be the woman who says I find that really open but women are also more sensitive to negative emotion so there is some slightly higher probability that that might be the case but then I think women are also associated at least in men's imaginations with nature which is part of the chaotic domain say as opposed to culture because they're sexually selective so you've got to think what is nature I mean we have that as a cognitive category right we think of the natural world we think of nature versus culture it's a fundamental opposition what is nature well nature is trees and landscapes and animals and all of that but that isn't what nature fundamentally is nature fundamentally is that which selects from a genetic perspective that's nature that's the fundamental definition of nature and it is the case that human females are sexually selective and it's it's a major component of human behavior so the the evolutionary theory roughly speaking is that the reason we diverged from chimpanzees eight million years ago 7 million years ago is at least in part because of the differences between sexual selectivity between female humans and female chimpanzees female chimpanzees are more likely to have offspring from and males but it's not because of their sexual selectivity so a female chimpanzee has periods of fertility that are marked by physical by observable physiological changes not the case with human females human female ovulation is is concealed so that's a very profound biological difference between human females and chimpanzees and the chimpanzee females will mate with any male but the dominant males chase the subordinate males away but human females are sexually selective and so and it's not a trivial fact so you have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors you think well how can that be well imagine that on average every single human female has had one child throughout the entire course of history which is approximately correct by the way then imagine that half of the man had zero and the other half had two okay and that's roughly the case so half of males historically speaking have been repres and the reason for that is because of female sexual selectivity so it is actually the case that female humans are nature it's not only that they're that that they're associated with nature symbolically as far as repre is concerned they are the force of nature that does the selection and so their nature in the most fundamental way and there is a chaotic element of that at least in relationship to men and also in relationship to women because a lot of the female on female competition is competition that's chaotic for the right to be sexually selective right not only with regards to men which drives a lot of politicking but also in relationship to each other because part of what human females do is jockey for position in the female dominance hierarchy for the top position which is the woman who gets to be most sexually selective and so that draws female female competition and it's a different dynamic there's there's similarities between female female competition and male-male competition but there are also differences and they're pronounced so men for example while men are more likely to compute compete for socioeconomic status and that's partly because that drives female made choice so the correlation for men between socioeconomic status and sexual success is about 0.6 and for women it's 0-0 in fact it's actually slightly negative so and that's a huge difference between men and women but you know that you know the anthropologist Sarah hurdie Hrdy and she's like my favorite feminist theorist although as she would say I'm a theorist who happens to be a feminist but she studied primate behavior and she watched she looked at the women very care they were the females and I went very carefully and looked at it chimpanzees and gazelles and found that the female minissha like male primatologists would look and say oh the females the males are dominant and the females are so cooperative she looked more carefully and so the females weren't exactly cooperative like they would pass around their infants their baby you know whenever they were and would fine and so the male primatologist say oh they're they're so kind and caring she found out that when it was not your it was not hers they would take little Tufts of hair that wouldn't come out or they'd do something to the eyes and and the baby would like be injured and she saw all this violence especially true in their status differentiation yes so that's much more likely that'll happen when a higher status female is taking care of a lower status infant exactly and she said the great tragedy well not tragedy she'd the reality of our species in fact the subtitle of her book is that the woman who never revolved we didn't evolve for niceness and cooperative there's an immense competition and we can according to her we are its indelibly you know marked in our nature to compete for the dominant males and there's in - and that seems to cross culturally as well that does flatten out a little bit in the more egalitarian societies yeah instead of being exaggerated it does flatten to some degree so you could imagine that there's a biological component and a cultural component and both in in in that case if you modify the cultural component then that seems to decrease the overall so like let me be more clear about this women are less prone to mate up across an up status hierarchies in Scandinavia than they are in less egalitarian countries but they're still prone to do it so worldwide for example women young women find men who are about four years older than them maximally attractive and they tend to mate across and up status hierarchies and so one of the consequences of that for example is that as women have entered the workforce they've actually driven inequality because rich women will only marry rich men men as rich as them or richer whereas rich men will marry women who are poorer than them but women won't and so what that means is it's another factor that's pooling wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people this is also sorted of mating now and you just find someone with your background you wear as a doctor might have once married is secretary you now marries another doctor yeah well can I ask then stepping a little bit back from primates as well how does this selection work in the era of swiping right and left how what is your reaction to the way young people date today oh that's a good I was really hoping we'd get into that you were very into the monkeys so I didn't want to interrupt no no well well I should close off the Scandinavian discussion just by pointing out and this is something that the Scandinavians are really going to have to wrestle with is that if you Institute effective policies to promote equality of opportunity which the Scandinavians have done you're going to produce some equality so like a 50-50 distribution of men and women in the workplace but you're also going to exacerbate certain kinds of inequality and you can't get it out of that so you cannot have equality of opportunity and equality of outcome together they don't work together an equality of outcome the essential equality of outcome doctrine which is often described with the code word equity is that at every level of every occupation the people have to be represented by the same number that they're represented in at the population so if it's not 5050 men and women at each in each occupation any and in each Strada at each occupation then that sort of prima facie evidence for discrimination and for systemic discrimination it's like nope sorry you have to factor in choice and choice actually turns out to be a very important determinant and as this society gets flatter and flatter choice becomes a more important a more and more important determinant and so you so what that essentially means is that the most radical end of the left-wing political agenda is logically impossible in fact it's impossible for a variety of other reasons and they should look at the data I mean it it's just a cliche now of in a group of activists and they'll say oh well we need in order for women to achieve equality we need government funded day care and we need they have it in Sweden yeah Sweden has fewer women in managerial levels American women are ahead in fact now they have Jenna they have quotas over there so they need female CEOs and females on board hasn't made any difference they're bringing in mime American women because we're so much further ahead so it's like no difference in the distribution of men and women lower than though it's it's called the Nordic paradox and okay you guys are so wonky I will get back okay yeah yes that's good good well we all want to get back to well I was thinking this morning about I was talking to a variety of political types and we were talking about this morning yeah in DC it hard to believe hard to believe no I'm not I'm not telling you a bunch of Republicans here and I've been talking to Democrats as well but it was mostly Republicans here and we were talking about abortion and I made a case that that's really not a very productive discussion because you're talking about a problem way too late in the sequence of problems so by the time the discussion starts to be about abortion there's 50 problems that have already emerged that no one has addressed and some of those problems are the fundamental problem is how human beings should regulate their sexual behavior and that's a big problem and you think well and there's an interesting thing that's happening you know the people on the right would say well that's easy is like don't sleep around and and get married and have sex with your marital partner and that's all the problem so there's strictures on sexual behavior and those would be the traditional ones and what you see on the left is that there's this weird paradoxical demand let's say that people should be allowed to express their sexuality in any manner that they choose whenever they want but that sex is so dangerous that it has to be carefully regulated at every single stage of the interaction and so you know that many state legislatures have now followed the example of university campuses and put it in affirmative consent legislation so that every move you make towards physical intimacy has to be preceded by the instantiation of a verbal contract essentially it's like well can I take your hand yes you actually from what I understand you actually have to say yes like nodding is not sufficient and so and so each stage has to be it has to be preceded by affirmative consent and you know which which well I won't I won't say anything about yeah I will it's absurd it's absurd to assume that that's how human intimate relationships are supposed to proceed and then you have complicated laws emerging that are part of that that for example this is the case in California as I understand it is that you cannot give affirmative consent if you're intoxicated okay so you think about that it's like well what does that mean it means that like a lot of sex Jesus has been illegal for a long time including marital marital yes it's nice to me on my honeymoon okay well buddy I'm rethinking it it seems it seems to me it seems to me it seems to me to mean the California legislation that if you have sex with your wife or husband and either of you is intoxicated then you're either one of you or both is guilty of rape that's what it looks like to me actually I was in a debate a few years ago at the University of Virginia law school and I turned to my debate partner and said so if what you're saying is right two people can rape one another hmm right she said yes and I said oh I mean how can that be well that that's the question well okay so then I would say well it's interesting because I think that a lot of this confusion has emerged fundamentally as a consequence of the birth control pill so you know cuz you got to think situationally before you think ideologically or psychologically it's like it seems to me that the 20th century will be remembered for the hydrogen bomb the transistor and the birth control pill and those are unbelievably radical technological innovations and maybe the most yeah but my fairly on the door it's dependent on the transistor you know cuz I spawned all of that so that that's the big technological innovation that spawned all that and of the three I would say the the birth control pill is probably the bigger hydrogen bomb so and because it it changed the fundamental biological nature of women and men and because it gave women for the first time in biological history the the option of choosing their reproductive status yeah and that's that's we like that that's absol yes and no like yes we like it but it's not something that's come without a tremendous its complexity a fellow can have you been reading no no I think you'll find him interesting is easy right well I'm not I'm not making a case for the abolition of the birth control pill by any stretch of the imagination but I'm pointing at its complexity and so because one of the questions is well once you can regulate your reproductive function what attitude should you have towards sex and one answer might be the more of it under the more varied circumstances the better because why not and I would say that was actually part of the attitude that emerged in the aftermath of the birth control pill in the 1960s right and it was it was a reasonable response in some sense because it's such a cataclysmic change that you don't know what it implies well what's the consequence of that well first of all people aren't reliable enough to use birth control in an entirely reliable manner so even though it can work at near 100% efficiency you have to take it extraordinarily regularly and in a disciplined manner for that to work and so there was still the problem of unwanted pregnancy let's say and then there was the problem of the proliferation of sexual epidemics and that culminated in AIDS which you know could have easily wiped all of us out but didn't but there are other sexual epidemics that could have had the same effect but we've been fortunate enough to escape them and and then and then more recently there's been this weird inversion especially on the radical left that points to the re-emergence of something like a set of sexual taboos you know like I think the idea that sex is casual and that it's a form of entertainment is I think it's an absolutely preposterous idea I think that it's it's psychologically shallow beyond belief to hold that as a core proposition because it forces you to first of all if it's repetitive sex with multiple partners it it forces you to treat people as if they're interchangeable and I don't see how that's good for you psychologically or for the people that you're using interchangeably it it implies that you can divorce sexuality from play from the desire for a relationship from emotional fragility from love from family from responsibility all of those things that are part of everyone and I don't think you can and I don't think people's experience indicates that you can and especially on the emotional front and I think that's partly what's driving and there's also a residual sense that there's something about sex that's fundamentally dangerous and maybe it's dangerous emotionally and personally and maybe it's dangerous socially and psychologically which it most certainly is because it's a powerful force and the way the left is reacting to that is by insisting that all forms of sexual behavior are valid and and and that it's reasonable to manifest all of them but that it's simultaneously so dangerous that absolutely every aspect of it has to be state regulated and in an increasingly draconian form and so I think what needs to happen is that the left and the right have to get together and have a like a real discussion about what constitutes fell in sexual morality and that's the conversation you have to have way before you worry about solving like the abortion debate which you know is very divisive and very and very intractable one of the things we talked about actually just last week on the podcast is this cover story in the Atlantic about the sexual recession among young people that despite the advent of the birth control pill abortion is is going down it's that there's a there's Lexus and I think is going down hook up fewer arms have you can't help into that you're about in on that well if you raise the cost of something you decrease its prevalence you know and and I think that it's it seems to be you know a Juris now don't know why I kind of think that it's also a reflection of the same thing that bloomberg reported on just a few days ago they said that across businesses men are thinking I'm not spending any time with a single woman that isn't you know associated with me in some formal manner like my wife I'm not going to do it I'm not going to mentor young women I'm not going to be in a room alone with them because I could face career annihilation absolutely and instantly they they're frightened of young women escape Julian said that's part of it but we can over exaggerate the part I mean anxiety and depression is going up amongst both young men and young women suicide is going up that that there's it's not just a you know most people I think are not we're talking about an elite demographic who is into the consent and political correctness and work with their this is across the board and its global it's in it's happening even in Sweden it's really happening in Japan yeah and Japan exactly so so many things are and that speaks to and especially in Japan they have people especially young men have given up on intimacy and that having sex is actually I mean that had too much trouble sex robots right well right well and there's pornography yeah there's photography basically zero risk meters when you allow for pornography that that that men and women will sort of separate that from their actual sex anyway we're seeing a whole I guess collapse of intimacy let alone sex and and and and and I don't think that's just explained by the political nature so I I'd be interested in your thoughts yeah well I don't know that I don't know the literature on the decline in sexual activity well enough to know if it's valid or reliable mhm but I mean I mean I think that you know in a stable society you take lots of things for granted you take you take the fact that men and women are going to be sexually attracted to one another for granted and even though it's more fragile than it appears you know it and it's suppressed more easily than you might think and you take the idea that men and women are going to move together towards the establishment of long-term intimate relationships for granted but that's partly because you don't understand what invisible preconditions exist to make that self-evident you know and when those invisible preconditions are disrupted by rapid technological or sociological change then things shift underneath you and you don't know why like a lot of it is traced to the advent of the smartphone especially in the Generation Z that that a Kate was explaining this to us that you could see it was broadband internet and the smartphone that led to this you know increasing fall-off of relationships yeah well maybe the abstract is more interesting than right you see that good I just wanted I want to know the truth have you ever been with somebody you loved and I'm fascinating all that but you really want to get back to your smartphone has that ever happened yeah well it happens all the time it happens to me no it happens during our podcast and I'm kind I'm researched well they're very or they're very addictive they're very addictive you know I read the other day that but they're very alluring they are kind of going together the preferred method of interpersonal communication between young people now is testing rather than face-to-face communication right and the swiping the Apes yeah well that's that's a whole that's that's a very interesting topic too that the like the tinder phenomenon that's because that that's an also a major technological revolution because what it's done I would say for the first time is reduce the cost of rejection to males to zero because it hides it the only people you ever hear from our people who haven't rejected you although although they true but but there was one man who had to make 300 he key actually tallied it yeah he had to make 300 requests of swiping right yeah to one replies already he had the sense of sure sure sure but it's massively attenuated because you're not being humiliated not at all not at all it's really it's really at arm's length and you know you can swipe very very rapidly and so you can get all that rejection over within a very short period or less be worse not I mean not nearly as bad yeah so and you know I I don't know what and I mean tinder also reduces the one of the other things that things that you want to think about with regards to sex and I think this is probably particularly true for women is that to what degree is it in women's interests to allow the cost of sex to fall to zero because with pornography certainly does that and it just seems to me that that's not a very good long-term strategy for relationships between men and women because whatever sex is worth the cost of zero is the wrong price and so that's you know I bunnyranch and paid quite a bit for well true true but you but that's true but you know you don't have to and you know I've heard from a number of women what written read blog reports on their frustration with their attempts to be relatively sexually selective like let's say they decide that they're not going to sleep with their new partner on the first date you know they're frustrated by the fact that to the degree that they're being cautious in their sexual behavior which i think is actually an admirable idea that they're instantly out competed especially if their partners are somewhat impulsive by women who will say yes at the drop of a hat and so well again I don't think you know it depends on what the goal is that's the thing is that there's the short terms their short-term sexual gratification but the literature indicates that married couples for example or couples in a permanent long-term monogamous relationship are more sexually satisfied than single people and maybe the single people have to be parsed out into those who are sexually successful and those who aren't but I suspect that wouldn't make that much difference but whatever there's the utility of relatively immediate sexual gratification for whatever that's worth and the adventurousness that goes along with that let's say the hunt and the excitement of having a new partner and all of that and maybe even the danger that's associated with that because people like to have a little bit of danger in their life but what's the goal it's like what do people want and I mean there's a great book called a billion wicked thoughts that was written by Google engineers and so it contains great psychology because Google engineers don't care about political correctness and they just write down what they find and they don't even notice that it's politically incorrect hence James tomb or for example and what they found was that women use pornography just as much as men but the pornography that women use is verbal it's not imagistic and that the pornographic novels essentially follow the same extraordinarily standard plotline to the degree that publishing houses like Harlequin which I was going to say it's the it's the bodice rippers that's right snob yeah right so in the Harlequin series you have you know the that were published like in the 1970s that are pretty they're tame well there's a variety they range from they range from mpletely tame to essentially to hardcore pornography but the but the plots are quite similar and the plot is you know young relatively innocent woman finds powerful interesting dangerous male tames him and then they live happy yeah it's the beauty in the beasts plot search for women on pornhub we discovered we did an episode on porn was for women it was getting rape wasn't that like there's no lesbianism or at least that was your port yeah that was yours on me okay my port is going to the williams-sonoma store I know it is it is female all those men and women should never tell one another their fantasies because when they're outraged by what we say and we're totally bored by what they say and I thought like women have kind of these scenarios and you know I don't know you know I don't know what their storylines storylines and matters like I don't want to say this to you but if there's a lot of just close-ups of female body parts yeah well men are much more visually oriented I know sexually and but now they're being shamed I mean now that it's called the male gaze mm-hm and so there's all of us think oh my god the Sports Illustrated is exploiting the female forget it yeah baby men like it and I'm worried that now sort of the way in the past sexual sub you know gays were shamed we're now reversing it and shaming like heterosexual yes--that's differ we had the young woman who complained about being whistled at and I said don't worry it stops yeah do we have a little bit of time for a couple more topics with you because one of the things that is coming out of this younger generation and you have a chapter of it in your book which I'm sorry I wanted to finish what the line that we were pursuing I do this well with sexual behavior the question is what's the endgame and then this is what people have to ask themselves is like one of the coral to the female pornographic romance is actually the establishment of a long-term relationship and the question is you know it's so funny because I got pilloried in the New York Times for talking about enforced monogamy squirty because that gets brought up like in everyone I talked to that woman for two days I know it's just like a little side comment and then that became like a showcase like like in forced monogamy you mean forced marriage no I mean that was an anthropological term what she knew perfectly well because she's a very smart person and all it means is that there's a pronounced proclivity in human societies around the world to enforce monogamous relationships at multiple levels of the sociological hierarchy you do it culturally you do it you do it in expectation you do it legally you know an enforced monogamy so if my son was just married and if he came to me next year and he said you know okay dad guess what I've managed to have four Affairs in the last year with heart women and my wife hasn't found out about any of them I'm not going to pat him on the back and say good job kid you know I'm gonna say what the hell's up with you you know you violated the vow that you took you're putting your whole future risk you're betraying yourself and your wife and well that's enforced monogamy you know the the idea is that the social norm is the establishment of a long-term monogamous relationship and that there are strictures put in place to support that but also to punish deviation from it and you say well you know maybe maybe not so much on the punishment in but you can it depends it's like what do you want what what is it that you want you want a long-term stable relationship or not and if that's the goal then your behavior should be devoted to whatever it is that facilitates that goal and I don't see that I certainly don't see that casual and impulsive sex fits that bill now not in the least and all of the evidence with regards to living together shows that that's actually detrimental to the establishment of a long-term relationship so first of all common-law marriage people who are in common-law marriage are much more likely to be divorced so that's the first thing the second thing is people who live together before they get married are much more likely to be divorced after they get married the idea that well you can try someone on for size and see how it works and then you're gonna see if you're compatible it's like that's one story another story is how about you and I live together for a little while and you know if you're you're not so bad but maybe I can find someone better and if I do you know in the next year and a half or so because we're not hooked together in any formal way I can just trade you in it's okay you can do the same to me but I don't really see that as the sort of complimentary mutual interaction that leads to the formulation of long term trust and I think it's a better story for interpreting what constitutes living together then well you know we're gonna try each other out because that's what mature people would do rental yeah well that's right wash the rental yeah yeah well that's that's it and and and but what more most importantly the data indicate that it doesn't work is that you're more likely to get divorced not less likely because maybe the right attitude is well you're probably about as flawed as me and you know we're lucky that we found each other and so let's see if we can make a commitment because we're engaging in something that's very risky you know an intimate relationship and we're gonna commit to each other and see if we can build something of value across time and there's a definite of risk in that but there's a complement to your partner it's like well I think you're worth making a sacrifice for and what's the sacrifice well it's everyone else it's a big sacrifice and there's and if you don't see that as a compliment then I don't think you're thinking because not only is it a compliment it's sort of like the ultimate compliment and maybe you don't get to have a marriage that works without that compliment maybe it's so difficult to establish a long-term relationship that's functional that you have to make a walloping sacrifice very early on in the relationship in order for that to even be a possibility and you know maybe not because what the hell do we know about what binds people together but but it's not that easy to stay with someone for a long period of time you know it's it's a real it's a real commitment it takes a tremendous amount of effort so yes it that actually you're bringing us back to the beginning and your time with Tammy and one of the things about I think I'm gonna guess this is a bit of an overlooked part in your chapter in your book but I just was like one of my favorites it was your book on modern parenting oh yes and that was the one I thought I would get most trouble for I know but critics don't read that far into the book well well it my mother when I had my first child gave me a 1950s copy of dr. Spock and he was considered so controversial and yet he was just like the most sensible person made new children very very well was a pediatrician and you your rule for parenting is do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them and you kind of in that one chapter and it's not even one of your longest chapters just did this wonderful sweeping overview of modern parenting and the problems and in some ways that we're producing maybe some of these kids who are prolonging adulthood prolonging the markers of adulthood that that you feel that parents you said you see today's parents is terrified by their children not least because they've denied credit for their role as benevolent and necessary agents of discipline order and conventionality and then you told some hilarious stories about when your wife ran a daycare center out of your house and you would you would get into tests of wills with some of the two-year-olds but son is ordinary or deep here he got married he still doesn't want to do anything he doesn't want to do yeah he's very charming yeah and very emotionally stable so it's like he's easy to get along with but trying to get him to do something he doesn't want to do it's alright he had my wife defeated when he was nine months old and she's tough like it seriously she's no pushover but he would just sit there with his mouth closed and glare at hers like I'm not eating that and I can take more than you can dish out it was really something to see you know to see that kind of force of will in someone not small talk a little bit about that and just the modern roles between men and women I mean we're less you know they're you don't really you're not really supposed to distinguish between fathers and mothers even though that seems to inevitably happen in most well it happens in large part because the children differentiate between them like parents are under the delusion that most of what you do with your children is driven by what you want to do with your children when in fact it's driven to a massive due by what your children want you to do with them and so there were studies done thirty years ago on feminist parents who decided that they were going to raise their children in non gender differentiated manners and when they were studied they found that the parents who had that explicit philosophy were just as gender differentiated with their children as the parents who didn't have the philosophy and the reason for that is that if you're a parent that has any sense at all you don't respond to your children as a rigid ideologue you respond to them as whatever it is the child man manifests it him or herself as like you know with any individualized relationship you take your cue from the person and you might think while a child has no intrinsic nature but you know if you think that you either don't have children or you've never seen a child or you're so blinded by your Radiology that you don't have a child you just have a blank projection screen onto which you project your presuppositions and then heaven help your child you know so so a lot of the gender differentiation is actually driven by the children's demands and and that's all for the good that chapter I thought I would get into tremendous trouble for writing that chapter because it's contentious right on the surface this the rule because the rule first implies that children can be dislikable and then I would say again you know it's like have you met children exactly a child where they're children you didn't like obviously and it's a lots of children are dislikeable but it's taboo to admit that because they're all sweetness and light and innocence ever since Rousseau but you know who so put all five of his children in an orphanage where they all died so maybe we won't know so we won't talk too much about Rousseau and and then the next taboo is well that parents can dislike their children but if you're a clinician and you don't think that parents can dislike their children then well then well then you're not a clinician because one of the things you constantly see is that pathology within families is an incredibly common source of psychological destabilization right and it's terrible tension between parents and their children and between siblings what I suggest in the in the book which I think is radical by today's standards is that your fundamental job as a parent is to ensure that by the time your child is 4 years old that they are maximally desirable to other children and two adults because what happens is that after the age of four you aren't the primary agent of socialization if the social world becomes the primary agent of socialization and if your child is the sort of child that's invited to play by other children because your child is capable of four strolling gratification and taking turns and playing someone else's game when when it's necessary and abiding by the rules and not having a temper tantrum when they lose and not getting to you know high on their horse when they win then many children will invite them no III know we have we have our limited time and so I just wanted to I was actually say any more question because I really want to hear you talk well oh I know I just want to let it all take 15 seconds to wrap that up in this well so look you get married when you have your children and you're flawed and your partner's flawed and hopefully you're flawed in different ways and so you put the two of you together and you make one approximately normal person and then hopefully and then your child has to interact with that dyad that is a reasonable representative of social norms and if they discipline if your child disappoints you with their behavior the probability that they will disappoint other people is very high and so you have an ethical obligation to ensure that your child is behaving in a manner that makes them optimally desirable to their playmates and also to other adults because then people the kids invite them to play and they get to be socialized right they get they have friends for God's sake is like what do you want for your kids how about some friends wouldn't that be nice and maybe what you'd like is that they regulate their behavior well enough so that when you take them places restaurants to see your friends to see your relatives they behave in a manner that sufficiently civilized so their intrinsic charm wins over the adults and everywhere they go people are smiling and welcoming instead of wishing with fake smiles that the damn brat would leave along with their foolish parents which is not a good that's not a good environment to have your child constantly exposed to no friends because they're too selfish and immature and irritated you're irritating two adults so that they're barely tolerated under the mask of false smiles it's like you have an ethical obligation to regulate your child's behavior so that they're optimally acceptable socially and that is not how people look at children in the modern world they think well you're raising their self-esteem or you're enhancing their creativity or you don't want to put constraints on their behavior because you're going to interfere with the flowering of their intrinsic self and you know it's all Rousseau in nonsense and there's no evidence yeah such a corrupt and he had these babies with this poor scullery maid and left them all in a actually a place where they would just languish and die yeah right five of them Rousseau yeah I know I know yeah exactly oh man is intrinsically good yeah but I just remember a few weeks ago I was I really met you in and somehow I got onto somebody's Twitter feed whom I will not mention because oh my god that anyway a difficult person and she was attacking you and had a selection from your book a way you had called two-year-olds little monsters and so suddenly all of these distraught Twitter followers of this feminist were saying occasionally there'd be a parent who would take they kind of two-year-olds kind of are monsters you know and then there'd be a and they kind of are and they had taken this out of context and shown it like just something to deplore it and it was so amusing Tim this little hopefully they'll soon be cursed with some two years I won't say which one was two years old and had he was a good boy but he had an insane meltdown in a supermarket I was with my mother we both pretended we didn't know oh yeah oh yeah we heard people say oh my god Oh haven't watching a two-year-old have a tantrum is it so it was very like I didn't want to be a we had a boy who used to be in like when my wife was taking care of more kids than ours there was a little boy who had learned to throw a pretty decent tab yes and and he would do that and it didn't work in our house because we just leave him have his tantrum and going into a different room and then he'd kind of wake up out of it there wouldn't be anybody around and so that like if you put all that we're not in dramatic display and you had zero audience it's not you're not gonna sustain it anyways he could actually hold his breath until he turned blue so you should try that you go home and see if you can do that in front of the mirror man like it's hard it's very very dire will you do it was impressive it was and and you know two-year-olds are very impressive they're there they have unbelievable outbursts of rage and and disinhibited emotion and your job is you know they're they're driven by these underlying motivational systems that are unbelievably powerful and it's part of what makes them delightful because when they're happy they're insanely happy and when they're playful they're incredibly playful and so the positive end of them is is way exaggerated compared to you know a rather drab adult and and so it makes two-year-olds extraordinarily interesting but the same is true on the negative emotion side they're completely dysregulated and it's really hard on them like to have a two-year-old who isn't in control of their emotions means that you have a child who's developing central personality you know their their ego for black of a better word is constantly being swamped by these powerful underlying emotional systems you know what it's like if you are enraged for any period of time or if you're engulfed by grief like it's exhausting it's it's it's demeaning and it's exhausting and it's the same with a little candidates like it's a real defeat for the developing integrated individual to be subjugated by those catastrophic ly powerful emergent emotions and part of your job as a parent is to scaffold the part of the child that can regulate and inhibit those powerful underlying systems so with my son for example when he used to misbehave I would count and say you're gonna go sit on the steps he'd say oh no I'm not I would say oh yes you are and then usually I'd have to chase him around because he wouldn't go sit on the steps and so I'd put him on the steps say you're gonna sit there until you've got yourself under control and so he'd say no I not say yes you are and then he tried to get up and I just told him say you're gonna sit there I'm gonna hold you till you sit there no or not it's like I could no wait a two-year-old so I usually won those battles and then he'd sit there I'd say look kid this is the deal I'd say two things like you won't have a bad day or you won't have a good day you think about that because if you don't have a good day a bad day we could have a bad days you sit here as soon as you can controlling yourself and you ready to be civilized then you can come back and we can have a good day so we'd sit there just just I was unbelievable to watch just enveloped with rage you know just trying to get himself under control you know and so I'd come back thirty seconds later and I'd say you know what good got yourself caught your act together you know yeah so then I wait and usually it took him two or three minutes and he'd calm down and then he'd come back out and you'd say I'm ready to have a good day and he meant it you know and I could tell he meant it too because whatever resentment I was harboring towards him for his misbehavior and you have to watch that when you're an adult would vanish because he'd come and he he was done he was ready just you know to proceed on a civilized basis it was really interesting to watch that because it took him every time he sat on the steps it took him a shorter and shorter period of time to attain mastery right until you know it got to the point where he could only have to sit for 15 seconds or so when he would bring himself under control and that was a victory like you if you imagine the neurological systems developed that are responsible for personality integration a victory for those systems because they were attaining the ability to regulate the lower order spontaneous emotions and you know and and he turned into an individual who's capable of a tremendous level of self control and you know and he had large team with yes absolutely and well it turned out well for my daughter too because she ended up being very ill and he ended up being extraordinarily level-headed and reliable and thank God for that could you could you come to my house and do that for my little Maltipoo Izzy cuz I got I can't she I can't I can't train her she's like one night the next book the dog I would love how to train your dog before tea yeah what is the one rule my what's with petting the cat I wrote about dogs for two pages to begin with just to satisfy the dog it didn't satisfy you can't satisfy them alright well we can't thank you enough for coming here I know the AEI audience is just so delighted to have had the chance to hear you well I'm really happy good to chance to talk my weights of talk I've only met you like once we met in DC but I just see you passed electron yes oh you swiped oh yeah well there was that we're not going into that [Applause]

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 3,602,400

Rating: 4.8935218 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, Femsplainers, Christina Hoff Sommers, The Factual Feminist, feminism, american enterprise institute, factual feminist, danielle crittenden

Id: hKUffHXOb8U

Length: 90min 10sec (5410 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 21 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/plasmarob]

This was a very good conversation.

one to watch and share with people.

[u/ApostateAardwolf]

Enjoyed this very much, well worth a watch

[u/DronedAgain]

This is a good one. It's essentially a version of the talks he's giving on tour now.